Arisen : Genesis (12 page)

Zack heard another cry, not the woman’s this time. And then the front door of the safehouse banged open, Maximum Bob and Dugan flowing out of it, walking with their rifles to their shoulders, spreading out to either side. At the noise, the woman turned toward them. And Zack could see two things now. One, the woman was very young. Two, the thing she was carrying was a baby – the source of the other cry.

Padding smoothly toward the pursuing mob, Bob shouted in that commanding, booming voice of his. He spoke in English and Somali. “Stop!
Kuacha
! Stop, or I will shoot you!
Kuacha, au mimi risasi wewe
!” At the same time, Dugan was circling around, trying to get to the woman. One of the sick people lurched at the two of them. “Back off, man!” Dugan barked, looking unamused and not all that interested in whatever this guy’s problem was. When the man kept coming, Dugan struck him in the face with the barrel of his rifle. It knocked him back, but he straightened up immediately, unaffected, and came at them again. Dugan put his boot sole in the man’s chest and gave him a mighty kick, sending him sprawling over backward.

But he got up again and advanced.

This was all too much for Zack to watch. “Dugan!” he yelled down to the street. “Bob! Do
not
get close to those people! I’m fucking serious. Stay clear. Get out of there.”

As Dugan put his arm around the young woman’s shoulder, another of the infected lunged for him. Zack could sense Bob tense up before making the decision. But it only took an instant. He shot him four times between the shoulder blades, in the center of mass.

The guy didn’t fall. He jerked but kept on coming.

Up top, Zack startled at this. But he knew 5.56 rounds were tiny and high-velocity and sometimes went right through people. If somebody were hopped up, and the shots missed his vital organs, he might not even know he was shot.

Though it was unlike Bob to miss vital organs.

“
Dugan…!
” Bob shouted, and Dugan spun around as the shot man was almost on him. As he whirled, he pulled his .45 from its drop-leg holster and put two double-taps in the man’s chest. The force of the heavier rounds knocked him back, but he came up again. From the other side, Bob took careful aim and now fired eight rounds into his head. Finally, the man collapsed.

But the other infected were upon them.

Out of nowhere, surprising everyone, four Somali men with AKs came skidding around the corner, and opened up. Dugan pulled the young woman to the ground, shielding her and the baby with his body. Bob hit the dirt. The Somalis kept firing, until they had cut the sick people to ribbons. They lay in ungainly piles of meat, draining fluids. Bob sprang to his feet again, his rifle trained on the Somalis. The one in the lead, older and with gray hair, raised both his hands up and out, one of them pointing his AK at the sky. He approached Bob slowly, while the other three helped the girl up from under Dugan. They spoke rapidly to her, and pulled her away.

The leader got within a couple of feet of Bob, who was still aiming at him. He leaned in and said, “
Una risasi yao KATIKA KICHWA
.” Bob screwed up his face, and shook his head in incomprehension. His Somali was limited mainly to life-or-death commands and ordering food at restaurants. The man took a breath, and spoke slowly, in English now. “You have to shoot them
in the head
.” He nodded once to see if the American understood.

With that, the four Somali men, arms around the young woman and baby, retreated around the corner, and disappeared from sight.

Zack stood frozen with his head sticking out the window, keenly wanting to unsee what he had just seen.

But then he saw something else – more figures shambling down the street, but from the opposite direction. And many more of them this time.

He screamed at Dugan and Bob to get the fuck back inside.

* * *

By the time Zack hit the TOC, he could hear them clomping up the stairs. As they passed the landing, Zack said over his shoulder: “Dugan. Your gun barrel, and your boot. Disinfectant. Now.”

“Check,” Dugan said, turning down toward the bathroom.

Zack was hailing Langley to deliver a supplemental, when another line went. He answered it. It was Creech AFB. The UAV people.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Yeah, we’ve got an MQ-1 Predator we put up in your airspace about ninety mikes ago. We started having control problems – mainly delayed control response. We think it’s something with local radio traffic there, on adjacent bandwidths.”

“What’s happening with local radio traffic?” Zack looked at his bank of radios, and made a mental note to scan around, just as soon as they weren’t being overrun by rabid plague victims.

“Don’t you know? It’s going batshit. Common operational frequencies are jammed. Too much yak, not enough spectrum. Anyway, we were worried about our asset, so we transferred tactical control to Lemonnier. We figured they’re 9,500 miles closer, so the delay wouldn’t be as bad.”

“Copy that.”

“However, we just lost contact with them. For a little while, NO ONE was flying this bird. We’ve transferred control back to us – but the delay’s worse than ever. We’re operationally ineffective.”

“Then why don’t you just land it?”

“Because, by all accounts, the shit is coming down in HOE, and we’ve got about a hundred queued requests for drone coverage. So we were wondering – can you try flying this thing from there?”

Zack was thinking that he emphatically did not have time for this kind of shit, and had about a hundred other things to do, and was about to say so. But then it occurred to him that having his own drone to task would be a pretty dandy thing. For starters, he could more efficiently find out what the hell was going on in his own AO.

He moved over to the portable GCS unit, made the control connection, and tried to remember how these things worked. It had been a while. He managed to put it on a heading for their grid coords there at the safehouse. As it flew in over Hargeisa from the northwest, Zack panned and zoomed the camera to get a sense of the streets. The feed must have been dodgy, because from a distance, the streets seemed to be… wiggling.

He zoomed in tighter.

Reluctantly, he began to understand what he was actually seeing. The streets of the densely populated northeastern neighborhood of Wadada Xero were filled up like Mardi Gras. There were hundreds of bodies, maybe thousands, thronging the roads.

And that spot was only about a mile and a half away from them.

Alamo

Zack put the UAV into a wide racetrack pattern overhead, and was still staring disbelieving at the screen, his face slack, when he realized Dugan was sitting behind him. The SEAL was backward in a chair, his arms on its back, waiting for Zack to notice him. SEALs definitely had the ability to sneak up on you, and they still sometimes did.

“You look like a dog staring at a ceiling fan,” Dugan said.

“Sorry,” Zack said, snapping back to the room. “Look at this.”

He showed Dugan the heaving throngs of the diseased on the streets exactly one district over.

Dugan whistled. “How close is that?”

“About 2,400 meters.” Zack paused. “What’s your recommendation?”

Dugan looked thoughtful. “You mean stay or go, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let’s review our status. The whole town’s in chaos. There are sick people roaming the streets, attacking healthy people, and presumably infecting them. Everybody who’s not sick and delirious has got a gun – and is shooting the place to shit. Sound about right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. You should start by getting on the blower and trying to line us up some support – either immediately, or at least on call. And we definitely need to get that State guy out of here and to a medical facility. But, otherwise, for now, I say we stay put. Our defenses, the physical structure, are sound. I don’t think the sick will be able to get inside. They’re too fucked up. And, as for the armed survivors, unless they’re looking for shelter or resources, and are bent on taking them by force, I don’t think they can either.”

“Okay. If that’s your call.”

“The safest place for us right now is here. That may change. But we’ve got supplies for two months. We just Alamo up.”

With this, all the lights in the TOC blacked out for one second, then slowly came up again. The sound of an engine started in the background.

“And there goes the power,” Zack said.

“And here comes the diesel generator,” Dugan said. “That’s exactly why we’ve got it.” This was not their first blackout or brownout.

None of the computers or other electronics went down, as they were all on a local uninterruptible power supply with two hours’ capacity. That would now be recharged by the rumbling generator. Depending on how much they ran it, they had fuel for weeks.

Dugan shrugged. “Anyway, this might end up being what they call a self-cleaning oven. Go away for a few days, or hide out, and the sick people and the armed people might kill each other off. And, if they don’t, it’s still the problem of the Somali police and army. Failing that, the UN.”

Zack tapped a stylus on the UAV control console. He pinned Dugan with his eye. He said, “I don’t think this is your standard-issue civil unrest. Or your run-of-the-mill epidemic.”

Dugan held his gaze. “You think this is really the shit coming down, don’t you? The big one.”

Zack didn’t answer. He just nudged the joystick on the PlayStation controller, zooming the camera view. The heaving mob in the street was heading their way. He looked back up at Dugan. And he paused again before he spoke.

“What the hell was that out there?”

Dugan’s handsome, angular face didn’t betray any emotion. “What? You mean the guys outside we shot who didn’t die?”

“Yeah.”

“I suppose that is a cause of some concern.”

Zack slit his eyes, and parted his lips. “I heard what that Somali man said. He said you have to shoot them in the head. What the fuck does that mean?”

Dugan paused fractionally. “That we’re fighting zombies?”

“Not funny, man.”

But then he noticed that Dugan wasn’t laughing.

* * *

After a brief staring contest, Dugan went back upstairs, and Zack got on the horn. And that’s when he understood this was really happening. He spent a half an hour trying to drum up a medevac bird for the State guy, or any other kind of bird, just to fly him the hell out of there. There was nothing going.

Then he started looking for a QRF to come in and help defend the safehouse – maybe a platoon of FAST marines, a squad of 75th Rangers, helo extraction for his team, armed drones to cover them, Apaches, SAD shooters, security contractors, anything. He called Langley, State, JSOC, USSOCOM. Everyone with assets in the region was already engaged, or not even answering the goddamned phone. The shit was clearly, totally coming down everywhere. All across HOA. And, on top of it, the drone jockeys were right – comms were starting to get seriously overloaded.

Zack took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. He was still alone in the TOC, Baxter still upstairs helping with overwatch. The noise of shooting out in the streets was still penetrating the walls – plus getting thicker, and coming closer. Zack shuddered. The whole building was starting to feel like it was pressing in on him. As if it wasn’t so much a sanctuary as a trap. Like he was just sitting there, waiting to die.

He stopped what he was doing and used biofeedback techniques to try and get his breathing under control. He tried to remember that they had two heavily armed professional badasses in there with them, who were totally committed to protecting the team. He also tried not to think of Benghazi – of that 400-strong militia attacking and burning the consulate, and a fucking
U.S. Ambassador
dying of smoke inhalation trapped in his “safe room.” Or of those two other professional badasses who had died trying to prevent that from happening.

He cast his eye over to the UAV GCS. The bird was still in its autopilot racetrack pattern. Zack had been prepared to either field requests for the UAV to some of these engagements around the region, or else to beg out of the duty. But no one contacted him. Not a soul. Maybe nobody knew he had the thing. Or else it was wedged comms.

Before he’d really noticed it, because of its gradual approach, the sound of shooting had closed to right outside the building. There was some kind of street battle going on right on their doorstep. Zack was already thinking about running upstairs when somebody up there shouted for him. He doublechecked the drone then ran up the steps. When he got to the top, Bob handed him an M4 rifle.

And Zack saw that Baxter already had one.

“Get your vest on,” Bob said.

Zack could hear the firing more clearly now through the open upstairs windows. He could hear stray rounds snapping by outside, others thwacking into the surface of the building. Dashing back downstairs for his body armor, he made a mental note to keep low and stay away from the windows. As he ran back up, something exploded – something close. It knocked him to his knees in the narrow stairwell, and he could smell smoke and something burning. He ran up the last few steps.

Dugan, Bob, and Baxter were hunkering down by three of the four window holes. They were each pressed up against the towering stacks of ISUs, the plastic crates that covered the walls everywhere but the windows themselves. Dugan got up and came over to Zack.

“What do I do?” Zack said, trying to master himself.

Dugan nodded. They had to shout now over the noise of the battle outside. “We’ve got foot mobiles on the street below, in company strength, with a couple of technicals. Crew-served weapons in back. Looks like local militia. They’re fighting a big tide of the sick people. We’re trying to stay out of the whole damned thing, hoping maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

“Will they?”

“I think they’re pro-government militia – though that might not matter much at this point. Right now they’re not shooting at us. But it’s the collateral damage I’m worried about. The wild small-arms fire is no problem. But that was an RPG that just smacked into our building. If that keeps up, it could degrade the structure. Or, much worse, set it on fire. Then we’ll be McFucked with Cheese. And we have to keep that from happening. Bob is selectively engaging the rocket men, as well as the technicals, as they become a threat. But it’s a total rat fuck. Take the other window. Keep your head down, but keep an eye out. Use your own judgment. You decide somebody’s a threat, you take him out. Okay?”