Noticing she was shaking, one of the soldiers handed Carolyn a heavy wool blanket. “This should help, ma’am,” he said. She thanked him, and he walked back to his seat.
She covered herself, leaving only a small opening around her face to breathe.
The big Chinook slowly turned to the right, banking ever so slightly. Carolyn instinctively looked out the rear hatch to give her inner ears the assurance that, yes, they were actually turning, and she saw it. A single clawed hand grasping the edge of the chopper’s back ramp.
She blinked her eyes, praying she was just seeing things.
She wasn’t.
Two yellow orbs burned back at her from the blackness.
It had somehow managed to gain a handhold on the underside of the chopper after throwing the crew chief out the back.
And now, it was climbing inside.
Carolyn screamed as the beast passed her, scrambling forward into the hold. It hadn’t seen her. Covering herself with the blanket had saved her life.
Startled by her scream, the soldiers turned, oblivious to the beast moving toward them. The first two were thrown out the open rear of the chopper — spinning through the blackness to their deaths below — before they had time to react.
The creature was moving fast, clawing and tearing as it went.
The next soldier brought his weapon to bear, but he too was flung toward the rear, and he skidded across the metal floor until his body disappeared into the darkness. His rifle slid across the floor, thudding to a stop against Carolyn’s feet. She looked at it, for an instant wishing she’d learned how to handle a gun. She grabbed the rifle, which to her surprise was much heavier than she thought it would be.
The cargo hold of the chopper was filled with shrill, terrified screams as the members of her team scooted toward the front, toward the cockpit. The soldier farthest away from the beast opened up with his M16, spraying a volley of three-round bursts into the creature, which reeled back and let loose a horrible, thunderous roar, waving its long arms as if to knock the bullets away. Small, chunky clouds of gore blossomed behind it as the supersonic shells exited its back. But it didn’t go down.
Carolyn, holding the rifle in her left hand, crawled on all fours toward the very rear of the chopper and huddled against a heavy bag of equipment strapped down to the floor near the ramp. She crouched low to stay out of the beast’s field of view, trying desperately not to scream. The cold wind from the rotor wash pummeled her face.
The other soldiers started firing. The muzzle flashes from their M16s lit the interior of the cargo hold like strobe lights, capturing each movement as a still picture, a single moment of terror. The creature dropped to its knees as the shells slammed into its body. Sparks flew from the metal beside Carolyn’s head, and she realized she was in their line of fire. She crawled around the heavy equipment bag, trying to shield herself. The metallic ting of spent rounds bouncing around her was almost as loud as the bursts from the soldiers’ M16s. The sturdy bag thudded against her as some of the rounds hit it. She was only feet from the edge of the chopper’s rear ramp, and the empty blackness outside. She held tightly to the bag as the chopper began to jink wildly to the left and to the right, its rotors’ noise changing pitch — growling — with each abrupt movement.
She peeked over the bag and saw the creature crawling into the cockpit. The soldiers were desperately trying to fire at the thing as they skidded across the floor, working to maintain their balance.
She watched in horror as one long, clawed arm sliced through the air and crunched into the pilot’s helmet. The big chopper dropped sickeningly, Carolyn’s stomach rising into her throat as she floated above the metal floor for an instant.
She looked out the rear ramp and saw the treetops whipping by, small bits of leaves and branches snapping off as the bottom of the Chinook slid across the upper branches. She could smell the trees. The scent of broken wood, green with sap.
They were going to crash.
Carolyn always heard that people who knew they were about to die would see their entire lives flash before their eyes.
As the chopper started to spin out of control, all she saw was the horrid face of a beast standing in the cockpit of the doomed Chinook, one clawed hand grasping part of what used to be the pilot, two bright yellow eyes fixed directly on her.
She heard thick branches snap. The screech of twisting metal.
And then everything went black.
CHAPTER 19
The OH-58 Kiowa Warrior scout helicopter was the last aircraft to escape the carnage at KCI. Its occupants were also the last two survivors.
Colonel Garrett Hoffman sat silently in the right seat, trying to comprehend what had just happened; his entire base of operations, hundreds of troops and civilians, had just been massacred by a wave of…
Things.
He’d heard the president’s speech, heard that some kind of mutated rats had killed thousands of people in Kansas City. Incomprehensible, it seemed, until he saw them with his own eyes. By the thousands.
So many, thousands, hundreds of thousands…
Moving faster than he thought possible.
The eyes, the goddamned glowing eyes…
His troops had stood their ground and pumped all the firepower they could throw at the beasts — and still they came. Climbing over their dead. In waves. Small yellow eyes glowing brightly in the night. Tearing into his troops. Killing them.
He’d watched as the Air Force peppered the tarmac with cluster bombs, tearing hundreds of the things to shreds with each pass. But still, they came.
He’d watched as the last choppers wallowed into the sky, carrying the lucky few who had managed to escape at the last instant. And then, as his own chopper had lifted off, he’d watched them completely cover the tarmac, their bizarre chattering and clicking filling the Missouri night, as they moved toward the terminal building. To kill whoever remained.
His entire base camp — the whole goddamned airport — had been overrun in a matter of minutes. It had been so fast, too fast to make any decisions. Too fast to move. Too fast to save anyone.
I left you all behind.
He was stunned, in a state of shock, and swept by a sickening wave of guilt. The airport had been his, and he’d lost it. Worst of all, he was alive, and his troopers weren’t.
Part of him felt he should’ve died with his soldiers, but another part knew he was getting a chance to avenge their deaths. To kill as many of those fucking things as he could. Especially the humanoid ones.
He’d emptied his sidearm into the head of one of the two-legged devils, which had jumped at least twenty feet into the air to grab the right landing skid of the Kiowa, and watched as it fell dead to the cement below, rapidly torn apart and devoured by the rat-things swarming where his chopper had been just a few seconds before. They hadn’t been briefed to expect anything with two legs, but whatever it’d been, Garrett knew he’d seen intelligence in its eyes. Behind the fury of its fiery gaze, it was thinking. He almost hadn’t been able to pull his trigger fast enough to make the goddamned thing die.
Garrett couldn’t wait to kill more of them, with his bare hands if he had to. The thought made him warm inside. Hate was an effective field dressing.
“Sir!”