by N. W. Harris
A corpse lay ahead, an airport worker in a blue jumpsuit. There was no way to know what killed him. The sun and heat had sucked all the water out of his body. The skin of his face was sunk in and cracked, tightening over the bone underneath. His shrunken eyeballs looked too small in their sockets, and the concrete around him was stained where his rotting fluids had seeped out and baked in the hot sun. Black and green flies buzzed around the partially mummified adult.
Shane suppressed a gag and looked away, guiding the group well clear.
“We best get friendly with it,” Liam said grimly, though his accent made everything sound more chipper than it should. “We’re going to see lots of dead blokes in this city.”
It was evident the Australian boy had seen his share of bodies back in his hometown. His unruffled reaction brought to light the one thing they all had in common. They’d seen their parents die horrible deaths, and they had been forced to leave their bodies behind to rot. Giza was their chance for revenge.
Zigzagging across the tarmac, Shane tried to keep some distance between them and the corpses. The breeze died as they approached the terminals, and the smell grew thicker. The buildings must be filled with the dead, adults who’d turned on each other when the limbic manipulator was active. Shane stopped breathing through his nose, unable to bear it any longer.
They found an area where an aircraft had plowed through a section of the chain-link fence surrounding the airport and walked out onto the road leading into the city.
“It’s a heck of a lot quieter than I remember,” Jake mused.
“You’ve been here before?” Laura asked, seeming to crave the distraction of conversation.
“Yeah, when I was ten,” he said, a nervous tremor in his voice. He walked between Shane and her. “We came and saw the pyramids on holiday.”
“That’s information you might’ve shared earlier,” Tracy pointed out. She sounded calm, like she’d done this a thousand times.
“Well, I don’t remember much.”
“What do you remember?” Steve asked. His eyes scanned the environment around them, and he held his gun in front of him, his grip appearing light on the stalk and ready to bring it up so he could aim and shoot in an instant.
Along with Tracy and Maurice, he looked like a seasoned soldier. Shane realized his eyes were automatically searching for threats as well. The experience in Atlanta and the training he’d received had turned him into a fighting machine. From a distance, he imagined they must look like a veteran Special Forces unit slipping into the city.
He glanced at Laura, Jake, and Liam. They looked anxious and out of their element compared to the others. They had the same training, but they were not yet christened to the real horror of combat. Shane both envied their innocence and feared it could be a liability. Knots tightened in his gut, realizing that Kelly was now on a team where five of the seven were inexperienced.
“Not much,” Jake continued, running his fingers through his dark hair. “I remember it being hot.”
He was leaner than the rest of the Aussies and a little shorter than Shane was. In addition to playing rugby, he ran cross-country and had a kid brother waiting for him back in Australia. The athletic boy had captured the flag for his team several times. Shane didn’t know much else about him, but he knew the kid’s strength and endurance would be an asset in the fight ahead.
“Yeah,” Laura said, pulling her vest off her chest as if to get more airflow between it and her skin. “I can see how that would leave an impression on you.”
“And I remember the traffic being a bugger,” Jake said. “We only stayed for a couple of days. The pyramids were awesome.”
“Anything else?” Tracy was all business.
“Sorry mates—that’s all I remember.”
The airport behind them, a mix of the modern and ancient buildings of Cairo loomed ahead. Random gunshots grew louder as they approached, and he hoped Kelly’s team wasn’t under fire.
The streets were congested with cars and trucks, some abandoned with their doors hanging open like the driver had fled in a hurry, and others with their drivers and passengers dead inside. The animals had done a number on the adults of Cairo, but there were also lots of bullet holes in the cars they passed.
“Oh man,” Maurice said, putting his hand over his face.
“Don’t breathe through your nose,” Shane advised.
“And try not to look at them.” Laura’s face had a greenish hue.
It was harder to follow her advice. The dead were everywhere. Bodies hung out of windows, littered the sidewalks, and lay twisted and broken on the steps of buildings, like they’d fallen from above. There was a constant humming sound, the flies busy feeding and sowing maggots. It made him feel even sicker to think Leeville looked like this right now, though on a much smaller scale. It was easy to be disgusted at the bodies, and not recognize them for what they were. These were people—people who deserved a better end than this.
“Where are the survivors?” Steve asked, panning his gun left and right so its barrel followed his gaze. “I expected we’d be getting harassed by now.”
“Clearly the smell drove them out,” Tracy replied, her shirt pulled up over her nose and mouth.
Shane imagined this place hadn’t been vacant since it was created. Cairo was so much older than any city he’d ever visited in the States. He sensed ghosts of the past, roaming the empty streets and welcoming the souls of the rotting corpses who’d so recently joined them.
It felt like Cairo itself was dead. He wondered what the future would be if they defeated the Anunnaki. Would the old cities be reoccupied, or would they start over with new cities? How different would they be on the other side of this apocalypse? Maybe, like the prior visits by the Anunnaki to ancient Earth, in a few thousand years, people would believe the stories of this war were just myths. People might once again believe they were alone in the universe.
These thoughts weighed heavy on him as he hurried down the street, passing towering glass office buildings, shopping areas, and temples that looked like they’d been around since the dawn of time. He noticed Maurice glance up at an old church with reverence, but Shane couldn’t take any interest. He just wanted to get beyond the dead to a place where he could get fresh air.
Swarms of flies grew so thick that they had to copy Tracy and wear their shirts over their noses and mouths to keep them out. This city belonged to them now, along with squawking buzzards, sulking dogs, and feral cats. A movement ahead caught his attention. He swore he saw the legs of a body disappear, dragged inside an open door. He held his fist up and squatted, signaling his team to stop.
“Go away!” a boy’s voice yelled in Arabic. “They’re mine. Go find your own.” Shane understood him and wondered how many other languages the rebels had uploaded into his brain.
“Sounds like one of the crazies Jones warned us about,” Steve whispered. He was next to Shane, their guns pointed at the building where the voice came from.
“Leave them alone,” the voice said angrily. “They aren’t for you.”
“We just want to pass,” Shane called back in the boy’s native tongue. “We won’t touch anyone.”
He sensed the longer they stayed here, the more agitated the boy would become. Darting to the next car, he crouched behind it, directly in front of the building. The rest of his team took turns crossing the exposed space between vehicles.
Slowly raising his head, he looked into the dark doorway, but he couldn’t see anything.
A gun went off behind him, and the metal of the car’s fender complained with a loud ping as a bullet ripped through it. Shane dropped to his belly, rolling so he could bring his gun’s barrel to the other side of the street. There was an ancient, five-story stucco building with most of its widows busted out. He didn’t see any movement inside.
“Damn it,” Steve cursed, sweeping his gun back and forth. “Where did that come from?”
“They’re mine,” the Egyptian boy on the right side of the street ye
lled angrily, firing a burst of rounds from his hiding place. The plaster erupted off the side of the building four stories up, where Shane guessed the first shooter took cover.
“We don’t have time for this,” Tracy growled.
She propped on one knee and took aim at the building. The grenade launcher made a whomp sound. A second later, a fireball erupted through the open window, presumably from where the first shot was fired. Pivoting toward the other side of the street, she fired a grenade through the door where the legs had disappeared.
Shane covered his head until the plaster stopped raining down, his ears ringing from the explosions.
“Holy crap, Tracy,” Laura said. “You didn’t even know if this one was going to try and hurt us.” She rose to her feet, looking into the dusty shell of the building on the other side of the car.
Amongst the rubble was a fresh corpse, still smoking from the blast. The charred boy was lying face down, like he’d tried to leap out of the open window just as the grenade went off.
“Sorry, but we don’t have the luxury to wait until they kill one of us,” she replied coldly, her eyes looking at the buildings around them for another threat. “If they point a gun in my direction, they’re going to die.”
She sounded heartless, though he knew she was right.
“Let’s move,” Shane ordered, worried the noise might attract more of these poor kids whose brains had come unhinged.
They hurried along, guns aimed in every direction. The temperature had to be well over a hundred. Sweat gushed from him, and he felt like he’d go mad if he didn’t get away from the dead soon. Ahead was a meat truck with greasy stalactites hanging beneath the back doors. The unrefrigerated box must’ve turned into an oven under the desert sun, broiling the cargo into a rotten stew. He didn’t dare take a whiff, but he could guess how bad it smelled by the way flies were particularly concentrated around it.
Swatting his way through the buzzing insects, he froze in front of the truck. His eyes locked on a red Honda Civic. The hood and roof were splattered with blotches of blackish mud. A step closer revealed these were the dried, bloody footprints of dogs.
Vomit rose in his throat, and the sun’s heat seemed to double in intensity. He came to the driver’s window, his boots crunching in broken glass on the ground below it.
“Mrs. Morris,” he groaned, putting his hand on the roof of the car to keep from collapsing. There she sat, wearing her Leeville High Football Team T-shirt. Her face was missing, replaced by a writhing mess of maggoty flesh.
“You alright, mate?” Liam asked. It sounded like he was speaking to him from the top of a well.
He tore his eyes away from Aaron’s mom and looked at the Aussie. Liam’s nose and mouth were covered by his shirt, but his brow was furrowed with concern. A glance back at the car told him he was losing it. The small sedan was red, but he didn’t recognize the brand. It was not a Honda. The dehydrated carcass of an old lady lay across the center console.
“I’m fine,” he replied. “Just a little hot.”
He smacked at the flies and lifted his shirt back up over his face, turning away before Liam could study him long enough to figure out he might be coming unhinged.
It could just be a side effect of the neural upload, but he also worried that somehow, his slave gene might have been activated and he was going crazy like the two Tracy had killed. He remembered how he felt when the limbic manipulator made him want to murder Tracy and Steve. He’d been so certain it was the right thing to do. A chill ran down his spine.
He pushed the thoughts aside, forcing his attention on the buildings they passed. Nothing could stop him from doing what had to be done. He wouldn’t be distracted. He had to lead his team.
“On the left,” Steve whispered, and they all dropped and pointed their weapons in that direction.
A skinny kid who looked to be about fourteen walked through the intersection a block away. He wasn’t carrying a weapon, and his oversized red tank top hung loosely, showing his ribs. He disappeared between the buildings. Shane pitied the boy, who was headed toward the pyramids where the Anunnaki would land, marching toward his doom.
“Guess that means we’re going the right way,” Liam observed with a despondent voice.
After another mile, the street sloped upward and away from the buildings, joining with a bridge. A breeze pushed the stench and flies away, and a wide river with calm, green water flowed by below.
“The Nile,” Jake muttered distantly.
“Once we cross this bridge,” Tracy had the map open, “Giza is to the south.”
She folded it and shoved it back into her vest. They crept up the bridge, scanning the area. Ravens screeched in the palms lining the river, and Laura dropped into a crouched position and aimed her gun at the sky. Her eyes looked wild, filled with terror.
Shane put his hand on her shoulder, and she jerked her gun toward him.
“It’s okay,” he promised, pushing the barrel out of his face. “They won’t attack you again.”
She scanned the sky once more, and her attention came back to him. Sighing nervously, she stood. Panic loosened its hold on her expression, replaced by a sheepish grin.
“The others must’ve already come this way,” Tracy said, pointing at a wrapper from a granola bar, the same kind they were all given.
“Who in the devil could eat at a time like this?” Liam crinkled his nose.
“Probably Jules,” Maurice answered. “Nothing will stop that girl from eating.”
“And that’s the bloody oath if it is hers,” the Aussie replied, shaking his head with disbelief. “I’d be chundering after one bite.”
He doubted Maurice’s confidence in her appetite—Jules wouldn’t have eaten if someone on her team had been killed. The little green wrapper told him Kelly was all right. Tracy picked it up, shoved it in her pocket, and then continued climbing the bridge.
They stayed low, close to the concrete guardrail as they crossed over the Nile. At the peak, they could see the pyramids rising in the south.
“Take cover,” Tracy whispered, pointing at the city below.
Shane ducked behind a car and took aim at a river of kids flowing through an intersection two blocks away. Some of them carried guns over their shoulders in a casual way, like they weren’t concerned about being attacked. They looked like teenagers, none younger than twelve or older than seventeen. They were all the enemy wanted for now—the second wave would collect the younger children.
“What’s that guy doing?” Shane pointed at the street just below the bridge.
A kid in a black shirt was ducking behind the cars, slipping closer to the parade. He had a pistol in his hand and seemed intent upon using it to take out a few of them.
“Looks like he wants to die,” Liam replied.
When the suicide gunman was less than a half block away, he stood up between the cars and leveled his weapon at the crowd. He yelled and fired the pistol three times, unimpressive bangs when compared to the earlier boom of Tracy’s grenades. A girl at the edge of the mob dropped. Shane would have expected panic and screaming if this was a sober crowd, but the slave gene obviously had these teens possessed. Without appearing startled, they pivoted and charged toward the shooter. He turned and ran, firing over his shoulder without aiming. Just before the mob was upon him, Shane saw the boy laughing in a way that only insanity could inspire.
They beat him down quickly and without emotion, as casual as if they were taking out the trash. Once the gunman lay motionless on the ground, they turned and rejoined the river of kids like nothing happened. As disturbing as the scene was, it promised these kids weren’t a threat to his team. Their behavior seemed entirely defensive, and they probably wouldn’t attack unless someone provoked them. It was the ones walking around by themselves he had to worry about.
“I ain’t keen on mingling with those folks,” Steve whispered, an urgency in his tone like he wanted to get going.
“The map has us taking the first si
de street, so we won’t have to,” Tracy replied.
“Let’s move,” Shane whispered, advancing down to the next car.
With his friends following behind him, he hopscotched his way to the bottom of the bridge into Giza. As he was slipping between cars, one of the kids in the mob seemed to look directly at him. Shane stopped and crouched down, worried that if he continued forward, the kid might think he was charging in like the last lunatic. Either the boy didn’t notice him, or he didn’t view him as a threat. He said something to the guy in front of him, who also looked over, but they walked by and out of sight.
Taking a left at the bottom of the bridge, he sighed with relief once his team was between the buildings and out of sight of the mob. He’d made it this far without killing anyone, and he hoped the first life he had to take today would be that of an Anunnaki. The isolated crazies and the others who calmly made their way to the pyramids were not in control of themselves. The idea of shooting them filled him with dread, though he knew he couldn’t hesitate if the situation demanded it.
The sun drifted lower, and the city grew darker. Avoiding rotting bodies, he darted along in the shadows. The cooling air reenergized him, and a breeze whisked away some of the flies and stench. He looked up and down each street they crossed to make sure they weren’t running into another ambush, but all was quiet.
“Three blocks to go,” Tracy whispered after they crossed an intersection that brought them closer to the hypnotized throng than before.
“Listen,” Shane said, raising his hand to stop them.
A rhythmic chanting came from the direction in which they headed. It was deep and mournful, with drums setting the cadence. The music was mesmerizing, and Shane imagined it coerced the kids marching to the pyramids into an even deeper trance. He continued cautiously, the chanting sending chills down his back. It seemed primal and sinister, like it might precede some terrible ritual.
Two blocks later, a girl screamed, her desperate plea rising above the feverish music. He raised his rifle to his shoulder, rushing toward the sound. She screamed again, a torturous note that turned his blood to ice.
