End Zone

by D C Alden

  ‘It’s alright,’ Lem said, scrambling to his side. ‘The water will come on any second, you’ll see.’

  ‘Stand by,’ said the voice, and Lem gummed a smile at Dave. She took his hand and led him beneath one of the brass nozzles. ‘The rubber seals are part of the hygiene protocol,’ explained the voice. ‘Momentarily they will fill with air and then the showers will begin. Thank you for your patience.’

  ‘Get tae fuck!’ snarled the Scottish woman, then she bellowed with laughter.

  Pipes clunked and groaned somewhere above them, then the balloons began to inflate. Dave found himself watching the black orb grow larger, saw the liquid sloshing about inside, heard the creak of the expanding rubber. They were going to burst, and Dave stepped back, as did a couple of others.

  ‘Come on!’ another voice shouted. ‘Get on with it!’

  The balloons swelled. Pops rippled around the room, and the air was suddenly filled with a fine mist.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ Dave whispered. The mist settled on his skin. He wiped his arm, leaving a long thin streak of dirt. He watched Lem do the same. She looked up at Dave. Her eyes were bloodshot, and he saw a pattern of blue veins snake across her neck and chest. She stepped closer, then jammed a filthy finger deep into Dave’s eye socket.

  Dave screamed and staggered backwards. ‘You fucking bitch!’

  Lem came after him, raking her filthy nails against his face and chest. Dave swung his fist, catching Lem on the jaw and knocking her to the tiles. More screams filled the dead air as the room erupted into sudden, savage violence. Dave staggered to the door.

  ‘Help me! Let me out!’ he screamed, but his cries were lost in the furious roar that filled the chamber. He spun around, a hand cupped over his left eye, the blood running through his fingers and down his arm. He saw the Scottish woman leap onto the back of a man with long dark hair who tried desperately to throw her off. She vomited all over him, then slipped to the floor, her screams unintelligible. Everyone was fighting, clawing, biting. Dave shrunk into a corner, his skin crawling with terror. Then, almost as quickly as it had started, the violence stopped. The terrible screaming suddenly faded to nothing. Even the wounded barely uttered a sound.

  Dave whimpered. They were looking at him, all of them, a blood-soaked mob of stark naked lunatics. They moved slowly towards him, eyes wide, their hands like bloody claws as they closed in like a tightening noose.

  ‘No!’ Dave screamed. ‘Please!’

  And then they charged. He tried to fight them off, kicking out and swinging his fists, but they swarmed all over him, yanking the hair from his head in bloody clumps, gouging out his other eye. Hot vomit splashed over his face and chest. He felt an arm wrenched from its socket, and screamed as his balls were ripped from between his legs. He felt teeth sinking deep into his flesh, felt fingers in his mouth, pulling, clawing, tearing.

  Dave stopped struggling. He wanted it over.

  The others ripped him to pieces.

  ‘Safe to say that the field trials are a success,’ Marion announced, watching the CCTV monitor.

  ‘When do we do this for real?’ asked Ponytail. His name was Terry, and the greasy rat tail that hung from the back of his skull was the only hair he had left. The other twelve members of the newly formed Global Liberation Front were a mixed group of men and women of various ages, all of whom had been convicted of violence against the state in the name of animal liberation or the survival of the planet. They were extremists in every sense of the word, but Marion could tell by their faces that the last few weeks had taken a heavy toll. It was time to say something.

  ‘You’ve all worked very hard, and at considerable risk. You’ve witnessed some very strange, and at times disturbing events here, but it hasn’t been for nothing. Mother Nature is in trouble, we all know that. She needs someone to fight for her, and if the governments of the world refuse to take up that challenge, then it’s up to us. Am I right?’

  ‘Too bloody right,’ Terry said, looking at the others.

  Marion pointed to the CCTV monitor. ‘This is the game changer. This will focus the world’s attention and steer us away from the precipice.’

  No one spoke for a moment. The only noise in the room was coming from the chamber below, the sounds of feet slapping against tiles, the grunts and snarls of the infected as they marched in a circle around the room.

  ‘When do we get to tell our families?’

  It was Olivia, a twenty-something in jeans and a combat jacket. Her face was pale, her blond dreadlocks tied in a thick knot behind her head. ‘After all, they’ll need time to adjust, right? Prepare themselves for what’s coming.’

  ‘Livvy’s right,’ said a silver-haired academic type in glasses and a thick cardigan. ‘The spread of infection is almost immediate. Things will collapse pretty quickly. We need to tell our loved ones about the Refuge, how to get there, what to bring — ’

  ‘You can tell them soon, once we leave this place.’ Marion explained. ‘Of course, some will be resistant to our plans, which is why only Terry will be given the location. After we leave here, you’ll liaise directly with him.’

  ‘And use your common sense,’ Terry warned them, tapping a finger against the side of his head. ‘After the collapse of society we’ll need individuals who’ll be able to adjust quickly to a pastoral world. We’ll need strong people, both physically and mentally, and women of child-bearing age. We can’t afford to carry any dead weight, so no cripples or coffin-dodgers. Right, Marion?’

  Marion nodded. ‘Terry’s right. We’re building a new world from the ground up. It’s going to be difficult enough without adding unnecessary burdens.’ She looked around the room. ’Any other questions?’

  ‘What do we do about that lot?’

  Terry pointed at the CCTV feed, where the infected were still circumnavigating the room.

  ‘Dispose of them, same as the others. I’m sure this will be the last batch.’

  Marion saw relief on their faces. They’d gassed and incinerated at least a hundred people in the last two months. They needed to know there was light at the end of the tunnel. After all, this wasn’t Auschwitz.

  ‘Thank you, Marion.’ Terry turned to the others and clapped his hands. ‘Right, let’s get to work.’

  Just before she left the room, Marion paused in the doorway. Everyone stopped to listen as she looked back at them and smiled.

  ‘Stay focused, and stay positive, everyone. The new world is almost upon us.’

  Bunker Mentality

  ‘Two of the more significant questions about this phenomena concern the levels of sexual activity and the capacity for non-vocalised language, which can be an indicator of reproductive strategy and group dynamics. Language is arguably the hallmark human trait, and from the limited footage I’ve seen, it’s clear that some kind of proto-language is being employed.’

  Coffman glared across the conference table at Curtis Stringer, the ageing Nobel Prize-winning Paleoanthropologist. ‘In English, please professor.’

  Stringer scratched at his straggly grey beard. ‘My apologies, Madam President. Let me put it another way…’

  As Stringer continued, Coffman’s mind began to drift. Her National Security Council had occupied the secure conference room for almost two hours now and the President hated being below ground. She wasn’t claustrophobic, but the more time she spent inside the bunker located beneath the north lawn, the more she craved fresh air and sunlight.

  She’d been President for less than six months, and according to the latest polls she’d dealt admirably with the fallout from Baghdad. Medals had been pinned to American chests and much praise heaped upon the Iraqi people. The Aswad government had been duly rewarded with billions of dollars of clean-up money and infrastructure development. Coffman had attended more memorials than the five previous presidents combined, and in doing so had ingratiated herself with the American people. They were actually using the word love, according to the latest focus group data, a bizarre concep
t for any politician, but if the soccer-moms of America had her back, she was going to exploit that approval to the full. Because with love came trust, and once she had that, Amy Coffman could pretty much get away with anything.

  And then came the video, just as the political waters were losing their chop. It was the reason she was meeting with her NSC below ground, why Coffman had the world’s foremost Paleoanthropologist smuggled in under a blanket of total secrecy.

  Baghdad was coming back to haunt her.

  She refocussed her attention on the ageing academic.

  ‘…violent tendencies, so in conclusion, this phenomenon is proving to be both fascinating and deeply troubling. The virus has the ability to strip away hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, resulting in something that resembles pre-Neanderthal behaviour and cognitive function, as found in the sub-species Homo heidelbergensis, hence the reference to the H-1 virus in my report. As for the group circular movement behaviour, that’s still a mystery. There’s nothing in human history that can explain such a regression and associated behaviour.’

  Coffman waved a hand. ‘Thank you, Curtis. Someone will show you out.’

  The President looked around the room. Stringer’s now-vacated seat aside, every other chair was occupied. Flanking Coffman were Karen Baranski, her former head of State Department Operations and now her National Security Advisor, and Erik Mulholland, her ever-loyal Chief of Staff. To Erik’s right was another ally, Admiral Charlie Schultz, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Drew Clark, Coffman’s Secretary of Defence. The others were all National Security Council principal committee members; the Secretaries of State, Treasury, Energy, Homeland Security, the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. A security full-house.

  Before anyone could talk, Coffman pushed back her chair and walked around the table, stopping in front of the TV on the wall. An image from the Baghdad drone footage was frozen on the screen, the infected circling an indiscriminate structure in the embassy compound like a giant human doughnut. Coffman could feel the anger building. She assumed all this was behind her. She assumed, wrongly, that she could control something like this. She had underestimated Mother Nature, like so many before her.

  ‘Play the video again,’ she ordered.

  Coffman remained standing, her arms folded across her chest, as she watched the man in the black ski mask and sunglasses appear on another screen. He represented a group called the Global Liberation Front, and the email was the second one they’d received via a now-obsolete email address bounced from a chain of dark-web servers that no longer existed. The first email, received almost eight weeks after the destruction of the Baghdad embassy, had been shocking enough; a video of Marine Lance Corporal Hector Nunez, locked inside some sort of fish tank as he vomited blood and fluids and vented unholy screams. A living, breathing, fast-moving bio-weapon, now in the hands of terrorists.

  The second email had arrived just a few hours ago, and it contained a list of demands; the immediate shutdown of all fossil fuel industries, an end to deforestation, mineral mining, chemical and industrial dye manufacturing, a total ban on commercial air travel, the internal combustion engine, and most bizarre of all, the artificial inducement of a meat allergy into the general populations of the western world in order to curb the impact of intensive meat farming. Coffman had almost laughed out loud at that one; try selling that to the hamburger-loving American public. According to the eco nut-jobs, the implementation of those demands would ensure an end to rising temperatures and man-made climate change. They would also ensure the death of the global economy.

  Three months, that’s all they had. Three months to dismantle western civilisation.

  ‘Who the hell are these people?’ Coffman asked.

  All heads turned to CIA director James Buchanan. ‘We have no intelligence on the group at all, Madam President. They’re clearly the new kids on the eco-terrorism block. Video analysis confirms that this Philip character is not an Arab; he’s European, either a German or Austrian, possibly Swiss or Dutch. All of those countries have very strong environmental movements whose fringe elements have employed direct action in the past.’

  ‘So, how does a homicidal Swiss tree-hugger find himself standing in the rubble of the US embassy in Baghdad? And more crucially, how does he smuggle an infected and highly contagious Marine out of the country without anyone noticing?’

  It was a rhetorical question, Coffman knew. The intelligence apparatus of the United States had been trying to unravel that ball of string since video number one, with little success.

  ‘The window of opportunity was extremely tight,’ Admiral Schultz reminded the room.

  Like the others he was dressed in civilian clothes, a demand made by Coffman. They had to keep this off the radar, which was why they were meeting on a Sunday morning. The last thing anyone needed was for this to go public.

  ‘We had boots on the ground four hours after the blast,’ Schultz said. ‘Whoever took him had to move quickly.’

  ‘And the drone footage gave us nothing?’ Coffman asked.

  ‘Afraid not, ma’am. The Green Zone was hidden beneath a cloud of dust for much of the day.’

  ‘There has to be some Iraqi involvement in this,’ insisted Secretary of State Jayne Pascoe. ’This is their back yard after all.’

  Coffman shook her head. ‘This has nothing to do with the Aswad Administration.’

  Pascoe frowned. ‘With all due respect, Madam President, how can you be so sure?’

  Because the Aswads were in on the whole thing, she thought but didn’t say. ‘We’ve earmarked billions in compensation and reconstruction over there, Jayne. The Iraqi government wouldn’t jeopardise that.’

  Pascoe didn’t look convinced. ‘A rogue element, then. Hard-liners unaligned to the Aswads, perhaps?’

  ‘That’s a more probable scenario,’ Coffman admitted. She walked around the table and retook her seat. ‘We’ll get to how in due course. Our priority now is to find Nunez.’

  Drew Clark spoke next. She was the first female Secretary of Defence in US history, an appointment that boosted Coffman’s progressive credentials, but the president cared little for political correctness except when it suited her. She chose people for their skills, their ability to take orders, and their loyalty to her cause. Clark was such a creature, a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a masters in political science. A former diplomat in Coffman’s State Department, Clark’s twenty-one years of service in the US Army made her a shoe-in for her role as the nation’s military attack dog. Physically she was tall, almost six feet, and she wore thick-framed glasses and a bob haircut. She habitually wore grey trouser suits — a colour that matched Clark’s demeanour — over a figure that was devoid of any womanly curves. And when she spoke, her Minnesotan accent was buried beneath a career shaped by international travel and diplomatic service.

  ‘From a military perspective we’ve got Iraq under the microscope,’ Clark told them. ‘Global Hawks are providing aerial reconnaissance twenty-four-seven, and right now the Iraqis are living under an invisible dome of surveillance. We also have a JSOC element embedded with the Fifth Fleet in the Gulf, ready to deploy if we need them.’

  ‘Every intelligence asset we have over there is working the problem,’ Buchanan added, ‘but without a detailed brief I doubt they’ll make much progress.’

  ‘If it were me, I would’ve got Nunez out that same day,’ Schultz told the room. ‘My opinion? He’s being held elsewhere, the Middle East, possibly Europe or North Africa.’

  ‘What about here?’ Mulholland speculated. ‘Maybe they put him on a boat, shipped him across the pond. It’s possible, right?’

  Coffman glanced at her Chief of Staff. She could see the uncertainty in his face, the flicker of fear in his eyes. Despite his assurances, Coffman believed Erik was still troubled by the event. After all, he’d witnessed the horror
in real time.

  Across the table, Homeland Security chief Diane Grady waved Erik’s concern away. ‘Highly unlikely. Port of entry checks are very robust.’

  ‘Would you stake your career on it?’ Schultz countered. ‘Last time I looked, our southern border is still leaking like a tin roof in a monsoon.’ Schultz turned to the President. ‘As this asshole in the video said, they’re prepared for the End Times. They’re ready to pull the trigger, Madam President, and the clock is ticking.’

  ‘Then we’d better start preparations. At the very least we need a plan in place, to give the impression that we’re cooperating with their demands. A plan that’ll buy us time to continue the hunt for Nunez.’

  ‘Do they even need Nunez?’ Mulholland asked the room. ‘You heard the man; Nunez’s body fluids will find their way into the human food chain. They could take a syringe filled with Nunez’s blood and inject it into food, like a coffee pot in a diner somewhere. People will still get infected, right?’

  Coffman looked at the faces around the table and saw them all imagining that very thing. No one answered the question.

  ‘What happens when we find them? Do we have a plan?’ Grady asked.

  ‘Depends where they are,’ Buchanan answered, ‘but we’ll need a team on point, preferably from CIA’s Special Operations Group. SOCOM can provide additional support and logistics. That okay with you, Drew?’

  Clark nodded. ‘Absolutely. Anything you need.’

  ‘Set it up,’ Coffman ordered.

  They debated the subject for another thirty minutes before the President called a halt to the meeting. When the door finally closed, only Coffman, Mulholland, Baranski, Schultz and Clark remained.

  ‘We have three months,’ Coffman reiterated, ‘or witness a pandemic the like of which we’ve never seen before.’

  ‘Unless we find the bastards first,’ Schultz growled. ‘Ma’am, you’ve just ordered the biggest and most intrusive surveillance operation the world has ever seen. Finding these GLF assholes is the priority now. It’s just a matter of time.’