by Glynn James
Then he felt a pain at the back of his head, and felt a trickle of blood run down onto the collar of his shirt. His head swam with dizziness for a moment, and he stepped back, spinning round to see what had struck him.
The crunching of gravel on the drive. Fast footsteps, heading away. Walter’s eyes were blurred, but he could still make out the receding figure, running with a limp, he thought. He hurried back into the house, shutting the back door as quietly as he could, and stopped for a moment to lean against the porch wall, before heading quickly to the bathroom.
It was a cut, or a deep scratch, barely two inches long, and it was bleeding a lot. He couldn’t make it out clearly in the small mirror, and it was difficult to line up Mel’s tiny make-up mirror with the equally tiny toilet mirror, so that he could see the back of his head. It hurt a lot, he knew that much, and he felt tired, very tired.
Whatever it was that attacked him was gone now, as was the creature that had stumbled through his vegetables.
Walter took a bandage from one of the first aid kits stacked up in the kitchen, and stuck it to the back of his head, then went to lie down.
He’d get some sleep. The place was locked up and the creature, or creatures, had gone. He was fine. Sleep was what he needed. Maybe the headache would go away, and in the morning it would be warm again and he wouldn’t feel so cold.
Walter Jennings slept like the dead.
* * *
The creature ran onwards into the night, driven by a base, mindless urge that never faded or grew weary. It had an evil energy that burned bright. It was not flesh that it sought, nor hunger that drove it. It was blood – and the need to infect. Its burning, dead eyes bored into the darkness, scanning for anything that lived and breathed. It had touched many since it had first crawled from the darkness of the Channel Tunnel.
And the lights of the larger town in the distance beckoned it.
On These Fell Shoals
Earlier, when Dr. Park had asked Juice, the big bearded one, who seemed to be the team’s resident geek, why they couldn’t just radio the carrier for help, he’d said:
“Well, Doc, radio communications are a bit of a black art. A good military HF radio can in theory reach anywhere in the world. However, getting it to work in practice requires graft, calculation, skill, luck, and patience. First off, the little stub antennas you see in the movies won’t cut it. An antenna capable of bouncing signals off the ionosphere and reaching around the world generally needs to be a massive, oddly-shaped series of cables strung up across trees, buildings, or Clark masts. Now, we’re lucky enough on this boat to have a kind of mast, plus a boom. But said antenna needs to be cut to the length appropriate to the frequency, pointed in a precise direction, given enough power, and finally blessed with suitable weather.”
Now, hours later, and as they’d started to drift into shore, Dr. Park saw Juice clambering up around the cruciform mast, stringing copper wire he’d scavenged from the boat. Perhaps related to this, he also saw Homer cross himself.
Handon stepped to the boom and spliced the end of Juice’s improvised antenna into his hand radio. “Mortem One to JFK CIC, how copy?” He spoke in quiet but intent tones, then released his transmit bar, pausing two seconds. “Mortem One to any call signs receiving, acknowledge.” Only silence came back, settling on them in the ominous darkness.
And the shore came closer.
* * *
Ali clocked the discomfiture of the scientist as she and a couple of the others casually swung by the resupply pallet to palm a few extra magazines and grenades. She guessed there was no way to soft-pedal this kind of thing, not on a boat this small.
But reassuring their joyriding civilian was not real high on her list of concerns right now.
She jammed a couple of 30-round STANAG magazines in her thigh pouches, grabbed an energy bar and a bottle of water, and padded silently back toward the prow. She then lowered herself gracefully to the deck, peeled open the food bar’s wrapper and started getting it down. One lesson of military life was that the best time to eat is generally now.
She watched some of the others also top up from the pallet. After they had first sailed out of the city-side marina, tacking like Ithacan sailors possessed, with dozens of howling animated corpses leaping off the pier literally into their wake, the first thing they did was make a beeline for their resupply pallet. With its own cargo canopy, this had gotten shoved out of the plane at the beginning of their original insertion, with the eight human parachutists diving headfirst behind it.
Setting up a resupply cache, to allow them to rearm and refit with ammo, radio batteries, water, and all the other essentials that urban combat burns through at a dizzying rate, had struck everybody as a good idea. But putting it down in the lake had been the stroke of genius of Gunnery Sergeant Fick, who assisted with their mission planning and logistics.
Not only had they needed to avoid overflying the city and thus waking the dead; but Fick had discerned that there was no safe place to put it on the ground in Chicago anyway – every square foot was a no-go zone, and prone to being overrun at any second. But at least the surface of the lake was guaranteed to be dead-guy-free. So the pallet had been configured on a semi-rigid raft that auto-inflated just before splashdown, with an onboard radio transponder to locate it.
Picking up the floating cache on their way out of town had radically increased their odds of eventual survival. Ali had even been out of pistol rounds by the end of the Battle of Lake Shore Drive, as she’d come to think of it. Not that she minded using her sword. It soothed her in a strange way, the ritualistic motions of kendo, and it reminded her of her friend, Pope – with whom she used to train in their dojo back at Hereford, and whom they had left behind in Chicago.
It was he who had dug the team out from under the mountain of Zulus beneath which they had gotten buried – though he’d only done so by volunteering to be buried under them himself. The best Ali could hope for him now was that he had found his final rest.
Anyway, the entire team had effectively been black on ammo by the end of the street battle. Now they were at least dug out of that particular hole. But, unfortunately, it sat way deep down inside of several other kinds of perilous holes.
For instance, they were still a damned long way from help, never mind safety.
The motion of the boat was imperceptible. But the treeline loomed a little higher every time Ali looked up at it. From where she sat, she could make out the silhouette of Homer, up at the very prow of the boat. From his posture, she also knew just what he was doing. He was praying. Watching him quietly, and with affection, Ali remembered the line from that great atheist John Fowles: “We all drift on the same raft. There is only one question. What sort of shipwrecked man shall I be?”
She chamber-checked her rifle, double-checked the safety, then lay down and racked out.
Now was also always an excellent time to get some sleep.
* * *
Homer stopped reciting. He found prayer was a little like meditation – you had to have the discipline to drive the other thoughts out. And he wasn’t succeeding tonight. One thought kept intruding, as it had more and more over the last weeks and months. It had become like some invader, or homunculus, in his brain. Some kind of virus. The thought abided, and grew, and he couldn’t make it go away. And he didn’t entirely want it to.
This thought was of his family.
Ever since the fall, and being stranded in the UK, he had gotten by the way he always had: by keeping his faith, and by doing his duty. But his faith had clashed with the near certainty that his wife and his children were dead, or worse – a crushing certainty that his faith could not overcome. And his duty to country, to unit, to humanity, had meant that he could not fulfil his duty as a father and a husband. He could not go to them. He could not find them.
And, whether or not he could still save them, or ever could have… still there could be no explanation, no excuse, no solace, for not having tried.
When h
e had been on the other side of the ocean, when he had been head-down in operations, and working for the survival of what remained of the species… well, it had felt like a long way from the New World, and further still from the old living world. An uncrossable distance.
But now, against all possible odds, they had crossed that distance, as well as an entire ocean – and here he was back in North America. The carrier itself was, even at that moment, moored off the Atlantic coast not 100 miles from his old home in Little Creek, Virginia – the last place he had seen his wife and children alive. When the team flew off the carrier’s deck, into the maw of their impossible mission, Homer had sworn an oath:
If it pleases God to let me pass through this last storm… I swear that I will go and find them. One way or another, whatever the outcome… I will find them.
And now, also against inconceivable odds, he had survived that mission, at least what it had thrown at them so far. The near catastrophe of their busted air drop, the hour he fought alone out on the streets… Then their first rampage through the streets to get to the underground bunker… The fire and explosion, the second, even more desperate, running urban battle to the water… And then, finally, when all hope was gone, and they had resigned themselves to a last forlorn stand, dying side by side as brothers…
Well, then that marina had appeared over the hill like Zion, and the sailboat like the angels that rescued Lot, and verily were they vomited out of the belly of the whale. All of it against impossibly long odds.
But there was a word for a triumph over impossible odds: a miracle.
Homer wondered: would he be worthy of this one?
The weights of his irreconcilable duties were starting to shift.
* * *
Predator only grunted and growled softly in the dark as Juice worked on his leg.
His friend had finally convinced him that the time had come for the lumber-and-duct-tape splint to come off. This was what Predator had improvised after the lethal winds over Chicago had wrapped him around a building-top antenna, bending his leg all the way back the wrong way. Luckily for him, the much bigger medical pack in the resupply pallet had a military-issue fiberglass moldable splint. It only required a little water, which was one thing they had plenty of, and it could be fitted perfectly around his knee.
Predator sat and caught his breath while it hardened. He also caught the scientist watching him from across the deck, which gently rolled and glittered with starlight. It felt like they were floating alone in a tiny pool at the center of an endless, empty void. Which was the case. Predator addressed Park in his growly basso, which carried across the night air even at low volume.
"So this business about you needing to find Patient Zero, Doc. Is there even such a person? And how can we possibly find one dead guy among billions?"
Dr. Park nodded and touched the corner of his glasses, composing his reply. "I just need a sample of the virus from a very early-stage victim. Not necessarily the first one, but the earlier the better. As to where… well, I was head-down in an electron microscope at the time, so I didn’t follow the epidemiology or disease etiology very closely. But we do have a good idea about the point of disease emergence: eastern Africa, in northern Somalia. It’s always Africa, by the way.”
Predator grunted again as Juice poked at the firming cast. “Why is that?”
“I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. Not my field. But it probably has to do with the very poor public health standards, as well as the large and diverse animal populations. Almost all emerging human diseases are zoonotic – that is, originating in animal species, and then crossing over to humans. Usually via animal husbandry – livestock, slaughtering, breeding, food contamination with dung, that sort of thing.”
Sitting in his dark corner of the cockpit, Henno snorted quietly. “Yeah, though people started doing a good little line in creating new diseases themselves.” Henno had previously done WMD counter-proliferation work in the SAS.
And that included hunting bioweapons.
“So now we have to fight our way into darkest Africa,” Juice mumbled, wrapping Pred’s leg in heavy tan gauze. “Never thought I’d get out of that region alive the first time.” In his previous unit, the shadowy Intelligence Support Activity, Juice had done several tours of the Horn of Africa, fighting and disrupting al-Qaeda affiliates in the region.
As Juice taped down the gauze and splint, Predator dug out a pouch of rough-cut chewing tobacco, and held it open for his nurse. Juice took a wodge and jammed it in his cheek. Predator followed suit and spat messily over the gunwale. He grunted again. “I don’t know. Starting to wonder whether any of this is really worth the battle. Even if we cure the disease, the world’s still shot to shit. Maybe we just keep going because we’re hardwired to survive.”
Juice frowned, sadness obvious on his face even in the dark. He hated to hear his friend talk like that. And it was true that all of this, the whole ZA, was a damned miserable waste. But it definitely wasn’t pointless. Not as long as friendship remained. That was what it had always been about for him, anyway. Fighting for the man next to you. Dying for him, if need be. He didn’t see that it mattered what got you – a Zulu, or a Tango (terrorist).
It was all about the love that made you willing to make the sacrifice.
At this point, Handon emerged from below. He looked down at Predator. “What you’re hardwired to do is kick ass, Master Sergeant. Just focus on that, and you’ll be fine. Anyway, who are you kidding? You’d have no idea what to do with yourself without the fight.” He looked around at the others, and spoke gruffly. “Plus we’ve already done all the hard work on this one. We’ve got the package, and we’re out of Undead City. The rest is just a pleasure cruise.” None of that needed saying, not to guys on this team. But, as commander, it was Handon’s duty to spread around some motivational pabulum now and again.
He wasn’t sure he believed it himself, at least not at that moment.
But it was his job to say it – and sound like he meant it.
Dr. Park sat up straighter in the dark. He peered into the blackness, trying to make out what exactly was on the shoreline to their east, their evident direction of drift. Of course there wouldn’t be any lights on in structures. He’d left electricity behind in his bunker, Alpha had left it in Britain, and humanity had left it in its past.
In any case, Park couldn’t make anything out. It was all black on black.
But it was definitely getting closer.
The whole boat jolted beneath them, and a loud bump echoed through the hull.
“What the hell was that?” Predator rumbled.
Homer stood. “Relax,” he said. “It’s just submerged debris. There will be branches, rocks, maybe whole submerged trees, as we get closer in to shore.” He paused to peer over the side, the whites of his eyes shining slightly in the starlight. “In fact, this one’s doing us a favor. We’ve run aground, but it’s stopped us drifting any closer in to shore. Now tell me we’re not watched over…”
“Terrific,” Predator grumbled. “First the Kennedy runs aground, now whatever this piece of shit is called.”
And the boat had in fact stopped.
For a few seconds.
But then it lurched violently – and Homer, the only one standing, was hurled out of the cockpit. Sliding away, he clawed at a cleat and line to stop himself going over the side.
Bloodless fingers gripped anything within reach, all around the cockpit and deck. Saucer-wide eyes flashed from person to person. None of them had the vaguest idea what was happening, nor quite how to react.
The whole ten-ton boat rolled and bumped beneath them like a theme-park ride.
Aground
Commander Drake still hadn’t made it out of the small officer’s room off the flag bridge, where he had met with Gunny Fick. He’d started out reading messages on his phone – but then after that, the cursed thing wouldn’t stop ringing. As ship’s XO, and in the wake of a large number of simultaneous catastrophes, Dra
ke had about ten thousand problems to deal with.
And he had to deal with them simultaneously. Or so it seemed.
“If they can’t get them resealed in the next twenty minutes,” he said into the phone, “pull everyone from that duty and reassign them. We’ve got a whole lot of other crap we need those ratings for, most of it a lot higher on the tasking list. If it’s not a quick win, shit-can it. Good. Out.”
Seemingly on cue, the door to the flag bridge knocked, then opened. A man stuck his head in, looking friendly yet respectful.
Drake swiveled his head to clock him. “Captain Martin,” he said. “Entrez, s’il vous plaît.”
The man hesitated – trying to figure out if the American was taking the piss. Martin was British, a captain in the Corps of Royal Engineers. He had also been the only one aboard and still alive who knew enough about nuclear reactors to be able to shut down the JFK’s – when they had needed to do so quickly, as the mutineers, known as the Zealots, tried to run the ship aground. By Martin's last-second heroism, the ship had avoided smashing into the coast any more catastrophically than it actually did.
So Martin had saved the ship from sinking – but not from wedging itself firmly up on the shallows off Virginia Beach. Since then, he’d spent most of his time out in the shoals with the damage parties, trying to work out their prospects for refloating the beached supercarrier.
“Sit,” Drake said. “Report.”
Right, Martin thought to himself, pulling out a chair and sliding into it. Americans – no nonsense. And straight to the point. “Well, sir, the bad news is that we’re well aground – the keel is wedged like hell into a series of large sandbars.”
“How wedged?” Drake asked, not looking any more thrilled than he sounded.
“Five meters deep. A bit more at some points.”
“I presume you’ve got good news to go with that?”
“Yes,” Martin said. “The hull’s intact. Bent in a few places, subject to a bit of stress warping. But not actually breached anywhere. That we’ve been able to find.”
