And with the inevitability of loss.
So Predator had suffered losses, just like everyone else. And, like the others, he kept that pain and loss wrapped up tightly. Everything had to be secondary to doing the job – most especially any weakness that might interfere with operational efficiency, that might endanger their missions. And that might get people killed.
But what Pred could really never show, and what ate at the very depths of his soul, was exactly the thing made the others never worry about him. Because if he really could never be killed… then he was doomed to go on fighting this war forever. Even after the last of his brothers had fallen. He didn’t much like the idea of being last man standing. This was one reason he worried so much about keeping Juice alive. As long as Juice didn’t go down, he knew he could go on.
Hell, he’d already outlived Cali, which he wouldn’t have guessed would happen in a million years, given his line of work – not to mention women’s longer lifespans, plus Cali having been five years younger than him.
But, even if he couldn’t be killed… he could still be turned.
And some frail, childlike part of him was terrified of that danger – because what kind of Zulu would he make? Even discounting the fearsome image he projected, all the mythology that surrounded him, he figured he would be horrendously dangerous, on account of his size and strength alone. He knew he could do atrocious damage, if he went on a rampage before someone managed to stop him. Victims of the virus had definitely been turning more quickly lately – he’d seen it, and there was no denying it. It was some mutation, no doubt, conducing to quicker spread and worse outbreaks.
What if he turned before anyone could put him down?
This made him super-paranoid about getting bitten, or splashed. It also made him absolutely determined, and cold-blooded: if he did think he was infected, he was going to turn himself off – instantly. There would be no time for goodbyes.
He sucked at goodbyes, anyway. As Cali had known even before the end.
His total loyalty now was to his team. And, before everything else, he wanted most to keep standing and fighting beside his brothers, doing his duty by them – and dying with them, if it finally came to that. But the more missions they did, and the dicier things got, the more likely it was that he would at some point be turned – turned into a terrible danger to the very people he loved so much.
And it was this conflict – wanting to stay, but not wanting to stay too long – that tore at his soul from two sides.
Oh well, he thought. I guess I’ll just burn that bridge when I come to it. Meanwhile, he kept his side arm very handy – safety on, hammer down.
But with a live round in the chamber.
Because maybe there was only one thing that could kill Predator.
Predator.
* * *
When next Handon exited the bombardier compartment, he found Henno holding up a section of fuselage just outside it. The serious Brit was slouching slightly, sharpening a big fighting knife, and looking moody – or maybe even slightly dangerous. It also looked as if he’d been waiting for Handon. Which he had.
Handon stopped walking, nodded, put himself up against the opposite wall, and just waited for it.
Henno carried on with the schick-schick of his blade on the whetstone, then looked up at Handon, his eyes in shadow. “I get what you were trying to do back there. On the water. It took me a while to twig to it, but I do get it now.”
Handon only nodded in response. It didn’t need rehashing. Henno was talking about Handon’s decision to try to help those stranded people on the lake. The escapade that had nearly gotten the whole team killed, and nearly scuppered their mission. The underlying factor that had motivated that decision had been Handon’s fear that they were all in danger of becoming dead inside, losing their humanity – and leaving no distinction worth having between the living and the dead.
“Thing is…” Henno said, slipping his knife back into its belt sheath, and the stone into a pouch. “Nobody’s going to have any humanity to safeguard… if everyone’s all fucking dead. Yeah?”
“I take your point.” Handon figured they both understood each other. And, anyway, he was fairly inclined to see it Henno’s way right now. Everything was a trade-off, and there was always a balance still to be achieved. But maybe he’d already achieved it – he’d dispatched the pirates, spared the girl, and gotten everyone out alive, along with the mission objective. Maybe that was the middle way.
Then again, maybe more compromises would be required next time – more whittling down of their humanity, more concessions to necessity, more accords with death. Who could know? More problematically, he wasn’t sure how Henno was going to react if more viciousness did become necessary – and Handon refused to do it. It was possible the two of them were going to have some kind of a reckoning.
By this point, Henno’s expression hadn’t softened at all. And the last thing Handon wanted was a face-off. So he just looked away and changed the subject. He said, “I’m sorry you’re going to have to jump without your rifle.”
Henno looked up again and smiled, but it wasn’t a very conciliatory expression. “No worries, mate. I expect if I really need one, there’ll be plenty of them lying on the deck down below.” With that, Henno straightened up and took himself back to the rear of the plane, which was starting to tilt and whine.
They could both feel their descent beginning.
* * *
“Looks like setting up a perimeter might have been overkill this time,” Handon said to Fick over his shoulder. The two men stood back to back, looking out across a lightly forested but otherwise empty landscape, as the pilot stood on the road on tippy-toe, topping up the wing tank from one of the jerrycans of avgas. The rural two-lane highway stretched out of sight in both directions, undulating gently through sparse pine forest. The sun shone on them through thin clouds, and a few birds could be heard from the treeline.
Fick nodded serenely in response. “Yeah, well… as General Mattis sagely instructed: ‘Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.’”
“Smart Marine,” Handon said, scanning the horizon over his sight.
And, it was true, things were going disarmingly well. Lonely stretch of highway, not a structure or even abandoned car in sight, nice smooth touchdown on the blacktop. And, though Chuckie made a lot of racket, and the least-wounded shooters on board had immediately spilled out to pull security, there wasn’t a dead guy to be seen, not for miles in any direction.
Handon tried to remember the last time that had happened.
God bless America, he thought, still scanning the wood line over his rifle. There was definitely something to be said for her great open spaces. Not to mention the open highway. Then he cocked his head, as he saw Predator hobbling forward and off the edge of the road. He pressed the PTT button on his radio, rather than shouting. “Pred, what have you got?”
There was a pause as the big man limped up to a tree with a narrow trunk and broad, dipping branches, dots of pale orange weighing them down. “Peaches,” Pred reported tersely. Handon could see him reaching up and plucking fruit. He carried on doing so until the pilot finished dumping in the last can of fuel, capped the tank, and dashed back on board.
The other operators then collapsed on the plane. Handon watched them all reboard, Pred holding out the front of his shirt, which bulged with the fruit, then shook his head and waited for the others. As usual, he’d been first out, and would be last back in. Finally, he backed up to the bomber, climbed up and in, and pulled the hatch shut. Pred was there, handing him a ripe peach before heading back down the length of the aircraft. Handon accepted it, took a very wet bite, then stuck his head out into the flight deck to watch the take-off.
Some part of him wasn’t going to believe this until they were airborne again. This was the not inconsiderable part that had been burnished into cold, unsentimental steel by many years of reverses, setbacks, ambushes, dry holes, and easy m
issions instantly turned lethal and impossible. But less than a minute later, Chuckie’s rear wheels left the ground, the plane climbed and banked, and they were safely back up above it all.
Plus they had peaches. Handon’s was damned tasty. But he knew they were only going to have another hour to enjoy them.
Because then they were going to be right back in the thick of it.
And he feared it was going to be thicker than even they had ever seen before. If reports were to be believed, what was waiting for them at the edge of the continent – the biggest undead herd that had ever been recorded – was going to make their desperate battle through undead Chicago look like a light day of room-clearing drills back in the shooting house.
Handon figured they’d better enjoy their peaches while they may.
He took another sweet, juicy bite, and wiped the juice off his chin with his forearm.
Simulation
USS John F. Kennedy, Flag Bridge
Drake turned on his heel again, turning away from his private room, that blessed privacy ebbing so quickly out of reach. He then numbly followed Captain Martin back through the Flag Bridge, then down four flights of ladder and back out onto the deck.
So far away, he mused, yet so far away.
As they stepped outside, Drake looked up and sniffed the air. For centuries, sailors had physically attuned themselves to the portents of the weather. That had all changed with the advent of geostationary weather sats and high-resolution Doppler radar.
But then it changed again when everything went to shit.
And now Drake’s nose, newly alert, smelled something on the air. But the approaching storm could already be seen and heard, out on the horizon to the northeast. He snapped back to reality when he saw Martin stopped and looking back at him. Drake shook his head, carried on at a smart pace, and said, “Give me the background on the way.”
Martin nodded as they marched toward a low structure that was the most direct route to the nuclear reactor frames. “The background is: since I failed to get the reactor started and get us out of here, and now as a result we’re probably all about to die, I’ve been keen to figure out how I can make myself useful. As far as keeping us alive a little longer goes.”
“Go on.” Drake pulled open the hatch, let Martin go in first, then they both began descending again immediately.
“Right,” Martin said over his shoulder. “So what I’ve been doing is putting together computer simulations – of the Kennedy on the sandbar, of the ocean floor and the tidal sea around it. And of what’s going to happen when the storm gets here.”
Drake nodded tiredly. He followed Martin off the ladder, through another hatch, and into a dark passageway, which they fast-walked down toward the reactor control room.
Martin looked over his shoulder. “One thing first, though. How long did you say until the UK engineers arrive?”
After Martin had shut down the reactors, to keep the carrier from plowing catastrophically into shore – and after they had worked out that most of their nuclear engineering ratings had died in the mutiny, outbreak, and explosion – Martin knew the next thing Drake had done was radio CentCom in the UK, to try to and rustle up some guys with the expertise needed to restart their reactors. Martin also knew Her Majesty’s Forces had pretty much sodomized the proverbial canine on that one. But, still, word was that the engineers were in the air and inbound.
Drake, grimacing, didn’t answer until they were just outside the control room. He stuck his head in and saw that Martin’s two attachments, Ensigns Safo and Jakobs, were at their stations. He pulled up short and pulled Martin into a conspiratorial huddle outside, just around the corner. He checked his watch.
“Six hours,” he said, finally. “They’re on a fucking prop plane, which was the only thing CentCom could rustle up that could both cross the Atlantic and land on the flat-top. And which would hold their team, plus pilots.” Before Martin could react, he added, with conspicuous emphasis, “But that fact is need to know. You read me, Captain? I cannot have word of this getting out. Morale is on a goddamned tightrope as it is. There’s beleaguered, and then there’s totally fucked. And I can’t have the crew feeling they’ve slipped down from one to the other.”
Martin nodded. He did read him. The scuttlebutt he’d heard had them needing to hold out for only an hour or two once the onslaught began, before the engineers arrived and they could all get out of there. He figured now the scuttlebutt had been planted. But, still, it was hope, a damned precious resource.
“Okay,” Martin said. “Tell me this, then. Can these blokes definitely start this reactor?”
Drake paused and tried to keep his expression from darkening any further. “No. Not definitely. They’re not Royal Navy – they’re not even maritime nuclear engineers, but civilian power-plant guys. It was all CentCom could manage. And they’re not familiar with this exact type of reactor. But they’ll have a shot at it.”
“I had a shot at it.”
“Touché. I know, it’s not stellar news.”
Martin looked stoic as he said: “Well, I’ve got some more.”
Drake couldn’t even look surprised. It was pretty much all bad news lately.
“Come inside,” Martin said, leading the way, nodding to his two ensigns, and sitting down at a desk with a chunky and powerful-looking workstation atop it. He logged in, then swivelled to face Drake. “The thing is this: I’m not sure the ship’s engines alone are going to be enough to get us off this sandbar. Even with full reactor power.”
Drake nodded tiredly. “Yeah. That had occurred to me as well. But there didn’t seem any point in freaking out about it until we could actually try.” Also, he mentally added, because I didn’t have the bandwidth, and there were more pressing things that I needed to freak out about.
“It also depends heavily on when we actually try it,” Martin added.
Drake nodded again. “The tide table.”
“Exactly. Depending on the tide, we could be in as much as five feet deeper or shallower water. Which makes a big difference.” He called up a lush, matrixed, 3-D environment on his screen. “I’ve built a simulation of the carrier, based on the specs and schematics you left your home port with. And I’ve also done a simulation of the immediate environment, particularly the seabed, based on old oceanographic surveys – plus sonar scans I had your people upstairs do for me.”
“Good thinking.”
Martin clicked and dragged the rendering of the carrier and the seabed beneath it, both of which pirouetted around an invisible axis. “Remember, this is just a simulation. But I’ve put in friction coefficients based on the particulate make-up of the sandbar and the surface materials of the carrier’s hull. Also a power coefficient based on maximum engine output.” He tapped a couple of keys. “So if we ramp it up to full power, and do it at low tide… as you can see, the carrier doesn’t budge.”
“And if we do it at high tide?”
Martin clicked and changed a menu selection, then ran it again.
“Then the carrier doesn’t budge.”
Drake sighed. “Well… at least you don’t have to feel bad about not getting the reactor started.” He put his palm on his forehead, and ran it through his cropped hair. “It didn’t even matter.”
* * *
Lieutenant Campbell was becoming the seemingly eternal watch officer in the Kennedy’s Combat Information Center. “Doesn’t this woman sleep?” her subordinates asked one another as they went on and off shift, while she was always there. Now, she swept back into CIC after some briefings on the Bridge.
“Sitrep on the bombing sorties,” she ordered, striding to the center of the big room.
That would be a sitrep since four minutes ago, thought a junior officer sitting at a high-tech console. But he answered flatly. “Birds two minutes from target. Enemy disposition unchanged, based on previously computed delta. Telemetry says all aeronautical and combat systems nominal.”
Campbell nodded. But before she could ca
ll out her next order, an Aerographer’s Mate Third Class tumbled in from outside, presumably from up in PriFly. “Lieutenant,” he said. “We’ve got a situation. And I can’t find Commander Drake.”
“Out with it.”
“There’s a storm front coming in, ma’am.”
“No fucking shit, Seaman.”
“No, uh, I mean… no, ma’am.” The young enlisted man looked more flustered than he had a second ago. “I mean an actual storm front – a weather front. It’s whipped up pretty quickly out in the North Atlantic, and is coming down fast across Nova Scotia. The edge of it’s going to hit us dead on.”
The LT blinked once. “When?”
“Its edge will be here in an hour. And we’ll be inside it in two.”
Campbell blinked once more. Right behind that other storm, she thought. They were going to get hit with this at the same time as they were being shellacked by the dead. A one-two punch. She shook her head. “Fan-fucking-tastic. Can’t we predict weather more than an hour in advance anymore?”
“No, ma’am, not these days – not without reliable weather sats. Plus, the weather patterns have been getting weird for two years.”
The LT knew it. The meteorological and oceanographic guys did not have an easy job in the ZA. Then again, nobody did. “Okay. Get me a detailed forecast and a severe weather report with implications and recommendations. And update the charts. Dismissed.”
She turned her head back up toward the overhead screens. Because she still had bombing runs to quarterback.
And they were starting within the next minute.
* * *
Drake watched Martin’s computer simulation run a couple of different ways, impressed, if not exactly pleased. He looked over at the composed British officer, and at the Corps of Royal Engineers patch on his shoulder. “I thought you were an engineer, not a video-game designer.”
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 9
