Slaughterhouse

THIRTY.

The world had slipped into total insanity.

Rawlings looked around as the truck rolled through the Klowns, giggling as much as she could beneath her armor. A necklace of twine bearing three rotting fingers encircled her neck, their stink lingering in her nostrils. The odor of decay overrode all the other smells—smoke, ash, exhaust, cordite from expended munitions. The only scent it couldn’t overpower was the reek of her own fear and that of the men in the truck with her as the vehicle rocked around like a ship foundering at sea.

All around them, thousands of Klowns swarmed, pealing in macabre delight as they hurled themselves against the remains of Fort Drum’s defenders, hooting and hollering in the night. Many of them were military, and despite the ravages of the Bug, they still operated in a coordinated fashion. The only reason their attacks weren’t successful was that someone in the headquarters building had seen fit to erect machinegun emplacements on the building’s roof and on the crude walls that surrounded it. The three twenty-millimeter antiaircraft guns roared as they flung thousands of rounds per minute downrange. The defense was incredibly effective. Bodies and parts of bodies lay all around the perimeter. The emplacements were hidden behind banks of sand bags and metal plating that defeated all but the most expert sniper fire. Just the same, Rawlings could see dead soldiers who had been gunned down during the pitched fighting.

Several Klowns tried to climb into the trucks. Muldoon and the others, laughing as maniacally as they could, pushed them off.

“Military only!” Muldoon would shout. “You ain’t a lightfighter, you ain’t shit!”

“I am military, you fuckin’ gorilla!” one NCO shouted back. In his old life, the soldier would have been a wizened, Yoda-like lightfighter. In the grips of madness, he was no more than a cackling lunatic.

“My ride, my rules, Master Sergeant!” Muldoon said, chuckling. Rawlings couldn’t see a good deal of his face behind his night vision goggles, but she was certain the mirth he feigned wasn’t mirrored in his eyes.

“Hey, fires are shifting!” Nutter tittered, grabbing onto the side rail as the truck lurched again.

Rawlings could barely hear him over the din of combat, but she saw the defenders had slewed most of their guns to the south and started hammering away at the combatants downrange, slashing through them with twenty-millimeter rounds and forty-millimeter grenades. The trucks had a fairly clear avenue of approach, and the chances of fratricide had just been markedly reduced.

The Klowns saw the shift, as well. They surged forward, jeering and rushing toward the container walls like some gigantic, single-celled organism. The trucks accelerated, racing them to the edge.

So did several Klown-driven Humvees.

“Okay, here we go!” Muldoon shouted. “Get ready, fuckers!”

Rawlings moved to the center of the truck’s bed with the rest of the soldiers. They crouched, steadying each other against the rig’s incessant swaying.