Across the courtyard, he thought he heard the scrape of claws on stone.
“Quickly, inside,” Andris said.
Glenn pressed himself against the wooden doors of the mosque. “Locked.”
The scrape of claws grew louder, closer. The wind no longer carried the salty scent of the ocean or the oily memory of streets that had once been filled with motor scooters. Now it stank of the unmistakable stench of carrion. Rot hung in the air.
“We must get inside,” Andris said. His tone was forceful, but he kept his voice at a whisper. “Now.”
Glenn heaved his shoulder into the wooden door. It creaked and bent but did not give. Sweat streamed down the man’s forehead as he strained to shove it open. The door would not budge. He bashed the door again, this time giving little heed to caution and quiet.
Groans echoed from the neighboring streets. The rattle and scratch of claws and talons tumbled ever closer. The smell. Like a tidal wave of rotting meat.
The first sallow face armored with pocked bone appeared. A monster created by manmade biological agents of war, teeth hooking from cracked lips, and stained claws hanging like bloodied scythes from its fingers. An unholy abomination lumbering on bone-plated legs, a demon born from sickness.
It was not alone. The rattle and scrape of others resounded behind it.
Andris threw himself at the door with Glenn, and at last the door gave way. The trio spilled into the mosque’s cavernous belly. Andris turned to force the door into place again, his eyes searching the room for something to brace against the door.
As he looked around, an electric current coursed through his vessels, sending his heart climbing into his throat. The very things he had sought to escape filled the mosque, a holy place made unholy by monsters.
The nearest of the Skulls reared back. Its mouth opened to reveal a mismatched set of teeth, sharp yet crooked. Then it screamed. Another joined the horrendous bleating, followed by another and another.
An unexpected image rose in Andris’s mind. He saw Terrence on the military plane, sedated and bandaged, escaping hell on earth as he ascended into the sky.
Maybe the man is luckier than I thought, Andris thought, appalled by the sourness of his own thoughts.
While the first Skull screamed, its claws raking for Glenn, Andris did not hesitate.
-15-
Being in the cavernous fuselage of the C-130 reminded Shepherd of his early days in the army, back when he was a noncom and being shipped around in a military jet like this. The hearty thrum of the huge engines. The drab canvas straps pressing into his shoulders. The vibration shuddered through his bones, making his teeth rattle.
Even after all these years, it felt familiar. Of course there was a slight difference, what with all the Portuguese men and women aboard instead of American troops. But the atmosphere was largely the same—some passengers somehow finding sleep, others sticking their noses in a paperback. Conversations far and few between, happening in excited bursts.
Opposite him sat Rachel and Rory. Rory maintained a white-knuckled grip on his restraints. The young midshipman had been a ball of stress flying across the Atlantic the first time, and this time seemed no better for him. Rachel seemed as composed as ever. The young woman was unflappable.
Nearby sat Divya, who looked every bit at home on the plane as she had on the Huntress. Shepherd didn’t know the doctor well, and now seemed as good a time as any to talk.
“This isn’t your first time on a bird like this, is it?” he asked over the growl of the engines.
Divya kept her eyes on Matsumoto’s biomonitors. She adjusted something on one of his IV drips. “I’ve flown on planes with wings that looked like they were duct-taped on. Crashed once flying over South Sudan in an old military-plane-turned-passenger-jet.”
“With the Hunters?”
She shook her head. “Doctors Without Borders.”
There was a faraway, nostalgic look in her brown eyes, as though she thought of those times fondly. He couldn’t imagine enjoying the experience of sweating his balls off in a foreign forest with bugs bigger than his hand and bacteria that would eat his flesh.
“I made and lost more friends during that time than at any other point in my life,” she said. The C-130 dipped, making Shepherd’s stomach flip. Turbulence shook the plane for a moment. When it ceased, Divya continued, “I don’t mean to trivialize your experience, but it was like being in a warzone. Sometimes we were in warzones. You went where the viruses took you, regardless of what else was going on in the world. Because the viruses didn’t care. They would destroy you in peace or in war.
“And at the end of the day, after staring death in the face like that, it was the nurse with blood spattered across her shirt while treating an Ebola patient, or a doctor, already sick with dengue but still treating a patient, that kept you working. Because they continued, so did you. They fought, so you fought. It sounds silly, maybe, but those were my brothers and sisters.”
“Doesn’t sound silly at all,” Shepherd said. Now he understood her expression. There was a brotherhood—a sisterhood—formed in the direst of circumstances. No blood relationship, no friendship, could match the intensity of that bond.
“So let me take a wild guess,” he said. “After those years traveling around the world, you couldn’t stand civilian life.”
Divya laughed. “No, there was something morbidly terrifying about settling down as a clinician, safe in my suburban office. When Dom tapped me for the Hunters, I accepted without another thought.”
There was a beat of silence as she checked something else on Matsumoto’s monitors. Then Divya turned to him, her head cocked. “I don’t usually spill my guts like this.”
Shepherd gave her a knowing grin. “It’s okay. We all enjoy a good war story from time to time.”
The plane shuddered again, dropping unexpectedly. But this time there was no turbulence. Then they veered hard. Too hard.
Divya’s eyes locked with Shepherd’s in an unspoken question. That wasn’t right, was it?
As if in answer, the plane abruptly dove. Several of the crew members jolted awake. The worried expressions on their faces showed even the experienced airmen and -women had not expected a maneuver like that.
“Something’s wrong,” Shepherd said. He moved against instinct, unclicking his restraints and standing. Strap by strap, he pulled himself toward the front of the plane. A few of the airmen joined him, speaking in trenchant Portuguese.
The plane lifted again, tossing several of them off their feet. A few tumbled backward in a heap of limbs. One hit his head against a seat with a sickening thwack. His limbs went still, and another man knelt by his side to help. Divya pulled herself toward the injured airman.
Shepherd continued toward the cockpit. His fingers reached for his sheathed knife. Normally, he wouldn’t dare approach the cockpit of an ally’s aircraft with a drawn weapon. But his time in the world of the Skulls had permanently colored his expectations. Nowadays when something went wrong, it tended to go catastrophically pear shaped.
As he wrapped his fingers around the hatch handle, his heart thudded against his ribcage. With a deep breath, he pulled open the door.
It opened with a metallic clink. A face swiveled toward him. Eyes, red from burst blood vessels, stared back at him. A crimson beard hung from the man’s mouth from where he’d been feeding. He had no bony growths jutting from his face, nothing to indicate he had been a Skull for long.
But there was no mistaking that the Oni Agent had wrapped its demonic fingers around the man’s brain and squeezed the humanity out of him. There was nothing left behind those piercing eyes now except for raw predator instinct and ravenous hunger.
The infected pilot lunged. There was no time to wonder how he had been infected or why. Shepherd ducked, barely avoiding the raking yellowed fingernails. The gnashing teeth chomped the air where Shepherd’s neck had been moments before. He shot out an elbow into the pilot’s stomach.
What would have sent a normal
man to the ground only enraged the infected pilot. He swiveled on his heels, a growl escaping his lips, and attacked again. Shepherd tried to pull his knife across the man’s neck, but the pilot was too quick.
Pain rocketed through his back as he was slammed against a bulkhead. Stars sparkled in his vision, his eyes going crooked for a moment. The pilot’s hot breath washed over him, and he struggled to hold the man’s grasping hands back as his mind swam.
Shepherd’s world became a blur of red and pain, swirling like blood in the water, muddling his senses. He heard frantic shouts behind him, but all he could do was try to keep the grinding teeth and raking nails at bay. The plane lurched again, and the pilot and Shepherd rolled forward into the controls. Shepherd was vaguely aware of bodies lying in pools of blood nearby. The ferrous odor stung his nostrils, nearly making him gag.
Then he felt the weight of the pilot lifted from him. A few of the other airmen wrapped their hands around the thrashing Skull. A gunshot exploded, slamming against Shepherd’s eardrums. Another blast, then another. The concussion practically threw him off his feet, and he braced himself against a stanchion. He struggled to stay upright, his head swimming as the deck seemed to lurch beneath his feet. The damned Skull had rung his bell when it had slammed him against the bulkhead.
Another storm of voices echoed through the cabin.
It took Shepherd a moment longer to realize that his lack of balance wasn’t due to an injury after all.
The plane was going down.
***
Lauren spent most of her time aboard the Huntress in the medical bay and the labs, surfacing from her work only to find a few hours of sleep or a quick meal. But still, when half the crew was off the ship for a mission, she felt the emptiness. Their absence was made all the more evident by Divya’s departure. She hated sending the young doctor across the ocean, but someone needed to make sure Matsumoto made it there alive.
Not only were the corridors vacant, but all the patient beds lay empty for the first time she could recall since the outbreak.
Have they ever been empty since that first mission to the oil rig?
Lauren didn’t think so. Now her only patients had been sent back to the United States. She hoped she had made the right decision regarding Terrence. He would desperately want to get back to the fight. His best chances stood with the practiced military physicians and medical personnel she hoped were still alive and doing their jobs.
“Still thinking about Terrence?” Sean said through his CBRN suit. He was bent over a sample they’d obtained from Ronaldo’s people.
Lauren nodded, her own CBRN suit crinkling. “How’d you know?”
“Wild guess,” Sean said. “You’re like a drunk at the pub trying to drink from an empty glass, so distracted you forget you’re just sucking down air.”
Lauren laughed and then realized that was exactly what she was doing. Her pipette was positioned too high in the conical plastic tube she held between her gloved fingers. None of the liquid was going into it, just air.
“Damn,” she said. “I’m losing my touch.”
They finished preparing their samples for chromatography and genotypic analysis. Only when they were done did Lauren acquiesce to Sean’s suggestion that they grab a bite to eat and step away from the lab. There was nothing they could do now but wait for the machines to finish spitting out their data.
The Hunters had already departed for Tangier when Colonel Ronaldo had called the Huntress earlier that day. He had asked for Lauren by name and told her they’d found something interesting.
In this case, interesting had been an understatement. Ronaldo had sent a chopper to the Huntress bearing unusual cargo. The dead dog had been one of the many strays running around Lajes. This one had frequented Lajes Field, and according to Ronaldo’s men, it was one of the friendlier of the feral pack. Some of Ronaldo’s people had noticed that it went missing for a few days. They’d finally found it lying dead behind a warehouse—looking far different from the stray that had begged for scraps.
Yellowed, bony bumps had been protruding from the dog’s skin. Its eyes had been mottled with the telltale crimson, and the dog’s teeth had started growing wildly from its mouth.
But Ronaldo had insisted they had cleared all the Skulls from Lajes, that there was no possible way a Skull was somehow still lumbering around their base. It didn’t make sense. If that was true, how had this dog come down with the Oni Agent?
“I’m still trying to wrap my mind around possible vectors,” Lauren said when she and Sean finally took a seat in the mess.
Sean nodded, swallowing a mouthful of food. “Maybe the dog ate something already infected by the Oni Agent. Or it snuck out of the base and ran into a Skull. Got scratched and then turned.”
“Maybe,” Lauren said. Those were plausible explanations. Lauren wanted to believe one of them had to be true. But at the same time, she couldn’t accept them. A dog escaping a Skull with only a small scratch would be a miracle. Gnawing on infected material? More likely. “What if it found a dead Skull—or even a piece of one—that had washed ashore?”
“That’s a possibility.”
“Or it might’ve eaten some other animal infected by the Oni Agent—which is how Ronaldo’s people missed it. Say, a gull or something that had been gnawing on a Skull somewhere else.”
Sean visibly shuddered. “Birds spreading the Oni Agent. That gives a whole new meaning to an airborne agent.”
“That isn’t even funny.” Lauren looked at her watch. “Time to get back.”
They returned to the lab. Lauren transferred the genomic and molecular component data from the assays and input them into another computer. There, she ran a program that would analyze the constituents of the Oni Agent they had found in the dog. The software compared these constituents with that of the original Oni Agent, along with the strains of airborne agent they had discovered.
“Two minutes,” Lauren said, initiating the data analysis.
Sean watched the progress bar on the screen. As it inched across, pixel by pixel, cold roots of apprehension twisted through Lauren’s insides. She hoped the Oni Agent sample was an exact match to the original. If it was anything else, any kind of variant they hadn’t encountered before, then they were in trouble.
The computer pinged. Lauren held her breath. If it was airborne, if people at Lajes were already breathing it in or ingesting it somehow, then it was only a matter of time before they started turning into Skulls. She was never more aware of how limited their ability to produce the Phoenix Compound was than at that moment.
“Damn,” Sean said.
“It’s not a match.” Lauren felt dizzy and grabbed the lab bench for support. “It’s not the airborne strain the FGL developed, and it’s not the normal Oni Agent. It’s something new.”
-16-
“We got contacts, Dom,” Meredith said. “Dozens of ’em.”
She had only a half second to wonder if Dom had even heard her message. The next half second was spent in a churn of rising adrenaline and nerves firing faster than automatic gunfire. Charging Skulls hurtled toward Bravo team in a horde of slashing claws and hooked teeth. Gunfire erupted from Glenn and Andris’s rifles, leveling the first wave of ravenous creatures with a wall of lead.
Meredith flipped the selector on her rifle to automatic and squeezed the trigger. Rounds plunged through a monster’s face. Blood and diseased flesh sprayed from the exit wound. Meredith stepped aside as the fresh corpse slid past her. More of the ugly beasts took its place. Their wild yells echoed with the concussive power of small explosives. Their cries easily drowned out the soft staccato of Bravo team’s suppressed rifles.
One of the Skulls lowered itself as it ran, aiming a shoulder at Meredith. Huge spikes jutted out of its vertebra. Even if the monster’s six-inch-long claws missed her organs, the Skull could kill her by falling against her. Horns rimmed its brow, and wisps of black hair curled around them. A beard tangled in bony protrusions framed the creature’s
open maw, a sad reminder of the human the beast had once been.
Thank God for armor-piercing rounds, Meredith thought as she plugged two into the beast’s chest. She swiveled, firing at the next Skull, then the next. Vaguely, she was aware of the Skulls pounding on the doors of the mosque, desperate to join the fray inside. Somewhere in the distance, she thought she heard glass break. Maybe even voices over her comm link.
But all of that seemed to fade away. Her vision narrowed to the line of sight directly in front of her. She saw only the red eyes staring at her with unquenchable rage. Each yellowed claw searching for flesh. Each overgrown ribcage heaving with the excitement of fresh prey. She fired, only just aware that she was retreating. She could sense Andris and Glenn being pushed into a corner with her. It seemed for every Skull they brought down, more poured toward them from the dark recesses of the building.
Blood and cordite hung heavy in the air, overwhelming the moldy odor drifting from what was once lush carpeting. More Skulls tumbled and fell, piling up where people had once come to pray.
There was no deliverance to be found here.
“We’ve got to move!” Meredith yelled.
“Yes, I will make us an exit,” Andris said. He fired a spray of rounds into the nearest trio of Skulls. Others climbed over their fallen bodies. Instead of reloading, Andris reached for something on his pack.
A grenade, Meredith realized. The man was mad to use an explosive like that in such a small space. But what choice did they have?
“Fire in the hole!” Andris boomed.
The grenade arced over the Skulls. They paid it no heed, throwing themselves into Bravo team’s blazing gunfire. Meredith’s rifle bolt locked back with a disheartening clink.
“Out!” She reached for a fresh magazine.
A violent flash of light bloomed from the other side of the mosque. A concussive wave lifted the Skulls nearest it, knocking over Skull after Skull like bowling pins. Meredith was already crouched, bracing for the impact, when the blast hit her, throwing her into the wall. Her vision swam as heat rolled over her. Pain drilled into her skull through her eardrums, followed by an intense ringing.
The Tide_Dead Ashore Page 14
