He felt as though he’d been hurled naked and flailing into a heaving ocean made of sound. The medic wasn’t kidding.
The fire was so thick and continuous that Black could hardly tell one sound from the other, incoming or outgoing, rocket, mortar, or machine gun. It all just ran together in a shrieking continuum.
“OURS OR THEIRS?” he shouted as the medic pounded up the breezeway that skirted the courtyard.
“EVERYONE’S,” the kid shouted back.
Soldiers stomped past them the other way, slugging heavy ammo cans. Everyone they passed was yelling something at everyone else, or at them.
An impacting mortar round in the far corner of the courtyard heaved a truckbed’s worth of earth into the sky. Black’s hearing momentarily washed out. The medic staggered from the shock but didn’t drop him.
“Hold on, sir!” he cried.
It’s cold out here, Black thought as the kid reached the entry he’d been headed for.
They stumped along through a corridor of blast walls and beneath a heavily sandbagged opening.
“Make a hole!” the medic shouted at the gaggle of people in front of them. “Look out!”
They were in a narrow barracks bay that Black hadn’t been to before. Several soldiers were in there, sweating and pointing and shouting at one another, clutching overheated weapons and jabbing fingers in every direction and unsuccessfully carrying on seven urgent, high-volume conversations at once.
“—wer Two needs fifty-cal ammo NOW.”
“—at the mortar pit, but I don’t kn—”
“No, fuck that! We need to—”
“—get there from here. You gotta go around!”
The medic pushed his way through, soldiers turning in the midst of their shouting to see who was being carried past.
An upside-down sergeant who Black recognized entered the far door ahead of them. One of Merrick’s junior guys. Thick built, low to the ground, commanding. An afro that was way out of regulation.
He surveyed the ineffective scene before him.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP,” he bellowed hoarsely, bringing the room to silence.
The soldiers all turned as he stomped toward them, sniffing their panic with contempt.
“We’re gonna figure out who needs wh—”
He saw Black and his chauffeur approaching.
“Where’s he going?” he demanded.
“Says he’s gotta get to the C.P. to use the radio,” the medic panted.
“Hell,” the sergeant grunted, “he can’t fuck it up any worse than it already is.”
He stomped past toward the group of soldiers, looking dubiously over his shoulder at Black. Black gave a downward thumbs-up as the medic carried him out the door and down the corridor.
“How you doing, sir?” the medic puffed.
They were passing through a stone passageway now, the thunder outside momentarily dulled to a heavy rumble.
“Goopy.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“What’d you give me?”
“Ain’t the drugs, sir. It’s the concussion.”
“Oh.”
They turned a corner. The noise was building again ahead of them.
“But I gave you a shitload of morphine.”
“Oh.”
The medic turned again and a square of light appeared in front of them.
“Gonna be loud again, sir.”
Cold air hit them as they burst into a narrow outdoor channel between two buildings. Hessco baskets lined each side of the passage, but they were barely head high. Noise filled the universe.
“WAIT,” Black shouted. “STOP.”
The medic complied. With nothing else obstructing the sightlines, Black momentarily had an upside-down, nearly three-hundred-sixty-degree view of Vega’s surroundings.
“GOTTA MOVE, SIR.”
He looked up. Or down. Down past the medic, and saw.
They clung to the vertex of a great cavern, its walls studded with inverted trees, its floor a gray roil of clouds, all the air within it echoing with awful sound.
He saw what lay in every mountainslope sliding away beneath them in every direction. Saw what was brought upon Vega, and understood what was intended. He’d never seen or heard anything like it in his life.
Not even that day.
He felt certain in that moment that if he let go he would fall past those slopes and tumble among those clouds.
Not even on that mountain.
“SIR!” the medic urged.
“KEEP GOING,” Black yelled.
They pushed on through the next entrance, cutting left at the first intersection. They were on the same route Caine had taken with him his first night at Vega.
“They don’t know what, sir?” the medic panted.
“What?”
“What was it you said you know . . .”
He gasped and ran.
“. . . that the C.P. guys don’t know?”
Slung across the kid’s shoulders, Black considered how to answer that question succinctly.
That you’re facing more fighters than you or your headquarters ever imagined because your lieutenant murdered a kid and the Army built a wall and I thought I knew what I was doing and all of us together managed to accomplish what no one has accomplished in thousands of years, which is unite everyone in this valley in a single purpose.
They were close to the CP.
And we don’t have a chance of holding this post unless everyone they’ve got in the province comes to help us.
“Just keep going.”
The medic stomped around the final corner. The CP was just up the corridor.
“Thank you,” Black muttered woozily.
“Right.”
They’d arrived at the little door to the radio room.
“If it helps,” Black said, “I ordered you to take me here.”
“Aw, fuck your orders, sir.”
The medic kicked the door open with a boot and squatted sideways through the low frame, barely managing to squeeze himself and Black through it.
He stopped short. Black turned his head upward at the upended scene before them.
Despite the outpost being under what the tactics manual would call a complex attack from a superior and determined force preparing the battlefield for ground assault, there was only one frantic, red-faced person on duty in the command post to direct its defenses.
Standing among the racks of radios, a taut telephone-style cord circling his body and stretching to a handset tucked under his chin, another handset in one hand, a walkie-talkie in the other hand, and a raft of maps sprawled across one another and spilling from the desktop, stood the cool kid. The freckled, T-shirted punk who’d been at the desk every time Black had been to the CP before. There was nothing cool about him right now.
“Where the fuck is everybody?” he screamed at them hysterically.