The Flood (25 page)

Pretty much without hope, Handon led the others in flowing through and clearing the area. There had no doubt once been virtually nothing here but infected Somalis, first-stage victims – but they were two years gone.

And then the most unexpected thing happened.

“I’ve got a live one!” Juice shouted. “Erm, a dead one!”

Handon rushed over through the darkness. Juice was pointing his rifle down at a gurney out near the edge of the ruins, one which was somehow still upright. Even crazier, there was a body strapped down to it. Instantly, even in NVG view, Handon could see the figure’s skin was covered in sores and dirt, and it was lolling and moaning, as well as pulling against the wrist and ankle restraints.

His heart leapt with hope.

Ali glided up, pushed up her NVGs, pulled out a visible tactical light, then clicked it on and put it on the wriggling body. “Yeah,” she said, clicking the light off again. “This dude’s definitely Somali.”

Thank fuck
, was all Handon could think.

But then Predator rocked up, leaned in, pulled open its eyelids with the thumb and index finger of one hand – and shined his own light in them with his other hand.

“Only one problem,” he rumbled, clicking the light off.

“What?”

“Dude’s alive. He looks like Joe Shit the Ragman. But he ain’t dead.”

Handon actually laughed. “Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

The man opened his mouth and croaked, “
Meeh qof kasta? Yaad tahay?
”

“Sorry, boss,” Pred said. “I don’t think he’s even infected.”

“Well who the hell tied him here?” Handon asked. “It doesn’t make any sense – he obviously hasn’t been here for two fucking years.”

“Search me,” Pred said, shaking his head. He pulled his baby-sized knife from its vest sheath and sliced through the man’s bonds, wrists and ankles.

The female-pilot voice sounded again in Handon’s ear:
“Cadaver One, you are about to be in serious contact. ETA one mike.”

And now Handon and the others could hear it – that same heavy panting and low barking, over the thunder of a lot of prehensile feet and hands hitting the ground with a great deal of weight. Alpha had barely survived their first encounter with these things. Maybe they were more prepared now.

Then again, there were also four troops rather than one.

“Ammo check,” Handon said.

“I’m black, Top.”

“Red here. Dark red.”

“Black on rifle rounds. Pistol okay.”

“Okay, enough,” Handon said.

There was no way they could take that many of these things with melee weapons. The overwhelming likelihood was that they’d be overrun, swarmed, and torn to pieces – just as Graybeard had earlier. Hell, Handon could picture it in his mind’s eye so clearly: Alpha finally going down, for good, under this new, monstrous, fast, strong, evil evolutionary product of the Zulu Alpha.

They couldn’t take us down with Foxtrots. So they made something worse…

Even the mighty Alpha team was vulnerable now. Naked. Weak. Surrounded and outrageously outnumbered, options evaporating, they were looking at a retreat back into the hospital – where, with a singularity forming up outside, they were pretty likely to meet the same fate as those last-standers back in that radiology suite. Not a winning plan.

But there was no other plan.

“Into the hospital,” Handon said. He felt Henno looking at him – and knew exactly what he was thinking:
We go into that hospital, we ain’t coming out.
He was probably right. There was a singularity descending – and this one had heavy cavalry, in the form of the plague-infected baboons, supporting the good old regular infantry, namely dead humans.

But at least they’d be alive – for a little while longer. Maybe they could clear a way out with air support, or sneak out, or wait for the dead to disperse… but of course Handon knew as well as the rest of them.

The dead almost never dispersed.

As the team dashed for the nearest entrance, and the first baboons came into visual range and started that blood-chilling screaming, Joe Shit the Somali Ragman followed after them. He was yelling at the operators: “
Waxaad kale ma aadi karo in ay jiraan! Vampires in ay jiraan! Vampires!
”

Pred looked over his shoulder. “Wait – did that dude say vampires?”

Ali, running alongside, shrugged. “He’s babbling. He’s incoherent. But, yeah, he said vampires.”

“Dude,” Pred said, looking at the emaciated little man. “You’re in the wrong horror movie! We got zombies in this one.” He obviously thought this was hilarious. As the operators blasted through the door into the pitch-black hospital, Pred held it open for the Somali. He couldn’t just leave him outside for the baboons.

He pulled the door closed seconds before hurtling bodies slammed into it, shrieking and barking. The others started pulling over nearby heavy crap to barricade it. And there they all were.

Trapped in the Hargeisa hospital – ground zero of ground zero.

And the only Somali they’d found was alive.

Plus a pain in the ass.

* * *

Handon didn’t need to find a window. He just had Juice flip his monocle around. It was obvious. They were already surrounded a quarter-mile thick on all sides. And with the animal dead leaping through and around and over the human Zulus and Romeos, it was perhaps the most inescapable singularity any of them had ever seen.

They could try to put in some air strikes – the F-35 had plenty of ordnance.

But with the MRAP gone, and the team exhausted already, there was virtually no chance of getting out of there on foot – even if they did get out of the hospital alive. But there was one thing Handon could do.

“Cadaver Two from One.”

When Fick answered, it was with a lot of engine and rotor racket in the background. That was good – at least he had followed Handon’s instructions, gotten on the helo, and was now winging it the hell out of there.
“Go ahead.”

“What’s your location?”

“Five hundred feet up, thirty clicks north of you, and doing a hundred and fifty knots due north.”

“Copy that. Listen. When you feel you’re a safe distance out, I want you and your team to re-insert for the secondary target site.”

“What makes you think there’ll be local dead there, when there were none in Hargeisa?”

Handon sighed. “We won’t know until you get there.”

Also, this was all they had left. The designated secondary target site had always been a little town called Gebilay, formerly with 80,000 residents, and located 35km to the northwest. It would have gone down soon after Hargeisa. And it was where their mission plan had them heading to – if everything went to shit at the primary target site.

Which is pretty much exactly what’s happened
, Handon thought.

“Anyway,” he said into his mic, “it will keep you a safe distance from the amusing multi-species singularity we’re building up here.”

“How bad is it?”

Now Handon let a long pause drag out on his end.

“You shouldn’t count on us getting out of here. Not on this one.”

* * *

Fick sighed and cast around the blacked-out helo cabin. Taking up most of the room in the middle was Graybeard, now off his folding stretcher and strapped into a more high-tech Skedco rescue litter. He also had an oxygen mask on, a variety of medical monitors strapped to him – and his second liter of typed blood mainlining into him via high-gauge needle. Most reassuringly of all, he was being worked on by Doc Walker herself – the
Kennedy
’s top-ranking flight surgeon and CO of the hospital.

When she’d heard Fick’s call come in, she insisted on jumping on the Seahawk and leading the medevac mission herself.

Fick now grabbed her by the upper arm and stuck his face into hers. “Listen, Doc! He wasn’t bit by human dead. It was monkeys.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Dead ones. But Doc Park said getting bit by infected animals probably wouldn’t infect a human. You got me?”

LCDR Walker looked skeptical. She also looked at the straps holding Graybeard to the litter, in addition to the ankle and wrist restraints she’d brought in her medical bag. “We’ll see,” she said, going back to work on her patient.

Fick nodded, looked up front toward the pilots, and willed the bird to go faster.

The helo, call sign Firehawk One, was the same aircraft and crew that had conducted non-stop ammo runs, as well as gun runs with its minigun and Hellfire missiles, during the Battle of the
JFK
. It had also ferried the nuclear engineers from the USS
Washington
over to the
Kennedy
just in time to get her reactors started and get them the hell out of the path of the storm of the dead.

Now, assigned a medevac mission, they had scrambled and gotten airborne in minutes, then flown to meet the Marines at slightly higher than their safe top speed. Between these guys and Walker, maybe Graybeard would have a chance. Nonetheless, he needed to get back to the hospital ASAFP. So Fick hesitated now. Then he remembered their mission – and that 50 million lives were riding on it.

He flipped down his NVGs, scanned the ground below to the left, which was the west, and then pulled on an ICS headset to give instructions to the pilots. “Hey, guys, I’m gonna need you to set down again and re-insert my team.”

Doc Walker gave him a mean look.

Fick kept talking. “That road north out of Hargeisa is just a couple of klicks to the west. You can touch and go and get back in the air in seconds. We’ll hump overland on our own to get where we’re going.”

The pilot paused before answering, but complied.
“Wilco.”

The Seahawk banked sharply to the left and started descending. In less than a minute it was flaring in low over the dusty black road.

Fick kissed Graybeard on the forehead and then leapt out, Reyes and Brady right behind him, before the helo’s tires even touched the ground. They squatted and covered up their heads as the Seahawk’s 2,000hp twin-turboshaft engines wound all the way up and the rotors threatened to bury them all in dust and flying debris, and then roared off again into the pitch-black night. Soon the airframe itself was only a smudge on the black of the sky, lights blacked out, and quickly becoming nothing more than a fading echo of power and speed.

Fick scurried off the road into the bush, his two remaining Marines following him. And they all hunched down, facing outward, and stayed there for ten minutes – just tuning in to the night.

Brady and Reyes thought about what was waiting for them next.

Fick thought about what they had to do next – and how they were going to do it.

Vampires

Hargeisa Hospital

“I’m gonna have to kill this dude,” Predator muttered, as the crazed non-undead Somali continued to follow them through the bottom-of-the-ocean black corridors of the deserted and ransacked and gore-strewn hospital.

Handon had sent Ali up to the top level of the three-story building, to look for some way to the roof, or other suitable overwatch position. So she wasn’t there to translate the man’s torrent of Somali babble. Juice had a little Somali, but not a lot, and he had other shit to do right then. But as the man ranted, the word “vampire” kept cropping up. This was hardly the first batshit crazy survivor they’d encountered in their travels, so nobody was too perturbed.

“I’ll slot him,” Henno muttered. “Happily.”

“Yeah, sure,” Juice said. “The dark-skinned Africans can die in droves, and nobody cares. Or we could just tie him back up.”

Henno shook his NVG-adorned head in the green-and-black darkness. “I don’t give a shit if he’s got orange polka dots – or if he’s lily-white and second in line for the throne. I don’t care if he’s the Prince of Wales himself. What does it take to get this through your skulls? One person doesn’t matter – nor a hundred, nor a hundred thousand.”

Handon got it. They all pretty much got it now. But they also had a core of essential humanity that it was impossible to entirely tamp down.

And right now Handon just wanted the group to pipe down, so he didn’t say anything that might add fuel to the fire. What he wanted right this second was to find the cafeteria, which was their best chance of finding water. His own CamelBak was dry, and he was pretty sure the others’ were as well, after their long-running battles, the first part in the heat of the day. Also, it would probably be the biggest room in the hospital, where they could spread out, do a supplies manifest, make plans – and, if it came down to it, Alamo up.

“At least he’s actually Somali,” Pred said. “Can we just stick his head outside, get him infected, and then take him back? No one would have to know.”

“Yeah, and you can be the first to be inoculated with the resulting vaccine.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Handon finally said it.

The door they’d entered through by the quarantine tent was midway along the lengthwise axis of the building. The front entrance was off to their right and they’d already covered most of that area. So Handon took them left. He was soon rewarded with a sign pointing to the cafeteria. He didn’t know the Somali word, but recognized the universal coffee cup with crossed fork and knife pretty quickly.

They were moving fast again, those green IR illuminator beams panning over every surface and giving the scene the vague air of a spec-ops fire sale on a used car lot. Still in the lead, Handon startled and spun when he heard a crunching sound to his left – it was the dead outside bashing in a wire-reinforced glass door – the wire probably being the only reason the glass had survived this long. But it was also pretty clear that eventually these guys were going to bash their way through.

Trying to catalog options, Handon stuck his weapon into an open room on the right – it was some type of linen closet, with a shitload of piled-up, and somehow still starched, white bedsheets, towels, etc. He withdrew and kept moving, knowing the team would be right behind him.

Another room on the right, another quick look – this was a slightly bigger storeroom, with what looked like random crap and medical supplies. How med supplies had survived two years without being scavenged was another mystery. Or maybe it wasn’t. It said to Handon that the survivor last-stand they’d found earlier was from the original fall. This place had been wiped out – fast and completely.