Slaughterhouse

THIRTY-SEVEN.

It took a lot longer than ten minutes to get Hays Hall evacuated. When the troops had built the walls surrounding the two-story headquarters building, they’d dragged one final container in place to seal the vehicle access then used a crane to hoist a second container on top of it. The crane had been taken out of commission earlier in the battle, so the only way out was to rappel from the wall or come down caving ladders.

The delay was one of the longest in Lee’s life, virtually unendurable as he crouched next to the wall with Twohy, his radio telephone operator, and four other soldiers who had clustered around him, trying to provide protection while he quarterbacked the fight from the front. Charlie Company had halted its advance and formed a trailing wedge, becoming a type of wall that the Klowns would commit suicide trying to scale.

From the roof of Hays Hall, the remaining defenders poured it on with everything they had left as the first of the soldiers trapped inside the compound made a break for it. The wounded went first, several of whom were litter-borne. Lee called for the ambulances to be moved up, so those men could immediately be transported off-site. That involved pulling some of Echo’s soldiers forward out of the blocking position they had taken in the rear. Lee couldn’t leave the ambulances unguarded, as the medics operating them were armed only with pistols. The Klowns would have loved to take them down, and Lee was quite predisposed to ensure they didn’t have the chance.

Twenty minutes after the evacuation began, the rooftop defenders had abandoned their posts. That left only the ground combatants standing between them and the Klowns. Lee ordered Hallelujah Hayes to retrograde his elements back toward Walker’s position, where they would be directly backed up by the remaining Echo formations. That way, the battalion would be more centrally located and better able to defend itself should the Klown reinforcements make their way past the small task force led by Turner and Muldoon.

Not that there’ll be much left to defend with. The battalion had been expending its munitions at a fantastic rate. It was difficult to know how much longer the unit could maintain its current tempo, especially with Echo deployed in a battle formation. While the unit was still supplying the battalion, it was doing so with only a small percentage of personnel. No one was able to keep a good count of what was going down to the company level, and the battalion had been fighting pretty much the entire time on the road to Drum. Lee hoped—prayed, actually, which was the first time he’d resorted to that in quite a while—that they could pull Mountaineer out of Hays Hall and get the hell out of Fort Drum.

“Colonel!”

Lee turned. Two Alpha Company lightfighters were escorting another man with them. Unlike the lightfighters, the newcomer didn’t have any MOPP gear on, though he was armored up and carried an M4 carbine. He was shorter than Lee but more squared off in a heavy-jawed sort of way that reminded Lee of Sergeant Major Turner. The olive-skinned man had bright green eyes that shined beneath a furrowed brow.

“Colonel?” the man echoed.

Lee felt the blood leave his face. The man was Brigadier General Salvador, the deputy commanding general of the 10^th Mountain Division.

Lee saluted.

“Sir, you need to get behind the line!”

Salvador looked Lee up and down then leaned forward, staring right at the subdued lieutenant colonel oak leaf insignia on Lee’s armor. He raised his eyes back to Lee’s masked face.

“I don’t know of any Colonel Lee attached to the First Battalion. Who the hell are you, soldier?”

Lee decided not to sidestep the issue. It wasn’t very important at the moment, anyway. “Harry Lee, former S-3, First Battalion, Fifty-fifth Infantry Regiment,” he said. “You need to get off the battlefield, General. As in, right now.”

“The S-3? So you’re a captain?” Salvador snapped. “Why the hell are you wearing lieutenant colonel insignia? Where’s the XO, Walker?”

“Major Walker is not here, sir. If you follow these soldiers, you’ll be taken to him, and he can fill you in on everything that’s gone down since the battalion pulled out of Boston. I’m busy here.”

Salvador pushed his way forward and got right in Lee’s mask-covered face. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Do you have any idea how badly you’ve basically butt-raped military tradition, not to mention how many regulations you’ve violated? Boy, you’re in some serious trouble here!”

Lee looked at the two soldiers who had accompanied the general. Both were half crouched because of the gunfire ripping through the air, and not all of it was coming from the battalion. The Klowns were rebounding since Hayes’s company had pulled back. The void had given the infected enemy time to regroup, and they were focusing solely on Charlie Company, hammering them with everything they had.

“Get this man out of here!” Lee yelled at the pair just as several soldiers still manning the wall above them opened up with full automatic gunfire.

Everyone dropped to the ground, including Salvador. The general might have been pissed, but he hadn’t forgotten he was out in the open, in the middle of a shooting war. Something buried itself into the shipping container wall behind him with a sharp noise, and Lee looked back to see an arrow lodged there.

Higher up, one of the infantrymen manning a defensive position was reacting to the fact he had one stuck in his left thigh.

Oh, fuck!

“Get Salvador out of here!” he shouted, bringing up his rifle.

The soldier with the arrow in his leg started shaking as the first wave of giggles hit him, and he immediately lowered his weapon and opened up on the men below. One of the soldiers who had escorted Salvador jerked as several rounds struck him. Next, Salvador grunted and started discharging his M4 into the ground. Lee’s RTO curled up into a ball as the general’s errant volley stitched a trail right in front of him. Lee pulled his rifle’s trigger, sending three bullets through the infected soldier above him, just as the others on the wall brought their own weapons around and began firing on the same man. The infected soldier danced a ballistic-driven jig as a score of rounds slammed into him, driving him off the wall and out of Lee’s view.

Lee turned to the men beside him. The first soldier who had been hit was lying face down on the ground, a puddle of blood forming near his head. Salvador thrashed next to him, his left hand clamped over his right shoulder, where his short neck met his body. Blood pulsed from between his gloved fingers. His eyes were wide with fear and shock. He knew he’d been hit, and he knew it was bad.

“Get him out of here!” Lee shouted to the remaining soldier and the RTO. “Twohy, get him to a medic, right away!”

More people ran toward them, and not all of them were in uniform. Lee took up a fighting position, but one of them threw up his hands, waving in the darkness.

“No, no! We’re from Hays!” the soldier shouted.

“How many of you are left inside?” Lee asked.

“I think we’re it, other than wall security. They’re on their way out now.” The man looked down at Salvador as the Twohy helped the other soldier heave him into a fireman’s carry. “Shit, is that the general?”

“It is,” Lee said. “Help these men get him out of here. Twohy, you know where the ambulances are?”

“Yes, sir,” said the RTO.

“Then get him to Nightingale, right now!”

“On it,” Twohy replied, and the group moved off, carrying the injured general with them.

Lee turned back to the fight. Charlie Company was continuing to fall back. They were extracting a healthy penalty on the Klowns. Bodies were stacked up four deep only a few hundred meters away. But the Klowns kept coming, clambering over the dead and twitching near-dead and cackling with glee as they retaliated with assault rifles and hand grenades of their own. One of the containers down the line exploded when an AT4 round burrowed into it and detonated, sending red-hot shrapnel whirling through the air. The fire had come from behind the Klown lines. The crazies were bringing some heavy weaponry to the party, which meant it was time for the battalion to beat feet.

“Wizard, this is Six!”

Walker came back immediately. “Six, this is Wizard. Over!”

“Wizard, are we about done with the extraction? We’re losing the line over here. Chaos is being pushed back. Time’s up, we have to go. Over.”

“Six, this is Wizard. Roger, we’ve got a few stragglers, but they’ll be out in less than two minutes. We’re ready when you’re ready. Over.”

“Wizard, Six is ready right now. Pull Alpha back under covering fires, then do the same for Charlie and any other forward units. Start that right away. Over.”

“Six, this is Wizard. Roger that.”