by J. Thorn
“Roger that, Kilo Four, all received. Will re-route a team to the tunnel entrance. Confirm your location, over.”
“We’re following the Zulus. Will attempt to intercept, over.”
“Copy that, Kilo Four. Proceed to intercept. Be aware that the Harbour barracks division is mobile and currently sweeping toward the town from their base. Expect friendly crossfire and watch for blue-on-blues. Proceed with caution. Your main objective is to secure the repopulation area and await their arrival.”
“Roger that, Risborough. One last thing.”
“Go ahead, Kilo Four.”
“CentCom has been alerted.”
“Understood, Kilo Four. We are aware. We have thirty minutes to contain.”
“Then what?”
“Hammer down, Kilo Four. The plane is already on its way.”
“Understood. Kilo Four out.”
“Be careful out there, Martin. Out.”
“Always,” muttered the soldier to himself, as Wesley rammed the first of the walking dead, breaking its spine instantly and sending it tumbling under the wheels. Nearly every bone in its body shattered as the vehicle ploughed over it. The soldier clipped the radio back onto his belt and flipped the safety up on his weapon.
“One down!” he shouted, opening up on two other zombies trying to break down a door across the street.
MEMORY, THAT TRICKSTER
“Everyone’s getting wound too tight.”
The Colonel spoke quietly now, across the open air above his spare desk. Handon and Ainsley sat stiff-backed on chairs opposite. The Colonel only shouted when he needed to. Or when he was pissed off. Otherwise, his authority came across well enough at low volume.
“I don’t suppose it needs saying that we can’t afford to be tearing ourselves apart. There are few enough left of the living. And eating us alive is the job of the dead.”
“Yes, sir,” Ainsley said. Handon just nodded.
The Colonel paused a beat, then his tone softened. “What happened out there?” He was referring not to the fight, but to the mission just ended. Where the team lost both their POs in the course of half an hour.
Ainsley and Handon looked at each other. Ainsley screwed himself up and said, “No excuses, sir.”
“Just bad luck?” the Colonel asked.
Ainsley nodded. “You could call it that.”
Handon leaned forward in his chair. “But bad luck is also cumulative, Colonel,” he said. “These missions deeper and deeper into Europe. They’re getting close to the bone. Keep it up and we’re going to lose a team. Maybe two, when a second goes over to bail them out.”
“That’s why you sons of bitches get paid the big bucks,” the Colonel said. “And, anyway, always has it been thus. If hardcases like you don’t take the impossible missions, then who will? You don’t like it, go be a farmer, or a coal miner. God knows we need more of them. And, anyway, your missions are deep because that’s where the remaining labs are.”
It was true that the diciest and most critical jobs had always been reserved for the Tier-1 special operators – Delta Force, SAS Increment, Seal Team Six, and the USAF 24th Special Tactics Squadron. Now, unsurprisingly, the job of saving humanity had mostly fallen to them. The coalition government in the UK knew that every big pharmaceutical company and biotech lab in the world had been frantically working on a vaccine, or a cure, or both, at the time of the fall. But then the lights had gone out.
The Internet had started to blink out within minutes of the world’s power grids going down. Phone networks shortly after that. Now, whatever the state of research amongst the world’s top virologists and biomedical researchers, their findings were walled up with them, entombed. The researchers were assumed dead (or undead). But their data, still buried in there with them, remained of critical interest to the living.
Now the job of the surviving Tier-1 operators was to go there in person and try to get it. At the very tip of the spear for this work was Alpha team at Hereford. There were also a half dozen other teams of highly skilled SOF guys doing similar kinds of high-value jobs. But Alpha was unique – made up of representatives of all the very top commando and SOF units in the world. They were mixed in together because they’d been teamed up for a nearly impossible job just before the fall. And they were still together now because they knew and trusted one another; and because most of their home units no longer existed; and because they wanted it that way.
Across the UK, most of the specialized military units did less dramatic but still critical things like scavenging Europe for electronics, food, medicine, seeds, and other supplies. And the regular military, well, they were now basically a home guard – fighting outbreaks in the cities, hunting the scattered soulless in the countryside, and holding the borders.
But at the very top of the whole military heap, well, Alpha was called Alpha for a reason.
They had been hitting European labs so far because that’s what they could get to. It was as far as their capabilities for force projection stretched.
“And it’s either that,” the Colonel added, referring to the missions to scour the labs, “or hang out on this island waiting for the walls to come down. And the last lights to go out.”
Neither Handon nor Ainsley spoke back. They already knew the score.
“Your latest haul has been shot up to Edinburgh.” The high-tech ecosystem around Edinburgh University had been the UK’s center of biomedical research before the fall. And so it remained now. Everything the operators and their POs dug up was immediately sent up there for exploitation – usually by ghosting the drives and sending them over the wire, which was fastest. Time was not on their side.
“With luck, you’ll get a new target package out of that last intel.” One of the first things the geeks in Scotland looked at was actually email. All the world’s labs, scientists, and university researchers had been collaborating and sharing findings. These email trails often revealed which labs had made the biggest strides – and thus which ones the survivors should hit next. “You men rearm, refit and stay on one-hour alert.”
“Sir,” said Ainsley. He started to rise.
Handon stayed seated. “What’s this about some new type of Romeo?”
The Colonel shuffled a paper. “You tell me. Heard you saw one.” He paused, looking up and holding Handon’s eye. Finally, he looked down again and spoke, more quietly. “There’s been an outbreak down in Folkestone. Bad. Happened fast. Police and regular military say they have it contained.” All three men let that hang for a second. “Contained” had often been a euphemism for “catastrophe.” But if this outbreak and the new Romeos were connected, the Colonel wasn’t going to elaborate.
“You’re dismissed,” he said.
* * *
Handon went straight from the briefing to the base gym, where he dressed out and hit the free weights. It was also the personal responsibility of every Tier-1 operator to maintain a razor edge of physical fitness. The job had always been like being a professional athlete, but with no off-season – and death or dismemberment if you lost a game. Now, as an added bonus, if the game clock ran down to zero, everybody in the stadium died with you.
With his earbuds in, sinking into the music of a world that used to be, warming up by bench-pressing 180 pounds without a spotter, he let his mind wander back.
He remembered the madness after the quarantine, but before the final fall. Chaos engulfing Europe, government control failing in state after state, waves of refugees streaming west and north from the Mediterranean and the Levant… Britain simply keeping the borders closed after the 11/11 attacks… and then the waves of the desperate, crossing the Channel on everything from cabin cruisers to container ships to inflatable two-man rafts.
For a while, they were simply turned away en masse, from Dover, from Folkestone, from Hastings. But, finally, the RAF had resorted to strafing the Channel with Tornado and Typhoon fighter-bombers, setting alight the oil slicks from crippled and listing seacraft. In addition to tens
of thousands of floating dead, Britain got something like a moat. It had become necessary for national survival. The UK simply had no way to accommodate 500 million refugees – never mind to test them all for infection. To let them in would have been to doom their island home. The dead would have swarmed from Land’s End to John O’Groats in days.
So the kinder, gentler modern Britain of EU membership and international human rights accords had reverted to its Churchillian spine of steel quickly enough when it had to. The RAF fought a second Battle of Britain. That it was largely against civilians made it no less a struggle for survival.
Handon remembered getting back to Hereford after the aborted North Korea mission, and getting on the horn with Bragg for a sitrep – and for a new tasking, given all the chaos.
“Yeah, you guys hang tight where you are for now…” There had been shouting and gunfire in the background. “The 101st Airborne is being mobilized to try and secure the borders north and south here. National Guard units are being called out to lock down the cities…”
As usual, the Big Green Army had moved too slowly. It was too enormous a bureaucracy to turn on a dime, let alone to try and keep up with a virus spreading and mutating like wildfire through a population that was about as ready for it as the Native Americans had been for smallpox. Also as usual, the elite Joint Special Operations Command, and its constituent SOF units such as Delta, had considered themselves above this kind of ponderousness and panic. And certainly no one could say they ever lost their cool.
But when the American south started to go down, as the unsecured southern border with Mexico became a raging and unmanageable vector for the virus… and as the military bases became beleaguered outposts in a rising sea of the dead… and then when well-meaning combat medics poked a hole in the dike by bringing infected men inside…
Well, the elite operators were too few to make any difference then.
And this next war was one that no part of the military, even its elite, had been prepared to fight. Finally, the only survivors were scattered small units of SOF in remote locations overseas – and particularly those training for an ultra-secret joint mission on a certain hardy island nation in the stormy North Atlantic…
* * *
Sergeant Major Handon realized, almost too late, that he’d somehow lifted all the way to the point of muscle failure – even with the low, warm-up weight. How many freaking reps was that…? The transporting music, and the transfixing vision of his memory and mind’s eye, had caused him to lose track completely.
With a last pulse of strength, he heaved the bending and trembling bar up to the lower pegs on the rack above and behind him, and rolled out from under it. Sitting up, he regarded his hands in the low light, while the music still rolled over him, and his breathing slowly came back down to normal.
It took 100,000 years to build up all of human civilization, he thought to himself, almost amused. And it took the virus, a strand of RNA barely 100 nanometers long, less than 100 days to bring it all down…
KEN TAI I-CHI ("ATTACK AND DEFENSE ARE THE SAME")
“Onegai shimasu,” Ali said to Pope, bowing deeply, her wooden sword, or boken, held straight before her in both hands. Pope bowed in mirror image. The two stood facing each other on the padded floor of the “dojo” that they had cobbled together in the basement of the Hereford gym.
Pope was Alpha’s guy from the elite paramilitary arm of the CIA, the Special Activities Division (SAD). A child of immigrants from the Caribbean, he had served as a Marine officer through a half dozen tours in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, before being recruited by the Agency. Guarding spooks and rescuing hostages in some of the world’s very dodgiest corners had been his idea of a relaxing retirement activity. Thin, dark, and extremely soft-spoken, Pope was also the prototypical “gray man.” You didn’t notice him until he killed you.
Coming out of his bow, he hauled back and launched a powerful diagonal strike at Ali’s neck, which she countered with a loud snap, while pivoting around him like a big cat.
Despite the wooden swords, the bamboo armor, and the pleasantries in Japanese, Kendo (literally, “Way of the Sword”) was not practiced at Hereford in any form that pre-apocalyptic devotees of the sport would have recognized. As Neal Stephenson once noted, “Kendo is to real samurai sword fighting what fencing is to real swashbuckling: an attempt to take a highly disorganized, chaotic, violent, and brutal conflict and turn it into a cute game.” Needless to point out, the men and one woman of Alpha had no time for games in the ZA.
Pope and Ali traded a half dozen more high strikes, spinning and grunting, before Pope tried for a decapitation strike. Ali dropped out from underneath it, and took Pope’s legs out with a mighty side swing. Now they half lay facing each other.
Just-in-time learning and training, for specialized missions and environments, was old hat for special operators. But, who, really, would ever have guessed that Japanese sword fighting would become the new rage, after the fall? At various times, the fashion had been for Brazilian ju jitsu, Krav Maga, the Close Quarters Defense system… and always the incessant pistol, assault rifle, submachine gun, and sniper rifle work. But it turned out the medieval Samurai had the best line on close-quarters, silent combat in varied terrain against multiple, swarming opponents.
The pair of duelers banged swords four times at close range on the ground, neither able to generate any power while prone, before Ali closed to grapple. But Pope was already rolling away and back onto his feet.
Virtually everyone operational at Hereford now carried a wakizashi, the samurai short sword, as a secondary weapon. Some also went out with the long sword, the katana, for certain kinds of specialty work – for instance, in heaving strongholds of the dead, where silence was non-negotiable. And where backup wasn’t coming – ever.
Inevitably, of course, it was now the fondest dream of some of these badasses to get to the point where they could fight with the long sword in the right hand, the short in the left, whirling and flashing, and holding off unlimited zombies, with no support. (“My left hand is my fire support,” as the saying went.) Alas, fighting with two swords was a lot like shooting two pistols simultaneously: looks very cool in Hollywood (or Hong Kong) movies, but takes an insane level of specialized skill, plus a very particular scenario with multiple moving opponents, for it to be worthwhile. It was virtually always better to just focus on one weapon and using it masterfully.
Both coming to their feet again, sucking for air, swinging and slashing close-hauled and with zero room for error, the two dancers whirled around the room.
For Ali, the swordfighting was like an intense meditation. Every motion was instinct and improvisation, and her mind was set free, for reverie, for recollection… for revolving again around to her memories of how they got there, the bizarre gravity well of the fall…
* * *
She remembered a much earlier moment of looking at Pope’s handsome and serene face, unmasked and unarmored then, as they sat in the back of a humming Royal Air Force BAE 146, a small military passenger jet. They were finally on their way to the staging area for the North Korea op. Six months of intensive planning, training, logistics, and rehearsals – all to infiltrate their hybrid team into the world’s last Stalinist police state.
North Korea had already gone nuclear while the world stood and stared. They had even been involved in nuclear proliferation, supplying Pakistan and Iran with technology and materials. But now they had been found to be manufacturing Plutonium-239, in one of their existing fission reactors. HEU, highly enriched uranium, had been one thing. It was the primary ingredient in the atomic bombs of which the North Koreans already had several.
But plutonium was something else entirely – it would allow them to produce hydrogen bombs, orders of magnitude more destructive than what they already had.
The U.S. and UK had decided that could not be allowed to happen.
By this point in time, the strange pandemic, the one that made its victims dazed and
violent, that had them turning on and attacking medical personnel, friends, loved ones… had begun to filter through the news. It had just started to get the attention of the world’s medical authorities, not to mention cause paranoia amongst travelers. The ever-present white face masks of the bird flu and swine flu days made a major comeback.
But no one yet knew what they were really dealing with.
So Alpha team’s mission had proceeded on schedule. There would always be pandemics. But loose H-bombs could spell the end of civilization as humanity knew it.
The RAF plane was a small one, with only thirty seats, so when it turned on a dime, everyone on board could feel the lurch. Ali and Pope exchanged looks across the tiny table. Captain Ainsley came in from the forward compartment.
The seven other operators, and the dozen support personnel, turned to face him.
“We’re standing down,” he said. Everyone at this level was far too professional to grouse. They just took it in. Ali’s first thought was that it must be something to do with the pandemic. But she was wrong. The captain visibly swallowed a lump in his throat.
“Two BA triple-sevens have just gone down on approach to Heathrow. One crashed into a populated area just outside of London, in Slough. The other ditched in the Channel.”
There was a small reaction to this, an intake of breath, a ripple of shock throughout the cabin. The age of terror was back – it had actually never left. But it seemed like too many threats at once now. Too much to take in, never mind to take on.
“All incoming flights to the UK have been diverted, all those scheduled going out canceled. As a military transport, we’re just getting in under the ban. Our plan is to RTB and regroup there. I don’t know what the status of our mission is now. We may be re-tasked.”
