Plague War: Pandemic

by Alister Hodge

  Mark shoved his rifle into his hands. ‘Take mine. When it runs dry, stab for their eyes with the bayonet,’ he said, drawing his short sword from the scabbard at his waist.

  The back of Nate’s thighs hit against the low wall; they were out of space. He let loose a spray of bullets at head height, blasting two Carriers from their feet, then felt the firing pin hit an empty chamber.

  ‘I’m out!’ he yelled, changing the grip on his rifle to use the bayonet.

  ‘Fuck! Me too!’ said the marine to Nate’s left.

  There were eight Carriers left. Each of the Infected was dressed in army combat fatigues, previous soldiers of the Fort before having their minds reprogrammed by plague. Tanner stepped forward, rifle switched to auto as he attacked. Two Carriers went down, faces obliterated by the high-powered rounds before a third grabbed hold of the gun barrel, ripping it forward and down. Tanner stubbornly held onto the weapon, his finger snapping in the trigger guard and jamming it on fire. Bullets fired uselessly behind the Carrier then the last magazine was empty. With a second wrench it pulled Tanner forward, clamping teeth into the gap between his shoulder and neck, it ripped out a mouthful of tissue. He screamed, punching at the ghoul to try and break its grip as it drew him down to the ground.

  The others were powerless to intervene as the remaining Carriers attacked, each man targeted by two or more. Mark thrust into the closest one, shoving the sword point deep under its chin, up into the brain. The Carrier dropped like a sack of concrete, dragging Mark’s arm down. A knee drove into his side and suddenly he was on his back, two pallid faces leaning over him with lips drawn back. He kicked upward, driving a heel into one face, knocking the ghoul off its feet, then wildly slashed with the blade, opening a grotesque smile through the other’s neck. His sword had bitten deep, almost to the vertebrae. The head lolled to the side, the neck wound hinging open and causing the creature to unbalance. It earned Mark enough time to gain his feet. A savage chop finished the job, biting through the spine and cutting the head free. He stabbed down into the other Carrier before it could stand again, driving the point of his sword through its open mouth and into the brain stem.

  Mark panted in exertion, turning to help the others. Tanner was a lost cause, immobile with a gaping cavern where his throat had once been. His attacker had moved on to Nate and the last marine, who had both been forced to the ground. They were desperately fending off the snapping jaws and tearing fingers of three Carriers. Mark lunged from where he stood, stabbing his sword into the base of one’s spine, causing its legs to buckle and fall to the side. Suddenly one of the Carrier’s heads exploded in a mist of tissue and bone, and then Vinh was beside him. Mark drove his sword tip through the thin bone above the Carrier’s ear that he had felled, as Vinh shot the last Carrier from above Nate.

  Nate shoved the fallen corpse off him, then wiped a slick of brain fragments off his face, flicking the foul ooze from his fingers in disgust. ‘Is Tanner ok?’

  ‘He didn’t make it,’ Vinh said, shaking his head.

  Nate squatted next to Tanner, his feet squelching in a congealing pool of blood about his body. He reached out a hand and turned his head towards him, exposing the wound on the far side of the neck. Deep bites had ripped out crescent shaped clumps of tissue, severing his carotid and jugular vessels. He’d bled out in seconds.

  ‘Yeah well, you got here in time to stop this happening to the rest of us,’ he said looking up at Vinh. ‘I bloody owe you.’

  Vinh just shrugged and looked out over the compound. ‘There’s more of those bastards coming from the south side. We better get going before they corner us.’

  As the men entered the stairwell, Mark flicked on his torch to guide their way. The lower half of the staircase was strewn with twenty or more corpses. Mark looked back at Vinh, recognising the significance of the fight his squad had undertaken to reach them.

  ‘How are the rest of your men, did you lose anyone?’ he asked.

  ‘One of the guys caught a few pieces of your grenade, nothing life threatening though. We did alright – no bites,’ Vinh said as he picked his way around the bodies.

  The rest of Vinh’s squad were outside the bottom door in a defensive semi-circle facing outwards. Mark shielded his eyes from the glare of the morning sun. Carriers from the southern end of the compound were approaching, leaving scant minutes until they were under attack again. Mark’s eyes flicked back to the east, only to find their path of retreat towards the beach also blocked.

  ‘Any spare magazines?’ asked Mark, ‘because we’re all out.’

  Most of Vinh’s squad were running low, the carpet of dead surrounding clear evidence of where they’d spent their rounds. Gun fire sounded from the direction of the beach and Mark cracked a half smile in relief. The main force was finally entering the compound.

  Vinh ordered his men back into the building they had fought so hard to reach and clear out. ‘Keep your heads down - I don’t want any more ‘friendly fire’ injuries from the marines heading our way. Look around you,’ he said, pointing out the sheer scale of devastation they’d wrought on the Infected. ‘We’ve done our job today – no one can argue that.’

  Chapter Eight

  Harry drew the last stitch tight and cut the thread before covering the laceration in a white dressing. ‘Check on the wound within a day or two, if you see any redness, swelling or pus, come back and I’ll chuck you on some antibiotics, otherwise I’ll see you in a week to clip out the sutures.’

  The marine had sustained a simple laceration on his thigh during the operation. It was typical to most of the injuries he’d treated that day. There had only been two serious traumas, one soldier that had shot himself in the leg while climbing over a fence, and the shrapnel injury. The grenade injury had been relatively lucky, with only simple flesh injuries to one thigh. The gunshot hadn’t fared as well. Harry had been forced to give the guy a below knee amputation after finding the ankle joint completely destroyed.

  Harry excused himself from his patient, flicking bloodied plastic gloves in a bin as he walked out of the room in search of some fresh air. Harry exited the building, found himself a spot out of the wind and lit a cigarette. He’d slipped into his old addiction, finding it oddly amusing that his smokes were no longer the most likely thing to get him killed.

  Leaning back on the outside wall, he exhaled a long plume of smoke as he watched the marines at work. The clean-up had begun. Twenty soldiers were hard at work off to his left, excavating a long trench inside the back fence line. The men digging the hole probably had the better end of the stick, compared to the others stuck lugging corpses to the mass grave. With morbid curiosity, he watched the soldiers stack the bodies with business like efficiency.

  Already, the compound looked like a different place compared to what he had walked into. By the time he’d landed with the last group of men, the fight was over. He’d had flashbacks to the farm when he’d viewed the main killing ground below the Fort’s Keep. Despite all the violence he’d witnessed over the preceding months, the sight of so many dead bodies still made his mind reel. He’d heard that Mark had been involved in the main battle, but as of yet, had not seen him.

  Within his clinic lay the problem that had him stressed - two soldiers with plague infected bite wounds. He’d ensured they were well secured, wrists and ankles manacled to the steel frames of their beds. There had been other soldiers bitten during the fight, eight in total. Six had taken responsibility for the situation, eating a bullet fired by their own hand. Those men had joined the Carriers in the mass grave already. But the remaining two were Harry’s problem.

  He was back to square one. After quitting the civilian health service when it mandated a policy of euthanasia, he was being told to do the same thing; although this time around as a member of the armed forces, it was no longer a request, but an order.

  A heavy hand dropped on his shoulder, making him jump.

  ‘I see you’re still trying to kill yourself with those bloody thi
ngs?’ said Mark.

  Harry dropped the stub of his cigarette on the dirt, ground the butt under his heel and grasped Mark’s hand in a firm grip of welcome.

  ‘And I hear you’re trying to get yourself killed by volunteering for high risk missions,’ countered Harry. ‘You look like you got through ok?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. It got a little hairy there for a while though.’

  Harry just nodded as he looked back at the grave diggers. Nothing more needed to be said. He knew some of Mark’s motivation lay in a desire to protect his mates. It wasn’t necessarily a death wish, he just knew that it would be dangerous, and would rather it be himself faced with the threat than any of his fellow soldiers.

  ‘How are you holding up?’ Mark asked.

  ‘Most of the job’s fine, it’s just my usual role with an army uniform thrown in. But I have to ‘treat’ plague bites. They’ve taken the Health Department’s protocol – sedate the patient, then penetrate the skull and destroy the brain with a drill. Except there isn’t one in my equipment, so I’ll be stuck hammering in something pointy instead. I just can’t get my head around deliberately killing my patients,’ said Harry.

  ‘I’ve seen you kill plenty of Carriers. Just think of it as another one of the Infected.’

  Harry looked at Mark scathingly. ‘It’s not that fucking easy, and you know it,’ he muttered.

  ‘Ok. Let me put it another way then. Being a doctor, they probably won’t court martial you over disobeying an order. But if you won’t do it, then it falls back to their commanding officer to carry out the task,’ Mark said.

  ‘And, your point is?’

  ‘What the hell do you think that’s going to do to every officer? They already have to live with decisions that sometimes result in the death of their soldiers, but then you’ll be asking them to personally end the life of those that get bitten. To end the life of soldiers who are as close to family as you get these days. It’ll break even the most resilient eventually. Can you imagine their suicide figures in the long term? And how do you think the rank and file would come to view their leaders? They’d eventually just despise them as executioners.’

  ‘So why are you wishing that fate on me instead?’

  ‘Because you’re a doctor, it can be interpreted differently for you.’

  ‘I could have sworn I took a Hippocratic oath “to do no harm”. How the hell is it different for me?’

  ‘Well, what if “life itself” becomes harm to the patient and others?’ said Mark.

  Harry opened his mouth to argue, but Mark cut him off before he could start.

  ‘We already know that people don’t survive this infection. They’ll inevitably die, and then reanimate as another mindless killer. However, you have the power to stop this from happening. You can give all our soldiers the knowledge that they will have an opportunity to die with dignity, while removing the burden from the officers that already carry their own weight of guilt. Why would you consider refusing our men something so important?’

  Harry’s face fell. ‘Fuck you, Mark.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For taking away any option of refusal,’ he muttered. ‘You better find a bottle of scotch somewhere, because I’m going to need more than a few drinks after this.’

  Harry looked broken, shoulders slumped as he turned and walked back into the clinic.

  Chapter Nine

  Steph walked slowly, her eyes casting ahead to search for any irregularities on the landscape. Although the sun had dominated the ice blue sky for an hour since dawn, it had yet to melt a thin layer of frost covering the ground. Each step gave a light crunch as her foot broke through to the underlying dirt. Steph and Jai’s squad of recruits had been elevated to the next phase of training and were expected to contribute to the camp’s safety by patrolling the approaching highway. They’d been given the safest shift; this early in the morning, Carriers were still half frozen after a night spent in sub zero temperatures.

  The squad walked in a staggered line across the road and into the grass verge. Twenty metres to the rear walked their Sergeant, observing and supervising their progress. Both Jai and Steph were at the end of the line, walking through calf length grass. Each cradled an Austeyr rifle in their arms, comfortably at the ready. During the past weeks, the weapons had become an extension of their bodies, always within hand’s reach no matter the time of day. To be without a rifle now was to feel naked.

  ‘Do you see that up ahead?’ Steph said quietly. ‘There’s a hump in the grass at two o’clock. Is it my turn or yours?’

  Jai searched the ground ahead until his eyes found the Carrier. Only its back was visible above the grass. Keeping his eyes fixed on the ghoul, he pulled a new weapon from behind his shoulder, a long club with a steel reinforced end. Shaped like a baseball bat, the club had been improvised to assist skull penetration. Jai depressed a button above the handle, and a circlet of five-centimetre-long spikes appeared around the end. The clubs had been issued the day before, as the army sought to preserve ammunition for higher risk confrontations with the Infected.

  ‘I’ll sort it out,’ he said. ‘Might as well give this thing a christening.’

  As Jai got closer, the Carrier noted his approach, its head moving slowly to face him. It had been an obese older man before becoming infected. Wearing only jeans, a layer of ice glistened on the pale skin of its back, reflecting sun back at Jai. Without waiting, Jai swung the club underhand with force, burying the spikes deep into the Carrier’s forehead to puncture the frontal lobe of the brain. Jai went to jerk the weapon back but found the metal spikes were lodged in the bone.

  ‘Hit the button again,’ said Steph.

  Jai pressed the button on the handle once more, and the spikes recoiled into the bat. The Carrier’s head dropped with a dull thud onto the dirt. He gave the body a nudge with his boot to ensure it was dead, grunted with satisfaction and replaced the club in its holder on his back.

  ‘I think I have a new favourite weapon,’ he said, while taking back hold of his rifle.

  Steph allowed a half smile to kink one side of her mouth. ‘Just don’t use it at the wrong time, yeah? No point saving bullets if it gets you killed.’

  Jai rolled his eyes at her motherly advice. ‘I would have thought you’d take that for granted. I don’t plan on dying any time soon.’

  The two jogged to catch up with the line that had moved forward another 20 metres in the meantime.

  ‘I hear our group might be getting deployed soon,’ said Jai.

  ‘Who’d you hear that from?’ asked Steph, her interest gained.

  ‘Our Sergeant was on the table behind me in the mess, talking with some of the other trainers,’ Jai said. ‘Your name came up at one time, seems like you’ve impressed a couple of people higher up the chain with how you handled yourself.’

  ‘I’d take anything you hear with a grain of salt,’ Steph said, dismissing the compliment. ‘What did they say about the deployment? Any specifics on where we’d be sent?’

  ‘I heard about some town outside of Geelong. We’d just be clean up teams after the main swarm’s wiped out by regular forces. Doesn’t sound too dangerous.’

  ‘Bet that means house clearances,’ said Steph, her gut clenching at the thought. ‘Give me a Carrier out in the open any day, it’s when those bastard things surprise you that they’re dangerous.’

  A low rumble of an engine caught both their attention, silencing the conversation. The whole line stopped, each person’s gaze drawn to where the road disappeared over a blind rise 200 metres distant. The noise grew in volume, something was driving fast, past the point the engine could sustain comfortably. Suddenly the roof of a public bus appeared over the rise. As it cleared the ridge, it began to accelerate toward the squad blocking the road.

  The Sergeant’s voice roared behind them. ‘Rifles up! All vehicles must be searched for plague. If that bus doesn’t begin to slow down, move to the right side of the road and take out its wheels!’

>   As one, the recruits in the line took a side on stance, rifles aimed menacingly at the approaching bus. Steph bit her lip hard as she watched the huge vehicle accelerate toward them. Just as the Sergeant was about to order his squad off the road, the bus began to gear down rapidly, brakes groaning as they slowed the huge weight. The bus stopped less than twenty metres away in the middle of the tarmac, no attempt being made to pull onto the verge.

  They waited for the door to open without reward. Through the tinted glass of the windscreen, Jai thought he could make out the driver gesturing at them to come closer.

  ‘Hey Sarg,’ Jai said, ‘I think he wants to talk.’

  The Sergeant squinted at the driver through the glass. ‘Fucking idiot looks like he’s shitting his pants. No prize for guessing what he has on board then,’ he said. ‘Right, you two,’ he added, pointing out Steph and Jai, ‘You’re with me, the rest of you stay put.’

  Steph and Jai trailed the Sergeant a step behind, rifles at the ready. They walked to the driver’s side where the man slid back a section of window. The air-conditioned bus was roasting compared to the morning chill, with Steph feeling hot air brush past her face from the open window. Through the gap came the unmistakeable snarling of Carriers. The driver was enclosed within a security box. The Perspex barrier protecting him was smeared with blood where the Infected had smashed their fists in an attempt to break through. A spider web of cracks across the structure showed it wouldn’t hold for much longer.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ demanded the Sergeant, ignoring any effort at civility. ‘You were an inch away from having your tyres shot out!’

  The driver looked like he was barely keeping it together. Sweat beaded on his forehead and soaked his armpits and back. His hands were shaking on the steering wheel he gripped for support.

  ‘Carriers! The bus is full of them!’ he yelled.