Free Operation Wild Tarpan by Addison Gunn Page B

bring his senses back.
    For a brief moment, Cobalt watched him, dumbstruck at how such a powerful man had been brought to this by the very parasite he’d fought to spread.
    Slowly, Miller left the protection of his position, and walked dead centre into the middle of the street.
    The only indication that the wailing Stockman recognized the significance of the situation was when he met Miller’s gaze. For a moment, the general’s eyes were clear.
    Without ceremony, Miller raised his weapon, rested the muzzle against Stockman’s skull as if he were a rabid dog, and shot him in the head.
     
     
    A T THE NEW dawn, for the first time since the artillery barrage, a boat made it safely into the compound’s docks. Army units on the bridges had been set up with SMAWs and machine guns, leaving a small supply fleet baking away in the Long Island Sound waiting for safety, but a push by security team Dagger had cleared the way for them to arrive, at first in a trickle, then a rush that forced the Rats to deploy more pontoon docks.
    The crewmen had wild stories of sea serpents, and Miller believed them. Snakes as thick around as garbage cans, coiling away in the deeps, didn’t seem unlikely after watching those bodies get torn apart in the river.
    No more Infected wandered out into the river for snipers to kill. Recon by fire slowed, then stopped entirely. The military fire teams broke down into armed mobs with a natural size that hovered between a dozen and twenty, agglutinating together into a mass of humanity that attacked vehicles and fled before the helicopters arrived.
    For now the Astoria Peninsula was safe, and they had food. Meanwhile, engineers struggled to strip out and replace one of the helicopters’ clogged fuel systems before the mob realized there weren’t any airworthy helicopters left to chase them down.
    With the Charismatics out of the way, the Infected were unfocussed, but not completely disorganised. Drone overflights of Manhattan and Brooklyn showed mixed groups of military and civilians foraging for food in the streets, hordes pulling down rhino-sized thug-behemoths with a mixture of brute force and firepower. What food they had was shared equally, fairly. But they weren’t sending patrols along the main roads, the attack teams on the bridges had almost melted away in front of Dagger. The siege broke into dozens of separate groups.
    Every so often another Charismatic leader would gather a larger mob, and whenever the next one arrived in the area, Miller was certain Cobalt-2 would be called on. For now, Miller was sharing a meal, in this case a can of creamed wheat, with his team.
    The power was out. The generators were under repair after the previous day’s damage, and the only light in the break room came from the alcohol lamp they used to heat their food.
    Morland cleared his throat. “I can’t believe we...”
    One by one, they all stared at him.
    He looked around, blinking, and ducked his head to his meal.
    They weren’t talking about it.
    Shank were, however. Security team Shank had now formally swallowed what remained of Switchblade, along with a chunk of the Rats and as many uninfected ex-Army members as they could find from the refugee population. Miller had thought he might find some kinship with them, but when he’d visited, they were bragging to one another about how many Infected— bug-brains —they’d killed. Laughing, cheering each other on, like something out of a bad war movie.
    They’d be collecting ears, next.
    Miller hunched in on himself—slurping his soup—not bothering to look up when Lewis made his way into the break room.
    The old man instinctively tried the coffee machine, but, without power, it was useless. Miller shuffled over on the couch to make space, and Lewis sat down, leaning forward to select a can from the random selection surrounding the lamp. He picked out some kind of stew, and Miller loaned him his utility knife—he’d never look at the damn thing as a