The Flood

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  Abrams saw the logic of this. He also wasn’t insensible to the force of Park’s argument – or his adamance. They had moved mountains to get him out of Chicago, because he was supposed to be the one man who could cure the plague. Maybe they’d better listen to him.

  “Okay,” he said. “I can try to contact CentCom again. And I can put this to them – but I don’t think they’re going to be enormously enthusiastic about yet another air mission out into the shit to pick something up for us.”

  “Perhaps they should generate some enthusiasm for something that could save them all – save all of us. And, anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’ve got to convince them. Because I’m telling you the fate of the world hangs in the balance. This mission could save the world – for real. It will give us the breathing room we need to finish the vaccine, and for it to start protecting people.”

  Abrams sighed. “You are a damned insistent son of a bitch, aren’t you?” He had only just approved Park’s DNA sequencer shore mission. And now he was pushing hard for another one.

  “Okay, okay,” Abrams said, picking up a handset. “You win.”

  Park nodded – plus crossed his arms, threw his shoulders back, and stood up to his full height. He was a very different man than the one who had been cowering in his bunker, waiting for the end of the world. It was obvious he wasn’t going anywhere. And he was going to keep pushing on this – all of it – until it was done.

  Or until they were.

  Take the Fat Cow

  CentCom Strategic HQ - JOC

  Major Jameson – former officer of a very small unit of Royal Marines, now seemingly commander of all of CentCom, for all eternity, ever since the outbreak there and immolation of the helo flight of senior officers who were supposed to relieve him – put his radio phone handset back down. He was standing, but hunched over, both his hands pressed into the desktop. They were holding his weight. For now.

  He looked up and directly into the eyes of Sergeant Eli, his best friend, long-time troop sergeant, and now unflappable second-in-command. Luckily, Eli had been in the JOC when this latest call from the USS John F. Kennedy came in. Jameson had quickly got him on another extension, so he had heard almost all of it.

  This was good, because otherwise Jameson might not have believed his ears.

  One person among many there who hadn’t heard the call was Lieutenant Miller, one of the two surviving operations officers from the original staff of the Joint Operations Center – and who Jameson now saw standing looking at him, no doubt needing something else from the nominal commander of this royal shit-show. But Miller instantly saw from the expressions on both of the Royal Marines’ faces that something had changed.

  “What is it, Major?”

  Jameson didn’t know how to say it in any kind of way that did justice to the daftness of the idea. And he didn’t have the energy anyway. So he just said it. “That was the Americans on the aircraft carrier. They said there’s a bloke who’s got a virus that will kill all the dead. He’s trying to get to London.”

  “What?”

  Jameson knew he had heard him just fine. He looked over at Eli. “If something like that exists… if it actually worked…”

  “Yeah,” Eli said. “We could fight back – in a way that actually worked.”

  “It’d relieve the pressure on London. Hell, it could be the beginning of the end.”

  “Where?” Miller asked. “Where is this person?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jameson said, as if only now remembering that bit. “Moscow. They just want us to pop over there and rescue him.”

  Eli shook his head. “Aces. Another mission into fallen Europe.” He looked up at his commander. “Just when we think we’re out…”

  “They pull us back in again.”

  Jameson felt like crying.

  * * *

  Four hundred yards from the Strategic HQ building with the JOC in it, Group Captain Guy Gibson struggled back to consciousness. He was lying on his back and something was scratching his neck. Reaching around behind him with tingling fingers, he found it was grass. He was lying on his back in the grass.

  Hmm. That’s very odd.

  As his senses slowly came back online, he realized many of his muscles ached – and the exposed skin on the front side of his body, including his face, felt warm, or maybe slightly burnt. Singed. Had he been lying out in the sun? At his family’s country estate in Cambridgeshire? The sun was almost going down now, so maybe he’d fallen asleep while sunbathing.

  But when he tried levering himself up on his elbows, and raising his head… he realized he was still on base, still at CentCom HQ. And in front of him was the main aircraft hangar.

  Except… two thirds of it was gone. Torn away. Burnt down. Blown up.

  Panning to the right, he saw there was some kind of wreckage all over and around the helipad. RMPs were going around, roping off the whole area, as firefighters packed their gear and loaded up their fire trucks.

  Group Captain Gibson blinked once and half-smiled – realizing he didn’t have the faintest idea what the hell had happened. Searching his memory, the last thing he recalled was… leaving the Pilots’ Ready Room. Yes, that had been it. He had left to go back to his quarters and get another paperback. Because he’d read all the way to the end of the one he’d brought with him – and it was quite a long one. He’d got back to his quarters, swapped books… and was walking back.

  And he remembered he saw two Chinooks flaring in to land on the helipad. They had been the incoming command element, replacements for everyone killed in the outbreak, sent to take over control of CentCom HQ and the whole war.

  And that was it. That was all he remembered. From what he could see now… their landing evidently hadn’t gone very well. Climbing to his feet, he found himself to be basically uninjured. And his first instinct was to get back to the Ready Room and check on the lads, the other standby pilots. But a four-minute walk got him close enough to realize: there was no longer any such thing as the Pilots’ Ready Room. It was nothing but twisted steel, black soot, and brackish pools of water – which Gibson assumed were from the efforts to put the fire out.

  He wandered back out toward the helipad, passing various people involved in whatever recovery effort they had managed to muster. No one really seemed to take notice of him – not until he got to the tape that surrounded the wreckage, and a Royal Marine in full combat kit looked his way. He looked him up and down, seeming to clock the flight suit, and then walked briskly up to him. As he approached, Gibson saw his rank – Private – and his nametape: Simmonds.

  “Sir,” the Marine said, throwing up a salute. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine, Private, just fine, thank you. Marvelous.” Gibson paused and cocked his head. “Any chance of you telling me what in the blazes just happened?”

  “No problem, sir. But if we could just talk as we walked…”

  * * *

  Jameson got both Eli and Miller into one of the command offices that fronted the JOC – the one that had been least blown up, shot out, and filled with bodies and shell casings during the outbreak. The three of them swept off chairs, and the desk, and took seats around it.

  Jameson knew he was about be faced with yet another world-changing decision – namely whether to launch another damned air mission into Europe. And, as with all his other vexed matters of command, the buck was going to stop with him.

  But… the very first thing they had to do, before making any kind of momentous decision, was figure out if there was even any kind of theoretical possibility of them doing what the Americans had now asked of them. Jameson had a strong feeling there wasn’t – and that would collapse his decision space in a very pleasant way. When a problem went from difficult to completely impossible, it became easy again.

  “There’s that last Beechcraft King Air on the tarmac,” Miller said.

  “Keep talking,” Jameson said.

  Miller nodded. He’d brought a laptop with maps, and with access to all the
CentCom internal systems. “Okay,” he said, calling up the plane’s specs. “Max cruising speed of that Beechcraft is 333mph. And it looks like it’s 1,555 miles from here to Moscow. So you’re looking at a little over four and half hours flight time.”

  “That’s not bad,” Jameson said. “This man might even still be alive by the time we got there.” He flashed back to what the Americans had told him: This guy is alone on the ground, he’s trapped, he’s completely surrounded. He could die at any second. We need you to extract him NOW.

  Miller looked back down at the specs. “Trouble is… the max range of the Beechcraft is 2,075 miles. So you could get there—”

  “But we’ll never get back,” Jameson said.

  “Some rescue mission,” Eli said.

  “What about mid-air refueling?” Jameson asked, knowing the answer before he asked the question.

  Miller looked up. “Still only one tanker flying. And it’s halfway to Somalia.”

  Jameson exhaled. “Can we turn it around? Re-task it?”

  Miller shrugged. “Maybe. But if we did…” and he went back to a map with live air mission statuses on it, “At this point, it would have to return to RAF Brize Norton to refuel itself.”

  Eli leaned back in his chair, and tugged at his body armor. “Never mind that we’d be giving up on the bloody vaccine.”

  Miller flipped maps. “It gets worse. From the best intel on enemy positions we have, Brize Norton is about to be under serious threat. There’s no guarantee the refueling crews wouldn’t all be slouching and moaning by the time the plane got back. Never mind the runways still being clear…”

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Jameson said. “Jesus.”

  “I’m not sure it even matters,” Miller said. “There simply aren’t any pilots left to fly the Beechcraft. Not fixed-wing pilots. All of them died in the hangar explosion. I mean, obviously, we could try to get someone in from another RAF base…”

  Jameson drummed his fingers on the desktop. Every time he’d requested resources, he’d either been laughed at – or the call hadn’t been answered at all. British Forces had basically stopped being one entity, and started being a bunch of clans and individuals fighting for survival. This, evidently, was what it looked like when everything well and truly fell apart.

  And to the best of his knowledge, there was only one pilot of any description left alive on this base. Jameson decided he needed to talk to her. Maybe what he needed was some fresh air. He hadn’t left the JOC since he could even remember.

  He stood up and looked down at Eli. “Keep putting together a mission plan. Assume we can insert by air somehow. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Before the others could answer, he was out the door and speaking into his radio: “Wyvern Two Zero, this is CentCom Actual.”

  “Go ahead, Major.”

  Jameson stepped up to the blown-out window and cast around. “Yeah, can you set down and meet me on the hilltop overlooking what’s left of the hangar?”

  Slight pause. “Affirmative, wilco.”

  Jameson turned around, threw his team radio on the desk – then pulled off his headset and tossed it as well. He was damned well going to be unreachable for ten minutes, for once in his life. As he strode across the barely controlled chaos of the JOC toward the exit, ignoring the eyes on him, he thought:

  The world will just have to hold itself together for that long.

  * * *

  The little bare hilltop was a strangely peaceful spot. By the time Jameson hiked up to it, a big Apache AH-1 attack helicopter had already set down, its rotors had just about spun down, and a certain Captain Charlotte Maidstone had climbed out of the cockpit and onto the ground. The only sound was the breeze, and they had a view down to most of the areas of the sprawling base, walled in as it was within the grounds of the former Wandsworth Prison.

  It was this compound that Charlotte had been instrumental in saving in the recent outbreak, just as she had singlehandedly pulled Jameson’s ass out of a very bad fire in the Dusseldorf mission – using her rockets and autocannon to cover his breakout, then plucking him out of the water and flying him home to safety.

  Speaking even as he was striding the last few yards, Jameson said, “I need to get to Moscow – me and all or part of One Troop. How do we get there?”

  Charlotte, her big £22,000 custom helmet in hand, nodded and took this in her stride. “I’d take the Fat Cow,” she said.

  Jameson had to presume that wasn’t a joke. Nothing was a fit subject for humor these days. “Go on,” he said.

  “It’s a Chinook variant – a CH-47D fitted with the ERFS II – Extended Range Fuel System – in the cargo bay. It’s three or four large fuel tanks attached to a refueling system. Holds about 2,400 gallons – on top of the bird’s internal fuel load of 1,050. Normally they use it as a mobile refueling point for other helos. But there’s nothing stopping it from using the fuel itself.”

  “Can it get to Moscow and back? That’s fifteen hundred miles one way.”

  Charlotte did math in her head. “Yes.”

  “Is there one of these bovine monstrosities on this base?”

  “Yes.” Charlotte pointed down to one of the helo parking lots. They could both see a normal-looking Chinook squatting there.

  Jameson exhaled.

  Now Charlotte hit him with the bad news. “But… it’s going to be pretty damned weighed down with all that fuel, and won’t fly blazingly fast. It’s also not going to have a hell of a lot of room for your team. It’s going to be full of fuel bladders.”

  Jameson deflated. “Damn. How few?”

  “Not sure. Maybe three or four men at most, at a guess?”

  Jameson shook his head. That wasn’t enough. He couldn’t take a single fire team into the middle of the Undead Red Army.

  “There’ll be a bit more room for the return trip, when half the fuel’s expended. Though I guess that doesn’t help you much…”

  No, Jameson thought. It didn’t. “Wait. Could its fuel bladders refuel, say, a Beechcraft King Air?”

  “Sure. No reason why not.”

  Jameson looked down and squinted in thought. The Chinook couldn’t refuel the Beechcraft in mid-air – but it wouldn’t have to. The little plane had enough range to make it to Moscow, just not back. It could refuel on the ground. He replayed Charlotte’s words: won’t fly blazingly fast. He looked up at her again. “How slow?”

  Charlotte did more math, but out loud. “Normal max cruising speed of the CH-47 is 196mph… I don’t think you’ll average better than about 150 in this one fully loaded. So that’s about ten or twelve hours one way.”

  Damn again. That was a long time – particularly to sit on overrun ground waiting for refueling. But it was what it was.

  “Okay. One last thing – can you fly it?”

  This seemed to take her aback. Then she realized there simply was no one else. “Ish,” she said. “I’m not rated for the CH-47. But I can make it go.”

  “Okay,” he said. That was what he needed to know. “You okay?”

  “All squared away, Major.”

  “Good job ignoring my advice to go to the Pilots’ Ready Room.”

  They could both see it still smoldering from their spot on the hilltop.

  Jameson turned and marched back down the hill.

  Laugh or Cry

  CentCom Strategic HQ

  And then he marched relentlessly back in through the same (formerly) glass-fronted lobby he’d strode out of ten minutes earlier. Only this time, facing the other direction, he saw what he hadn’t before: the civilian woman and three children who had been brought in from the front gate earlier – the ones with the civilian access ID Jameson had never seen before and didn’t have time to care about. He must have walked right past them on the way out. The four of them were camped out on a couch, the generic kind that graced lobbies everywhere.

  Except the floor of this lobby had rather more shell casings, broken glass, and smears of black gunk than average.
Stark reminders of the recent outbreak.

  For a second, Jameson was just going to pass them by again – to say he had shit to do would be beyond understatement. But the woman looked up and they locked eyes, and for some reason he couldn’t just march on.

  He veered over, looked down, and said: “Have they not got you settled yet?”

  The woman smiled sadly, full of forbearance. “They told us to wait here for now.”

  Jameson frowned. “How long ago was that?” He realized he’d totally lost track of the passage of time.

  “About two hours.”

  “Jesus,” he breathed, taking a seat beside her. She was still holding the little girl – and the two boys were sitting patiently, or maybe just exhausted, on her other side. “No food? Water? Cot for the little girl?”

  She shook her head no. Jameson got the impression she’d survived worse – and was committed to surviving more. Whatever it took.

  “May I ask your name?”

  “Rebecca. Rebecca Ainsley.” She produced a hand for him to shake, the little girl in her arms shifting – and she shifted herself to better cradle her. As she did so, the blanket fell away from the girl’s face.

  Jameson looked down at her, his distraught expression becoming one of disbelief. “Wait a minute… that can’t be… Josie? Amarie’s little girl?”

  Rebecca looked back up at him, her own expression startled now. “You know them?”

  Jameson just nodded. It could hardly be, but he couldn’t deny it. Amarie, the young Frenchwoman with those Tunnelers, hadn’t put the girl down once as Jameson and his Marines walked them all out of Canterbury, just ahead of the surging flood of dead. He’d seen her face many times during that exodus. Now the girl’s eyes opened and she looked up at him. And Jameson imagined that she recognized him, too.

  He leaned closer and said, “Where’s your mum, Josie?”

  She immediately started crying, and stuck her head back in Rebecca’s breast. Jameson pulled back – he’d obviously said exactly the wrong thing. He looked back up at Rebecca and she was shaking her head: No.