The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

the screams of anger, could hear even the distinct words, in German and maybe Italian. A noise to Travis’s right made him turn. It’d sounded like something heavy being dropped on the floor. It came again, and this time he saw its source. The hallway floor heaved upward an inch, hit by something from below. Some heavy object in the hands of probably a dozen people, being used as a battering ram to come through the floorboards. The third impact cracked one of them, leaving a four-inch-wide gap. Through it, Travis saw the nightmare. The space below was wall-to-wall with writhing bodies, faces twisted in rage. Eyes locked onto him through the gap, and a volley of incensed screams came up.
    He turned and saw Paige looking at the same spot. Then, beyond her, one of the snipers took something from his backpack. In the crazed light, Travis couldn’t see what the thing was, but had a pretty good guess.
    Paige turned, saw it, and screamed, “No!”
    The man pivoted toward her, and Travis saw what he’d expected: a grenade.
    “There are gas lines down there!” Paige shouted.
    “What the fuck are we supposed to do?” the man yelled.
    Paige had no answer.
    The floor heaved again. A second board fractured, right behind the first, and a hand gripped it from below and snapped it down into the darkness. The hole would be wide enough to admit bodies soon. A second later, Travis heard the battering impact again, somewhere else on the main floor.
    The sniper was still looking to Paige for an answer.
    “I don’t know what to do,” she said. She repeated it, looking around as if the answer would come to her.
    “Yes you do,” Travis said.
    She met his eyes. Narrowed hers.
    “The grenade,” Travis said, and then darted his own eyes upward. Through the ceiling. To something eight stories above their heads. She followed. Understood.
    “It’s all we’ve got,” Travis said.
    “Is it a chess move the Whisper would have expected?” she said.
    “We’re stuck with it, whether it is or not. Go. I’ll help these guys.”
    She considered it for another two seconds, then nodded. She turned to the sniper and held out her hand for the grenade. He looked like he understood the plan. Or didn’t care, so long as there was one. He handed it over.
    “Don’t take losses holding this floor!” Paige shouted. “Withdraw up the stairs when you have to! One way or another, this’ll be over in the next two minutes.”
    Travis stared at her. Realized he was storing the image. Wondered if he’d ever see her again.
    Then she was gone.
    He unslung his rifle, thumbed off the safety, and went to the basement door where the others were standing.
    Beyond it was the worst thing he’d ever seen. The basement, a vast space maybe twelve feet deep, crawled like a snake pit full of bodies, the living and the dead so intermixed it was hard to differentiate them. As the leading edge of the wave advanced up the stairs and was cut back by the autofire, those behind dragged the bodies aside, between themselves or above. The corpses that rode the crowd pumped arterial blood from bowl-sized exit wounds, spraying and coating the throng.
    Men, women, children. No fog to hide them now. The crowd was the sort you might encounter at a mall, or a supermarket, or anywhere. Some of the parents were holding seven-year-olds by the hand, as if unwilling to lose sight of them. Even as they dragged them forward into the gunfire. And even the seven-year-olds looked ready to kill someone. Would have tried to, had they reached the top of the stairs.
    The forefront continually surged and was seared back, ten to twelve steps below. Travis shouldered his rifle. Lowered the sights to the crowd on the stairs. Didn’t fire yet. Suddenly wasn’t sure he could. They were just people. Bloody and screaming, and furious enough to come forward into machine-gun fire. But still just people. It wasn’t their fault this was happening to them.
    One of the snipers stopped to reload. It took him only three seconds, but in those seconds of reduced fire, the crowd gained four steps, and the back-and-forth cadence resumed there. Their progress was like a ratchet, locking in each little burst of progress, never really losing it.
    A moment later, as the first sniper resumed fire, the other two ran dry in unison, and fumbled for fresh magazines. The crowd rushed upward at full speed; the lone shooter could only cover any one spot at a time. An old man wearing a ridiculous green bow tie,