The Virophage Chronicles (Book 1): Dead Hemisphere

by Landeck, R. B.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ a familiar voice echoed somewhere in the recesses of his mind.

  He could hear Julie calming him down, as she had always done when the noise and smell of combat, vivid memories of days gone by, once again threatened to unhinge him and turn him into the man she had never seen, never would have wanted to see. He had almost lost it a few times after his last return. They had been small things, minuscule and meaningless, which hat set him off, and he would never forget the look of fear and terror in his little daughter’s eyes as he turned from the dad she knew into a thing of pure fury, of ultimate rage. And each time Julie had placed her hand on his shoulder, reached right through the red haze of violence threatening to consume him, the calmness of her touch wrapping around him like a soothing blanket, extinguishing the flames and the madness that but a split-second earlier had burned in his eyes.

  Tom took a deep breath and unclenched his fists. He had to hold it together. Not for himself, not for these people around him, but for the two most precious things in his life and for their very lives which, from what had become evident, hung precariously in the balance.

  To do this, he would now have to become someone he himself barely wanted to remember and whom he had tried to leave behind. Quitting the forces, moving to Africa, doing good in the name of humanity.

  He would have to forego all his ambitions and dig deep, deep into the skill sets that had been imparted on him in years of gruelling training and missions many of his men had paid the ultimate price to complete. He would have to go back across a bridge he had tried hard to burn.

  He exhaled and looked around at the expectation written across the faces around him. He smiled and tapped Papillon on the shoulder.

  “Let’s give ‘em hell.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “Long sleeves next time?” Papillon glanced over at Faith, who was busy dressing scorch marks on Amadou’s forearm.

  “I’d say that’s a very good idea, wouldn’t you?” She smiled and put the finishing touches on the bandage.

  “It was the Frenchman’s driving that did it,” Amadou winced and cast a look of indignation at the large man looking down on him.

  “Gunny got a boo-boo?” Papillon teased, but Amadou wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of reacting.

  “Drive like that again, and we will see who ends up with a ‘boo-boo,’” he mumbled facetiously yet quiet enough not to upset the giant.

  Faith shook her head and looked at the two: “Ok, you, ‘mon grand,’ stop teasing and drive straight. And you, ‘ma poule,’ stop sobbing and wear long sleeves as he said. Casings are as hot as the bullets they fire. You should count yourself lucky you are at the shooting end of this gun and still alive in this whole crazy thing!”

  “Is this how you define luck?” Amadou glanced at her with a sadness she hadn’t seen in him before.

  “She didn’t mean anything by it, Amadou,” Tom interjected, having finished his 360-degree recce on the roof of the carrier.

  Their approach to Juba had not been an easy one, but then again, few things still seemed easy, if they ever had been at all in South Sudan. Checkpoints, fortified positions, and small barracks dotted about in the tall, dry grass had all been deserted by the living and instead reoccupied by a new kind of army; a united front that knew no politics, no enemies and no chain of command. There was no more in-fighting between factions, raids on each other’s installations, firefights, or territorial claims. This was a different kind of army. The dead only had a singular agenda, one that couldn’t have cared less about the rank, flag, or background of the man next to them. They were driven only by hunger and, like missiles guided only by an insatiable lust for warm flesh, the living were their only target.

  It was at one stage that the group had again found themselves surrounded by the better part of an entire battalion of dead soldiers wearing a virtual rainbow of insignia, all vying for pole position in their pursuit of the beacon that was the white APC.

  The crowd had become so thick that Papillon had to reduce speed to a virtual crawl to keep the vehicle from rolling as he pushed on, punishing the screaming clutch and crushing the dead troops under the vehicle's unforgiving wheels. But it wasn’t the threat of their sheer numbers that caused concern, but rather that many were still carrying their often locked and loaded weapons.

  As their excitement reached fever pitch, the soldiers started pounding the APC’s exterior with their rotting hands or whatever was left at the end of their arms. At first, Tom had thought they had been fired upon by living troops, but it was when more and more random shots went off that he realized it was the dead pulling the trigger.

  Within minutes they had found themselves under small arms fire the likes he had never seen or heard before. The bullets whizzed and pinged and cracked all around them, bouncing off the APC’s armour and ricocheting into the crowd. In the end, all they could do was sit tight and watch as the dead more or less shot either themselves or their decaying comrades. That was until Papillon raised his hand and pointed somewhere up ahead, above the heads of the battalion-strength contingent already surrounding them. It took a moment to register with Tom and Amadou what Papillon was on about, but soon enough, their eyes widened.

  Less than a couple of football fields away, off to the side, two lone figures staggered along, attracted by the commotion around the vehicle. Ordinarily, two more dead would not have made much of a difference, but going by what they saw, these two did. On their shoulder, each one of the two lumbering corpses carried a Russian-made RPG-7, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, each fully loaded, ready to be deployed at the pull of a trigger.

  Tom and Amadou scrambled into action. Small arms fire was one thing, and the APC’s thick steel chassis had no issue deflecting anything up to and including assault rifles, even at close range. An RPG’s purpose and design, however, was to penetrate the very kind of heavy armour they were surrounded by. The carrier, thus, was hardly a match for its power.

  “You don’t think…?” Papillon looked at them with a furrowed brow.

  “It doesn’t matter what I think,” Tom’s shot back, “if they fire one of these things at us by accident, it’s good night, Irene!”

  Without having to hear Tom’s next instruction, Amadou nodded and flung open the top hatch. With the agility of a squirrel, he jumped onto the roof and readied the .50cal.

  “Who is Irene?” Papillon started to ask, but his words were drowned out by the noise of the top gun, as Amadou unleashed its fury upon the corpses.

  Within seconds, a dark red mist filled the air in front of them. Bodies exploded as the large calibre ripped through the putrid mass, covering the windscreen with a sludge of coagulated blood and mangled body parts. Round after round tore through dead flesh, rupturing festering insides and disintegrating corpses at a staggering rate.

  “We need to move!” Tom shouted into Papillon’s ear.

  Amadou’s volley of Armageddon hadn’t quite managed to take out the two principal threats up ahead, who instead had disappeared from sight, as had everything else in a storm of tissue and blood. He didn’t have to give his instructions twice. With Gautier tossed about in the back while trying to cover his grandson’s ears, Faith was using all her might to keep David from following suit. Papillon pushed the pedal to the floor. The vehicle leaped over the first two rows of corpses clasping at its nose.

  “Whoaa, Whoaaa,” Amadou shouted from topside as he clung to the weapon for dear life.

  Wildly swinging from side to side, he was no longer able to aim, and the .50cal’s swivelling barrel now spat its deadly rain of searing hot metal into random directions. The APC crept forward, and the ride instantly became smoother as the heavy machine, row by row, crushed the corpses in front of it.

  Up top Amadou tried to steady the gun, but now encountered a problem of a different kind. Bullets from multiple AK’s started zipping and zinging around him as those undead soldiers still holding rifles waved around their arms, their twitching finger
s pulling a multitude of triggers and unleashing erratic volley after volley of indiscriminate fire. Tom and Papillon instinctively ducked several times as the plinking sound of shots bouncing off the armoured windscreen reverberated through the cabin.

  “Incoming!” Amadou’s panicked voice shrieked over the staccato of the gunfire and the wails of the remaining dead.

  Tom looked up just in time to see the launching flash and the tell-tale blue-grey smoke rising from one of the RPG’s. Its propulsion system fired instantly, sending the projectile hurtling towards them. They heard its tell-tale whoosh, followed by an almighty explosion. Momentarily everything around them went black. The three survivors in the back screamed and dropped to the ground. Papillon and Tom ducked behind the dashboard and shielded their eyes.

  “Holy shit!” came Amadou’s excited voice from somewhere in the dark above them, accompanied by wet thumps, like meat slapping onto a butcher’s block.

  “Damn…Ouch…Shit…!” Amadou swore, dropping himself back down onto the cabin floor, before rolling around, laughing hysterically.

  “What the hell happened?” Tom took a nervous glance over the passenger seat’s backrest, watching Amadou in bewilderment.

  The others, too, gathered around him in the dark red glow of the now sludge-covered windscreen. It took a few seconds for him to compose himself, but at last, he sat up and inspected his arms and legs.

  Pieces of intestine were draped all over him like tinsel and chunks of dead flesh clung to his blood-soaked clothes and hair. His face, barely recognizable, was covered in thick coagulated goo, the white of his eyes as wide as saucers and his wide grin of immaculate white teeth giving him a ghostly appearance.

  “You hear that?” Amadou raised his index finger like a school teacher, strips of flesh dangling from his forearm.

  He was right. The assault on their senses, the wailing, and moaning of the dead, the gunfire, and the loud booms of their own .50cal had all ceased. Instead, all that remained was a faint campfire-like crackle from outside, along with the sound of their own breathing.

  “Exactly. Nothing!” Amadou leaned back against one of the roll-bars and grinned.

  Tom and Papillon looked at the group and then at each other.

  “Go topside and check it out,” Amadou waved them on, still grinning mischievously.

  Tom was up first, followed by the big Frenchman, who, as usual, struggled to squeeze himself through the hatch. Slipping on the gore-covered roof, they steadied themselves against the gun mount.

  All around them, lumps of flesh and body parts, whole or bits, lay scattered about as if dropped from a great height. The air in front of the vehicle had started to clear, and instead of the red mist, it was now smoke rising from charred corpses dotted about that filled it, invading their nostrils with the sickly sweet smell of burning flesh.

  Tom leaned forward. Right in front of the APC’s nose, the carnage was indescribable. Fanning outward from a small ground zero-like crater, rows of exploded and fallen bodies extended in a semi-circle at least 50 yards wide, with large chunks of the dead flung even further afield. The blast from the RPG had disintegrated the corpses closest to its impact and torn apart those further away. There were upper halves still crawling, dragging what was left of their insides behind them, while others had instantaneously combusted in the explosion. Now their smouldering carcasses shuffled about until the flames consumed their heads and boiled their brains, sending the rest of their burning cadavers to the ground. The small crater itself had become a veritable pond of human spare parts. A ubiquitous dark red sludge covered every inch and thing in the immediate area, with coagulated blood from the corpses trickling in and gradually filling the pit.

  “Looks like the dead RPG guys did us a favour,” Papillon shrugged lackadaisically.

  “I thought we were gone for sure,” Tom flicked his tongue, realizing he had been standing there with his mouth open.

  Not daring to jump down into the slime and risk getting bit by one of the crawlers still active below, they began checking over the vehicle from their vantage point.

  “We’re going to have to clean this thing before all this crap starts stinking up the place.” Tom looked across the roof and nose of the APC, all covered in human remains.

  After a brief discussion, though, they decided cleaning off the majority of the mess would have to wait. Tom didn’t like it, but they were short on water and too close to the capital to stop now.

  Amadou and Papillon jumped out the back, careful to avoid any crawlers. They scurried about, gathering up what ammunition and weapons remained intact. Dead hands reached for their legs, and corpses rolled over as they unslung AKs from torsos. The charred skull of a soldier, nothing left below his shoulders, still snapped blindly as it sensed their presence. Hands still jerked, squeezing triggers of now-empty weapons, as if their owners were angry at being fleeced by two living people moving among them.

  Once or twice Amadou had to side-step a wriggling cadaver still carrying a grenade or two, its twitching fingers dangerously close to the pin. Papillon, less nimble on account of his size, took to stomping across the dead with heavy steps, his boots obliterating whatever they came in contact with.

  He felt no pity for the creatures and much less for these troops. He had been a peacekeeper on several missions around the world and what he had seen in the Congo and the Sudan had left an indelible mark. Opening fire to save civilians from the kind of war crimes he now would give anything to have wiped from his memory, he had flaunted the rules of engagement several times. It had only been for the fact that his unit held their code above anybody else’s that he hadn’t ended up in a French court. He smiled as the heel of his boot crushed another skull beneath it. He could see justice in what had happened to these soldiers. They had lost their humanity long before they had lost their lives. They hardly even deserved the eternal peace he now gave them.

  Meanwhile, Tom poured what little water they could spare down the windscreen and then engaged the wipers, clearing off enough of the blood to restore at least a minimum of visibility.

  “It’s not pretty, but it will have to do.”

  Papillon and Amadou returned with their sizable haul, Tom turned the ignition, and the trusty machine shuddered to life as if trying to shake off its new ‘paint job’.

  Meanwhile, Faith and Gautier had managed to find some spare clothes for Amadou, who was nursing burns caused by the rain of super-heated shells from the top gun.

  “Sorry mate, a shower will have to wait, though.” Tom patted him on the back. “God knows you need and deserve one.”

  The remaining 30 miles, by comparison, turned out rather uneventful and by the time they reached Juba, the cabin once again resembled some sort of order thanks to Faith, Gautier and even David, all grateful for the protection by the men and eager to do their bit as part of the team.

  As the carrier glided along the tarmac road towards the capital, Tom had looked around their crew and even felt a certain pride at how, despite their individual quirks and backgrounds, they had grown into something of a unit, perhaps a family even, although thinking of Papillon as a big brother or Amadou as a crazy uncle was still both hard to fathom and a little scary to say the least. He grinned and leaned over the big guy’s shoulder, looking over the White Nile at the silhouette of buildings and warehouses in the distance.

  “That’s our turn-off,” Papillon nodded.

  “About time,” Tom replied. He was running out of patience.

  CHAPTER 23

  A thousand miles away, an operator pushed back in his chair as the whiteout of the RPG explosion lit up the monitor array in front of him. Quickly readjusting his grip on the joystick control, he zoomed in on the carnage.

  “What did you do?” The CO’s voice barked through the clunky aviator headphones.

  “Wasn’t us, Sir. Something else hit them.” The operator shrugged, leaning in close towards the enormous LED display, much of the detail still pixelated and obscured by smok
e.

  Annoyed, he checked the signal and adjusted the view.

  The hum of air conditioners struggling against the relentless heat of the Grand Bara desert filled the room.

  ‘Djibouti is nice this time of year,’ his CO had said, and he had been naïve enough to believe it. Now, cooped up in a sweatbox of cables and screens, working up to 16 hours a day, he might as well have been deployed on Mars.

  “Why don’t we just blow them off the face of the planet and be done with it, Sir?”

  It was a valid question. They had been monitoring the memory stick’s location for days without so much as a mission brief beyond ‘track and trace’; not normally part of their unit’s remit, at least not for this long. He had signed up for the Air Force, not UPS. He smirked and playfully tapped the drone’s weapon controls with his index finger. One twitch and he could go back to his day job.

  “Don’t overthink it, Lieutenant. We’re helping out these Eupharm boys, nothing more, nothing less. God knows, thanks to their screw-up, we have bigger and better targets to fry. Let’em sort out their own shit for once.” The CO had to hold himself back from ranting.

  He had seen this thing evolve from the moment Eupharm had realized its mistake, and WHO had covered up its own lack of capacity as usual. A public-private partnership to end Ebola was what the project had been called officially, but DOD had always had a finger in the pie. And why wouldn’t they? As far as he was concerned, getting their hands on a weapon like this, along with the cure, put them ahead of the curve for a long time to come. Not unimportant in a global race that was once again heating up. Cold War 2.0.

  If only they had let the military handle the whole show from day one though instead of the Pharma fat cats, things would have been okay. Now they were not only mopping up the Eupharm mess but were fighting an enemy unlike any other they or the rest of the world had ever faced before.