“Where is it, actually?” Baxter asked.
“Still on an autopilot holding pattern, I presume, halfway back up the Hargeisa–Berbera Road.”
Zack woke up the laptop – and quickly discovered the main electronics were dead and cold. A quick survey revealed there was no power to be had in the Land Cruiser, no power inverter. Another facet of the enormous loss of the Tahoe.
“Oh, well,” Baxter said.
“So much for persistent eye in the sky,” Zack said.
“It’s still got like sixteen hours of linger time, though, right? We should be able to land it from Lemonnier.”
“Yeah. Or maybe it will just spiral down and out, fall out of the sky. Have its final rest deep in Somaliland.”
Baxter didn’t respond to this. Zack didn’t go on to suggest that this was any kind of metaphor for Maximum Bob – or for the rest of them, for that matter.
Dugan didn’t say anything.
He just drove on.
* * *
They saw the smoke first.
It wasn’t a good sign at all, though no one seemed inclined to point that out. Dugan slowed the vehicle incrementally as they got closer. They rolled up to a big Humvee, turned over on its side in the culvert. As they passed it, Zack could see splashes of now-dried blood on the windows. And he was seized with a massive sense of déjà vu. He’d seen this scene, lived through this moment, somewhere before…
Now the great plume of smoke rising from up ahead was unmistakable – and it resolved into multiple pillars, floating up side by side and joining hundreds of meters up in the now dark-gray-and-pink sky. The sand still hissed under their wheels, somehow more loudly at their reduced speed. Metal scraped on metal – Zack looked back, and saw it was Baxter dropping the mag out of his M4 and checking it. He slid it back into place with a confident click.
Zack didn’t know whether to roll the windows down, to try to hear something; or keep them up, for safety. But by the time they were in sight of the main gate of the camp, about 300 meters out, now rolling at only a few miles an hour, they heard noises loud enough to penetrate the Land Rover cabin, from ahead and to their left. First it was thin small-arms fire, rapidly crescendoing – which then culminated in a rattling crash. Dugan braked them to a stop, Zack craned his head and peered, and Baxter slid out the back passenger-side door and placed his rifle across the roof of the vehicle.
None of the vehicles had headlights on, so it took a few seconds for them to resolve. But it was a convoy of four Humvees, bumpers inches apart, moving something like 60 or 70 miles per hour. The crash had been the lead vehicle blasting through one of the smaller gates in the fence that ringed the camp. As the tail-end vehicle ramped out of the base, two figures squatting in the back fired assault rifles into the complex behind them. In fact, there was firing, in what seemed like all directions, from all the vehicles, which were evidently loaded for bear. The three Agency men instinctively ducked, but within seconds the firing had tailed off – as all four Humvees disappeared up the road that led west, further along the coast. They were very clearly not stopping for hell, high water, or abandoned babies.
They were only in view for a few seconds, but all three passengers of the Land Rover got a mental image of the convoy.
Baxter saw keffiyahs on some of the men shooting.
Zack clocked flashes of body parts in the grilles and wheels and undercarriages of one or more of the Humvees.
And Dugan spotted their distinctive unit insignia, stenciled on the side of each of the vehicles.
“It’s ODA triple nickel,” he said. “Or what’s left of it.”
“And making a run for it,” Baxter added.
Zack fought to get his breathing under control. The manifestly obvious was belatedly impressing itself upon him: their salvation was a mirage.
Camp Lemonnier, the invincible beating heart of U.S. military might in Africa, had somehow fallen.
It was now no more than Hargeisa with an armory.
Dugan started them moving forward again. Within a few seconds it was obvious he wasn’t turning around.
“Dugan,” Baxter said. “Lemonnier’s gone. It’s gone, dude.” Zack felt, for the second time, like he was back in one of the Alien films. When the dropship crashed on LV246. When Ripley blew an axle on the APC. When Private Hudson stalked up and down chanting, “Well that’s just fucking great, man. What the fuck are we supposed to do now, man?”
Dugan didn’t visibly react to Baxter pointing out the obvious. He spoke calmly in response. “I’m just going to get us a bit of a closer look. I’ve got friends in there – we all do. And maybe we can find some survivors. Or just find out what happened.”
As they approached the outer security station, the main thing about it immediately became obvious: it had been blown up. Wood splinters, burnt plastic and metal, and other debris were scattered in a 20-meter circle around the jagged outline of the little shack. Dugan stopped the truck and got out. As he stalked around, rifle aimed low, he quickly homed in on one spot and stopped there. It was just behind the only substantial remaining section of the structure.
Zack and Baxter cautiously got out and followed him.
And soon they saw. Slumped up against what was left to slump against was an American soldier – an MP, and a staff sergeant, from his uniform and insignia. He was conscious, lids half-lowered, breathing labored. He was also shy a leg – it had been taken off just above the knee, the wound seemingly cauterized by the blast that did the damage. Finally, his complexion wasn’t good at all – red bumps presented on the skin of his face, two or three having turned to sores. A thin black spiderweb pattern could also be seen just underneath the skin. When he clocked the newcomers and levered his eyes open, they were an inhumanly milky color, cloudy and opaque.
“Military, government, or contractor IDs,” he said, weakly but audibly. “And state your business on the base today.” Dugan squatted down before the MP, and Zack could see they were both smiling. God love the stoicism and unbreakable good humor of grunts. Zack also noted that Dugan didn’t get too close.
“What happened here, Sergeant?”
The man’s head sagged, or nodded, and he worked to get his breath. “Some snake eaters fragged my security station. AT-4 rocket, I think. Don’t blame ’em. Me and my team were sick. I’m the last one.” He coughed weakly. “You should go,” he said.
Zack looked away, over at Baxter, who was scanning around them over the top of his rifle. Dugan nodded his assent, but persisted. He looked up and down the great wall that ringed the base. “How did they breach the perimeter?”
The MP blinked heavily. His eyes looked even cloudier now. “That’s an easy one… from the inside…”
Dugan said, “They had sick people in the hospital, and couldn’t contain them?”
The MP nodded. “Some in the hospital. Some in the barracks. Guys coming back in from engagements who seemed fine… As usual, it’s all the little crap that adds up into one big turd…”
Zack looked back at the dying man, and laughed in spite of himself. Then he saw something change on the MP’s face. His lips crawled away from his teeth, and his pallor seemed to grower whiter even as Zack watched. A hiss escaped his throat, and his chin fell on his chest. Two beats passed. Dugan reached out for the side of the man’s neck with two fingers…
“Dugan,” Zack said, “bad idea…”
With Dugan’s hand now two inches away, the MP came back to life – his head snapped upright, and his teeth literally snapped at Dugan’s hand. With razor-edge reflexes, Dugan pulled his hand away, as a shot rang out, and brought his other arm around, swinging the machete. The MP’s head landed in his lap – with a bullet hole in it. Neither Zack nor Baxter had been aware that Dugan even had the machete. And Baxter had fired, instantly, to protect Dugan.
Dugan looked up at him. “Good. You dialed it up instantly. Excellent throttle control. On the other hand, there was the noise…” Dugan looked up the road toward the base and the ot
hers followed his gaze: lurching figures, maybe a half-dozen, all in military uniform. Baxter sighted down on them, but held his fire.
Zack put his hand on Dugan’s shoulder. “Come on. We’re done here.” Dugan stood up, none too quickly from Zack’s point of view.
“You’re done here,” he said quietly, looking into Zack’s face. Zack squinted, his expression sagging all the way down to his waist. There were dull red splotches here and there on Dugan’s face and neck. And the faintest of a black spiderweb trace at his temples. Zack staggered backward two steps, bent over and grabbed his knees, the wind completely knocked out of him. After a beat, he looked up at the commando he had believed to be insuperable.
“How…?” he managed to get out. Flicking his eyes to the side, he saw that Baxter had his rifle not on Dugan, but not exactly off him either.
Dugan shrugged, then reached over and pulled up his left pants leg. Just above the lip of his boot there was an angry double wound, infected looking – and also looking a lot like a bite mark. “Back at that stopped bus. One of them hiding underneath. Grabbed me before I saw it.” He shrugged again.
Zack slowly straightened up. Behind Dugan, he could see that the (literal) army of the dead was only maybe a minute away.
“Keep driving north,” Dugan said. “Try to make it to Camp Doha in Qatar, or one of the friendly ports in UAE. There are ferry services to Yemen – but if by some miracle they’re running, they’ll probably be a worse horror show than anything on land. On the other hand, it’ll get you out of HOE. It’s your skin, and your call. Keep using the radios – conserve power, but hail on the emergency frequencies at regular intervals. Try to get extracted – if you stay by the Red Sea coast, you’ll have a shot at the Fifth Fleet carrier strike group or their expeditionary force. If it doesn’t happen, then just keep moving. Stay out of the cities. Stop only for gas and water. You siphon while Baxter pulls security. Ultimately, you can drive yourselves right off this godforsaken continent if you have to. Got it?”
Baxter nodded, while Zack just looked at him. Baxter struggled to speak. “What are you going to do…?”
Dugan smiled, then tossed his head over his shoulder, toward the base. “I’m gonna stay here. Find a place to hole up – just take it easy and wait for the cavalry. You know they’ll come eventually.”
Zack tried to speak, failed.
Dugan looked into his eyes, his own both clouding and somehow twinkling at the same time. “This is the best place to get treated, anyway. CDC or WHO will have some kind of vaccine or serum before long. And you can believe they’ll start distributing it from right here.”
Zack just nodded, trying to keep himself together.
Baxter gulped audibly, then said, “You watch yourself, brother. Stay alive.”
“Don’t worry about me. You watch your own asses. Oh, and if any women of my acquaintance come round looking for me… well, just tell them I love them.”
“What? All of them?”
Dugan flashed that grin of his. “Absolutely. Every last one.”
Baxter nodded, as did Zack, both holding back tears. Between them, they probably had about ten more words left in them. “Thank you,” Zack said. “Thanks for getting us this far. For… for driving through hell to keep us alive.”
Dugan smiled again. “Hey, if it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it.”
With that, he switched the machete to his left hand, hefted his rifle by the pistol grip, turned on his heel, took off at a trot, and laid into the crowd of the dead spilling out of the base. By then, Zack and Baxter were already turned around and heading for the Land Cruiser at a run. As they squealed the tires turning it around, they got one last image of the SEAL wheeling and pivoting in the near dark… covering their withdrawal…
Still protecting them, until the very end.
Stronghold
The road out through Djibouti was worse than the road in, probably owing to the population density being much higher there than in western Somalia. Zack drove the increasingly mud- and blood-spattered Land Cruiser up the N1, through what was now a bright morning, trying to escape the gravity well of dying Djibouti town – another population center and thus total death zone. The light meant they could see threats. But, at the same time, parts of them – floundering, weak, human parts – wished they could stop seeing it all.
It wasn’t the cars, this time – though the highway was as much a riot of wrecked and abandoned vehicles as the ones out of Hargeisa and Berbera. No, now it was the human wreckage. The virus had clearly reached some kind of catastrophic tipping point here. Everyone was sick, or dead, if that’s what it was. And they roamed the roads and fields and hills and beaches in ever-thicker throngs. Wherever Zack and Baxter came upon them, the two living men were instantly high-value party favors in a piñata party for the dead.
Baxter was alternately firing out the back windows, one side or the other, and retreating back inside when it was no longer safe to do so. He kept trying to decide when it was too dangerous to shoot – or too dangerous not to. And, as before, they had to keep moving. On two occasions they slowed enough for bloody and sore-ridden hands to smash feathery cracks in the windows. Zack had no doubt that these frenzied creatures would peel open the vehicle like a sardine tin if given a minute or two to do so.
It belatedly occurred to Zack that a zombie apocalypse was a lot like any other kind of pandemic… except that the already infected people hunted you down.
“Zack…!” Baxter called from the back. He didn’t know why he was calling out. They could each see the same situation for themselves. And they both knew their prospects for survival were fading by the minute. Zack scowled as he manually downshifted, spun the tires, the engine whining in protest. The tires slipped on the dusty pavement, and the whole frame shuddered at the inertial abuse.
This all looked easy with Dugan doing it, Zack thought. Then again, his tactical driving skills were a lot fresher than mine…
He felt the absence of the SEALs achingly – felt utterly naked and defenseless without them. Moreover, thoughts of them filled him with despair. If Maximum Bob and Dugan, Team 6 SEALs with thirty-five years of operational experience between them, and with their incomparable skills and resilience, couldn’t get out of this mess alive… what chance had a couple of pointy-headed and weakly constituted analysts in a thin-skinned SUV?
“I know, I know…” Zack said over his shoulder, downshifting and making another desperate U-turn.
And that’s when it hit him.
“Button up,” he said. Baxter pulled himself back inside and powered up the window, as Zack pulled another two sharp turns and turned them out of the worst thickness of the early morning’s swarming dead. But turning away from that meant… heading back toward Somalia.
Baxter could read the road signs as well as anyone.
“Uh…” said Baxter. “Didn’t we just lose half our team, and almost get killed ourselves, fighting our way out of there?”
“Yes. But that was when we thought there was somewhere to escape to. There isn’t. The whole world’s on fire. It’s all coming down.”
“We don’t know that for sure.”
Zack shook his head. “We know the region’s gone. And we’ll never get ourselves out of Africa. Not with things the way they are.”
“So then where are we going?”
“To the one place left in the entire Horn of Africa that might be left standing. And the one place where they can be counted on not to be weak or sentimental and let infected people inside the wire.”
“And where the heck’s that?”
Instead of answering, Zack just dug out his phone, powered it up (precious power!) and handed it back to Baxter. “I need you to log into the telecoms and asset geolocation server.”
Baxter grimaced. That wasn’t an interface really designed for the small screen, but it could be done. Baxter checked the signal – no cellular, one bar via satellite. He called up the app. “I need your Agency ID and password,” he said.<
br />
Zack was still alternately swerving, braking, and accelerating, but the ranks of ravening infected were beginning to thin. The border with Somalia now lay just ahead. As Zack drove, he read his credentials out loud – security hardly mattered now… “ID is two, one, tree, niner, eight, zero, X-ray, Oscar.”
“Got it. Read-back: 213980xo.”
“Correct. Password is four, lower-case Golf, upper-case Romeo, lower Golf, lower Victor, upper Juliet, lower X-ray, upper November, two, lower Charlie, upper Whiskey, one, lower Foxtrot, upper Sierra, lower India.”
“Got it. Read-back: 4gRgvJxN2cWlfRi. Now you want to tell me what I’m geolocating? And make it quick, you’re down to six percent battery…”
Zack paused to reflect on how being an Agency analyst was awesome for the memory. If only his had worked a little better, a little earlier, they wouldn’t now be driving half the length of Somalia, right back the way they came. But only if his hunch proved correct…
“My tablet PC,” he said, finally. “We’re finding my tablet. It should be listed on the My Assets menu…”
Baxter thumb-clicked. “Okay. But why? Where is it?”
Zack grinned. It had been that weird feeling of déjà vu, seeing the blood-splashed Humvee over on its side in that culvert. He knew he’d seen that tableau somewhere before. In fact, he had lived through it – when he had been kidnapped by the al-Shabaab fighters, and then rescued on the road by Dugan and Maximum Bob. At the time, the three of them had been focused on hightailing it out of there, knowing that a-S guys always came back for their dead…
But what Zack never thought about until now was… that his tablet was a $2,000 piece of kit, and the a-S guys almost certainly would have taken that with them as well. Just as the original kidnappers had been oblivious to the device’s trackability, Zack was willing to bet that the others were as well.
Arisen : Genesis Page 16
