Authors: Mainak Dhar
'Man, it was like being in a zombie movie.'
David turned off the radio, realizing that everyone was too shell-shocked and had problems enough of their own to be able to help him. He did radio in a situation report, asking for medics to come in and care for the wounded men at the base.
That was when he got the one sliver of hope he received that morning. Someone from on board the USS Kearsage, the command ship for the Special Operations forces in Afghanistan, spoke up.
'Soldier, everyone's in a world of pain, and I don't know how much we can do for you but we are sending choppers out to get folks like you to safety in Pakistan. Be there by Sunset.'
David noted down the co-ordinates. It was a good twenty mile hike. He could easily make it there by Sunset, but not knowing what to expect along the way, he took his time preparing. He stuffed his pack with MREs. Many new soldiers hated the Meals Ready to Eat packs, but David had learnt, if not to like them, then to accept them as inevitable. He took as many extra clips for his M4 assault rifle as he could, and then he set out for his journey to the extraction point.
At the best of times, this part of Afghanistan presented a bleak landscape, but today what made it infinitely worse was the presence of injured and bleeding people littered around the roads. Clearly the American bases had not been the only places to be attacked the previous night, and David shuddered as he wondered what was to come when the Sun set again. The Americans could at least try to quarantine the injured soldiers, but for these villagers, there was nothing to be done.
What was eerie was the total absence of the infected people who had gone on the rampage the previous night. They had seemingly disappeared though more than once David got a feeling that hidden eyes were watching him. Once, while passing an abandoned village, he took out his M4 and was about to go into a hut where he was sure someone was watching him. But then, remembering the events of the previous night, he decided discretion was the better part of valour and continued on his journey.
Even with the weight he has carrying, he reached the extraction zone by four in the evening. He radioed his position and then sat on a nearby perch, his weapon at the ready. At five, a pick-up truck rumbled into view. David's senses went into overdrive. The black turbaned men riding on the back, carrying AK-47s and RPGs could be nothing other than Taliban warriors on patrol. There must have been at least six of them, and David knew that sitting in the open, he would be a sitting duck. Even then, he was not going to go down without a fight. In less than a second, he had his gun's safety off and the M4 was tracking the cab of the truck. He was about to pull the trigger when the truck stopped less than fifty meters away, and he saw that the Taliban were making no move to attack him. One of them got down and looked at him. David put his rifle down when he realized that the Taliban were not looking to attack him. If anything, they looked terrified. The man looking at him simply pointed to the Sun and then they were on their way.
David realized that they were doing exactly what he was planning- to try and get to safety before the Sun set.
About fifteen minutes later, he heard a buzzing sound and looked up to see an OV-22 Osprey come into view. The tilt rotor craft could take off and land vertically like a helicopter, and then fly in level flight like an aircraft. The Osprey landed just a few meters away and David sprinted to it, feeling a huge wave of relief wash over him as he entered it. There was only one soldier inside the craft.
'Sargeant, didn't you get anybody else?'
The man looked at David, a haunted look in his eyes.
'None of the others were clean.'
The full extent of the catastrophe hit David as he asked why he was not being flown to the USS Kearsage. The soldier turned away before answering.
'Sir, ten infected men are on board. Last I heard the skipper was debating whether to kill them before Sunset. They have already authorized cruise missile strikes on bases where only infected men are left.'
David braced himself as the craft took off, wondering if things had indeed gotten so bad that they could be considering killing their own soldiers? The rest of the ride passed in total silence till they reached the Shamsi airbase in southern Pakistan. David had never been here before, but he knew it was the major staging ground for the US drone effort over Afghanistan. He could see soldiers milling around, as other choppers and Ospreys landed, bringing in evacuees like him. The Sun was now about to set, and he saw that many of the men and women around him looked scared. He wondered if he looked any different.
Shamsi had once been a private airbase where rich Arab sheiks used to come for their falconry. Over the last few years, it had been transformed into a state of the art facility from which hundreds of Predator strikes had been launched. Officially, the base did not exist. David was still standing near the flight line when he heard a sudden silence descend upon the base. He looked up to see what everyone else was seeing.
The Sun had just begun to set.
A soldier came up next to him, talking to nobody in particular.
'They say the base is clean, but who knows what's out there?'
Another soldier spoke up.
'We've got five Ospreys with Gatling guns and fixed base defences that could stop a battalion. I don't think we need to worry.'
Having been through what he had in the last two days, David was not so sure about that. How did you keep out attackers you could not kill?
Nothing seemed to happen for some time, but most of the soldiers were so much on edge that they refused to take their packs off. Most wandered about, carrying loaded weapons, waiting for what would be coming at them over their walls.
When the attack began, it was as unexpected as it was vicious. David, like everyone else, had expected hordes of zombie like creatures trying to come in on foot. Instead, a huge truck came rolling towards the base's main gate, being pushed by a horde behind it. The machine gun fire bounced off it, and it stopped just short of the gate when three anti-tank missiles hit it. As the truck exploded, David could hear no cheering. Everyone inside had just learnt a terrifying lesson- the infected were not just mindless hordes, they were learning, and adapting, even trying crude tactics. And it had just been two days since it had begun.
A commotion at the rear of the base had soldiers scrambling there. He heard someone screaming.
'There's got to be at least a thousand of them coming!'
David scrambled up a watch tower to get a better look, unslinging his rifle, and he saw a chilling sight. As far as the eye could see, there were infected men and women trying to enter the base. The soldiers were unloading bullets into them as fast as they could, but they would get hit, fall and then get back up. Several of them got tangled in the barbed wire fence, but the others climbed over them. David took aim, seeing a now familiar black-turbaned head, with a yellowed face below. He squeezed one round, seeing one attacker fall. To his surprise, this one did not get back up. Did head shots kill them? Did all those zombie movies actually get that one right? He shook his head sadly as a minute later, the man, if that was what the creature could be considered anymore, got up and rejoined his friends in storming the base. Head shots didn't kill, but it did put them down for some time. David wondered if he'd stay alive long enough to put that knowledge to any use. The thought that he could turn into a mindless creature like those milling around in front of him was too horrible to even contemplate.
As the attackers began swarming through the base, David saw some soldiers turn their weapons on themselves, preferring to die instead of being turned into the monsters that now teemed around them. David considered the idea, but then Rose's face came before his eyes. He had to live. He had to get out.
One of the Ospreys had its rotors on, a young pilot standing nearby, too terrified to do anything. David ran to him.
'Son, can you fly this?'
The pilot nodded.
'Then let's get out of here!'
The man just looked at him blankly.
'But I haven't got my flight orders yet.'
David realized he was in shock, so he grabbed him by the shoulders hard and shook him.
'Kid, see those monsters coming? They'll rip your neck out in a second. Let's get out while we can.'
He climbed into the Osprey's cockpit as the pilot prepared for takeoff. The base was now teeming with the infected, and he could see fallen soldiers everywhere. He now also knew that the next day, as soon as the Sun set, these soldiers would join the hordes who had attacked them. As they flew by, he saw the roads filled with mobs of the infected, moving in their slightly stiff gait.
He looked straight ahead, and felt something wet on his face. He checked to see if he was bleeding, and saw that without realizing it, he had been crying.
'Kid, where do we go?'
The pilot now seemed to be more in control, but his hands still shook as he checked the map.
'Sir, I'd go to India. It may not have spread there so fast.'
A few minutes of flying later, David asked him which city they were flying over. The pilot looked at him with tired eyes.
'Does it matter? It's all Zombiestan down there.'
***
THREE
Hina saw that the Sun was about to set and then drew the curtains close. She had gone to college in the morning but had found it almost deserted. The Principal, who lived just off the campus, had looked at her as if she were out of her mind.
'Ms. Rahman, I would go home and be with my family if I were you.'
And so she had come home, but she had nobody or nothing to come home to. She realized that if her family had still been with her, she would have reacted very differently. She could understand why her colleagues were in a state of panic, because they were terrified about losing people or things precious to them in the chaos that threatened to engulf them when the Sun set. Hina had nothing or nobody to lose. And certainly she had nowhere else to run to. She had lived in this house for the last thirty years, and could not imagine going anywhere else. Her children were still not picking up their phones, and while she hoped that they were fine, she realized with a heavy heart that even when things had been normal, they had always been too busy to take calls from their forgotten old mother back home.
So she sat down in front of the one thing that was precious to her- her writing. The shelf in front of her study desk was lined with her books, and as she booted up her laptop, she wondered when people would read books again. Would there be a time in the future when people would write books about the time humanity had gone crazy under the influence of some mysterious plague and nearly destroyed itself? She certainly hoped so. It would be such a waste if nobody read books again.
She began typing, but found that she just could not concentrate with the sounds of panic coming from outside. The sound of people trying to get home; of people honking their car horns and of people shouting at others to get out of their way. As soon as the Sun set, she suddenly felt an ominous silence descend. It was as if some giant unseen hand had just pressed the `mute' button on the world. Hina peeked out through the curtains and saw that everyone on the street had stopped to look at the setting Sun.
Then it began.
The first sign of the chaos that was to come was the sound of guns being fired. There was a police station nearby and she figured the cops were trying to keep things under control. Then she heard screaming, and then the guns stopped firing. She had opened a new bottle of wine and finished her glass in a long swallow, her heart hammering as she wondered what would come next. People on the road were running now, and several were screaming. There were desperate cries for help outside her home, and Hina wanted to do something to help. But what could a frail, old woman possibly do?
Her home was an old colonial style house with two floors that would in today's market cost a fortune to buy. Her study was on the second floor, and she looked out the window to witness a scene that would forever be etched in her mind. There was a mob of people; no creatures would be a more appropriate description, transformed by the infection to mindless wild animals. They all seemed to be wearing black turbans, men and women alike, and with their tattered clothes, yellow skin and bloodied bodies, looked nothing like the people they must have been just a day ago. They wandered through the street in their stiff, loping gait and every time they saw anyone, they would attack like a pack of wild animals, surrounding their prey and scratching and biting till they brought them down. Hina saw one or two young men try and fight back, and she watched in horror as they were killed, their necks broken by their crazed attackers.
She watched a young girl, perhaps no more than fifteen, who was running from one house to another, pleading with the occupants to let her in, to give her some refuge. But there was no safety anywhere today. The creatures had entered several homes along the road and the screams coming from inside them told Hina what the fate of their occupants would have been. The young girl was now directly below Hina's house, and while Hina had turned off all the lights in her home, she saw her peeking out the parted curtains.
`Please let me in. Please help me.'
Hina looked straight at the girl's eyes and then saw four of the creatures moving towards her. Hina could have gone down and let the girl in, but then the creatures would no doubt see her. She stayed rooted where she was, paralyzed by fear, as the girl tried to run, only to be encircled and then brought down by several of her attackers. Crying at her weakness and ashamed at having done nothing to help, Hina hid under her study table, praying that they would think there was nobody home. When the sounds of the attack outside abated after about five minutes, Hina worked up the courage to part the curtains and look down. The girl was lying there, curled in a fetal position, blood all around her. Suddenly, her body twitched and spasmed and then after a sudden, violent jerk, lay still again. Then the girl suddenly sat upright and looked at Hina. Her face was yellowed and bloodied, and her eyes narrowed in hate. She scrambled around herself, as if looking for something, and then tore off a portion of her black skirt to tie around her head. Hina's heart was pounding. Everyone had said that the infection took one day to transform its victims. It seemed that the effects were now taking hold of their victims in ten minutes or less, transforming healthy, decent people into bloodthirsty, crazed killers. No wonder so many countries had gone under so fast. The girl pointed straight at Hina and emitted a shrill, ear-piercing scream. Several of the other creatures started to come towards her. Hina knew that she was trapped and with no way out.