by Glynn James
* * *
Four others who had also been in the briefing were Alpha team operators Ali and Pope. Ali was a former Delta sniper – now perhaps the most deadly long gunner left still breathing air; and Pope was a former paramilitary with the CIA Special Activities Division. They were taking fifteen minutes from mission prep and using it to pick the brains of the two British newcomers, Wesley and Martin.
The four of them emerged onto the five-acre flight deck, with its fresh sea air and bit of sun, and headed for the shade of the island. The towering structure, with its blast-proof glass windows and banks and arrays of antennas and dishes, rose up above them into a sky that had been crowding with clouds all afternoon. Either a weather front was coming, or they were sailing into one. The four sat down cross-legged, two with their backs against the steel wall.
“So the Folkestone outbreak was pretty close-run?” Ali asked.
Wesley nodded. “Yes. I remember thinking clearly: This the end. We’re all going to die. But then the cavalry rolled in.”
Martin nodded his agreement. “If an entire mechanized battalion hadn’t rocked up when they did, I have no doubt both of us would be slouching and moaning right now.”
Pope looked levelly at the British soldier, and clocked his insignia. “Royal Corps of Engineers.”
Martin nodded once. “Fifteen years in. Mostly vehicle maintenance the last couple of years, but a lot of structural prior to that – bases, bridges, great big solid things. I miss all that, come to talk about it…”
Ali looked over at Wesley, still dressed in his UKSS jumpsuit. “What about you. Always been with the Security Services?”
“Yes,” nodded Wesley. “Well, I have been since everything went to crap. I worked as a bodyguard before that, and for too many security firms to even remember. Started when I was eighteen, bouncing the doors of a nightclub in a small town in the Midlands. I was actually working in France when it all came down. Caught the last train back to the UK.”
“Lucky man,” Pope said. “Believe me. We’ve been back over there many times since.”
Wesley looked down at his boots. “Is it as bad as they say?”
Ali nodded solemnly. “And not just France. The whole continent’s a dead zone.”
“Jesus.” Wesley shook his head and squinted off into memory.
“We’ve moved through a lot of fallen Europe,” said Pope. “And you always find the same last stand, played out over and over again – blocked hallways, first-floor stairwells torn down, lot of shotgun shell casings lying around. The odd chef’s knife caked with that congealed black shit they have instead of blood. Usually, from the way it’s laid out, you can reconstruct the whole battle, their last minutes, blow by blow. It’s like a forensic jackpot. If any of that mattered now.”
Ali shrugged. “Of course, we turn up far too late to do any good. You can see all this evidence of people desperate for someone to come and save them. But no one ever did. Horror stories that ended with absolute horror. Being devoured – and killed, if they were lucky. Coming back, if they weren’t.”
Wesley thought of Amarie with a shudder. She had been a woman he had grown close to, during those last weeks of civilization in France. They had only been together a month, but the after-image of that time burned bright in Wesley’s mind. The horror that these soldiers had just described – had that been her fate?
Martin grunted. “What a state we’ve come to – where death is often the best gift you can give someone.” He paused while squinting off into his own memory. Then, more quietly, he said, “I had to take off the heads of two of my best young soldiers. With a fire axe from the wall of the hotel.”
The Folkestone outbreak had begun when one of the new super-fast zombies, which they called Foxtrot Novembers (for the “fucking nightmare”), had somehow dug its way out of the collapsed Channel Tunnel – and gotten loose in the barracks where Captain Martin’s platoon had been billeted. All had been turned except him.
Pope reached across and put his hand on Martin’s shoulder. “Hey. You did what you had to. For everyone’s good.”
Martin shook his head sadly. “And theirs, too. After the fast one had done the rounds, half of my platoon just laid into the other half, a very nasty fight in very tight quarters. No one made it out of that hotel alive. The upstairs was like some nightmare butcher shop that a tornado had just passed through. The floor was literally a pool of blood and there were bits of people everywhere. They didn’t stand a chance. And I knew the best I could do at that point would be to try to just bring the whole building down. I didn’t leave with any grenades.”
Wesley looked across at his erstwhile partner. “I had to do both of my boys with a shotgun. They were just kids.” These were his staff at the security station, who had been out on patrol when the Foxtrot scratched both of them, then disappeared in an eyeblink.
No one replied, but their expressions said it all. That sucks.
“With a single-barrel shotgun. I had to stop and reload.”
Both Pope and Ali actually thought that was hilarious, and had to carefully swallow their mirth. Pope paused a respectful beat before speaking. “You both did your duty. And next time it might easily be you or me that has to be put down. No one gets a pass.”
Ali kept her silence. And as she looked off the edge of the boat, thousands of yards away, toward the horizon, toward the edge of the world, she thought: What if Homer were turned? Would I have the strength to put him down? Privately, she doubted she did. She’d turned off hundreds, if not thousands, of living and dead both, in her career as an elite sniper. But this was one shot she could never take.
Would he have the strength to do it for me? she thought, thinking of their semi-secret, and perhaps very ill-advised, love affair. Oh, God… have we made a terrible mistake – for which we’re both going to pay later? Or, much worse, will the whole team pay? Or all of humanity? A whole world gone down for one misjudged love. It was equally romantic and horrific to contemplate…
Pulling Ali from her reverie, Pope asked the others, “When did you last see the Foxtrot?”
Martin answered. “I saw it go head-first out a window on the top floor of the hotel and hit the ground running. I mean literally running, like it hadn’t just fallen twenty feet onto its back. The last time I saw a human move at that kind of speed was when I watched the Olympic 100-meter sprint.”
“Word was,” Wesley said, “it was also in the battle in the village. But I never saw it. They said it took the concentrated fire of a whole battalion to bring it down.”
Martin shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re all expecting to find in Chicago. But you run into more than a couple of these things at one time… man, you watch your arse.”
* * *
Commander Drake appeared from out of a doorway to the island. He strode up to the group, without seeming to have to look around to locate them. (Pope remembered the tracking ship’s ID cards that broadcast all their locations.) He addressed one of the newcomers directly.
“Captain Martin. I’m guessing you carry a UK DoD cell phone?”
Mobile, Martin mentally corrected, smiling inwardly at the Americanism. But he just nodded.
“Take a look?” Martin handed it over. “Hmm. High-grade encryption capability. This should connect seamlessly to the ship’s packet data network.” He began tapping. “Here are guest credentials to get you on… And here’s my number…” He handed it back. “You think of anything else relevant to this mission, you call me.”
Martin almost said, “Aye aye, sir.” But instead he just nodded again.
Drake stalked off again – long, purposeful strides, like he had promises to keep. And nautical miles to go before he’d sleep.
HELLFIRE
Colonel Bryan (or “Doc” Bryan as the men almost always called him), flipped another page of Coriolanus. Though the grain riots and the assault on Rome in the story seemed eerily timely, his attention was even less on the book than before. Sitting in a bedside
chair in an otherwise empty wardroom of the hospital, he put his bare hand on the grievously wounded operator’s forehead again. The digital thermometer would have the last word on his temperature. But Bryan still felt like he could learn more through the touch of bare human skin.
Just so long as it actually remained human.
So far so good. The man was running a moderate fever – but that could be the result of any number of types of infection carried in by the deformed bullet and the gunk upon it. Infection in gunshot wounds was too common, ubiquitous really, even to remark upon. The unconscious operator had been put on massive doses of intravenous antibiotics, plus anti-virals. Aside from that, Bryan had been able to sew his severed neck artery back together, thus usefully keeping the blood in his body. So the patient actually stood a decent chance of surviving.
But, on this occasion, Bryan was a hell of a lot more concerned that if he died… he died properly, and completely. The man was held down with leather wrist and ankle restraints attached to the bed, but nonetheless… Bryan briefly opened one of the man’s eyes to check color, dilation, and opacity. Leaning back again, he monitored the man’s shallow breathing over the book in his lap. And he exhaled heavily himself.
This burden was his.
* * *
Back out on the helipad, the Black Hawk DAP (“Direct Action Penetrator”) that had brought the casualty in was more than a little dinged up itself. The DAP version of the venerable Black Hawk had stub wings mounted with a 30mm automatic cannon, rocket pods, and various other armaments. It had been feared this firepower was going to be needed for the extraction of Echo team. In the event, the bird’s pilots had been forced to land amongst a great deal of street debris in order to evacuate the badly wounded operator – during which one of its rocket hardpoints had been damaged by the edge of an overturned car. Two techs from the Aviation Maintenance Company wrestled with it now, trying to unmount an AGM-114 Hellfire laser-guided missile from the dodgy mount.
The two grimy and jumpsuited engineers hunched over the hardpoint, one supporting the missile from below, while the other used his full strength to try and pry it off. Between that, and all the dust in the air from the bird’s recent landing, neither noticed the smoke floating out from the base of the stub wing – nor the sparking that was happening underneath the cowling.
There was no getting around that maintenance standards had taken a beating in the ZA – otherwise known as the post-industrial era. The maintenance guys managed to keep the birds flying. But, in this case, the lack of replacement and spare parts meant that the electricals feeding the weapons mounts were long past their expiration date. And the stress of the collision with the car pushed them into overload.
Due to the shorting electricals, one of the Hellfire missiles, which one of the techs still cradled in his arms, ignited. And then it launched.
The aptly named Hellfire, a 106-pound air-to-surface missile, has a shape-charged warhead which packs a 5-million-pound per square inch impact, defeating all known armor (back when the enemy could operate things like tanks). Now, as it sparked off, its burning propellant generated 500 foot-pounds of forward force, violently ripping it free of its hardpoint. Normally laser- or radar-guided, the blind and dumb missile simply plowed straight ahead – and directly into the enlisted mess on the opposite side of the compound. Its payload, a high-explosive shape-charged warhead, exploded a fraction of a second after entry, completely destroying most of the building.
And most of the people inside it.
* * *
Doc Bryan not only heard, but felt the explosion from where he sat in the hospital. It actually bounced him in his chair. His phone went off a few seconds later.
“Go for Bryan. What…? How many?” He listened gravely. “Understood. I can be there in thirty seconds. But I need an orderly here.” He looked up from his phone and around the empty wardroom. “Orderly!” he shouted. “Nurse! Anyone!” A panicked-looking young woman in uniform ducked into the room.
“Sir?” she said, fear in her eyes. She already knew something terrible was happening.
“Watch this patient,” he said. “Ring me any anomalies. You do not leave this post.” He didn’t have time to brief her further. “Understand?” She nodded vigorously, but Doc Bryan was already leaping away down the aisle, and out of the room.
OVERRUN
Doc Bryan inserted a morphine syrette into the screaming, burning man lying on the ground before him. He had to get him sedated to work on him – or even to assess him. All the thrashing and flopping around was a danger, to the man himself and to others nearby.
Bryan had set up a triage point 100 meters from the scene where the mess hall had been turned into a flaming inferno by the errant Hellfire. He had to balance precious minutes spent moving critically wounded people around, against the risk of secondary explosions or other hazards close to the blast site. For the better part of twenty minutes now he’d been doing emergency trauma care – most of which consisted of keeping the blood inside the bodies of the victims – and sending them off on litters to the hospital.
He was so engrossed in wound management and triage that he’d failed to notice his stretcher bearers had stopped returning to pick up more. He finished fixing a burn mask to the man before him, mentally pronounced him stable, and called out for a litter.
None came.
For the first time in several minutes, Bryan looked and listened attentively around him. Engrossed in life-or-death tasks, he’d nearly totally zoned out – hadn’t even noticed the sounds or tumult of those fighting the fire, and others clearing rubble to pull out survivors. Now, his vision expanding, and his hearing dialing back up, he caught wind of more – and much worse.
Over and above the screams and moans of the wounded nearby, he could make out shrieks from further away. That – and now the sound of gunfire, ramping up fast.
It was all coming from the direction of the hospital.
Doc Bryan squinted off in that direction as a terrible chill seized his heart.
* * *
The Colonel was himself personally pulling hunks of smoking rubble off a crumpled ragdoll of a soldier, around on the opposite side of the destroyed mess, when an MP hailed him, coming up at a gallop – with his sidearm in hand. The Colonel paused and looked up.
“What now, Sergeant?”
The man looked for a second like he didn’t know how to answer. Finally he bit the bullet. “Some kind of outbreak, Colonel. Zulus in the hospital. It’s complete bedlam, but I’m sure of it. I put one down myself.”
“Jesus fucking… How many?”
The MP just shook his head, looking like he was fighting down panic.
And then the attack warning signal, a wavering tone across the base-wide siren, suddenly rent the air. The Colonel had never heard it – almost no one serving there had. It warbled up and down, chilling the blood of the already half-panicked garrison.
The Colonel dropped his hunk of rock where he stood, and drew his own sidearm. “Roust your entire command. Get them out there setting up a perimeter.”
“It’s already being done.”
“Take me to it.”
But the Colonel was already racing off ahead. He knew the way to the hospital.
* * *
Doc Bryan had to fight his way to the hospital himself. It seemed like half the personnel on base were running away from it – and the other half toward. The latter carried rifles, pistols, swords, and in a few cases improvised melee weapons such as shovels. Nearing the main entrance, shoving and being shoved, Bryan pulled up short.
There were four or five bodies lying motionless in a jumble outside the double swinging doors out front. All appeared to be dead of head wounds. From the pallor of their skin… well, Bryan didn’t think these people had been alive when they were killed.
He heard someone shout his name from behind. It was one of his young staff doctors – shouting at him to come back, to stay the hell out of there. Fear and guilt raged around in Bryan
’s breast, battling for control of his body and emotions, and he felt an involuntary sob rise up through his chest. He tried to master himself to take some action, to turn away – but then he looked again at the uniform and hair on one of the bodies. This one faced away from him, but was still bracingly familiar.
Gripped with horror, afraid to continue or to stop, he squatted down, leaned over… and rolled the body over. He couldn’t recognize the face. Much of it, in particular the nose, looked like it had been bitten off. Also, the base of her skull was a large gaping wound, from a gunshot, or shotgun blast. But her name patch on her blouse was intact. It was the nurse he had called in to watch the wounded Echo operator, when he ran off to the scene of the disaster at the mess hall.
He found he could now see, so clearly, reconstructed in his mind’s eye, though largely against his will, the nurse leaning over the patient, perhaps in response to him stirring, or convulsing… leaning over him close enough for him, or rather it, to snap its head upward, to stretch its neck out… and to bite. It must have gnawed through much of her face before she managed to pull away.
And then there would have been two zombies in the hospital. And only one of them tied down.
Unseen hands grasped Bryan by the arms and pulled him away.
On either side, flowing around him, four or five operators with assault rifles to their shoulders poured inside the hospital through the double doors.
* * *
“Sitrep!” the Colonel shouted, though not to anyone in particular. He was now the ranking officer on the scene. But, so far, no one really seemed to be running this battle.
An operator the Colonel recognized from Charlie team pulled his eye from his rifle sight and spoke in that inimitable ice-cool manner of SOF guys in a bad crisis: “We’ve got something like a perimeter, Colonel. Could stand to firm it up, but I don’t think anything’s getting out. We’ve been putting down squirters as they appear.” He snapped his sight back to his eye as a shadowed figure lurched past an upper-story window. But it was gone just as quickly. “On the other hand…I’ve seen a couple of groups of guys go in.” He paused to spit on the ground, toward the building. “Haven’t seen anyone come out.”
