The Dying of the Light: Interval

by Kristopher, Jason

  Still, the fire lit up the night quite well, showing us the stream of people who had, for the moment, faltered in their advance on the base. Clearly, Beoshane had been busy, since there were at least as many people in this assault as any of the others. They hadn’t decided to attack yet, either waiting for more orders or to see what we would do.

  Or they’re in shock, wondering how we could’ve blown up their greatest weapon so easily.

  “Sir,” came Gaines’ voice over the radio. “It looks like some of the folks up front are none too happy with the situation, and are turning around. Course, the ones behind them appear to have a difference of…”

  There was a shot from the mass of people, and then another, and another. The cracks of the shots were loud, even over the sound of the burning bulldozer.

  “Yeah, they’re all coming back our way, now,” said Gaines. “Permission to engage?”

  “Ops, Alpha. Request permission to engage targets.”

  I could hear her sigh over the comms, as could all the others. All of us wished there was another way, but Beoshane had whipped these people into a religious fervor, and they were ready to kill anyone in their path.

  Better them than us, I thought, realizing how often that phrase had been used over the millennia of man’s existence. It seemed to fit nearly every part of our history.

  “Permission granted, all teams. Engage at your discretion.”

  I saw Montero briefly lower his night-vision, then raise it again. It was clearly still too bright to use it, so I didn’t bother, and set my assault rifle on the concrete rail, steadying it for the oncoming horde. Suddenly, shots began to ring out at a steady pace from above, and I knew that Gaines and Barrents were beginning to thin the crowd.

  Then they began streaming around the wrecked dozer, pouring like ants around the wreckage and heading straight for us. Normally, the sentry guns would have turned them into chopped liver before ever reaching that point, but now…

  “Enemy in range in five,” said Montero, at my side. “Four… three…”

  I took a deep breath and sighted at the closest attacker, then moved my target when her head exploded from a sniper’s round. It’s going to be a bloodbath, I thought.

  I’d never hated Beoshane more than in that moment, knowing that he was out there, not giving a damn about any of the people he was sending to their deaths.

  Better them than us, I thought once more, as we began firing.

  The mood in Ops was somber as I walked in, covered in dirt and more than a little blood.

  “Alpha and Bravo squads are squared away, ma’am,” I said formally.

  Kim was bent over a monitor, talking to someone somewhere in the base. “OK, Charlie. Just get started as soon as you can.”

  “Right away, ma’am.”

  Kim straightened, hands on her lower back and a grimace on her face. It had been a long morning for all of us. She turned to the watch commander. “Marcus, I want spotters in the tower keeping an eye out for stragglers. Let me know right away if they spot anything.”

  “You got it.”

  She turned to me, finally. “How is everyone?”

  I shrugged. “No major injuries, some cuts and scrapes. Jake took a punch to the head that rang his bell a bit, but other than that we’re fine.”

  She shook her head. “I still can’t believe they made it all the way up there. How many of them were there?”

  “Well, I can’t confirm the numbers, you’ll need to talk to the cleanup crew for that, but if I had to guess, over a hundred. Maybe close to two hundred. And we’re gonna need some more mines, too.”

  “And Beoshane and his lackey got away again.”

  I nodded, as pissed about it as she was. “Gaines said he thinks the guy holes up in a camper of some kind when he comes out here, now. He saw something that looked like a mobile home at the far end of the group, and a couple people standing on top of it. He took a shot, and they jumped, but it was too far, even for him.”

  “Dammit!” she said, slamming her fist onto the desk. “Every time, he gets away!”

  “I know, and I don’t like it any more than you do, but what else can we do? It’s not like we could go hunting him down, or som—” I broke off, seeing that glint in her eye I knew too well. She was about to have a bad idea, and it looked like I was to thank for it. “No, Kim. You can’t.”

  She eyed me with one raised eyebrow. “I can’t? What was that, soldier?”

  I shook my head again. “I’m not a soldier, Kim, and you’re going off the rails, and you know it. You can’t send anyone out there to look for him. They’d be flying blind. We have exactly zero intel on him, his lackey, or this group he’s leading, other than his name. Hell, we don’t even know where they’re coming from!”

  She was clearly not happy with my analysis of the situation. “We need to find him. We need to stop this crap.”

  “I know, and we will. But we have to be smart about this. Let me talk to some of the guys and see what I can put together. Maybe we can come up with some idea that won’t get everyone killed. OK?”

  She nodded. “Fine, but do it soon. I’m tired of this asshole.”

  “Me, too, babe. Me, too.”

  The phone’s ring was shrill in her head as Kim groaned and rolled over, hitting the light switch mounted next to the bed. The soft glow of the lamp did nothing to disguise the clock’s accusatory notice of 5 a.m. She fumbled for her Bluetooth as the ringing continued and David began to stir beside her. Hitting the button on the device as she fitted it to her ear, she patted him on the back and he slipped once more into blissful unconsciousness.

  “This is Barnes,” she said softly as she eased shut the door to their bedroom. Nearly paper-thin, it would do little to block the noise, but David was a light sleeper and she wanted him to get his rest. “Go ahead, Ops.”

  “Ma’am, we have a call for you from Dr. Maxwell in Bunker Seven.”

  It took a second for Kim to adjust. I still think of her as Mary Adamsdöttir, she thought. “Put her through, Ops.”

  There was a click, and Mary’s voice came on the line. “Kim! Hello, so good to finally get in touch with you.”

  “Hi, Mary. Look, I meant to call…”

  “I know, George told me he told you. Don’t worry about it, I know you’re busy. Plus… Oh, no. I called too early, didn’t I?”

  Kim laughed. Mary had always been an early riser. “No, no, it’s fine. I had to get up early today, anyway. Now I have no excuse to be late. So what’s up?” Kim moved over to start the coffee, stifling a yawn.

  “It’s about David, Kim. About his blood.”

  Kim went cold. Ever since their final confrontation with Henry Gardner, they’d both wondered whether David was actually infected by the ‘zombie’ prion, as Gardner had told him. Though Mary’s initial tests had been inconclusive, she had continued to work on it off and on to determine once and for all if it was true or if that snake Gardner had been lying. Kim wasn’t sure she wanted to know, because if David was infected, then so was she, and that… that would change everything.

  “Kim, are you there?”

  Kim realized she’d sat in silence, lost in her own little world while Mary hung on the line. “Sorry, Mary, I’m here. Do you want me to wake David?”

  “I think that would be best.”

  “OK, give me a minute.”

  I swam up out of the depths of whatever fresh Hell I’d been dreaming of to see the blurry face of an angel in front of me. My brain took a second to finish booting up, and the face resolved into Kim, leaning over me with a grim look and her Bluetooth active in her ear.

  “Get up, David,” she said, easing me into the morning.

  I glanced at the clock and immediately regretted it.

  “Mary’s on the phone,” Kim continued, moving out into the main room.

  I coughed, the dry bunker air tickling the back of my throat and making me wish for a glass of water. I shook my head and sat up, scrubbing my hands over my fa
ce and hair. Feeling somewhat alive, I finally stood up, grabbed a shirt from the chair, and stumbled after Kim. She met me at the door with a large cup of hot coffee that smelled like heaven.

  “I suddenly remembered why I love you,” I said, smiling at her. When she didn’t return the smile and merely motioned for me to sit on what we lovingly called a ‘couch,,’ I knew something was up, and dropped the joke. “Let’s have it.”

  “Mary, I’m putting you on speaker,” Kim said, plugging the Bluetooth unit into the phone’s base. There was a slight crackle, and Mary’s voice came on the line.

  “Hi, David. Sorry to get you out of bed so early.”

  “Not at all. I’m sure it’s important. What’s up?”

  I heard her take a deep breath. “It’s about your blood, David.”

  I looked up at Kim, who reached out to take my free hand in hers. My other hand was suddenly shaking so bad I had to put down the coffee, which was saying something this early in the morning. I’d been able to put off wondering if I was really infected, telling myself that it didn’t matter, that Gardner had lied—every trick I could use.

  But here, now, there was no hiding from the truth. It was what it was, and I was either dead or alive. I moved over to sit next to Kim and wrapped an arm around her shoulders.

  “Go ahead, Mary,” I said, never more anxious about a piece of news in my life than this one.

  “As you know, I put your blood samples through every test in the book, and then some. I ran every analysis, looked at every factor—”

  “Please, Mary. Just get to the point.”

  “Sorry. You’re… you’re infected, David.”

  And there it was. The end of everything. My whole world was crashing down, and my life was over. And not just my life, either. The hammer I felt slamming into my gut must have weighed twenty pounds.

  “I see. And Kim?”

  “Her, too.”

  We had taken precautions all along, just in case, but obviously we had failed. I hugged my wife tight, but to her credit, she didn’t start crying, or shaking, or yelling. If anything, she was numb. Which was almost worse.

  In my dismay, I hardly noticed that Mary was still talking.

  “…but I’m not done,” Mary said.

  Kim and I looked at each other, but neither of us knew what she was going to say. “Not done with what?” I asked.

  “You’re infected, both of you. But I found out that you’re also immune.”

  “Wait, what?” I said, unable to process this additional news.

  “I’ve done every test I can think of, and as far as I can tell, you’re completely immune to the prion’s effects. Both of you.”

  “But how is that even possible?”

  “At this point, I’m not exactly sure. I’m not a geneticist, but without going into detail, it has something to do with the way the prion attaches to the DNA. I need help to find out more. Kim, I need you to call around to the other bunkers, see if any of their people has a background in genetics or molecular biology and can help me with this. I don’t want to put the cart before the horse here, but it could—and I stress could—be that your immunity might give us something to build on.”

  I stood up and began pacing, my mind running over all the medical and genetic information I knew. Which was, admittedly, not that much. “So, we’re basically carriers, then, Mary?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s it, then,” said Kim. “We’re locked down, as of this moment. Off the duty rosters, no missions, nothing.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.

  “David, if we’re carriers, we could infect anyone with this. Right, Mary?”

  “I’m not sure, but I don’t think so. I need to do more tests to confirm, but the early work shows that once in your system, the prion mutates somehow into a non-infective strain. I won’t know for sure until I can find someone to help me with this. For the moment, go with the assumption that it’s true, that you can infect others. Think of it as the new AIDS, just much more virulent and aggressive. And quick. Any contact between an uninfected person and any sort of bodily fluids from you two, and they’d be infected. Assuming they also don’t have whatever this immunity is. The strain they get could be the mutant one, though.”

  “OK,” I said. “So, we’ll be careful. We don’t have to cut ourselves off, we just have to take precautions. Remember how people back in the 90s were scared about AIDS? We can take precautions to avoid exposure to anyone. Mary, will regular cleaning products kill the prions? Like bleach, alcohol, etc.?”

  “Yes and no. Bleach does, rubbing alcohol doesn’t. You’ll just have to be careful.”

  “Mary…” Kim started to say something, and stopped. Started again, and stopped again.

  I sat back down next to her, and held her hand.

  That seemed to help, and she began again. “Mary, what about kids?”

  Mary sighed. “I don’t know what to tell you, Kim. Without knowing more about this immunity and the way it works, I can’t tell you much of anything for sure. You might pass it on to your kids, but maybe not. You need to find that geneticist.”

  Kim nodded to herself. “I’ll get on it, you can be sure.”

  “David,” said Mary, “you need to help, too. Find someone, anyone with a background in genetics or molecular biology. That’s the only way we’ll find out what’s going on here.”

  “Thanks, Mary. We’ll let you know if we find anyone.”

  “George and I love you both,” she said. “Stay safe and be careful up there. I’ll let you know if I find out any more. Maxwell out.”

  The speaker went silent, and I reached over to turn it off, sitting down next to Kim again. She was staring at the floor, and I knew she had been secretly hoping that we weren’t infected, that the world wouldn’t be that cruel to us. I took her hands in mine and squeezed. “We’ll get through this, babe. Just like Beoshane, the President, and everything else.”

  Kim didn’t even acknowledge my presence, and that’s when I began to get frightened. And more than a little motivated. There had to be a geneticist in one of the bunkers, and we were going to find him.

  Chapter Six

  Christchurch International Airport

  New Zealand

  Major Bill Shaw leaned against a bulkhead in the Galaxy, thirty-two thousand feet in the air, lost in thought. He missed his wife, his friends, and all the people he’d gotten to know over the last four years. He could still feel Jennifer’s arms around him, and he wanted nothing more than to turn the plane around and go back, even though he knew that would be signing the death warrants of everyone at McMurdo, himself and his crew included.

  If only he knew for sure that coming here wasn’t doing the same thing.

  “We’re about a hundred and fifty miles out, sir,” said Fraser, who’d taken the command seat for the last part of the flight. “Starting descent.”

  “I’ll take over from here,” said Shaw, coming out of his reverie. He took the seat that Fraser vacated, glancing at the controls. “I want to do a fly-over before we land, get some idea what we’re in for.”

  “Roger,” replied Evans. “Sir, have you ever done a non-ILS landing in one of these?” The ILS, or Instrument Landing System, guided pilots into every major and most minor airports in the world, allowing them to land aircraft of all sizes safely and without appreciable danger. Unfortunately, the ILS was a ground-based system, and when power failed across the world, so did the ILS.

  “I prefer the other ILS, Mr. Evans,” Shaw replied.

  “Other ILS, sir?”

  “Eyeball landing system,” he said, and heard a snicker from Lopez in his engineer’s seat. “Lopez knows what I mean.” Shaw could see Evans was getting nervous, and laughed. “Don’t worry so much, Mark. It’s just like anything else with an airplane—point the nose where you want to go, and the rest of the plane follows.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  “I do say so. Fraser, go back and let
Charlie and Arturo know what’s going on.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Fraser, leaving to go pass the news to the loadmaster and chief scientist.

  “All right, Mr. Evans, let’s get ready for that flyover.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Evans shook his head as they circled Christchurch at one thousand feet. “We can’t keep this up much longer, sir. It’s eating through our fuel,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder at Shaw, who was going over the photos they’d taken on their flyover. “We’re at just about three-quarters, sir.”

  “We’re almost done,” Shaw replied. He turned back to the photos and his engineer. “What do you think, Lopez?”

  “Not sure, sir. It’s a mess. None of the planes looks salvageable. There’s a mass of people near this building over here…”

  “Not people, Lieutenant. I’d bet you a week’s pay those are walkers.”

  Lopez nodded. “No bet, sir. I think it’s safe to assume that there are people barricaded inside, though, or were. It looks like they’ve armored some of the buildings, and destroyed others. I think this is the refueling station, over here, and these are the fuel tanks.”

  “It looks like a bomb went off over there! And if we can’t get more fuel…”

  Lopez just looked at him, already having reached the same conclusion.

  “Well, shit,” said Shaw.

  “Yes, sir. More to the point, if those people are still around, then they were sure to have noticed us as we flew over.”

  “So we might have a welcoming committee.”

  “Possibly, sir.”

  Shaw sighed and climbed back into the command seat. “It’s not like we have any choice.” He reached over and picked up the intercom microphone. “Good morning, everyone! Thanks again for flying McMurdo Airways. We’ll be landing in about twenty minutes, so please make sure you’re in your seat, with your seatbelt fastened and your articles stowed beneath the seat in front of you, and your seatback is in the upright position. Crew to stations, please.”

  Fraser looked up at Shaw with a smirk, and Shaw shrugged. “Just taking a lesson from Mr. Evans, here. Did I do All right, Lieutenant?”