Black Tide Rising - eARC

by John Ringo

  Then she turned and gunned the engine. The fifteen-pax van leapt forward and slammed into the naked bodies of the two remaining officers. They went down and she felt the sickening crunch as her wheels went over one of them. Then she threw the van in reverse and backed up far enough to shoot the one whose skull she hadn’t crushed.

  Sound suddenly came back all in a rush. Behind her, cheerleaders where whimpering in shocked tones, while Jessa continued to call for her. Incongruously, the opening chords of Elllie Goulding’s “Anything Could Happen” came out through the speakers, thanks to her iPhone plugged in to the van’s radio. Mia couldn’t help it. She started laughing.

  “Coach?” Jessa asked again, her voice scared.

  “It’s all right, Jessa,” Mia said. “Just give me a minute. I won’t let them hurt you guys.”

  “N-no, we know that,” Jessa said, though her voice trembled. “But I think you need to see this.” She held out her phone. On it, on one of the mobile news websites, were the words Mia had been refusing to think.

  “ZOMBIE OUTBREAK hits LA, NY! Major cities under quarantine. States of emergency declared all over the nation…”

  There was more, but Mia had seen what she needed to see. Anything could happen, indeed, Ellie, she thought as she handed the phone back to Jessa. “All right. Jessa, read the rest of the article and get anything useful out of it and any other news pages. Anything about cures, vaccines, instructions, whatever.”

  Mia put the van back into drive and rolled forward until she could pull off next to the roadblock. They’d just passed the exit to NM 550. They’d go back and take that exit, she supposed. “You guys stay here and keep a look out for any other cars. If someone comes over the hill, lay on the horn. I’ve got to get some stuff.”

  The team was too shocked to argue as Mia took her gun and hopped out. First up were the downed officers’ weapons: standard issue .9mm pistols. Mia grabbed the officers’ gear belts as well. Might as well have somewhere to holster the .9s, she supposed. One of the officers’ car keys had half spilled out of his pants pocket during his striptease, and Mia took the opportunity to look in the trunk of the APD car.

  “Jackpot,” she said lowly. The article had mentioned quarantine, so Mia hadn’t wanted to take the officers’ body armor, in case it had gotten blood on it when she’d killed them. Here, however, were spare tactical vests and two twelve gauge pump shotguns. She quickly took the items and headed back to the van. While her cheerleading team watched with wide, disbelieving eyes, she threw this loot, plus all the ammo she could find in the cars into the empty passenger seat of the van. Then she went back and took the mini-igloo cooler that she’d found on the floorboard of the car. Inside were several bottles of water and glory of glories: a twelve-ounce can of Sugar Free Red Bull. She brought this back and started the van back up.

  “Looks like we’re taking a different route,” she said as she wheeled her way back around. Luckily, there was no one else approaching as they took the exit off of I-25 onto NM 550.

  * * *

  It took a full ten minutes of driving in silence before one of the cheerleaders spoke up. As Mia might have suspected, it was Jessa.

  “Coach?” Jessa asked, her tone steadier, but still uncertain. “Um…?”

  “What happened?” Mia asked, humor in her tone, despite everything. “Was that what you were trying to ask?”

  Jessa tittered nervously, and a few of the others laughed in the growing darkness. The sun was sinking behind the desert mesas directly in front of them, and Mia had dug her dark Oakeys out of her purse.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, that was pretty…um…”

  “Weird?”

  “Yeah, weird.”

  “Yeah,” Mia agreed. “It was. I’ll explain it here in a second, okay? I need to do a few things first. Actually, I need you all to do something for me. You all have your phones, right?”

  A chorus of “yes”s filled the back seat.

  “Okay,” Mia said. “Of course you all do. I need you all to text your parents. Tell them that we didn’t make it in to Albuquerque before the quarantine. Tell them that I’m taking you to a safe place to wait out the plague. Tell them that they can meet us at the following coordinates. Are you all ready?”

  Another chorus of “yes”s.

  Mia checked the note on her phone and read off: “North 38 degrees, 18 minutes, 6 seconds. West 111 degrees, 25 minutes, 12 seconds. Sam,” she said, calling out her one senior male cheerleader. Sam, she knew, was an Eagle Scout. “Check everyone’s phone and make sure they got it right before they hit send.”

  She heard a few sniffles, some more whimpers, but eventually, everyone did it. “Now, I need to make a phone call. I need you guys to be quiet.”

  Normally, Mia wouldn’t dream of driving and talking on the phone in front of her team. It was setting a horrible example. However, she was not about to stop again before she had to in order to get gas. Luckily, they’d filled up in Santa Fe, so her tank was mostly full. She pulled out her iPhone and dialed her husband.

  “Baby?” Max Swanson asked, picking up on the first ring. His voice was filled with anxiety and worry, and it damn near brought tears to Mia’s eyes. She blinked furiously.

  “I’m all right,” she said quickly. “We didn’t make it in to Albuquerque before the closed the Interstate.”

  “Oh, thank God,” he said. “Neither did we. We just got the news on the radio and got packed up. We’re bugging out to your mom’s. We can wait here for you…wait…Hashim wants to talk to you,” Max said, his voice strained.

  Mia blinked. Hashim Noori was a very good friend. She’d met him in Iraq almost seven years ago. He’d been her interpreter then, but he’d since gotten a visa and moved to the US. He was a microbiology professor at UNM. Mia couldn’t imagine what on Earth could have made Hashim interrupt her husband on the phone, but then, this morning she couldn’t have imagined that she’d be bugging out in a zombie apocalypse scenario with her cheerleading team, either.

  “Hashumi,” Mia said into the phone. “Salaam wa alaykum,”

  “Walaykum salaam,” Hashim said, his lightly accented English impatient. “Mia. I must ask you. You were in a city?”

  “Yes, we were in Colorado Springs, at a cheerleading competition.”

  “There were many people there?”

  “Yes, Hashim, why?”

  Her former terp was silent for a long moment. “Mia. You have all been exposed. I have been reading messages on the internet. This virus is unlike anything else. It is airborne like a cold, but it is also passed through the blood, or a bite or cut. Body fluids from an infected person.”

  Mia pursed her lips. “Infected person. Hashumi, do they strip down? Go crazy, like?”

  “Yes, Mia. You have seen one?”

  “Four. The cops at the roadblock. They attacked us.”

  “Mia!”

  “They are dead,” Mia said, her voice blank. She still wasn’t thinking about the fact that she’d just killed four cops. “No one got bit or scratched.”

  “That is good, but Mia, this is very bad news. You must not join up with us.”

  “No, I think you’re right. We’ll follow along behind until we know if any of us have got it. How long?”

  “The incubation period is approximately a week, but if the police are turning now…we should know in a day or two.”

  “Got it. May I speak to my husband again, please?”

  “Of course. Fe aman Allah.”

  “And you, my friend.”

  “Baby? How long till you can be here?” Max asked.

  “I’ll be there in about thirty minutes, but you have to go on ahead without me.”

  “What? No!”

  “Baby, listen,” Mia said, blinking quickly to keep the tears at bay and remain focused on the road in front of her. “I have twelve cheerleaders with me. We were just at a fucking cheer competition! You know what those things are like! Hashim said this thing is like a cold. We could all be infected, and
I’m not bringing that around you or the girls. You go to mom’s. Hole up. Stay alive. I’ll join you as soon as I know it’s safe. I love you.”

  Max was silent. Mia could hear him breathing deeply, quickly. She heard the distant giggle of her youngest daughter through the phone. Finally, Max sighed.

  “All right,” he said, softly. “But you stay alive too, you hear me?”

  “I will,” she promised, knowing it wasn’t in her control at all. Knowing it could already be a lie, she promised. “I’ll see you soon.”

  * * *

  They’d gone on ahead to White Mesa anyway. It was slightly out of the way, but Mia didn’t want to take the chance of catching up to Max’s group. After she’d finished talking to Max, her friend Allison had gotten on the phone and told her that they’d leave a cache of supplies at their normal shooting site. Mia had very nearly cried again, but she’d managed to hold it together. Mostly because the sun was fully down now, and she needed to concentrate in order to see the road and the unmarked turn off to their shooting spot.

  Though the sun had just gone down, the half moon was already riding high in the sky. The dust from their slow rumble up the dirt road filled the air, as Mia stepped out of the fifteen-pax van. The moon turned the dust a silvery color and she was abruptly reminded of another night, in another desert, under the same moon, but a world away.

  “Salaam wa alaykum,” a voice called out of the shadows. Without thinking, Mia had the .45 up, pointing at the voice and the figure that emerged from the shadows. “Qaf!” she shouted.

  “Mia, my friend, It is me,” Hashim said, his hands up as he walked closer. Mia lowered her weapon and let out an explosive breath.

  “Hashumi!” she said, walking forward to hug the wiry microbiologist. He might have hesitated for just a moment, but he’d been in the US long enough that he hugged her back. “You idiot, I could have shot you!”

  “That is why I called out,” he said reasonably. She gave him a Look.

  “Hashim, you called out in arabic. This has been a very weird day. I like arabic, but it doesn’t exactly calm me down.”

  Hashim laughed. Mia shook her head, but eventually she gave up and chuckled with him. “What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked. “I told you guys to go on ahead.”

  Hashim abruptly sobered. “I came to help you. You are one adult with twelve teenagers. It will be hard for you to keep them all safe alone. And if any are infected…Well. I may be able to make a vaccine.”

  “Vaccine?” she asked, her voice rising, her eyes widening. “You can cure this?”

  “Not cure, vaccinate,” Hashim said. “We were working on something at the lab this week, when the first rumors started. UCLA sent us some samples and some protocols…It isn’t hard, and it works. I have been vaccinated. But…this will be hard for you, I am afraid.”

  Mia took a long look at her old friend. On the surface, Hashim looked like any other professor of vaguely middle-eastern descent. He wasn’t particularly big, and his wiry frame sometimes looked as if a stiff wind would blow him over. However, Mia knew him, she knew his history. She knew that he’d been hunted by Al Qaida since he was younger than her cheerleaders. She knew that he’d been shot, that his brother had died in his arms. She knew that he’d killed in his own defense before. He’d stood shoulder to shoulder with her brothers in arms, and that had earned him a ticket here, to the so-called promised land.

  Hashim was hard. He would do whatever it took. He loved her like a sister, but she had no doubts that he’d shoot her between the eyes if she turned, in order to keep himself and others safe. And that was just what she wanted.

  “Tell me,” she said, her eyes going flat as they hadn’t been for years since she got back from Iraq.

  “The vaccine must be made from infected spinal tissue,” he said softly.

  Mia closed her eyes momentarily while she absorbed this bit of information. Then she nodded, shoved the moral implications away in the back with the picture of the four dead cops and opened her eyes.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s take you to meet my team.”

  * * *

  “Coyotes,” Mia called in to the van. “Come out here. Time for a team meeting.”

  One by one, the cheerleaders filed out of the van. True to New Mexico form, the temperature had dropped rapidly as the sun went down, and a few of the freshmen were shivering in their warm-ups. Mia hefted the duffel bag that Hashim had carried and opened it up. Inside were several sweatshirts and jackets. It looked like Allison had raided their camping gear and left it for them.

  Mia let a smile cross her lips as she passed out the warmer clothing. Allison and Evan Dwyer were good friends. Evan had been a flight engineer in Mia’s last squadron. The families had bonded over camping and shooting excursions, and Allison was one of the kindest people Mia’d ever met.

  She was also a damn good shot with rifle, pistol and compound bow. And Evan had an arsenal that a gun dealer would envy. They were exactly who Mia would have picked for her zombie survival team. If she would have had time to pick a team, that is. She could think of no one better to help Max protect her girls, as well as their own baby girl, Kimber.

  “All right, Coyotes,” Mia said, bringing herself forcibly back to the present. The cheerleaders had distributed the warmer clothing and stood in a rough circle in front of her and Hashim.

  “I promised I’d tell you what was going on, and I thank you for being patient while I figured it all out. Basically, here’s the deal: the shit has well and truly hit the fan. Jessa, you want to brief us on what you found from the news sites?”

  Jessa looked a bit startled, but she stepped right up. There was a reason she was the team captain. “Um, there’s been an outbreak. Most people think it’s a biological terror attack. People get sick, like the flu, and then they go crazy and strip, like those cops back on the highway. And then they act like zombies. They’ll try to bite people…and if they do, then those people turn into zombies, too. That’s about all I’ve got. The news sites are talking about a vaccine and a government response, but everyone’s saying something different.”

  Mia nodded. That had been about what she expected. “Thank you, Jessa. I had you all text your parents and give them the coordinates of a town in Utah near a safe place. My family is headed to that place now. We’ve got supplies there. We can wait this out and survive there…but there’s a problem.

  “I won’t lie to you guys. There’s a good chance we’ve all been exposed. If we have, then we’ll turn, like those cops.”

  The shocked looks travelled around the circle. Elia, a sophomore, stumbled and sat down, hard, on the ground. Tears began to stream down her face, and she wasn’t the only one. Danny, a junior and her only other male cheerleader bent down and put his arms around her, whispering in her ear.

  “Listen to me,” Mia said. “Listen!” When she had their attention, she took a deep breath and went on. “I can’t promise you won’t get sick. But I promise you this. If you do get sick, I can promise you that I won’t let you become like those things back at the highway. I won’t let you hurt anyone.”

  She looked over at Hashim. He nodded slightly.

  “This is Dr. Noori. He is a very good friend of mine. Dr. Noori has been vaccinated. He knows how to make more vaccine. But in order to do that, we have to use spinal tissue from infected people. I know that’s horrible. I know it is, but that’s the reality we have to deal with.” Mia kept going, relentlessly driving the point home. They are adults now, she reminded herself. Their childhood ended two hours ago.

  Elia raised her tear-wet eyes. “Coach?” she asked tremulously.

  “Yes, Elia?”

  “If I…If I get sick, can I…can Dr. Noori use me? Because I don’t want to die for nothing.”

  The tears came hard and fast to Mia’s eyes. She swiped savagely at her face and nodded, not trusting herself to speak as each of the cheerleaders, her cheerleaders, murmured their agreement with Elia. Even her two freshmen,
Sonia and Dawn. Even at fourteen fucking years old, they were nodding vehemently. Mia waved them all in, and she subsequently found herself mobbed by twelve cheerleaders all trying to hug her and each other, all at once.

  “I promise you,” Mia said, her voice ragged and tear-soaked. “No one dies for nothing.”

  * * *

  They stayed there for another hour or so while Mia handed out weapons and explained the basics of shooting to those who hadn’t done so before. Both of the boys had been hunting, so they got the rifles that Allison had packed. Jessa got a shotgun, as did Cassidy, another senior. Yolanda and Bella, both seniors, got two of the cops’ .9mm pistols, as did Gina and Mackayla, juniors. The younger girls were instructed to partner up with the seniors and stay with them. Mia distributed the body armor as best she could, but she kept most of it for herself and Sam. It was too big for pretty much everyone else.

  When she was at least confident that no one would shoot themselves by accident, they piled back in the van and continued on down the road. Mia broke into the cops’ Sugar Free Red Bull and savored the kick of the caffeine.

  “Going to need to stop for fuel and supplies before too long,” she said. They were still at over half a tank, but it didn’t hurt to start making plans.

  “How do you want to do that?” Hashim asked.

  Mia pursed her lips. “I don’t know yet,” she confessed. “I suppose something will come to me. Ideally, we’d just walk in and pay for it as usual, but I don’t know how ideal this situation’s going to be.”

  “Coach?” Danny, the junior asked. Mia looked up and looked at him in the rear view mirror. He sat, his face illuminated by a phone, Elia resting on his shoulder, eyes closed.

  “What, Danny?”

  “I used to work at the Circle K on Alameda. Last summer. I know how to turn the pumps on from behind the counter. If it’s not ideal, I mean.”