“Let’s get to it,” Muldoon said to the soldiers behind him. “Nutter, you done puking yet?”
“I was just moving on to shitting my pants,” Nutter said, wide-eyed.
“Do it later. Let’s see if we have any live ones.”
“Great idea,” Turner said. He turned to the master sergeant. “Zhu, go with them. The rest of you, secure the area. We need to get back on the road.” He glanced over at Rawlings. “You know how to use that weapon, girl?”
“Yes, Sergeant Major,” she said. “I most certainly do.”
FOURTEEN.
Worcester, Massachusetts was a college town, home to the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Clark University, the University of Massachusetts’s Medical School, and Assumption College, among others. With a population of just under two hundred thousand, the city was the second largest in all of New England, second only to Boston. The bucolic area served as the last stop before a traveler entered the western suburbs of the Boston metropolitan area, and it was also known for its legacy of arts, liberal politics, suburban lifestyle, and fairly well-established regional airport.
Like so many other places in New England, Worcester was in the process of being bludgeoned to death. The city’s short skyline was already blackened and battered from fires that had gone unchecked, and the occasional siren could be heard over volleys of gunshots. Surrounding the city center, residential communities still smoldered, belching columns of gray-black smoke into the air. On the far eastern side of the city, the forest surrounding the Worcester State Hospital was on fire, producing a pall of dirty smoke that hung over the airport like a gauzy veil.
The airport was important to the battalion and its attached units. It had been officially shut down for some time, closed to all air traffic, commercial and private. But several dozen people were on the property, either caught in transit when their aircraft had been grounded or simply seeking some measure of safety. A single JetBlue Airbus A319 sat on the ramp outside one of the two active jetports that had, until recently, still been in use. Almost all of the general aviation aircraft were gone, and the only planes left were an old, battered Cessna 172 and a shiny Beechcraft Baron. The two aircraft were parked right next to each other, which left the majority of the general aviation ramp area available for the cav unit to set up around the four UH-60M Black Hawks they supported.
First Lieutenant Carl Dekker had arranged the cav unit’s four Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles—MRAPs—in a protective formation around the ramp area, their fifty caliber machineguns oriented outward. In addition, they arranged the four airport snow plows into a formation that would funnel ground traffic headed for the ad hoc assembly area into a narrow kill zone attended by two MRAPs and four of his dismounted cavalrymen.
Dekker also had a bit of a bonus to fall back on. While his command was detached from the rest of the battalion, he had been bequeathed eleven airmen and NCOs from Hanscom Air Force Base. Those men made up the remainder of Hanscom’s Internal Security Response Team, the unit that provided security for the base and responded to any physical threats. Dekker and his troops were good at that sort of thing, but he had to grudgingly confess that the ISRT was better. For that reason, he had put them between the cavalry platoon and the passenger terminal, where an attack was most likely. The only thing keeping the people in there from walking out onto the taxiway were locked doors, and while that would be a sufficient deterrent for families who were stranded but still sane, the second the Bug took hold and a bunch of Klowns came into being, that deterrent would quickly fail. So it would be up to the ISRT and its batch of M4s, M249 Squad Automatic Weapons, and shotguns to keep the goblins at bay until the cavalry platoon could get spooled up and stage a more lethal response. Dekker and his men had been spared a great deal of gratuitous contact with the Klowns, but they all knew what the Infected were capable of. The people they had been no longer existed. Only crazed, howling demons occupied their skins, demons who wanted nothing more than to spread the infection or, more likely, to tear a man’s skin from his bones and piss on his internal organs.
Dekker would run over them with the MRAPs.
But part of Dekker’s job was protecting the UH-60 Black Hawks. These provided tactical transport for the battalion, as well as logistical replenishment operations. When Wizard Six had chopped the cavalry unit away from their normal armed reconnaissance mission and had them secure the airport, he had put the troops of Nomad Platoon in charge of some very strategic assets. Normally, that wouldn’t have been tough duty. The aircraft would be stored in secured hangars and brought out only when they had a mission, but the hangars at Worcester Regional Airport were not exactly hardened, and they had no means to ensure entire structures could remain protected from assault. A second option would have been for the aircraft to be placed inside hardened revetments, surrounded by sand bags, HESCO containers, or other obstacles that would serve to protect them from indirect fire, thereby keeping them more or less out of harm’s way. The only thing they had that could even begin to serve as revetment material was several dozen water-filled plastic jersey barriers. The gaily-colored obstacles were hardly bulletproof and were maybe high enough to keep a raging dachshund at bay, but they weighed over a thousand pounds each. That meant they might protect the helicopters from vehicle-born attacks, in turn giving the Black Hawk drivers enough time to get the hell out of Dodge before everything rolled tits up and called it a day. The Air Force guys had used forklifts to move them into position, and they had even angled them a bit to make another choke point in case of attack. That had been nice of them.
The aviation crews had also manned up and were standing security with the rest of the cavalry team. While not as versed in the arcane art of ground combat as the cav and zoomies, they had at least gone through basic infantry training and presumably knew which end of an assault rifle to point at the enemy. Each aircraft had a crew of four: two pilots, one crew chief, and one gunner. That gave Dekker enough of a tactical footprint to make him feel comfortable, even though there were too many faces to put inside the MRAPs if they had to bug out. So some of the snow plows would be coming along for the ride, and with their big blades, they’d be pretty unstoppable, at least from the front.
Another bonus was that the Black Hawks had better communication gear. The cavalry’s radios were pretty much useless so far from the battalion, but the aviators remained in contact with the other air units. That lone pipeline kept everyone who wore a uniform at Worcester at least marginally up to date on current events. They knew the battalion’s convoy had already been attacked twice, and they knew the scouts were coming in to refuel. The airport still had power and a good amount of aviation fuel, which the aviators had already tapped. They’d topped off their Black Hawks then filled up four five-hundred-gallon blivets, inflatable doughnut-shaped bladders that would be slung out by the Black Hawks when the time came to close up shop and retrograde. Two thousand gallons of jet engine fuel sounded like a lot to Dekker, but the captain in charge of the aviation element had informed him that each Black Hawk had a fuel capacity of 360 gallons, and the Apaches could slug down 375 gallons in less than three hours. Suddenly, the blivets didn’t seem like much of a plus.