As they neared their ride, Carolyn noticed the other choppers on the ramp had also started their engines, and people were rapidly trying to get on board. Around them on the tarmac groups of soldiers rapidly set up fighting positions, placing heavy weapons on their stands, slamming belts of ammunition into the feeders.
These soldiers were staying to fight. No matter what.
Carolyn knew she was seeing real bravery.
A loud explosion erupted to her left — one of the helicopters at the far southern edge of the tarmac had exploded, pieces of the spinning rotor blades flying through the air. Next to it, another chopper was trying to lift off — but it was covered by something, things jumping from the ground, the things with the yellow eyes. Hundreds of them!
They were on the tarmac!
She watched the big Chinook rock side to side, unbalanced by the weight of the creatures — a black wave of the things! — leaping onto it from the tarmac. As the chopper slowly rotated, Carolyn could see the back ramp was still open, and the creatures were all over the inside. She looked away as the chopper abruptly tilted forward, the front rotor blades striking the cement in a shower of sparks, tossing long, ragged shards of metal into the air. A second later, the Chinook slammed back down onto the tarmac, exploding in a bright flash as the fuel tanks ruptured and the spilled fuel ignited.
She and her team were now sprinting as fast as they could toward their chopper. The crew chief was at the rear of the Chinook, waving them in. Their escort suddenly stopped, dropped to one knee, and started firing his weapon. Carolyn turned and looked behind for just a second and saw a black wave of the things speeding across the tarmac toward them. She saw people running, trying to get away, but they were overtaken, disappearing in the wave of fiery yellow eyes.
So close.
They weren’t going to make it, she knew.
They were all going to die.
She instinctively ducked her head as she ran below the rotor blades, even though the spinning disk was high above her head. The crew chief pointed his sidearm over her head and started firing.
This time, she didn’t turn around.
Carolyn willed herself to stop and wait as the members of her team entered the rear of the Chinook. She was, after all, the leader, and she should enter last.
She counted three of them. Three of four.
She spun around and saw the fourth member, Matt, running toward them. He must have fallen! she thought. Behind him was something she’d never seen before — and hoped never to see again. Something right out of the depths of hell. A creature on long legs, jointed like a Hollywood special effects monster. She screamed helplessly as the thing reached out with a long, clawed hand and grabbed Matt by the head.
“Matt! No!”
The beast effortlessly tore Matt’s head from his shoulders, a fountain of blood shooting into the air from severed arteries. The lifeless body fell to the cement.
The creature threw the wide-eyed head to the side as the crew chief’s bullets slammed into its chest. It was still heading toward them, but the impacts were slowing it down. With each shot, it threw its head back and screamed a horrible wailing sound, its mouth open wide, revealing rows of obsidian knives.
The engines spun up and the Chinook began to rise. The pilot wasn’t willing to wait one second more.
Carolyn tumbled into the back of the chopper, immediately followed by the crew chief, still firing as fast as he could.
Carolyn crawled on all fours toward the front of the chopper, trying desperately to put as much distance as she could between her and the wide-open rear ramp.
As the chopper lifted off, she watched in horror as a clawed hand grasped the crew chief by the ankle and yanked him out.
His piercing scream was cut short. And his eyes… For a second, Carolyn had seen the terror in his eyes as he was pulled from the chopper, yanked away from safety to certain death. She knew she’d never forget those eyes. She looked away and covered her mouth with her hand, sickened, her body starting to shake as the reality of the situation hit her. The crew chief had saved her life by standing and fighting, delaying the creature’s advance, and if he hadn’t…
Over the scream of the engines and the thwap thwap thwap of the rotor blades slicing into the black sky, clawing at the air to gain altitude, she could hear the chattering, the clicking, so intense that she covered her ears to muffle the terrible noise.
From what she’d seen, she knew everyone left on the ground was as good as dead. None of them had a chance.
As the big Chinook sped northward, the automatic weapons fire on the tarmac behind them slowly diminished. And then ceased. The earsplitting chattering stopped as well, replaced with the sickening sound of flesh being torn and ripped, the sound of screams from dying lips, as the things systematically exterminated every human being left on the ground at KCI.
And then, the things ate their own dead.
In an hour, they were moving again. Toward the others. They could smell them in the distance. And the night was still young.
CHAPTER 16
Just ten minutes after arriving on station, his matte-black U-2 Dragon Lady soaring through the thin upper atmosphere above Kansas City, the pilot — wearing much the same gear an astronaut would — recorded the rapid advance of the mutated creatures using his array of sophisticated sensors. The information was transmitted to the National Military Command Center — the NMCC — in the bowels of the Pentagon.
It was one of many reports streaming in, all grave in nature.
Positions were overrun. Contact was lost with almost all the military units preparing to enter the city. Survivors — of which there weren’t many — described waves of hideous things tearing through their positions, decimating the troops, killing every person in their path.
Thousands, if not millions, of the creatures. And they were moving fast.
Kansas City was now empty. There was no life there. The things had streamed out of the city, overtaken every single military unit in their way, wiped out the evacuation centers that had received the survivors from the previous night. Unstoppable. And worse, they were showing signs of intelligence. They were moving with a purpose, demonstrating intent. They weren’t spreading out at random.
The combined readings from the quickly growing armada of airborne infrared sensors chillingly showed the things had split into six distinct groups, spreading from the dead city like a gelatinous sea creature stretching its stinging appendages toward other cities.
Topeka.
Wichita.
Springfield.
St. Louis.
Des Moines.
Omaha.
Cities full of people who hadn’t been evacuated. Not to mention all the small towns that lay in the paths between these six cities and Kansas City. There had been no need to evacuate any of them. Until now.
Andrew Smith sat in the White House situation room, completely dumbfounded by what he’d heard from his SECDEF and secretary of Homeland Security. “How many did we lose?” he asked.
“Mr. President,” Hugo began, “we’re still trying to figure that out. We had roughly two thousand troops deployed around the city, and about a hundred within the city itself. We’ve had about fifty survivors accounted for so far. The numbers for the civilians…” He paused. “The evacuation centers have all been hit. We don’t have contact with any of them. We have to assume, sir, based on the reports we’ve received from the survivors, there probably aren’t—”