Medora Wars

by Wick Welker

  That was around dawn, Elise thought to herself, probably about ten hours ago. Ten hours she had been cramped inside the concrete tubing system of an ancient sewer waiting for Atash to finally speak.

  Malik’s voice broke the darkened silence. “How much longer, Atash?”

  “Only patience makes martyrs, Malik. Please be quiet,” Atash said.

  Malik gave no response but only thought inward about how empty the darkness felt around him. His cluttered thoughts seeped out into the darkness, draining away from his brain, and the ever-churning engine of his anxiety and doubt. He sighed peacefully for a moment longer before Atash spoke.

  “We can go now, my brothers. It is seven p.m. and most of the personnel are changing shifts. Please start collecting your weapons and your courage.” He stood in the concrete pipe and crouched as he lifted his own bag to his back, and picked up a rifle in the darkness. “I will only say this once. No lights, no speaking, and no firing a weapon until I do any of those things. Do we understand?”

  “Yes,” the group said in unison.

  “Let’s move. I’m leading in the front. We will keep a moderate pace as we go. Do not exhaust yourselves.”

  They moved forward through the underground pipe, with Elise trailing second to last with one of the men behind her, prodding her along. They curled their backs and moved swiftly for over an hour in what felt like a straight line. A suffocating fog of mustiness surrounded Elise, making her choke up in frenzied coughing with a fresh fever looming over her. The pipe finally curved and they were soon climbing higher through vent systems and small waterways. Scattered light littered down from above them and Elise finally saw just how dirty she was. Her arms and thighs were covered in thick, black grease, caked with dirt and blood.

  It wasn’t until they finally heard voices that they stopped. Atash quickly but quietly removed a small black box from his bag and produced a thin rubber tube that Elise realized was a fiber optic camera. He slipped it up in between a small slit of light and brought the black box to his face, swiveling a tiny joystick in one hand. Packing it back together, he motioned for the group to move once more.

  They now walked with silent steps and short breaths as they heard voices close above them. After finally reaching a metal ladder, the group stopped, and sat on the cool concrete of the underbelly of the building.

  Atash spoke, “Up above us in the facility is every single nuclear warhead that the U.S. possesses. We will soon possess them.” He looked back at them in silent waiting. “Do not doubt the brotherhood, for you cannot yet see the end. We will go up this ladder, and we will see what is above it. At this point, we will use our silent weapons by means of obtaining hostages. Does everyone understand?”

  “Yes,” they replied in soft unison as they stood once more.

  One by one they followed Atash, with Malik behind him as they climbed up the ladder, and into a room that was full of large water baths and troughs of running water. There was no one around.

  “Remarkable,” Atash said. “The arrogance of the American government. They would never dream someone, let alone their worst enemy, would ever breech this facility that they leave an entire room completely free of soldiers. Their confidence is exactly their undoing.” He laughed once more and proceeded down an aisle of water tanks as the group followed behind.

  As they walked, Elise heard the mumbling voices from a distant television at the end of the long room. The crew steadily held their rifles in front of them and walked silently toward the sound. The churning water in the room masked their footsteps as Malik and Atash approached a single woman in Army fatigues, who was seated at a small, wooden table. They stalked from behind her as her eyes gazed at the TV, unwilling to notice the crowd of terrorists coming from behind. Elise was about to yell when one of the men grabbed her from behind and squeezed his gigantic hand around her mouth, shaking her head back and forth.

  She was about to bite his hand, but then saw what the soldier in front of them was so engrossed with. What she first thought was an up close shot of bugs in a wildlife documentary was actually aerial helicopter views of a city. The shots were too far away to make out individual people and only showed ripples and waves of movement across city blocks and streets. It was like an enormous hand moving back and forth with fluid movement across the city, responding to the stimulus of bombs by backing away from the explosion, and then moving inward to stop that part of the city from catching fire. The infected were moving efficiently and deliberately like a beehive defending itself from an invader, rather than the meandering chaotic mess of the D.C. outbreak that she had seen before. She finally saw the caption under the screen that read “Apocalypse at Juárez?” The screen then flipped to another aerial view of a different city showing the same mass of human flesh that moved like wind through city streets. It was Jerusalem.

  As the entire crew watched the screen, Atash walked up from behind the soldier and gently put his hand on her shoulder. She looked up, unalarmed at first, but then fell out of her chair when she realized she didn’t recognize the person who loomed over her. Reaching for her side gun, Malik kicked down on her chest, knocking her to the concrete. She gasped for air as Atash knelt beside her and removed her handgun from her belt.

  “Shh, shh, don’t fight it. Don’t be afraid. You’ll understand soon. For now, yes you are our hostage.”

  She continued looking up at him, mystified as Malik took her radio from off the desk and turned it off.

  “Are you going to kill me?” she asked, a terrified ripple formed across her forehead.

  “I will if you ask me again,” Atash said, stepping over her. “How many people are on the outside of this door?”

  “Um, um,” she said, looking back at the small group of armed men. “It’s just a hallway, but it gets patrolled every five minutes by two soldiers.”

  “I’m going to find out in about thirty seconds if you’re lying to me,” Atash said as he removed his fiber optic camera from his backpack and threaded the rubbery end under the door.

  “I’m not lying!” she screamed.

  “Gentle, now, gentle my dear,” Atash said, putting his eye next to the other end of the camera. He closed one eye and held his breath for a moment, and then looked back at the soldier. “What’s your name?”

  Her face had drained of color as she looked around. “Just, fuck off.”

  “Your anger does nothing to me. What’s your name?” he said, kindly.

  “Private Patel.”

  “Private Patel, thank you for telling the truth.” Atash stood back up and opened the door. “It is important, my brothers, that we do not start our gunfire without identifying where the warheads are kept. Do you all understand?” He received his typical quiet response from the men and motioned for them to move out the door. “We will take one hostage per every brother, after that, we will kill silently. Malik, I’d like you to escort our witness.”

  Malik walked back to Elise and looked down at her as she hung her face toward the ground. The back of her hair was matted with dirt, and the clothes of her entire backside had crusted over with blackened blood. “Let’s go,” he said, grabbing the side of her neck from behind. “Walk in front of me.”

  The group moved out the door and into a darkened hallway, with Atash holding Private Patel in front. “If you say a single word at this point in time, I will have to swiftly end your life,” he whispered in her ear as they turned a corner and saw two soldiers at the far end of a new hallway, speaking softly to each other.

  Atash motioned to two men from behind him, who swiftly ran with their backs low along the walls of the hallway. They shot taser guns at the soldiers, who dropped to the ground almost simultaneously. As they gathered the men and began to tie them up, Elise turned her face toward Malik.

  “Malik,” she whispered. She waited for him to respond but heard nothing. “Malik, I will kill Atash if you want me to.”

  “Shut up,” he quietly said into her ear.

  “You don’t have to
be the one to do it. If you give me the chance, I can do it.”

  “I would’ve killed him long ago if I wanted him dead.”

  “I know you’re very far down this rabbit hole.”

  “I will shoot you right now if you don’t shut your mouth!” he said briskly, with spit flying from the side of his mouth.

  “You can still come out of this hole, it doesn’t matter how deep you are. Do you see that?”

  He simply squeezed her neck in response, slowly collapsing her airway. She managed to push out another breath before passing out. “Save us.”

  Chapter Twenty Four: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

  Stark looked down at the new corpse that Dave had brought in. He had lost count of how many of the bodies he had explored since they had been marooned. It was a teenaged boy with long, black hair that lay beside a mound of discarded bodies that had collected in the corner of the loading bay. His chest and stomach were covered with black tattoos, with piercings along his left ear and into his face, clinging to both nostrils and lips. Both the front of his thighs had large open wounds running the length of the muscle but were closed off by the same shining metallic mesh that Stark had seen over and over again.

  “They’re healing themselves now,” Stark said pointedly.

  “See that stab wound on his chest?” Dave said.

  Stark ran his gloved hand over a four inch, superficial wound above the boy’s nipple. “Yes…”

  “That’s where I tried to stab it through with a blade, but it just stopped.” Dave drove his pointed fingers into his palm. “I couldn’t even run it through.” He wiped his sweaty mouth with the back of his hand. “I had to use a bullet to his head, at least those still work.” Dave walked off and up the spiral staircase that led to the catwalks above the vast floor of the power plant.

  Stark’s radio blared with Douglas’ voice, “Dr. Stark, would you mind coming to the roof?” The crew had recently found a small passageway above the catwalks that opened up to a small hatch on the roof.

  “Yeah, I’ll be up in just a minute.” Stark clicked off the radio and looked down again at the teenager’s leg. “What are you?” he said, and then turned around.

  Stark climbed up through the catwalks, past Michaels, who was lying on her back and staring up at the ceiling. He had finally come to the conclusion that there was no way their unit was going to get extraction, and that the only way to stop the horde was one last desperate attempt. The entire situation had become such that the solution is simple, an annihilating explosion, he thought. He almost delighted in the simplicity of it given that there was so much now that he didn’t understand about the virus. His anger at Rambert’s reluctance to drop a nuclear bomb had long grown into indifference.

  He thought of Beckfield’s words: it’s the much less remembered act of cutting your losses and continuing in adversity that gets no praise. It’s men like me that change the world. Stark thought of the march of the millions of the infected dead outside the walls and realized that Rambert’s way of thinking had become extinct. There’s no more room for subtlety and patience anymore, broad strokes of change are they only thing that will make a difference now, he thought. Stark then felt the need to flee from the city, not for his own survival but from excitement of starting a new kind of frontier.

  He wriggled his way up a narrow staircase and out into the warm wind of midday. The sky was clear except for the continual screaming of fighter jets above. They crisscrossed the sky in pairs, dropping missiles into the sea of human bodies that spread out into all horizons around him.

  Douglas stood at the edge of the building with one foot on the railing, looking out with binoculars. There was a sound of pattering footsteps below, unrelenting with echoing off the concrete walls.

  “What’s going on, Captain?” Stark sidled up beside him and looked out.

  “Look out there. Just watch them for a few minutes,” Douglas said without taking his gaze from the binoculars.

  “Okay.” As far as he could see, it was the same city pulsating with movement from every building top, all streets and every low alleyway. He saw bombings at the edge of the city erupting with smoke and fire. He now guessed from the continual firestorm in the distance that the horde had broken past the El Paso border. He squinted his eyes through the binoculars and laughed. “We finally have a legitimate reason to keep people from crossing the border. Makes everything before the outbreak seem… trivial. The stupid shit we cared about…”

  “Don’t look out there,” Douglas said, not seeming to hear him, “look right around us. Around the building.”

  “What?” Stark put the binoculars down and peered over the edge of the building, which was surrounded in every direction. The horde was hugging the walls but moved parallel to the building in continuous movement. There were concentric circles of the infected flowing in an outward pattern from the building, moving in neatly confined single file rows. It was a separate horde that hugged the building, with a gap that formed distinctly from the infected that crawled around the rest of the city.

  “They seem to be very interested in us,” Douglas said. “It’s like they’re guarding us or something. None of them try to break into the building—they’re just marooning us from the rest of the city. We couldn’t get out of this building if we had triple the artillery that we’re carrying right now.” He peered down at where they had last left the shock tanks, which were now completely saturated with the infected as they swarmed around them with even footsteps.

  “They don’t stop for anything. They’re not even looking around to investigate their environment. They just keep moving and moving...” Stark said.

  “They might know what they’re doing. You think they’re just coincidentally imprisoning the one team that was sent into the city to destroy them all?” Douglas asked, taking the binoculars back.

  “But they’re not intelligent. They’re no smarter than a virus; they only know one thing—which is to infect others in order to reproduce. That’s it,” Stark said.

  “Then why in the hell aren’t they attacking us? They’re doing a hell of a lot of damage in El Paso right this minute. I just talked to my superior out there who says that they don’t just blindly flood the streets like easy targets. They’re… patient. They’ll wait and hide in buildings until our soldiers go in between, and then they fall out on top of them like fucking guerilla warfare. These bastards know what’s going on. They’re not just out to eat our flesh, they’re at war with us, and they know it.”

  “But, it doesn’t make sense, each one is still dumb as a rock—” Stark stopped mid-sentence. “Wait, I can’t believe I didn’t see this sooner.”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever heard of emergence?” Stark asked.

  “No.” Douglas looked back as he saw Dave and Michaels come up from the hatch below.

  “I can’t believe this. We’re actually witnessing something pretty amazing,” Stark continued.

  “What’s going on?” Dave said from behind.

  “It’s like ah, ah, a snowflake,” Stark said.

  “What is like a snowflake?” Dave asked.

  “The infected down there. Just listen.”

  “The hell are you talking about?” Michaels asked.

  Stark continued, “A single snowflake is a complex pattern of crystallized water. But how and where was it made? Microscopic water droplets just float around in complete chaos up in the sky until the perfect conditions of temperature and pressure are met, then, those water droplets… coalesce into perfect symmetry.”

  “Okay…” Michaels said in drawn out doubt.

  “Organization from chaos. An organized entity emerges from a more primitive source of interactions of simpler entities. This is emergence. This thing is found all over nature.”

  “You think this is happening with the twenty million infected people out there? Not only are they immune to electromagnetic waves but they’re onto us now?” Douglas walked away from the edge of the building and lay o
n the soft gravel of the roof. “Fuck me.”

  “Don’t tell me there is some sort of queen bee that we need to kill.” Michaels snorted.

  “No, no it’s not like that. Just think of a school of fish that goes round and around without losing a single fish to the shark, the school does this without an actual individual fish directing the movement. The pattern simply emerges from the smaller interactions of the individual fish, which makes an overall beneficial strategy to the school as a whole.” Stark swallowed and stopped for a moment, thinking about what he was saying. “The whole city of infected is like one being now. That’s why it will attack our troops in El Paso but hold us prisoner here. It is strategizing. The entire mass collects data from every footstep, from every small movement of each individual. By the small collisions and reactions of the individuals, the whole mass takes it into account, and adjusts in order to survive.”

  “Why are they doing this now?” Dave asked.

  “It was our pulse that we sent out. It must have stimulated the virus to adapt, making it much more agile and better equipped to collaborate with other host bodies. I mean, this is all speculation, but it’s my best guess at what’s happening.”

  “Holy shit,” Michaels pronounced and walked away to retire to the catwalks beneath the roof. “Good luck everybody,” she said as she walked backward down the hatch and disappeared.

  “The whole thing has to be wiped out in one swoop. It’s the only way,” Stark said with his eyes glued outward.

  “Well, the Army and Marines are about to mobilize into the city,” Douglas said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They’re coming in. Head to head combat.”

  “But we’re completely outnumbered.”

  “Yeah, about twenty to one. The airstrikes aren’t doing shit and they’re all spilling into El Paso now.”

  “When are they coming in?” Stark asked.

  “Uh, now.”

  “But, this doesn’t make any sense. They’re just going to get overrun.”