Escape The 1st Omnibus: WTF Books 1-3 (6 page)

Brad looked over the roof wall and saw the two dark figures huddled at the door. He turned, and he and Cole rushed down the ladder, waking up Méndez. With his pistol in his hand, Brad undid the bindings on the door and let it slowly open outward. The two men hurried inside and closed the door behind them. The man in front dropped the dark hood he had been wearing, gave a toothy, bearded grin, and extended his hand to Brad.

“U.S. Navy SEALS, we’re here to get you out,” he laughed. Brad didn’t return the handshake and instead just stared at the man. “Why so stern, Sergeant? Just fucking with you. We’ve been watching you guys the better part of two days. It’s good to be inside with you. It’s not a lot of fun out there in the city,” the man said.

“So who are you guys? Where did you come from?” Brad asked.

“Damn kid, where are your manners? Getting all personal and not even offering a guest a beverage,” the man replied.

“Shit, my fault,” said Cole, laughing and holding up a couple of cans of energy drink.

They all chuckled and moved to the interior of the warehouse. Méndez secured the door and followed them inside. Brad looked the men over; they were solid but not large. Both had overgrown beards and they wore an arrangement of camouflage. Instead of issue boots, they were wearing civilian-style hiking shoes.

Both men carried huge packs and an assortment of weapons. The chatty man carried a large scoped rifle and had a suppressed MP5 strapped to the top of his pack. His partner carried a scoped M14 as well as a silenced MP5, and they both had large handguns at their hips. They wore dark-patterned cargo pants and large, dark-and-tan-splattered hooded jackets—they definitely blended into the terrain here in northern Afghanistan. The man saw the pot and asked if they had any more.

“Tastes like shit,” answered Brad, “but suit yourself.”

Méndez smiled, reached over to stir the coals on the fire, and started to open a couple of cans of the Afghan slop.

“So you care to make a proper introduction now?” Brad asked.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” the man laughed. “I’m Chief Sean Rogers. This is my partner Petty Officer Brooks. We really
are
SEALs,” he smiled, “but we sure as hell ain’t in any condition to get you all out.”

“How did you get here? What are you doing all the way up here?” Eric asked.

The chief began to speak. “Well, we’ve been up here for a week now. We started about a hundred miles from here; been in the city for three days now. You guys were smart to hole up here. There ain’t shit but bad news out on those streets. We saw your Army brothers last night making all that noise. It was real John Wayne of them picking that fight, but also really fucking stupid. We’ve been watching you guys, trying to make sure you weren’t fucking stupid too. We don’t like to make camp with stupid people.”

Sean paused to open the can of energy drink and he gulped it down, spilling some on his beard. “That shit done yet?” he asked, digging a canteen cup out of his pack and handing it to Méndez. Brooks dug out a similar cup and handed it over; Méndez poured the contents of the pot between the two cups and handed them back.

“Damn, you weren’t lying! This does taste like shit,” Brooks said, and all the men laughed.

“So Chief, you were saying how you got here,” Brad said.

“Oh yeah. Well, we were a ways north of here in Teremez doing a little recon and trying to close out some leads, when we were told our pickup was going to be delayed. Later we were told it was canceled and we should try and make our way to the base at Hairatan. And yeah, that’s pretty much when the world went to shit,” Sean answered.

“Wait a minute,” Brad asked. “Teremez? You were operating in Uzbekistan? And what do you mean the world went to shit? This thing is everywhere?”

“Well Sergeant, I guess I can’t say for certain, but we know for a fact that things are bad out there.”

“Fuck yeah they are!” Brad yelled, “I lost my entire company yesterday, so will you stop fucking around and tell us what’s going on?!”

“Stand down Sergeant! You think you’re the only one that has lost people this week? I went to Teremez with six men; Brooks is all that I have left. If you’ll sit back down, I’ll try to explain.” Sean scooped up a mouthful of the slop, swallowed, then continued. “About two months ago we lost an embassy in Yemen, you may have heard about it.”

“Oh yeah, that was fucked up! They got rushed by protestors; the ambassador was killed. Al Qaeda, right?” Eric added.

“Well, something like that,” Sean answered. “What the people
don’t
know is that we had four former SEALs and a contingent of Marine guards assigned to protect that ambassador. Now what sort of protestors can take down that kind of muscle?”

“What are you getting at, Chief?” Brad asked.

“Well Sergeant, we now believe that was a test shot. We think the crowd in Yemen was infected. They tore through the embassy residence, walked through a wall of gunfire, and took everything out. The reason CNN showed the smoking rubble the next day and blamed it on mortars and rockets is because the Marine commander onsite ordered a C130 gunship to rain fire on his own position. He knew the ambassador was already dead and he had watched one of his men turn in the three-hour battle. That Marine captain stopped the spread,” Sean said. He paused to take another huge gulp of his energy drink. And went on to explain what they had found.

“We aren’t sure where it comes from, but we know that Al Qaeda found a way to make a weapon out of it. The nerds at the CDC call it
primalis rabia
or primal rage. It affects the brain, somehow protects it. You can stop the heart. You can shoot them through the lungs and the brain will still function for hours. It spreads through blood. A spit in the eye won’t do it, but get infected fluids into your blood and you’re screwed. Once a victim is infected, he slips into a coma, and then gets a fever. The heat of the fever seems to cause irreversible brain damage, then for reasons they can’t figure out yet, the brain reboots. When the victim wakes up, they are feral.

“The longer the person is infected, the harder they are to bring down. Recently infected ones can still be killed with a shot to the heart. Those infected for over forty-eight hours—-good luck, only extreme trauma to the body seems to bother them. After ninety-six hours, the brain is fully protected and nothing will kill them but a critical brain hit. They move in packs like wolves and they will attack on sight.

“The attack in Yemen put them on our radar. But we still didn’t know how to react until twelve days ago. A man code-named Asim walked into a field office in Pakistan. He said that there was a major global attack planned by the Sons of Bin Laden. Asim carried a special ink pen, but instead of ink it contained the virus. It was a brutal method of transmission. All you do is stab yourself with the pen, click the button, and bam! You’re infected. In the lab it took anywhere from two to six hours for the victims to reboot. Asim said there were over one hundred pens made and distributed globally. He only knew the locations of those in his cell and he gave them up. He was supposed to walk into a crowded mosque in Karachi, infect himself, and then wait for it to take hold. Asim came to us instead.”

“What happened next?” Brad asked.

Sean continued, “Well, my team was sent into Teremez. Asim had fingered two members of his cell who had orders to infect themselves simultaneously on different edges of the city. One tango at the airport and another tango at a popular park. We set up and staked out both locations, but things got difficult; things went wrong. I went with Brooks to the park; we watched for Tango One all afternoon. We had a good description of him but everyone that day seemed to look alike. Toward the end of the day, we spotted a suspect and took him down in a men’s room. We found the pen on him. Tango One didn’t want to answer our questions. We needed to know how to find Tango Two. He didn’t want to cooperate so we quickly eliminated him from the equation and turned our attention to the airport.

“The rest of my guys were set up in the international terminal. They just had too many suspects. They tried to find people sleeping or in the coma phase, but no dice. It happened quickly and without warning. In the smaller terminal Tango Two went crazy. They heard it over their police scanners. The local police were responding and by the time my men got there, they had already put down Tango Two.

“But therein lay the problem. Tango Two managed to scratch, bite, and claw a number of people before he went down. We didn’t even know how many because a number of them fled or went home after the incident. The Uzbek police thought they were dealing with just another insane person and didn’t buy our story. Even when we notified Interpol they didn’t care to listen. The Uzbeks were more concerned about us operating within their border than a possible epidemic about to explode on them.

“So victims go home, they feel sick, they go to bed, they wake up, and they attack their families, neighbors. Simultaneously all over Teremez, we were tracking at least fifteen outbreaks; by morning we heard of ninety more, then it just snowballed from there. By the second day the city was in flames. We called for extraction, but they told us we needed to hang tight. See, Teremez was just one attack; this was going on everywhere and somehow it had even gotten into a few of our larger bases.

“Bagram and Kandahar were lost quickly, and within twelve hours we had a complete loss of combat readiness in theater. All bases were locked down, NATO recalled all of its troops, the U.S. followed suit. That was chaos in itself, there just weren’t enough birds to move them, and they were battling the primal virus at the same time. Gentlemen, it’s pretty safe to say it was a huge cluster fuck. We stayed in contact with Kabul through that first night, but they were in bad shape and we eventually lost comms. The last message to us was to try to make it to the border.”

“What about your men? Where’s the rest of your team?” Eric asked.

“Dead. Getting out of that city was hell. It’s not like here, this place is small. Teremez on Day Two? You’re talking close to a hundred thousand of those fucking things on the streets,” Brooks said. “Chief and I got separated from the team. We were providing overwatch while they moved on ahead. They were surrounded and quickly overrun. It’s a fucked up world out there. They didn’t have a chance; in numbers, it’s like fighting a tidal wave.”

“What about the States, Chief? What’s going on at home?” Brad asked.

“We don’t know. Honest answer? Last update we got, there were no attacks in the U.S., but Mexico and Canada were nearly lost. Moscow, Paris, and London all got hit hard. Germany was attacked but they were holding,” answered Sean. “Our sat phone died two days ago, and our radios haven’t worked in three. Boys, we are in the dark.”

Brad then told the SEALs their story, how they’d lost communications during their patrol to the village, about the mobs, and how they had barely escaped to make it to Hairatan.

“So what do we do Chief? What was your plan B?” asked Brad.

Sean let out a sigh. “Plan B? Shit, son, we’re already past plan C, hell, we’re off the page.”

They were interrupted by the sound of gunfire and they all climbed the ladder to the roof. The small car was back, repeating the acts of last night. They watched it stop while two men jumped out and fired away at the mob until it was within fifty meters, then they jumped back in their car and sped away.

“Ha! That’s just Junayd, don’t worry about him,” chuckled Brooks.

“What’s so funny?” Brad asked.

“Oh Junayd, he’s a local Taliban boss. We bumped into him crossing the river. Well, we saved his ass actually. We gave him our car and those rifles he’s using,” said Brooks. “He is determined to take back his city.”

“You armed the Taliban?” questioned Eric incredulously.

“Hell yeah we did, if they’re keeping the primal bastards busy then they stay the hell away from us, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?” answered Sean.

“What about the other army unit, Sergeant Turner and his guys?” Cole asked.

“Yeah, they’re out there. We watched them escape, but for some reason they don’t like to lay low. Not sure how long they will last without instruction,” said Sean. “They took up residence in a two-story building on the edge of the city. I’m sure they aren’t as comfy as you all are in here.”

“Well then we need to get to them, we can’t leave them hanging out there, Chief,” said Brad.

“Tomorrow, son, tomorrow. But for now? Chief needs his sleep. Besides, them things are too active at night, we would never make it. So how ‘bout you guys show us where we can bed down,” said Sean.

The next morning they did maintenance on their vehicle and equipment. Cole and Henry made a run to the shipping containers to resupply their stash of Afghan slop and energy drinks while Brad showed Sean the supplies they had on hand.

“You guys have done a good job here, Sergeant, you probably have more ammo than anyone within a hundred miles,” Sean said.

“Well, we took everything we could. We have a few extra weapons too, but the MRAP is our baby right now. I don’t think we would have escaped the mob at Bremmel without it,” replied Brad.

“Yeah she’s nice, but she’s loud and will attract attention. I’m surprised you didn’t get a mob following you right into this fence; you guys got lucky.”

“So what’s the plan to get Sergeant Turner and his guys?” Brad asked.

“Well, first put this on your M4,” Sean said as he handed Brad a threaded suppressor for his rifle. “They are attracted to noise; this will help.”

They waited until the sun was high in the sky; the Chief had told them that’s when the crazies were the least active. Brad left Méndez in charge of the men and the warehouse before he moved out with the SEALs through the compound gate. They were fast and quiet. Brad was in great shape but the SEALs made him feel like a bumbling idiot as he struggled to keep up with them. They hugged the walls of the buildings, ducked behind abandoned vehicles, and sometimes tucked into alleys to avoid a wandering primal. But the Chief was right; they were less active during the hot mid-day than they were at night.