SC Page 022
- Dead Team Alpha: Part Twelve
Once the dust had settled, Heineman walked back up the stairs to inspect the attic entrance. The flash light beam illuminated a thin pall of slow-moving grey-brown dust swirling past the rafters.
“Where’s that hole in the roof, Trippes?” he asked.
“South east corner, sir. Real big too,” said Trippes.
“What do you have in mind, sir?” said Harris.
“Sampson?” said Heineman.
“Yes, sir?”
“You still fucking around in the APC?”
“We’ve just come out, sir.”
“Get your ass back in and grab the big Barrett.”
“Sniping them?” said Harris.
“Yeah. I think those fuckers have ripped holes in all the roofs here and are using them as a way of moving from one house to the other. Even if they aren’t we can get a few of them without directly engaging them. But first we have to make sure the attic’s all clear. Mistle, you’re up.”
Mistle had acquitted himself well on this mission so far, but Heineman couldn’t bring himself to trust him. Mistle would have to do a lot more than kill a few zombies to create that trust.
Mistle’s armoured bulk pushed through the squad to stand at the bottom of the ladder. He studied the aperture and reached up with the muzzle of his weapon to tap at the side of the opening.
It seemed that he tapped the floor with one foot and was gone. There were a series of crashes and thuds from the attic. Heineman tensed, wondering if Mistle had been caught in a struggle with a bunch of ganglers; Mistle’s lack of distress call was either due to him being overwhelmed or his supreme confidence that he could handle such an ambush. He readied his weapon in anticipation of going up as the cavalry.
A moment later the helmet-obscured head appeared.
“All clear up here, Captain Heineman, just a bunch of boxes and chests,” said Mistle. “There’s been a lot of activity though. Looks like you were right about these fuckers using the roofs as a way of moving around. I can see a hole in another roof.”
Heineman nodded. There had been suspicions and theories for a long while that ganglers might use means like ripping holes in buildings to move around, since they were strong enough and smart enough to do so. There had just never been a large enough number of them to require such means. The one that had attacked them wasn’t just there as a coincidence.
Rollins and Sampson came back into the house. Sampson was lugging the five foot long sniper rifle while Rollins carried a case full of ammunition. The two men looked worried.
“What’s up?” asked Heineman.
“Since you mentioned the roofs, sir, Rollins and I checked them out when we came out. There’s a lot of movement up there,” said Sampson.
“We saw a couple of ganglers hop about forty feet from one house to another. I think they’re pissed off about all the noise here,” Rollins said.
“If we’re going to do this, we’d better get a move on,” Heineman said, nodding. “Cant, you’re our designated dead-eye for today. Sampson and Rollins are going to be your back up.”
The Beretta was passed up to Mistle, who lifted with little effort and went off in the direction of the hole in the roof. The other three men went up into the attic after he went out of sight.
“Rollins, Cant and Sampson, you three get your asses set up. The only thing that you need to do, Cant, is blow the fuck out of anything you see jumping around,” said Heineman. “Captain Mistle, you’d be best to come with the rest of us to the basement.”
“On my way, Captain Heineman,” Mistle said, before dropping down from the attic a few moments later.
Heineman suddenly felt a shift in mood of the squad. He wasn’t certain if it was losing three of their number to sniper duty or if they were feeling some kind of apprehension about going down into the basement. He hoped it was the former, as he was feeling ill at ease with going under the house. It wasn’t a feeling that he could account for, they had cleared out countless basements and underground floors before, they all knew the risks and were well-trained in dealing with them. There was something else amiss here, something that he’d been feeling since walking into the house, but was only starting to take real notice of.
There was something very wrong here.
He and the rest of the squad had long ago become acclimatised to the concept of zombies and the realities that came along with dealing with them. Those old emotional responses to destroying these things that had once been human had been altered so that they could cope with the rigours of the job, part of that coping mechanism was the knowledge that what they were doing was essential.
This sensation he was feeling was not entirely new, but no less unsettling, the feeling that something had changed. That there was a paradigm shift unlike anything that he’d experienced before and that it spelled danger and hardship.
He couldn’t help but to cast a look at Mistle. The man was inscrutable behind that helmet. It was hard to even call him a man anymore. He was something else. If a definition for ‘paradigm shift’ were ever needed, Richard Mistle was the walking embodiment. Heineman felt that if anything went wrong here today, that it would be due to Mistle. Mistle had managed to allay Heineman’s fears is some ways, and now Heineman felt complacent, as though he had been conned. Now he would observe Mistle with a closer scrutiny and do anything in his power to make sure that he didn’t sabotage the mission and put the squad at risk.
The access to the basement was underneath the stairs. The door was slightly smaller than the standard house doors. It would make getting down there awkward, especially for Mistle in his heavier attire. There was limited scope for covering anyone going down there, so ingress would be hazardous.
For a moment he considered the merits of throwing a grenade down there, but he dismissed it. He would rather have the area as intact as possible, and it would take hours for all the smoke and dust to disperse. Add to that how dark it would be, even with all of them using torches, then the environment would be deadly. Besides, he wasn’t sure how much attention from the roaming ganglers such a blast would get.
Even though this was the precise situation for which Mistle had been trained, Heineman was reluctant to let him go ahead of the team. His new spike of apprehension and mistrust of the man stayed the obvious decision to have him go down into the basement first.
Having discounted using a grenade and trying to squeeze down there in twos, or in close single file, he was left with no choice but to have Mistle take the lead into the area below the house.
He gave Mistle a nod and went to the door. He eased it open as slowly as he could, he’d had lots of experience in throwing a door open and having a zombie lunge out at him. There was nothing here but a set of stairs leading down into the darkness of the basement.
There was a light switch close by that Mistle flicked on as he passed. While he walked down into the now lit basement, Heineman, in the guise of covering him, kept his weapon trained on Mistle’s retreating back.
