The charge ripped out a section of the fence. It also blew up a hose connected to a hold filled with petroleum gas. The fire reached that hold half a second after the explosion. The gases, concentrated under enormous pressure, flared like a match, generating a temperature of tens of thousands of degrees.
Before Kim’s desperate cry had faded, the Ithaca flew through the air in the most gigantic explosion Gulfport had ever seen.
49
Grapes fired with maniacal fury. Although he and his men had the assholes in the convoy (Were they Chinese? Japanese?) pinned down behind their tanks, they couldn’t get a clear shot at them.
Grapes had to admit that those yellow assholes were very good. They rebounded quickly from the mines, falling back in an orderly line, returning fire, never wavering, always hitting their target. A tall, gaunt officer moved behind them, shouting orders rapid-fire. Grapes tried to take him out several times, but he was too far away and didn’t stay in one place for long.
Those Chink soldiers had tried to flank Grapes’s men, but he’d outsmarted them by stationing his men on the side streets to ambush them. But both sides were equally matched at street fighting. They fought dirty, with knives, bayonets, even their fists. Nobody gave an inch.
A burst of bullets hit the Green Guard next to him in the back, and the Aryan fell dead without a word. Grapes’s jaw dropped. Where the hell did those shots come from?
Grapes hit the ground when a second burst shattered the Humvee’s windows and punctured its tires. He whipped around and spotted a group of men wearing white armbands making their way down a side street, firing on the confused militiamen caught in the crossfire. White armbands. Like the one that fucking Swede had on.
“Those are the Just!” he shouted. “They’re fucking traitors! Shoot ’em!”
His soldiers turned and fired on the Just, who ducked behind a house. The Koreans, as surprised by the new onslaught as Greene, didn’t hesitate and started to advance again, firing as they went.
Suddenly a ragtag convoy came roaring up from the far end of Redemption Avenue. It was a strange collection of tanks, garbage trucks, cars, and vans. Each one was spilling over with helots, shouting at the top of their lungs, shouldering their weapons.
The Koreans turned to face the new threat at their back. One soldier fired an RPG at one of the trucks. With a shrill whistle, the rocket raced toward its target and struck its radiator. The truck blew up and a fireball engulfed its crew. The other vehicles swerved around it. The helots jumped out, took cover, and started shooting.
The street was plunged into chaos. In the dark, the four groups attacked each other, not sure who was in their sights. Hong looked in amazement from the soldiers who’d ambushed them to the newcomers firing on that group, then to the scruffy group at other end of the street shooting at everyone. In the turmoil, with enemies running around everywhere, he couldn’t tell who was who, so he ordered his men to fire on anything that moved.
“Kim! Kim!” he shouted. Then he remembered that the lieutenant was storming the tanker. Hong let out a string of curses. The situation was getting more complicated by the minute. He had to get his men out or they’d be lost.
How many sides are there? he asked himself as he ran along his thinning lines.
Seconds later, the Ithaca burst into a fireball that spread out over a thousand feet. Flames spilled onto the docks, incinerating everything in their path. A sea of fire crossed the road and swallowed up the houses along the dock as if they were made of paper. The monster fire kept advancing, followed by a gigantic tidal wave stirred up by the blast. A boiling, hurricane-strength wind raged ahead of the flames, tearing off roofs, blowing out every window in Gulfport, and overturning cars. The fireball peaked, then folded back on itself, leaving hundreds of burning houses in its wake. The shock wave continued to advance, demolishing everything in its path.
“Who the fuck’re you shooting at?” I yelled in Mendoza’s ear, but he ignored me. Clutching his M4, white-knuckled, he fired steadily, carefully selecting each target.
Prit crawled to my side, skirting a mountain of broken glass. Dozens of bullets whizzed over our heads and slammed into the truck. The damn thing looked like a sieve.
“This is crazy!” the Ukrainian yelled over the din of gunfire. “It’s a free-for-all! If we stay here much longer, they’ll kill us! Our flanks are exposed!”
“We have to take out Grapes! Without him, the militia will turn tail and run!”
“Those aren’t militiamen out there!” Prit pointed to soldiers in strange uniforms who were attacking a house. “Judging by their uniforms, I’d say they’re North Koreans!”
“North Koreans? You’re shitting me! Where’d they come from?”
The Ukrainian shrugged and fired at some shapes approaching in the dark.
Suddenly, everything stopped.
First a flash of light blinded us for a moment. Then a volcano of fire shot up above the roofs. Next came the loudest roar I’d ever heard as a roiling windstorm flattened us. That blast of air hit with such force that the houses tilted and creaked. Except for the tanks, every vehicle was overturned. Splinters of wood and concrete rained down on us like shrapnel. I rocketed through the air, along with the hundreds of people around me who’d been swept up in the maelstrom.
I ended up fifteen feet away, my fall cushioned by a bed of flowers. I lay there on my back, trying to catch my breath, as colored lights circled overhead. My ears rang with a shrill whine.
I struggled to my feet, relieved to be in one piece. The only sounds were the crackling fire and houses collapsing after being thrown hundreds of feet in the air. Then I heard the groans of the wounded.
At least half of the men and women who’d been fighting a moment before lay on the ground, dead or so badly wounded they were beyond help. Not far from me, a helot stared in amazement at a piece of pipe protruding from his stomach. The fragment had skewered the guy like an arrow. Everywhere I turned, I saw bodies mangled by the explosion and shrapnel.
“Prit! Prit!”
“Over here,” said the Ukrainian, dragging himself out from under a section of a roof. “What the fuck happened?”
“I have no idea, but this is hell!” All the houses were demolished. The surviving civilians who lived in those houses ran out of the ruins into the dark, desperate to reach safety. What none of them knew was that the outer wall had been breached, leaving nothing between them and the Undead.
In the distance, the sky was aglow with what was unmistakably a fire. A really big fire.
“That fire’ll devour the town in a hurry,” the Ukrainian muttered, brushing off his clothes.
I grabbed my friend by the shoulders. “We’ve got to get to city hall! That’s where the supply of Cladoxpan is. If we don’t get one of those fungal cultivars, Lucia and I are screwed! And all the helots, too!”
Prit looked at the distant flames with a pained expression. City hall was backlit by the flames of the approaching fire; the blast of wind had destroyed its roof and shattered all its windows. There was no trace of Greene’s flag.
“It’s gonna be the race of our lives,” he said as he loaded his AK-47. “You ready?”
I nodded, scared shitless but determined.
“Let’s go,” Pritchenko said with a growl. “See you on the other side.”
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