Arisen : Genesis

by Fuchs, Michael Stephen

  “Zack!” Baxter pointed at the rope. “I’m supposed to help pull!”

  Zack nodded. “Okay.” He pressed transmit again. “Bob? Are you ready? We’re gonna haul you up!”

  “Yeah, go for it.” He still sounded… jovial. Jesus.

  They could hear the firing up on the road pick up. At this point, Dugan was holding off the entire militia by himself. Which was probably about the right distribution of their manpower. Zack and Baxter each grabbed two handfuls of rope and hauled hand over hand. The weight and drag were terrific. They’d reeled the rope in several feet before Zack realized… Bob wasn’t at the end of it.

  The ISU was.

  “Bob! What the fuck! Grab the rope!”

  “Negative. Get the gear up there first. Then we’ll deal with me.”

  Zack looked at Baxter, who was looking back at him saucer-eyed in the dark, pupils enormous with fear and night vision. Zack didn’t want to do it. But there was absolutely no time for arguing. The AK fire was still getting closer every second… Dugan was badly outnumbered, and could delay but not stop the assault… and the tide of the dead in the gully was swelling and advancing. Zack resumed hauling, and Baxter piled in. It was heavy as hell, and inched up the slope in jerks and tumbles. He had no idea how after this they were going to reel in Bob – who probably weighed 280 pounds.

  Finally, several eternities later, they grabbed the ISU – and realized why it was so heavy. It had the UAV ground control station, in its hard plastic case, lanyarded to the back of it. And lanyarded to the top of that was… Bob’s rifle, as well as his tactical vest, with maybe a half-dozen magazines in its pouches.

  “No!” Zack hollered. He snatched up the rifle, bracing the barrel with his bad arm in a spasm of sickening pain, and sighted down the hillside. There was Bob, sitting with his back to the truck, dead legs spread out before him, .45 in one hand and knife in the other. Dead were pouring around either side of the Tahoe, and Bob engaged them from one side and then the other. Zack could see it all play out, small but vivid in the eerie night-vision view. Bob leaned around and fired to one side, then the other, heavy reports of the .45, bodies falling – but many of them falling on him. He shoved them away, dropped an empty mag, jammed his knife into a face with bared teeth straining toward his.

  Zack, in a dead panic, flipped his selector switch to full auto, moved his aim to the right, alongside the Tahoe and along the line of ravening bodies moving across it, depressed the trigger, and murdered the whole group, an entire full magazine poured into the crowd. The figures jerked, fell… and then got up again.

  A hand yanked his headset off his ear. It was Dugan, pausing a half-second to seat it on his own ear. “Comin’ for you, buddy…” he said. Zack could hear the response – he wasn’t sure if it was leaking out of Dugan’s earpiece, or just bellowing up the hill. “Don’t you take a step down this hill, brother! Get the gear, and get the others out!”

  Dugan blinked. “Fuck that.” He hadn’t pressed the transmit button, which was still in Zack’s vest. He was just saying it. He raised his rifle and leaned into it to take a shot. And as he did so, another RPG streaked down and across the hillside, leaving sparks and a phosphorescent trail in the dark. It hit Bob dead on, plowing into the ground at the back of the Tahoe, and at the center of the mass of frenzied dead, throwing bodies ten meters in all directions. Dugan instinctively threw his hand up over his head and turned away. When he moved to straighten up, there were strong arms gripping his torso.

  It was Baxter, standing behind him.

  “He’s gone, Dugan!” Zack marveled at the nerve and bravado of the twenty-three-year-old. He had come into his own in a single instant.

  “Noooo— no!” Dugan raged against Baxter’s arms. But then he slackened. He knew it was true.

  “We gotta go!” Baxter shouted above the roar of the AKs, as well as the fire burning down below, and the inhuman gnashing and growling sounds of the army of the dead. “We gotta go now!”

  Dugan shook off Baxter’s grip, turned aside, and drew his knife, that evil six-inch fixed commando blade, with a single motion. Zack staggered backward, away from him. Dugan sliced through the lanyards around the ISU, handed the GCS to Baxter, the magazine-stuffed vest to Zack, and hefted the ISU itself under his left arm. “Go!” he said. Zack and Baxter complied, putting their heads down and sprinting up the hill and toward the bridge, the sound of heavy 5.56 fire following right behind them – and heavier 7.62 rounds cracking all around them and plunking into the steel and glass of the vehicles ahead.

  Dugan was running and firing almost blindly from the hip.

  Covering them as they all got the hell out of Dodge.

  Or almost all of them.

  Mountains of the Moon

  After surviving all of that, they almost got hung up and taken out in Berbera, which lay across the bridge and over the hill.

  As bad as Hargeisa had been, Berbera was worse – a ninth-circle-of-hell miasma of burning buildings, smoke-choked air, dead-thronged streets, heaving black darkness, and half-gnawed bodies in view on seemingly every square meter of ground. It was like the devil finally got free rein to do to this place in earnest what he had been doing in jest for decades. He finally got to fulfill his most erotic fantasy of seeing East Africa literally consume itself.

  Worse, none of the three survivors in the scavenged U.N. Land Cruiser knew their way around this particular shithole. They had to enter the city proper due to the now-familiar problem of intercity road entrances and interchanges being impassable parking lots. Zack called out turns from the moving map GPS on his phone, making constant corrections and adjustments when street after street proved impassable.

  By the time they found the coast road, leading east alongside the Gulf of Aden and toward Djibouti, Zack had given them up for dead at least five times. In the end, it was Dugan’s flawless and inspired driving, Baxter’s continuously improving shooting, and Zack’s flickering resolve not to let Maximum Bob’s sacrifice be for nothing, that saw them through.

  That and a great heaping shit-ton of luck.

  When they made it out alive, the coastal road was a great improvement. The terrain was flat, sandy, and surrounded by desert. This meant any stopped or crashed vehicles, or outbreak victims, could easily be spotted and driven around. Zack wondered idly if this was what a world hit by a gamma ray burst would look like… a bleak wasteland, populated only by the dying and the dead.

  Certainly Berbera, that horror show of panic and contagion and man’s profound inhumanity to man, was exactly what he’d imagined a bioengineered viral apocalypse would look like. Maybe, when they got to Lemonnier, they’d finally find out whether this was just East Africa in flames again… or the whole world burning.

  For now, the dying AND the dead were at least less of a threat when you could see them a mile away.

  On the downside, Zack realized with a spasm of slapped-forehead self-loathing that he’d never charged his phone – and the goddamned charger was back in the Tahoe, at the bottom of that gully, with the spirit of Maximum Bob standing guard over it, forever. He turned the device off, to save the remaining battery for some occasion when they couldn’t do without it. Such an occasion was sure to come – and no doubt before they found another compatible charger, which could well be never.

  The interior of the Land Cruiser wasn’t radically different from the Tahoe. More headroom. Baxter still rode in the back, so he could shoot out either back window. Zack had Bob’s station now, riding shotgun. After they were out of Berbera, he also turned off his NVGs, to save that battery as well. Now the slightly moon-washed desertscape spread around him flatly in every direction. He could see enough to feel like they were on some other planet.

  “What’s the P factor?” Baxter asked quietly from the back seat, breaking a long silence.

  “Huh?” Dugan looked like he hadn’t heard him.

  “The P factor. Bob said you had to crank it up.”

  “Oh.” Dugan’s throat bobbed
as he swallowed dryly. “P is for ‘plenty.’ He meant I should be slinging a lot more brass downrange toward the militia.”

  “Got it.”

  Dugan seemed to marshal his thoughts – as if he were trying to master himself for the others’ sake. “You did well back there,” he said finally, looking up at Baxter in the rear-view. “But you can’t be tentative. It’s all about throttle control. You’ve got to be smooth and keep the lid on – until the time is right, then you dial the violence up all the way. Instantly. You don’t hesitate. You understand?”

  “Check.”

  Zack listened to the veteran warrior instructing the younger man. Zack guessed maybe it was a way for Dugan to feel like he had some control over his situation.

  Dugan said, “You qualified on the M4 at the Farm, right?”

  “Yes,” Baxter said. “And the MP5, MP7, and a few handguns.”

  “You shoot well. The fundamentals are there. You just need more confidence. Remember: throttle control. Dial it up fast.”

  “Okay, Dugan. Check.”

  The SEAL’s visage seemed to cloud over again, and he spoke more quietly. “In a firefight you don’t have the luxury of coming up with a great plan…” He seemed now to be talking more to himself than to Baxter. “A decent plan executed now is better than a great plan executed five minutes from now, when you’re all dead…”

  And with that, Dugan resumed driving in fragile silence.

  Zack stole a glance over at the now-lone warrior. He looked like he was grinding his jaw. Like he was going over things again and again in his head. And in what seemed like a rare episode of genuine telepathy, Zack felt he knew exactly what was running through Dugan’s mental monologue: “whatever exodus was heading down this road is over. And we’ll be gone in a few minutes. It’ll be fine…” It had been Dugan’s call to leave the Tahoe on the road. And that, via a chain of terrible events, had led directly to Bob’s death. In retrospect, it was obviously a crap call.

  But everything’s obvious in retrospect.

  What had really killed Bob was the same thing that had brought that truck screaming out of nowhere, and out of control, onto them: bad luck. Bob had fallen to bad luck. And to his own selflessness. He had made a choice.

  To save the others.

  Zack personally knew two separate stories of SEALs falling on grenades to save their brothers – at the cost of their own lives. That was just how it was for them. And probably what gave their lives meaning to them.

  But none of that would comfort Dugan now – and nor did Zack imagine he could convince Dugan that it had just been bad luck. In any case, he didn’t even try. Every time he opened his mouth to say something, his throat dried up. Some sorrows were not open to outside intervention or comfort. Just as some brotherhoods were beyond the reckoning of people outside of them.

  Some tragedies couldn’t be made okay, not by words, and not by anything else either.

  Like everything else, it was, emphatically, what it was.

  * * *

  Zack shifted his legs around, seeking comfort. His right thigh brushed against something on the door. Examining it, he found it was a machete, in a sheath, secured to the inside of the door. He announced it to the others.

  “So much for peacekeeping,” Baxter said.

  “Yeah,” Zack said. “Gandhi wouldn’t walk around here unarmed. And ours didn’t make it out of the Tahoe.” He immediately regretted saying this. Like it was some kind of criticism of Bob’s last act on this earth, his last bequest of their critical supplies. Dugan didn’t visibly react.

  Not for a few minutes, anyway. That was when they came across the bus, which sat jackknifed across the road.

  And even from a half-mile out, they could see that it was surrounded by figures. Milling. Shuffling. And perking up when the Land Cruiser started to get within hearing of it.

  Dugan slowed and stopped 100 meters out.

  “What are we doing?” Zack asked.

  “Making a stop.”

  “We can go right around that, Dugan.”

  “Yeah. I know. But we need fuel.”

  Zack paused a beat. “There are trucks that run on diesel abandoned everywhere. And that don’t have a whole bus full of infected people guarding them. This is too dangerous.”

  “The bus has got a really big tank to siphon. I’m gonna borrow this.” He reached across Zack’s lap and took the machete. “Stay in the vehicle.” He took off his NVGs and laid them on the dash, then opened the door and climbed out. He seemed to have murder, or maybe fallen brothers, burning behind his eyes.

  “The hell I’m staying in the vehicle,” Baxter said, exiting the back a second later. Zack swiveled and saw Baxter had his M4 cradled in his arms.

  Dugan paused fractionally. “Okay. But no shooting unless you have to.” Baxter nodded and Dugan stalked off. Zack seated his own NVGs and swung out onto the sandy surface of the road, in the featureless middle of the desert, in the black middle of the night. And he had a perfect view of Dugan striding forward and just murdering the shit out of over twenty of the already dead.

  They had started moving forward even as the vehicle stopped, then picked up their pace when they locked on to Dugan. The ones at the front moved in a frenzy. And Dugan took them on like a kendo or aikido master. He sidestepped, pivoted, swung one direction and then the other, whirling and flashing. He cleaved skulls. He severed, or mostly severed, heads. And he carried on walking forward, leaving a 50-meter trail of bodies in his wake. It occurred to Zack that, however the adage had it, the road to hell was almost certainly paved with these things…

  Dugan disappeared around behind the bus. Baxter and Zack could just make out more wet thwacking sounds, as well as Dugan audibly grunting. He appeared on board the bus, through its windows, and moved the length of it, then walked back and climbed down.

  He cupped his hands and called out to them across the dry desert night air: “Bring it in.”

  Zack walked around the front and got in the driver’s seat, while Baxter climbed in back, and drove up to the bus. Buses are the only transport option for most Somalis, and their quality tends to reflect that. This one had replacement panels spot-welded on, mismatching tires, more primer than paint, and religious charms dangling from the rear-view. In a word, it looked like crap even before it suffered an outbreak and bloody melee on board.

  Suddenly it hit Zack. “Wait. I don’t think the siphon hose made it out of the Tahoe.” Dugan walked up, his breathing almost back to normal. The machete dripped with gore. Zack looked him up and down, but he couldn’t see any blood on the SEAL.

  Dugan quietly said, “Check the ISU.”

  Zack had no desire to second-guess this, so he wordlessly went around the back of the Land Cruiser and opened the rear door. He pulled the crate toward him, flipped open the top, and rooted through it, around the grenade gun, under all the magazines… yep, there it was. The rubber siphon hose. Zack hadn’t seen it his first time in there. Bob’s last gift to them. Or his latest one, anyway. There were also some kind of sachets underneath that, floating in the very bottom. Zack pulled one out and examined it. Iodine tablets. For water purification.

  Apparently there was no end to the number of times Bob would save their lives. It just went on and on.

  Zack coiled up the hose, brought it to Dugan, and in eight minutes they had topped up the tanks from the bus and were back on the road. Once again they drove wordlessly. Zack spotted a road sign: they were now less than 100 miles from the border with Djibouti. And Camp Lemonnier was only about five miles beyond that.

  Zack was too tired to start entertaining thoughts about whether they might just make it after all. He didn’t want to get his hopes up. Not because they might be dashed by reality. But because he was sure they would be cratered by his own fatalism – his longstanding and constantly growing sense that he would never get out of the Horn of Africa alive.

  The sand hissed under their tires, the placid ocean spread out silently to their right – and
the night held them in its embrace.

  Or its death grip.

  Zion Burns

  It wasn’t sunlight in the east. Or even sunrise.

  It was merely a very subtle blanching of the great black body of the sea and sky, at the point where they pressed together, like the border between this world and the next, like a gateway from being to nothingness. Zack felt the lightening before he really saw it. But within a few minutes, there were faint little dancing glints way out on the surface of the ocean.

  Jesus, Zack thought. We’ve been running for our lives the entire night…

  But then he looked again, suddenly transfixed by the dance of pre-dawn light. Beauty – even now, still in this world. As Zack stared wordlessly out the window, he felt a fleeting but regnant sense of affection for this place, this lonely blue planet. And that feeling made him want to know if the world was going to make it.

  He fired up his phone, burning precious battery power.

  The New York Times site pulsed for nearly a full minute without loading. He was just moving his thumb to give up on it, when the front page came in partially. “Hargeisa – Latest News and Public Health Advisories.” Zack screwed up his face in confusion. Why were they talking about Hargeisa? And then it hit him. Just as the sweet little German town of Marburg, and the gentle Ebola River in Zaire, had their names tainted for all time, now it was Hargeisa’s turn.

  New diseases were often named for the place where they were first identified.

  “We’re twenty mikes out of Lemonnier,” Dugan said, pulling Zack from his dark reverie. “Can you get eyes on with the Pred?”

  “Sorry, eyes on with what?” Zack asked.

  Oh – the Predator.

  He powered off his phone, realizing that somehow he had completely forgotten about the drone again. That thing really did fly itself. And the open desert coast road had meant they could drive safely without the aerial surveillance. But that was never going to last. Zack clambered over the armrest into the back seat, nudged Baxter aside, and pulled the GCS over the partition from the back. He got it opened up and arranged.