Chapter 63

December Twenty-fifth 5:00 p.m. EST 4:00 p.m. local time

Mark hung for dear life onto the back of the bull dozer as it crunched a final few cars to the side before letting out a belch of diesel smoke and lurching to a stop. There was a loud hum and a slight grinding sound as the driver raised the thick steel blade high enough to offer some protection to the cab.

Roughly a thousand yards to the west stood the hulking BOK Tower, a good two thirds of it visible above the roof of the low, squat cube of Tulsa City Hall. He took a deep breath and immediately regretted it; the entire city was suffused with the bitter, noxious scent of burning ferals. With a grimace, he glanced at the dozer's primary cargo. For better or worse, soon the only thing he would be able to smell was burning nitrocellulose.

He had no sooner hopped to the ground when several people on dirt bikes closed in to report on the progress of the groups that were putting things right throughout of the city. He received the reports with bemused nods and waved as they headed back to their tasks. He still didn't quite understand why they were coming to him.

With a shrug, he turned his attention back to the matter at hand. The earlier scouting expedition hadn't gone well. At first, he had been contemptuous of the vampires' choice of daytime refuge. The huge building seemed ridiculously exposed. Then he had noticed that many of the windows on the top floor and the sixth floor down had been broken out, while those of the floors between had been covered with plywood or plastic tarps.

The tallest building on the plains gave the defenders a high enough vantage point that they could chew up any force that approached on foot, while remaining relatively safe from return fire if they had erected even the most basic of defensive positions. With no electricity and, hence, no elevators, any attackers who gained entrance would then be forced to climb fifty odd flights of stairs to reach their goal. If, as Mark suspected, those routes were heavily guarded, the attacking force would be slaughtered on the way up, and, even if any survived, they would likely be too exhausted by the time they reached the top to do much good. There was no way he could even consider asking so many to sacrifice themselves, especially when success was far from certain.

They had tried to move in for a closer look, but bullets started to fall before they had even gotten within five hundred yards. Fortunately, at that range the shots from the untrained former inmates were wildly inaccurate. They retreated and tried several other approaches with the same result.

He and Brian had then retreated halfway across the city to the Tulsa Expo Center, which had already been undergoing the transformation into a communal food storage area and refugee camp for those who had either lost their homes or were too frightened to return to them.

By freak chance and rare good fortune, one of the refugees present was an armorer with the 138th Fighter Wing of the Air National Guard which operated out of the Tulsa International Airport. He had suggested using the unit's F-16's to attack the building, and indicated that he could even fly one in a pinch. He would, however, need a lot of help prepping them for flight. So, they had collected everyone with any experience as a mechanic or engineer and headed for the airport, making calls on the radio for anyone who had every piloted one of the jets to join them there.

That's where their luck had ended. The airport's fuel depots and many of the passenger planes had been set on fire and were still spewing flame and pillars of black smoke high into the air. More disappointment awaited them at the hangers used by the Air National Guard. Sledge hammers had been taken to the relatively fragile turbine engines and instrument panels of the high tech fighter planes, rendering them inoperable.

Then a low tech solution had been offered by a mechanic who worked for the Oklahoma Department of Transportation. It had taken them most of the afternoon, working in the thick, acrid smoke, to remove the Vulcan Gatling guns and the drums that fed them their linkless ammunition from two of the planes and mount them on the huge Caterpillar D10T dozers, the only vehicles available that had both the hydraulic and robust electrical systems needed to operate the weapons.

Getting the massive machines from the airport to here had eaten away even more of the precious daylight, not to mention a lot of the pavement of the Crosstown Expressway. They were running out of time.

Mark turned to look at the line of trucks that had followed them. The one directly behind him carried half of the 20mm ammunition that the National Guard unit had on hand. The rest were full of grim faced volunteers armed with everything from assault rifles to baseball bats. Each also had at least a few wooden stakes and a hammer tucked in their belts.

As they started to gather in a loose formation behind an old industrial building to the right of the dozer, bullets began to ping off the pavement and cars in the vicinity. Diane reached down to give Mark a hand as he climbed up the ripper on the dozer's rear to the flat area behind the cab. Using a pair of binoculars, he tried to locate the shooters. He could see some flashes from the interior of the top floor, but not the snipers themselves.

He turned to look at the policeman, a veteran of Desert Storm, who was leading the brave men and women who were going to attack the building on foot. The former Green Beret did a final check and nodded that he was ready.

Mark leaned forward to look up the barrels of the six foot long Gatling gun. The makeshift gun mount gave him about twenty degrees of play, which, from this range, was more than enough provided that it was centered on the building to begin with.

He thumped on the back window of the cab to get the driver's attention and pointed to the left while holding the thumb and forefinger of the other hand a short distance apart. The driver nodded, and the dozer lurched in the indicated direction. Again Mark looked along the barrels. Perfect. Or so he hoped; for all the ingenuity that had gone into mounting the weapon, no one had been able to come up with a targeting system other than the good ol' Mark I eyeball.

He peered down into the cab and again thumped on the rear window. This time, he cupped his hands over his ears and pointed to Junior and Valerie, who were sitting next to the driver. Valerie was still withdrawn and listless, but George was nearly bouncing with excitement inspired by riding in the huge machine. Again the driver nodded and reached over to slide hearing protection in place over their heads. Barney the dog would have to fend for himself.

Sticking plugs in his own ears, Mark picked up the button that would fire the gun. Each push would fire off roughly one hundred rounds. This was necessary as the ammunition drum only held a little over five hundred rounds total: firing continuously would exhaust his entire supply in less than five seconds.

He flicked the switch that started the barrels rotating. A silly grin appeared on his face; despite the circumstances, he was really looking forward to this. One of the benefits of his new inexplicable status was that no one had raised even a token objection when he had appointed himself as one of the gunners.

Picking up the handheld radio, he said, "Ready, Brian?"

"Yessir," the other man drawled back immediately.

Mark pressed the button, trying to time it with a slight sideways movement of the gun. The roar was intense, sounding more like a jackhammer than any gun he had ever heard before. Flames and tracer rounds shot out of the barrels like an erupting volcano. His jaw dropped open in excited astonishment as the windows of the top floor of the tower seemed to vaporize under the impact of the 20mm high explosive incendiary rounds.