Once they were north of this they would be home free. They’d still have to cross north London, with its higher risk of marauders, and after that somehow talk their way out at the Wall. But at least they wouldn’t be in the middle of a highly secure military zone, subject to discovery at any second.
Hackworth crawled back into his little space, finger on trigger, trying to decode the expression and body language of the driver as he did so. Because if Hackworth knew they’d be relatively safe from discovery after this… the driver knew it, too.
The last thing Hackworth saw before he crawled out of sight was a civilian truck facing them, trying to cross the checkpoint in the opposite direction. It was hard to miss because the men in the truck, and the soldiers at the checkpoint, were on the verge of shouting at one another. It was turning into some kind of a stand-off.
And Hackworth had already seen enough to know that, as order had started to collapse, looters and marauders in the city were attacking soldiers and stealing their weapons – which were quickly becoming priceless, with the spreading disorder, and the approaching undead horde. It was no surprise the soldiers were jumpy and aggressive. They were under siege – from all sides.
And even from his hidey-hole, Hackworth could hear this stand-off ramping up – all underneath the loud and tense voice of the guard who approached them now.
“ID, manifest, and destination.”
Before Hackworth could react, he heard the driver’s door fly open – and the pressure on the seat before him lifted, as the driver threw himself out.
“Armed men in the truck!” he shouted. “The whole back’s filled with raiders!”
Ah, shit. Hackworth thought. They’d just been done.
He heard more feet on the road, as well as yelling, all of it surrounding the truck now. And then a new shouted voice: “Everyone out of the lorry, right now – hands up and moving slowly. Comply if you don’t want to be shot.”
Hackworth didn’t see any way out of this. It was over.
He took a deep breath, and prepared to surrender.
But then gunfire rang out – ahead of them at first, and then all around. At first Hackworth thought the soldiers had simply opened up on them.
But then he heard cries nearby, in addition to the sound of bullets crashing into the cab and tearing through the thin metal skin of the cargo area. He covered up his head and curled up into a ball in his little space – praying everyone in back was doing the same.
What felt like a lifetime later, but was really no more than ten seconds, the gunfire died down – and Hackworth felt he had to see what the hell was going on. He dragged himself up into the passenger seat and peered out. He could see the unmoving bodies of soldiers sprawled out in the street in front of them. And on the other side of the barrier… marauders, armed with pistols, and a few military-issue rifles. They had evidently all come out of that civilian truck facing them.
And now they started sweeping forward.
And for no reason that Hackworth would ever be able to explain to himself, he opened the passenger-side door and swung down onto the blacktop – which was littered with shell casings, not to mention spreading pools of blood.
Movement to his left caught his eye and he saw a very young soldier, but with what looked like officer’s insignia and beret, pop up from behind cover with his side arm held forward. Nearly instantly shots rang out from the marauders – and the soldier took several hits in his body armor, and one in his shoulder, where Hackworth could see blood mist out into the air. The young officer went down on his back, hard, and his pistol skittered across the blacktop – all while Hackworth watched, horrified and frozen.
Looking up, he saw one of the marauders – a scruffy thirty-something man with long hair and a patchy beard, and incongruously wearing military-issue body armor – leap the concrete barrier with a pistol in hand. The man saw Hackworth as soon as he cleared the barrier, and leveled his gun at him.
Hackworth immediately put both hands in the air – though he kept hold of the gun. Maybe it was his civilian clothes, maybe his age or posture, but for whatever reason the marauder didn’t fire. Instead he eased off, then stepped over the prone form of the wounded soldier, his feet on either side of the young man’s waist.
Pathetically, the soldier raised his hands up in front of his face, trying to protect himself from what was coming, or somehow wave it all away.
And, then, unexpectedly he tilted his head and looked back – and straight into Hackworth’s eyes. His face was terrified, and in pain – and, mainly, he was pleading for help, for succor, for something. Anything.
Hackworth held the young man’s pleading gaze for two seconds – and then looked away. He looked ahead of him, where he could see more of the marauders removing the barrier. Their way out of there was now clear.
Without another look down at the wounded and doomed young man, Hackworth climbed back into the truck and slid over into the driver’s seat this time.
As he put the truck into gear… he heard the single shot.
He put the accelerator into the floor.
And he got them the hell out of there.
Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Fuck
750 Feet Over Western Russia
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!!!”
Oleg Aliyev – Kazakh bioweaponeer, half-assed vaccine researcher, and would-be savior of the world – came fully awake, and directly into full-on panic, as the blackness of the ground raced straight at his face, and the tortured helicopter shook violently all around him. Between his face and that hard frozen ground below was only a glass chin-bubble – and a totally indeterminate amount of open air. Indeterminate, but definitely shrinking fast.
Basically, he was going down – and he was about to go in hard.
Aliyev and his super-expensive Eurocopter EC175 – both of which had miraculously gotten away from his burning, exploding, zombie-overrun, lethal-pathogen-coated dacha back in the Altai Mountains of central Asia – were not only diving at the ground at high speed. But they also seemed to be in an uncontrolled roll to the right; and there was a little tail vortex thrown in for good measure. But Aliyev had to intuit all this from physical sensations, and from the instruments.
Because he couldn’t see a damned thing.
Yes, the ground was racing at his face – but there had been nothing like a lightbulb burning on this continent for the better part of two years. There was a sliver of moon up there behind him somewhere, but it was tucked in behind thick clouds, napping.
Which was exactly what Oleg Aliyev had been doing until two seconds ago.
And it was falling asleep while flying that – in a development which ought to be surprising to no one – had caused this unbidden and unwelcome dive, roll, and vortex. Specifically, he was pretty sure his hands had fallen off the cyclic, and then his slumping torso had pushed it forward.
Obviously, on a trip this long, the helicopter ought to have been on autopilot. But the damned GPS satellites falling out of the sky had scuppered that. Every time he tried to turn on the autopilot, the display read “GDOP Error” and wouldn’t engage. Aliyev vaguely seemed to recall this meant the GPS fix didn’t meet the error threshold. But it sure as hell didn’t matter now.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” he repeated, as he battled to regain control of the shuddering aircraft as it fell so enthusiastically out of the sky, with him in it.
Righting a plummeting and out-of-control helicopter had not been, to the best of his recollection, a major component of his hasty pilot training. But he figured he now had the rest of his life to figure it out. As he tried this, tried that, tried this again, he also realized exactly what his initial mistake had been – the flawed thinking that had got him into this aerial shit-show in the first place.
Where he’d gone wrong was in focusing on fuel, when he should have been thinking about flight time – specifically, how long he’d actually have to pilot the damned aircraft by himself. He’d done all his planning based on range, not endurance.
Not the helicopter’s endurance, and definitely not his own. He had known it was 3,655.52 miles from the helipad behind his former home – which sat nearly atop the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility – across much of Asia and all of Europe to Charing Cross, the very center of London.
And he knew his beautiful Eurocopter, which might only be beautiful for a few more seconds now, unless you thought fireballs were beautiful, had a cruising speed just a hair over 177mph – and could thus theoretically deliver him to his destination in twenty hours and change. Though that was before adding in the all-important refueling stops.
And there had been Aliyev’s error.
He’d been worried about the refueling issue. Because even with his auxiliary tanks, he could only stretch to 750 miles (on a trip of, again, over 3,600) before having to set down and try to find more fuel. And every single one of those stops was destined to be a no-shit breath-stealing dice with death. Every stop put him at massive risk.
So far he had survived two such refueling stops. In both cases, he’d taken off again with seconds to spare before legions of the local former population fell on his ass. And, perhaps relatedly, both stops had taken longer than anticipated.
And so now, as he realized when it was pretty much too late, he had been either flying or refueling for fifteen hours straight. And prior to that he had been caught up in his pathogen research, then vaccine research, then the adrenaline-washed horror show that had been him bugging the fuck out of his exploding and overrun dacha… and so now he realized – again, too late – that he hadn’t actually slept, by his count, in thirty-five fucking hours.
And the lack of sleep, and just trying to bull through and stay awake, was now right on the verge of killing him – killing him dead.
But as he hauled on the cyclic for all he was worth, and the helo simultaneously and miraculously came out of both its dive and its spin, and even the tail started to settle down and behave itself, Aliyev exhaled in blessed relief – because he had just saved his own life.
But he had perhaps only saved it for a few minutes.
Because he knew he was now going to have to try to land somewhere, park this thing up – and get some goddamned sleep. There was simply no way around it. He couldn’t just pull over, grab a 64-ounce coffee, and keep on truckin’.
And he definitely couldn’t risk falling asleep again.
Because, as he’d just learned, the only thing worse than falling asleep at the wheel – and it was much, much, much, much worse – was falling asleep at the stick.
And not only would falling asleep again probably send him off to his last, eternal, dirt-covered nap. But it would also probably mean the destruction or at least disappearance of the super-duper zombie-killing pathogen he had in a coldbox in back – and thus result in the whole world going to sleep right along with him.
And neither would ever wake up.
* * *
Luckily, through the night-vision goggles Aliyev managed to dig out of his bug-out bag without sending the helo into another dive, it looked like the ass end of nowhere down there below him. Just a whole hell of a lot of nothing.
Aliyev knew he was somewhere over western Russia – which was a goddamned vast place to start with. But not only couldn’t he see any structures anywhere down there – he couldn’t even see any roads. No telephone or power lines. Not a damned thing made by the hand of man. That was a pretty hopeful sign.
Even better… he could now just see a nice little glen in the middle of those millions of hectares of forest. This glen was clear of trees, looked fairly level – though that was tricky to work out with the crappy depth perception of the NVGs – and with nothing in it but a lovely little trickling stream passing peacefully through.
If Aliyev could survive a night on the ground anywhere, it had to be here.
He brought the helo down quickly but reasonably lightly on its four fat tires, then shut down the engines as quickly as he knew how. He clambered into the back, grabbed his bug-out bag and Benelli Tactical shotgun, pulled open the side door, leapt out to the ground, and ran like hell – the bag bouncing on his back, the shotgun pointing around crazily in all directions – until he was a hundred yards away from the aircraft, in whatever direction.
Then he stopped, turned around, squatted in the knee-high grass…
And he watched. And waited.
To see who or what would come.
* * *
Nothing did.
Vaguely reassured, Aliyev tiptoed back to the helo, climbed in, pulled the door shut, and got his head down – resting on a crate of grenades – then took a long look down the length of his body to just beyond it.
His last waking sight was the self-powered clinical coldbox by his feet.
It was this that held the whole purpose of this insane-ass, dangerous-as-fuck, multiple-cross-continental journey. The coldbox held his latest, greatest, and almost certainly last designer pathogen – Meningitis Z, or MZ – which killed the dead with outstanding reliability, and was also communicable as a son of a bitch. Unleashed among the dense masses of dead swarming Britain, it might reasonably be hoped to spell the beginning of the end for the world’s seven billion undead bastards.
At the very least, it would take the pressure off London, and maybe even save Britain. God knew – as did Aliyev, from radio traffic – CentCom wasn’t going to.
The same coldbox also held his MZ vaccine, which might just keep this pathogen, once it started rampaging around the globe, from taking out the few remaining living people along with it. And Aliyev was glad to be reminded of why he was doing all this. And it was good.
And then he lost consciousness, in absolute record time.
He only woke again, with a terrible start, not having the vaguest idea how much later – it could have been five seconds, could have been five hours – when the side cargo door fucking opened up.
From the outside.
That meant one thing: at least it wasn’t the dead. They couldn’t open doors.
Mentally, Aliyev was still seventy-five percent in his dream – he’d been dreaming of flying around the world like Superman, except with his arms spread out to his sides like a bird, and crop-dusting poisons out of his ass, which settled across the face of the Earth killing everything they touched – but when he woke up enough to work out what was happening, and saw faces sticking into his helicopter cabin…
He was too scared to speak.
But he was screaming inside his head:
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck – FUCK!
Cossacks
Somewhere in the Forests of Western Russia
“We are simple Russian peasants, tovarisch. We mean no one any harm.”
Yeah, right, Aliyev thought. It was simple Russian peasants who rose up with the Cossacks and opened up a giant can of whoop-ass on the Tsars. But he just smiled and nodded and warmed his hands around his tin cup.
He’d finally gotten that cup of coffee.
Now he sat before a small fire, a few meters from the parked helo, in the company of four strapping young Russian farm boys – the same ones who had so brazenly intruded on his sleep, and his helicopter. They hadn’t killed and eaten him yet. But they’d survived the Apocalypse this long somehow, out here in the ass end of nowhere, so there could be little question they were capable of it.
All of them wore dirty, frayed, earth-toned country-ass clothes and work boots. All had unkempt hair and various lengths of non-designer stubble. All were between big and very big, and all were variously armed. They could have been brothers; and, in any case, Aliyev couldn’t even really tell them apart.
He paused now to curse fate. Only he could have such utterly shit luck as to land in what looked like the absolute middle of the Russian nowhere, and somehow end up in the clutches of a host of Russian peasants – or Cossacks, as he fancied them. Then again, he very belatedly considered, sound does carry. So maybe they’d been some distance away when they heard the unfamiliar sound of a helicopter landing, and then tracked h
im down.
Which, as Aliyev scanned out past the firelight to the ring of utter darkness that surrounded them in this forest glen, made him wonder what the hell else was out there, tracking them down even now.
He looked longingly over to the side of the helo where, reflected in the flickering firelight, his Benelli Tactical shotgun was propped up against the airframe. That was where the farm boys had put it. Now it might as well be a hundred miles away up in a tree. Oh, how Aliyev ached for it. How he cursed himself for having let these four get the drop on him so completely.
Have I never heard of fucking door locks?! He cursed himself in his head. This was actually a ridiculous mistake he had made twice in a row now. But it was one he definitely wouldn’t be making again.
One way or another.
Sitting on the ground beside the Benelli Tactical was his bug-out bag. The farm boy in charge had taken a quick rummage around inside. But so far they hadn’t taken anything from him.
Except the medical cold box.
Which now sat at the feet of the one speaking, and calling Aliyev comrade.
“We hunt. We fish. We are okay.” His dark eyes, glinting in the firelight, darted down to the box at his feet. “The only thing we worry about is infection when we go into the town. One bite, one scratch…” He shrugged his massive shoulders, as if no more need be said.
Another one of them, sitting to Aliyev’s side and slightly behind him, said, “What is it inside the box, tovarisch?” The two of them had already opened it up and seen the vials and syringes within. “It’s a cure for the plague – isn’t it? Pravda?”
The last word meant: the truth.
Aliyev shook his head. He had to give the dumb country crackers credit – it wasn’t a terrible guess. Crazy lone scientist flying across Asia with vials of drugs in his expensive helicopter… what other explanation could there be?
Now he looked around and spoke carefully – using Russian he had not spoken in a long time, but which had been the sole language of his long career with Biopreparat, the Soviet Union’s giant and super-secret bioweapons program.
Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm Page 17
