Brady put his hand up placatingly. Okay, Master Guns…
But rather than being placated, instead Fick raised his rifle right at Brady – and cranked off a shot over his shoulder. The rifle was suppressed – but it still surprised the shit out of him, as well as Reyes and Graybeard.
“Contact left,” Reyes said across the radio, almost as an automatic reflex.
The whole fire team was on the verge of lighting up that stretch of deeply shadowed forest – and it was only because they were super-seasoned spec-ops Marines that they held their fire. Your ordinary group of nineteen-year-old Jarheads would in that instant be going cyclic on the treeline, launching grenades, and calling in air strikes and arty.
“What are you engaging?” Graybeard asked, from way back behind them.
Fick took a deep breath. He was forced to admit: “I don’t know.” He shook his head again. “I saw something moving in the trees.”
Brady touched Fick’s elbow. “So not so much on how we’re not here to fuck shit up, then.” He was trying to make light of it.
But he, Reyes, and Graybeard couldn’t help but be concerned.
Their grizzled and unflappable Master Gunnery Sergeant, who had seen and done it all, seemed spooked.
And that was more than enough to spook them.
“Move out,” Fick said, shaking it off.
* * *
Handon passed Predator outside the door and entered the ruined TOC to see Juice bent over a desk with his back turned.
“What is it?”
Juice straightened up and pointed at the station to his immediate left. From the large number of melted monitor frames and shattered glass, plus the stacks of radio sets, also mostly melted, Handon figured the main TOC jock, whoever ran this place, had sat there.
“One of the drives from that station,” Juice said, pointing at a blackened CPU case he’d already cracked. “It’s basically intact. The bad news is, it’s encrypted. The good news…” and he pointed at his own bit of charred desk, where he already had the drive mounted on his Toughbook, “is that it’s not encrypted enough.”
Handon shook his head. “We don’t have time to sit around while you crack strong CIA crypto.”
Juice leaned over and checked his screen. “Don’t have to. It’s already done.”
Handon arched an eyebrow.
“It’s a back door, basically. Works great on this type of hard-drive encryption. Took it with me out of the Activity.”
Handon almost smiled. “That legal?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But you don’t think this is the first time I’ve had to crack Agency’s shit, do you?”
Handon knew the military intelligence establishment had basically been set up because everyone in DoD hated working with, waiting for, and being dependent on the CIA for intel. The two intel communities were at odds pretty much by design.
“What have you got?” Handon repeated. They needed to wind this down.
“The second-to-last modified user file on here is a spot report. It’s about a quarantine tent at the local hospital. It was definitely the Hargeisa virus – after it hit, but before everything came down. A lot of infected there.”
Handon nodded. “I like your initiative. But the hospital was our next stop anyway.”
“I figured it was,” Juice said. “But the very last user-modified file on here is different. Take a look.” He leaned out of the way and started scrolling. “It’s a whole analysis document. A lot of stuff about emerging diseases, the threat of pandemics – plus bioweapons and bioengineered viruses. Including a chimera virus evidently purchased by al-Shabaab, a combination of smallpox and myelin toxin. The combined symptoms of which sound a hell of a lot like Hargeisa.”
Handon’s eyes lit up. “Get that uploaded to CIC so Park can see it.”
“Already done it.”
When Handon turned toward the doorway, he saw Ali standing in it, her lips parted wide, eyes squinted. She didn’t look happy. And then he remembered that her last mission with Delta, before coming to Hereford, had been to disrupt an al-Shabaab bioweapons plot. Right here in Somalia.
“Those the virus stocks you destroyed?” Handon asked.
Ali nodded once, seeming numb. “Yeah. I thought so.” She looked past Handon to Juice. “Whose name is on that report?”
Juice looked back to his screen. “GS-15 Zack Altringham.”
For one second, Ali looked like she’d seen a ghost.
Four minutes later, when they were back out on the ground and moving through increasingly dark streets toward the hospital, CIC put Park on the line with Handon.
“That report is a gold mine,” he said. “I’d say it could very possibly represent the origin of the zombie virus, though it also obviously mutated in some way. It makes a lot of things incredibly clear – stuff that was a total mystery before. It will be a huge help in beating and then eradicating this thing.”
“Copy that,” Handon said. “Does it take the place of a sample from Patient Zero?”
“No. Not at all. Sorry.”
“Then I’ve got to go.”
It was only a ten-minute patrol from the safe house to the hospital. When they arrived it was nearly dark outside – and basically pitch black inside. Handon already had his NVGs mounted on his helmet, as did the others. Now he pulled them down.
And he led the way in.
Man Down
Hargeisa Hospital
Everyone in Alpha had thousands of hours of operational experience under NVGs. (Hell, Ali had thousands of hours flying under NVGs.) Back in the counter-terror wars, every mission was a night mission. And, until the jihadis started getting their hands on primitive night-vision gear, it had been one of their many superpowers. ISIS had nicknamed the Tier-1 guys Shyatyn Allyl – “Night Devils.” And the operators had embraced it. Handon had seen more than one tattoo with those words on Unit and team guys. He’d even seen one in Arabic.
So not only were these four-barreled, ridiculously expensive night-vision devices the best ever produced by man, but the Alpha operators were more skilled at using them than anyone left alive. Nonetheless, the interior of this hospital through night vision was giving Handon a serious case of the creeps.
It was always the hospitals where the shit first came down. Well-meaning citizens, police, and paramedics brought the infected back there, where they soon turned – and where there was absolutely no ability to deal with the aftermath. Handon figured the most dangerous job in the entire zombie apocalypse was hospital security guard. Those guys went down like the front row at a machine gunning contest.
Basically, the Hargeisa hospital was ground zero of ground zero.
And, once again, this place felt to Handon like more than the sum of its physical aspects. It was dark, cramped, ruined, and filled with gore. But there was something else. A profound heaviness, or dead weight, that seemed like it wanted to drag them all down. This place wasn’t just awful.
It was evil.
Much of the interior was so dark they had to use their weapon-mounted IR illuminators to augment the NVGs. Now, as they moved down the first long, wide, main corridor in a staggered line, their green IR beam cones panned over walls, ceiling, and floor, as well as the distant end of the hallway. Body parts, gnawed to the bone, were scattered around overturned carts and medical equipment.
Handon actually saw bloody handprints on a window in a swinging door.
He approached another door on the right, which didn’t have a window in it. Scrawled on it in magic marker were the words, “DON’T GO IN HERE.” Handon disliked being told where to go so he took his left hand from his weapon and turned the handle, then gently pushed it open.
Inside was a complete horror show – virtually every inch of the walls and floor, and half the ceiling, thickly textured with gore. The scene inside took a little resolving. But, pretty clearly, the worst thing in the world had happened here.
A surgical team had made a meal of their patient.
Handon
blinked once and pulled the door closed again.
Maybe next time he’d listen.
* * *
The long hallway ended in a T-intersection.
To the right was a radiology suite – though more recently it had been an improvised fortress. Someone had made their last stand here – barricading the doors, piling up furniture. But it had ultimately been knocked over again. There were knives caked with black gunk on the floor, along with a lot of empty shell casings. Handon couldn’t tell for sure whether this had gone down at the time of the fall, or whether survivors had come in later and cleared a corner of the hospital for themselves. Either way, the dead had followed them back.
They probably held them off until the ammo ran out.
Handon had seen enough. He hit his mic. “There’s nothing here for us.”
“Not a sausage,” Henno echoed.
“Exfil, the way we came in.”
When they left, they closed the door behind them.
Homer said, “Never know when you’ll need a place to hole up.”
“Or a wall at your back,” Pred added.
There was still enough light outside that they definitely didn’t need their IR illuminators now. In fact, Handon flipped his NVGs up on his head.
“Okay. Where to now?” he said. “I’m open to ideas.”
Juice said, “We haven’t checked the location of that quarantine tent. It was supposed to be set up adjacent to the hospital. Should be just out of sight there, around the west side of the building.”
“No, sod that,” Henno said, as he flipped his own NVGs up, nodded, and spat. “Follow me. We’re going to the town center.” He marched off down the road that fronted the hospital, clearly expecting the others to follow. They did. In four minutes they emerged into a dusty square with some kind of military monument – a fighter jet mounted on a plinth of bricks. The square was surrounded by a couple of hotels, a bank, and the police station. This was also the junction where Hargeisa’s four major roads met. All of this was smudged in the dark.
Henno marched out into the middle of the square and turned back to face the others. “We’ve been doing this wrong,” he said. He then unscrewed the suppressor from the end of his rifle, pointed the weapon at the sky, flipped his fire selector to full auto – and cranked off an entire magazine.
When it went dry, the roar of the rolling burst echoed for seconds.
Henno nodded, satisfied.
“Now the dead bastards will come to us.”
* * *
A mile away, the echo of distant gunfire brought the Marines to a halt.
They all knelt where they were and went firm – waiting, listening, tuning in, and watching the black-and-green night through their NVGs. They all knew better than to run off half-cocked. If Alpha needed help, they’d ask for it. When there was nothing after the single long burst, Fick imagined he even knew the purpose of it.
They were trying to draw the dead.
It slightly pissed him off that they hadn’t warned him. But Big Boy Rules applied on this one. If Fick didn’t like it, he could lump it. And he had to admit it was not only a good idea – it was perhaps the exact right idea. Maybe the only one.
It just didn’t have the effect intended.
Fick, Brady, and Reyes heard a single, long, blood-curdling, high-pitched shriek from behind them. They had all heard enough Foxtrots scream to immediately know this wasn’t that. And underneath the shriek came a deep-throated barking and growling – like a pit bull mixed with a dinosaur.
Frankly, none of the Marines had the least idea what the ever-loving fuck any of that was. All of them turned to the rear, weapons up.
Just in time to see the night come alive and take Graybeard.
He went over on his back as they descended on him, manic movement and violence, a dozen other shrieks and howls joining the chorus.
And for two seconds, Fick froze dead.
This wasn’t like a bad fucking dream. This was far worse. He only came out of his stupor when Brady and Reyes sprinted past him, the latter yanking Fick to his feet. By the time they were up and moving, they could hear, and partially see, Graybeard fighting like a man possessed. His rifle must have been tangled up under him, or ripped away, because he had his pistol in one hand and knife in the other, and he was stabbing and shooting at the mountain of flesh and fur and teeth that had descended on him.
They were too small to be Zulus – and too fast. Limbs were pistoning and punching and tearing, muscular backs arching – and bared white fangs lighting up in the Marines’ night vision. As they approached, everything around them bobbing from their frantic run, Fick thought he could make out bald patches in the fur and rheumy eyes – and he sure as hell couldn’t miss the stench of rotted flesh.
Without question, death itself had fallen on Graybeard – just not in any form they had ever seen before. This was death teeming and shrieking and swarm-attacking. Somehow Fick intuitively knew these things had peeled Graybeard off the back of the pack. He wasn’t the weakest. But he was last – and he had been separated out.
And before the others could reach him, the dark shapes started dragging him away, off the road and into the forest. This was, by far, the worst and most terrifying part. Not least for Fick.
These things were taking him – taking his Marine.
At the same time, compact but heavy and globular bodies were flying out of the fray as Graybeard stabbed and shot, not giving up or giving in for a single second. When the others finally reached him, their immediate impulse was to reach in and start yanking bodies off him. But some other instinct repelled them. Those flashing fangs and powerful jaws were not only dangerous – everything about the creatures was repulsive in a way only infected matter can be.
So Fick, Brady, and Reyes formed a semicircle and started taking headshots. The shots were suppressed – but the shrieking and roaring was spectacular in volume. Anything that might have been sleeping in Hargeisa was awake now. But in only a few seconds, the rampaging pack on top of Graybeard had been converted into an inert mound of sloping backs and rotted fur and flesh.
However, no sooner had they taken down this group than more came at them out of the treeline. The three Marines still on their feet pushed out a salient to protect the mess on the ground that was Graybeard – and they took knees and started shooting.
Normally wild animals flee when faced with humans or gunfire. These ones just kept coming – until they were all cut down.
And finally there were no more left.
* * *
If the single peel of gunfire had alarmed the Marines, the noises Alpha heard now, from almost a mile away, were a thousand times more disturbing.
But, exactly as had the Marines, the Alpha operators went firm, after pushing out into a defensive perimeter around the center of the square. And they listened and waited. Handon knew Fick would update him the instant it made sense to do so. That was about a minute later.
“Cadaver One from Two. We’ve got a man down, one times critical WIA. Have called for helo medevac.”
“Copy that, Fick. Can you defend an HLZ inside the ville?”
“No, I think Hargeisa’s a no-go. We’re going to get him out of town, just on the road somewhere. ETA sixty mikes on medevac.”
Handon read between the lines. Fick wasn’t worried about the safety of his medevac inside the town. He was worried about compromising the mission even more with helicopter noise.
“Copy. We’ll move to you to support.”
“Don’t be a dipshit, Handon. You stay as far away from us as humanly possible, and I shouldn’t have to tell you that. Anyway, we’re consolidated and combat effective. We’re fine. You watch your asses there.”
Handon knew Fick was right. The point of being separated wasn’t to support each other. It was the opposite – for one to be able to survive the destruction of the other. But destruction by what? “What are we looking at? What attacked you?”
Before Fick could answer, though,
Handon could hear the beginnings of an answer from much closer by. It was heavy breathing, or panting, with some kind of barking – and a lot of heavy appendages hitting the ground.
In another two seconds the shadow creatures flooded into the dark square from the southwest corner, another whole pack of them, sluicing through the gaps in the surrounding buildings. All Handon could really make out was big puffed-out chests, long thick tails flapping behind some of them – and all of the creatures loping heavily along on all fours like lions or hyenas.
Galloping. Charging.
But Ali, leaning serenely into her rifle, could also see them leading with long snouts, like a dog’s muzzle, framed with long but patchy fur, their powerful jaws already snapping, opening and closing over long white fangs, or upper canines. She traded a quick look with Juice. They were both thinking the exact same thing, though neither had time to vocalize it:
Five thousand pounds of baboon coming at you – DEAD baboon.
And then everyone started shooting as one. Within seconds, Alpha was hunkered down, firing non-stop into the darkness, which had come alive and was rushing in on them like they were the last free meal in the entire ZA. They were being regarded as what they had always been to Africa, to the rest of the predatory universe: meat. Meat on the hoof.
But in another few seconds, it was many of the attacking primates that were themselves meat, perhaps as many as two dozen of them cut down – but the rest of the pack now swarmed through Alpha’s lines, right into them.
And the melee weapons came out – spinning and flashing in all directions.
It was 360-degree zombie warfare like never before.
* * *
Graybeard couldn’t speak – much of the left side of his neck had been torn out – but his serene eyes spoke eloquently. There was defiance, but also resignation. This man had cheated death a hundred times. If today was his day, then so be it. It didn’t change who he was, and he wasn’t changing his attitude toward any of it.
And he’d put up a hell of a last fight.
Lying on his back, gulping as he tried to breathe, he was actually bleeding from a dozen places at the very least. While Reyes stood ten feet away with his rifle to his shoulder, pulling security, Brady tried to get pressure dressings on some of the worst bleeders, while Fick applied pressure with his bare hands to the neck wound. The trouble was that enough pressure to stop the bleeding would likely be enough to strangle him.
The Flood Page 13
