Or maybe their luck had just been good.
They still had their two gun trucks, stored and maintained in a garage built for the purpose – about two kilometers away, at the end of the rudimentary dirt track that led up into the mountain forest. Although the vehicles had been modified to run as quietly as possible, driving them right up to the gates would have been a bad idea. Also, that was two kilometers of road they didn’t have to clear through the forest.
Brendan looked out now at the forbiddingly dense stretches of juniper and boxwood trees, the clouds periodically grazing their tops, that surrounded them on the steep hillsides. Somewhere out there in the bush, how far he didn’t know, were Jake and Kwon – off on another of their long-range reconnaissance patrols (LRRPs, pronounced “lurps”). Brendan was pretty sure they kept running these not out of any real operational need – but just to get the hell out of camp, and get away from the others for awhile.
Those two had always been the hard-chargers, the super-soldiers, and in the post-Apocalypse it had started to get so it was only their own company they could stand anymore. The others’ deficiencies as operators and human beings had started to grate on them. SF guys were constituted to work in tight groups, and on top of one another for long stretches of time. But not this long, and not this tight.
Basically, the seams were starting to show. And to chafe.
It probably didn’t help that Jake and Kwon didn’t have anyone or anything to kill – aside from the occasional black-backed jackal that wandered up into the mountains and ended up in their stockpot. But when they ran their scavenging missions into formerly populated areas, the critical thing was always to maintain total stealth – to get in and get out without disturbing any of the former residents or having to destroy them. They also had to be alert to living survivors, assuming they would be at least as dangerous as the dead.
But they’d never encountered any living survivors. Not a single one.
Then again, their home was East Africa, where the shit had originally come down. They didn’t know any more about the virus than the outside world did. But they knew what a Petri dish this region had always been, serving up far more than its share of viral and bacterial pathogens. And they also knew about al-Shabaab’s interest in bioweapons, as well as their thwarted bio-attack against the deminers at Camp Lemonnier from a while back. So it hadn’t been too hard to work out the point of disease emergence, despite being practically on top of it when it happened.
For a while, after the fall, Brendan and Jake and the others had discussed going somewhere they could take over some abandoned buildings, something more modern, more permanent. But it quickly became obvious that would never work. They simply had to be in the middle of nowhere – it was only being out at “the ass-end of the boonies” that had kept them alive in the first place. As it was, they practiced ruthless noise and light discipline, especially at night. The odd Zulu that wandered through could always be dispatched quietly – the team only carried suppressed weapons now – or just allowed to keep shambling on by.
Brendan shook his head in amusement to remember all this. It had only taken them about a month to start calling them Zulus. They had jumped straight to that from “sick people” – never using the other Z word. It had seemed too silly. But, then again, so was their whole reality now.
No, the odd lone one or pair stumbling by was no problem. What they lived in terror of was the herds. They knew these were out there – they’d seen them. And there was the ever-present specter of the Zulu singularity – when enough were attracted by prey or noise, and so many had gathered in one place that they just kept drawing more, feeding on their own frenzied noises, and never going away.
They’d seen this in their handful of missions to the big cities.
And they’d vowed never to go back.
* * *
As Brendan watched Todd dust off the repaired sign and climb down, the radio clipped to his belt went.
“Bren, Eli.”
Brendan keyed his mic. “Go ahead, Elijah.”
“Shadow is ten mikes to RTB. Want to come by and review the footage?”
“Want to give me a preview?”
“We’re okay. It’s going to miss us.”
Brendan exhaled. “Copy that. There in ten.”
He got to his feet and dusted off his ass, noting that his Crye combat pants were getting threadbare. There was of course a lot of unused clothing lying around the world. But getting it required digging through the dressers of the deceased – and anyway Crye gear was special, much beloved of Special Forces guys.
The job of piloting their little Shadow UAV, with its fourteen-foot wingspan and 38hp motor, had previously been the responsibility of their Fox, the intelligence sergeant. It had now fallen to Elijah, for no better reason than that he didn’t have enough to do. Not that any of them did. But it was in their DNA to stay busy, to get shit done, to keep improving their situation. Also, the job of being their eyes on the world around them kept Elijah engaged with the others.
He’d grown increasingly withdrawn during the eighteen months since the end of the world. Lately he spent most of his time reading his Bible. It was a little as if Elijah had married God – and it seemed his relationship to the team had become secondary, and burdensome to him. Brendan had no idea how Eli squared his Christian faith with what they saw around them every day. But somehow he did.
Looking over, Brendan saw Todd packing up his ladder and toolbox and carrying them back to the maintenance shack. He had a couple of minutes before Elijah needed him, so he figured he’d check out Todd’s handiwork. It would also be a reverential moment, a chance to remember.
As he walked, for some reason he thought back to what he figured was the exact moment when Elijah’s bonds to the rest of the team began to fray. It had been by the side of that overturned gun truck on the road out of Camp Lemonnier, with the dead descending on them from three sides – and with a smoking handgun lying on the ground beside a lifeless outstretched hand.
Later, when they got to safety, Elijah had seemed shocked, furious, and not quite rational about Pete’s death – and about all the killing of the dead, most of them their former brothers, which they’d had to do to get out of there. He cornered Jake in camp and said, “You didn’t have to kill all those sick people. They were still God’s children. Maybe they needed our help, our compassion.”
Jake shook his head and spat, having little time for the missionary healer routine. “Fuck God,” he said. “There is no God. Look around you! I was raised in the church. But it’s all bullshit.”
Elijah had looked down, still seeing Price’s body, tears brimming in his eyes. “And Pete… he’s in hell now. There’s no forgiveness for suicide.”
Jake shook his head. “Oh, come on – that’s bullshit, too. There’s no heaven or hell – or, if there is, we’re already in it. And Price did the right thing. We’d all do the same.”
Elijah tried to protest that they wouldn’t, but Jake had already turned his back and walked off.
Brendan passed now through the gate and into the forest clearing out front. They usually left the gate open during the day, though it was shut with a heavy bar at night, with one man always on watch while the others slept. Stepping outside, he turned and looked up at the plaque Todd had made in the first place, all those months ago: the beautifully carved and beveled letters in the juniper wood that had been taken from the dense and cloud-blanketed forest.
It read: CAMP PRICE.
Since Afghanistan and Iraq – particularly in the bloody and brutal al-Anbar Province – many forward operating bases (FOBs) and combat outposts (COPs) had been named for fallen special operators.
There were a lot of names to be remembered.
Peter Price had actually been in the same Q Course with Brendan – the infamous Special Forces Qualification Course. They met when Pete did Brendan the substantial kindness of pointing out that his backpack was light for that day’s timed ruck march. (He’d someho
w forgotten the four L’s of the Q Course: “Don’t be late; don’t be light; don’t be lost; and don’t be last.”) But Brendan had been so slap-happy from the prior evolution that he couldn’t even read the scale correctly when he weighed it.
After being assigned to Triple Nickel and deployed to Somalia, both Brendan and Pete had been brand new together – both on their first SF deployment. Pete was also one of the very few SF guys who didn’t come from the combat arms – he’d had a technical billet in the regular Army, repairing radars and aviation electronics.
And, in the end, he had turned out to be the only one who had the resolve to sacrifice himself for the team – in what was his very first contact.
The only shot he ever fired in anger… was at himself.
Predator
Camp Price - Tactical Operations Center
Of course Pete wasn’t the only one they’d lost.
The first thing they’d done after the fall of Lemonnier, and reaching the safety of their wilderness camp, was refit, rearm, saddle up – and head out to look for the other half of their detachment: the split team that had disappeared into the bush, out looking for that lost SNA platoon. Now, of course, they had a pretty good idea of what had happened to both the SNA and their own guys.
But, on that day, when they had raced out to their last reported coordinates, they hadn’t found any trace. Or, at any rate, no trace that any of them felt real inclined to talk about. Brendan remembered having to order Kate to stay put while the rest of them rolled out. Afterward, she hadn’t pressed them about what they found. She was smart enough to know not to push it with the men about their fallen brothers.
“Hiya, Cap.”
This was Kate greeting Brendan now as he stepped into the dimness of the hooch that served as their tactical operations center (TOC). There he found Elijah flying the Shadow UAV from its ground control station on the desk, and Kate, looking alert and leaning over Elijah’s shoulder. Brendan reflected on how far she had come.
Kate had been an exceptional soldier when she joined the team – or she wouldn’t have gotten the assignment in the first place. But she’d initially had only minutes to try to find her feet, and had begun the end of the world by trying to fit into an exceptionally close-knit team, no doubt feeling both useless and unnecessary. But she’d found her place, and become a valued member of the detachment.
Though, to Brendan, he still had the sense she was always trying to fit in, to prove herself. Maybe she felt like she was their only compensation for losing half the team – and that it was a poor trade. Her gender had never been an issue. Brendan for one didn’t give a damn whether her plumbing was concave or convex, as long as she could put steel on target, which she could. And she had a cool head.
Elijah stole a glance up at Brendan. “Got spooled video for you.”
Brendan cut to the chase. “You’re sure it’s going to miss us?”
“Yeah, pretty sure—”
“Thank God for that.”
“—but, then again, it’s not going to miss us by a real big margin.”
In their experience, herds tended not to change direction once they got moving, unless they hit a major terrain feature, like a cliff, or the edge of the continent. The terrifying thing was that they did sometimes slow down, or speed up – sometimes a lot. No one knew why. Maybe they sensed fleeing prey ahead, maybe it was some undead logic of their own, led by the raging viral infections in their brainstems.
The team had first learned about the herds in the early days, when the satellites were still up, and they used them to scan the region for other survivors. But in sweeps across Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Yemen, and beyond… they’d seen absolutely nothing moving that looked like a living person.
Which didn’t mean they hadn’t seen anything moving.
They’d even seen the aftermath of a herd in person, on a scavenging mission to Harare, across the border in Ethiopia. It was like locusts had come. And they knew they wanted absolutely no part of that. But they also figured their number was going to come up eventually – and one would hit them dead on and wipe them away, leaving only bones.
But that was always true of life, and had been before the fall – you knew your number would come up. You just didn’t know when. And so you carried on anyway, trying not to think too much about how you were going to end up.
It was shortly after Harare that they’d started sending out regular recon flights of the Shadow to spot for herds. If they at least knew one was coming, they could bug out before it got there. How they’d survive without the security of their bush camp around them was another question – one they’d deal with later.
“I’ve plotted out its projected path,” Kate said, leaning over a regional map she’d spread out on the desk beside the control station. “The northern edge should pass two or three clicks to our south.”
Brendan whistled. That was too close – their closest call to date. And this was also one of the largest herds they’d ever spotted. It seemed like they were getting bigger over time.
Kate said, “As long as we hunker down, kill the lights, and keep the drum’n’bass music down, it should slip right by us.”
Brendan leaned in and looked at the drone video over Eli’s shoulder. The ground control station itself was the Universal mini-GCS – a new piece of hardware that was supposed to fly every drone in the American arsenal. But it flew some better than others. It looked like a ruggedized laptop on steroids, with a fat base and wings out either side – one of which had a joystick and flight controls, the other controlling the sensor pod and optics. A thick rubberized antenna stuck up off the monitor. Elijah was focused on getting the UAV safely onto its final approach path. The three of them watched the video on the tilted screen.
Most of the view now was of thick misty forests spreading out below in the foreground and out of sight to the right. Just visible on the horizon to the left was the blue edge of the ocean, actually the Gulf of Aden. And, coming up in the middle distance, dead ahead, was the hulking crown of Mt. Shimbiris, sitting upon its sloping, forested shoulders.
Camp Price lay on its western slopes, which meant the Shadow was close to home. Brendan clapped Elijah on the shoulder, straightened up, and turned to leave. The Shadow was launched from a trailer-mounted pneumatic launcher, and landed on a short dirt landing strip that they had cleared and leveled just outside the camp walls. It also basically landed itself using a Tactical Automatic Landing System, which was based on micro-millimeter wavelength radar. They pretty much just hit the land button and let it come back in and touch down.
But Brendan didn’t want it sitting out there alone by itself for long.
It was a very capable asset, with a range of 182 miles, a service ceiling of 15,000 feet, and a top speed of 127mph. And it was the only strategic ISR asset they had. They also had an Aeryon SkyRanger, which was a little military quadcopter – basically a remote-controlled toy with expensive optics. That one could stay aloft for fifty minutes, but its airspeed was a joke, so it was mainly good for looking down on the area of operations you were already in. The Shadow was their only way to extend their vision any farther, and to get advance warning of what might be coming for them, out beyond their patch of mountain forest.
As Brendan stepped through the doorway and out into the dappled sunlight, he heard both Elijah and Kate shouting behind him. At least one of the shouts was “Holy shit!” Instead of turning around, Brendan picked up his pace. Already he could hear the noise of something bigger than the Shadow’s little propeller engine. And as he got into the clearing and looked up, he could see there wasn’t one drone overhead.
There were two.
And they had just nearly collided.
* * *
Jake and Kwon came running in the front gate, both wearing their big excursion rucks and carrying their rifles. By coincidence, they were just returning from their patrol. And they had seen it, too.
“What the hell?” Kwon said.
All three no
w looked toward the south-west, necks craned at the sky.
“Predator,” Jake said calmly. “General Atomics MQ-1.”
Their RQ-7 Shadow, and the new mystery drone, had both been flying on similar headings, coming in from the west. Elijah had veered theirs off at the last second before a collision – one which would not have gone well for the Shadow. The Predator had nearly four times the wingspan, and outweighed it by 2,000 pounds.
As the three of them watched the sky, their Shadow circled around once and came in for a landing. Brendan knew it must be nearly out of fuel – they had pushed it out to its max range to scope the herd. But, much more disturbingly, the Predator also began to bank and come back around again.
It did two lazy loops of Camp Price, the camera in its sensor ball, slung underneath the nose, pretty clearly pointed directly down on them. Then it leveled out its wings, accelerated, and flew off to the south-west.
Brendan and Jake looked at each other in spooked silence.
They were no longer alone.
And whoever was out there… now knew where they lived.
Hellfire
Camp Price - Outside the TOC
“Input?”
Jake silently rolled his eyes. He hated it when Brendan just opened the floor for opinions. It was supposed to be the job of the commander to lead – to issue the commands. This wasn’t the only source of conflict between the two.
“Yeah,” Todd said. “Did it not occur to anybody to follow it?”
Elijah answered. “The Shadow was running on fumes. We had to bring it down. By the time we could refuel, load it back in the launcher, and get it up again, the Pred was long gone.”
Everyone was there now, standing in a loose circle outside the TOC. What had just happened was the only direct contact they’d had with other survivors in the region, and thus perhaps their biggest drama since the fall. It also represented the very real possibility that there were other surviving U.S. military units out there somewhere.
“Why we didn’t shoot it down might be the real question,” said Kwon.
Arisen : Nemesis Page 11
