Arisen : Genesis (21 page)

Zack looked away, over at Baxter, who was scanning around them over the top of his rifle. Dugan nodded his assent, but persisted. He looked up and down the great wall that ringed the base. “How did they breach the perimeter?”

The MP blinked heavily. His eyes looked even cloudier now. “That’s an easy one… from the inside…”

Dugan said, “They had sick people in the hospital, and couldn’t contain them?”

The MP nodded. “Some in the hospital. Some in the barracks. Guys coming back in from engagements who seemed fine… As usual, it’s all the little crap that adds up into one big turd…”

Zack looked back at the dying man, and laughed in spite of himself. Then he saw something change on the MP’s face. His lips crawled away from his teeth, and his pallor seemed to grower whiter even as Zack watched. A hiss escaped his throat, and his chin fell on his chest. Two beats passed. Dugan reached out for the side of the man’s neck with two fingers…

“Dugan,” Zack said, “
bad idea…
”

With Dugan’s hand now two inches away, the MP came back to life – his head snapped upright, and his teeth literally snapped at Dugan’s hand. With razor-edge reflexes, Dugan pulled his hand away, as a shot rang out, and brought his other arm around, swinging the machete. The MP’s head landed in his lap – with a bullet hole in it. Neither Zack nor Baxter had been aware that Dugan even had the machete. And Baxter had fired, instantly, to protect Dugan.

Dugan looked up at him. “Good. You dialed it up instantly. Excellent throttle control. On the other hand, there was the noise…” Dugan looked up the road toward the base and the others followed his gaze: lurching figures, maybe a half-dozen, all in military uniform. Baxter sighted down on them, but held his fire.

Zack put his hand on Dugan’s shoulder. “Come on. We’re done here.” Dugan stood up, none too quickly from Zack’s point of view.

“
You’re
done here,” he said quietly, looking into Zack’s face. Zack squinted, his expression sagging all the way down to his waist. There were dull red splotches here and there on Dugan’s face and neck. And the faintest of a black spiderweb trace at his temples. Zack staggered backward two steps, bent over and grabbed his knees, the wind completely knocked out of him. After a beat, he looked up at the commando he had believed to be insuperable.

“How…?” he managed to get out. Flicking his eyes to the side, he saw that Baxter had his rifle not on Dugan, but not exactly off him either.

Dugan shrugged, then reached over and pulled up his left pants leg. Just above the lip of his boot there was an angry double wound, infected looking – and also looking a lot like a bite mark. “Back at that stopped bus. One of them hiding underneath. Grabbed me before I saw it.” He shrugged again.

Zack slowly straightened up. Behind Dugan, he could see that the (literal) army of the dead was only maybe a minute away.

“Keep driving north,” Dugan said. “Try to make it to Camp Doha in Qatar, or one of the friendly ports in UAE. There are ferry services to Yemen – but if by some miracle they’re running, they’ll probably be a worse horror show than anything on land. On the other hand, it’ll get you out of HOE. It’s your skin, and your call. Keep using the radios – conserve power, but hail on the emergency frequencies at regular intervals. Try to get extracted – if you stay by the Red Sea coast, you’ll have a shot at the Fifth Fleet carrier strike group or their expeditionary force. If it doesn’t happen, then just keep moving. Stay out of the cities. Stop only for gas and water. You siphon while Baxter pulls security. Ultimately, you can drive yourselves right off this godforsaken continent if you have to. Got it?”

Baxter nodded, while Zack just looked at him. Baxter struggled to speak. “What are you going to do…?”

Dugan smiled, then tossed his head over his shoulder, toward the base. “I’m gonna stay here. Find a place to hole up – just take it easy and wait for the cavalry. You know they’ll come eventually.”

Zack tried to speak, failed.

Dugan looked into his eyes, his own both clouding and somehow twinkling at the same time. “This is the best place to get treated, anyway. CDC or WHO will have some kind of vaccine or serum before long. And you can believe they’ll start distributing it from right here.”

Zack just nodded, trying to keep himself together.

Baxter gulped audibly, then said, “You watch yourself, brother. Stay alive.”

“Don’t worry about me. You watch your own asses. Oh, and if any women of my acquaintance come round looking for me… well, just tell them I love them.”

“What? All of them?”

Dugan flashed that grin of his. “Absolutely. Every last one.”

Baxter nodded, as did Zack, both holding back tears. Between them, they probably had about ten more words left in them. “Thank you,” Zack said. “Thanks for getting us this far. For… for driving through hell to keep us alive.”

Dugan smiled again. “Hey, if it doesn’t suck, we don’t do it.”

With that, he switched the machete to his left hand, hefted his rifle by the pistol grip, turned on his heel, took off at a trot, and laid into the crowd of the dead spilling out of the base. By then, Zack and Baxter were already turned around and heading for the Land Cruiser at a run. As they squealed the tires turning it around, they got one last image of the SEAL wheeling and pivoting in the near dark… covering their withdrawal…

Still protecting them, until the very end.

Stronghold

The road out through Djibouti was worse than the road in, probably owing to the population density being much higher there than in western Somalia. Zack drove the increasingly mud- and blood-spattered Land Cruiser up the N1, through what was now a bright morning, trying to escape the gravity well of dying Djibouti town – another population center and thus total death zone. The light meant they could see threats. But, at the same time, parts of them – floundering, weak, human parts – wished they could stop seeing it all.

It wasn’t the cars, this time – though the highway was as much a riot of wrecked and abandoned vehicles as the ones out of Hargeisa and Berbera. No, now it was the human wreckage. The virus had clearly reached some kind of catastrophic tipping point here.
Everyone
was sick, or dead, if that’s what it was. And they roamed the roads and fields and hills and beaches in ever-thicker throngs. Wherever Zack and Baxter came upon them, the two living men were instantly high-value party favors in a piñata party for the dead.

Baxter was alternately firing out the back windows, one side or the other, and retreating back inside when it was no longer safe to do so. He kept trying to decide when it was too dangerous to shoot – or too dangerous not to. And, as before, they had to keep moving. On two occasions they slowed enough for bloody and sore-ridden hands to smash feathery cracks in the windows. Zack had no doubt that these frenzied creatures would peel open the vehicle like a sardine tin if given a minute or two to do so.

It belatedly occurred to Zack that a zombie apocalypse was a lot like any other kind of pandemic… except that the already infected people
hunted you down
.

“
Zack…!
” Baxter called from the back. He didn’t know why he was calling out. They could each see the same situation for themselves. And they both knew their prospects for survival were fading by the minute. Zack scowled as he manually downshifted, spun the tires, the engine whining in protest. The tires slipped on the dusty pavement, and the whole frame shuddered at the inertial abuse.

This all looked easy with Dugan doing it
, Zack thought.
Then again, his tactical driving skills were a lot fresher than mine…

He felt the absence of the SEALs achingly – felt utterly naked and defenseless without them. Moreover, thoughts of them filled him with despair. If Maximum Bob and Dugan, Team 6 SEALs with thirty-five years of operational experience between them, and with their incomparable skills and resilience, couldn’t get out of this mess alive… what chance had a couple of pointy-headed and weakly constituted analysts in a thin-skinned SUV?

“I know, I know…” Zack said over his shoulder, downshifting and making another desperate U-turn.

And that’s when it hit him.

“Button up,” he said. Baxter pulled himself back inside and powered up the window, as Zack pulled another two sharp turns and turned them out of the worst thickness of the early morning’s swarming dead. But turning away from that meant… heading back toward Somalia.

Baxter could read the road signs as well as anyone.

“Uh…” said Baxter. “Didn’t we just lose half our team, and almost get killed ourselves, fighting our way out of there?”

“Yes. But that was when we thought there was somewhere to escape to. There isn’t. The whole world’s on fire. It’s all coming down.”

“We don’t know that for sure.”

Zack shook his head. “We know the region’s gone. And we’ll never get ourselves out of Africa. Not with things the way they are.”

“So then where are we going?”

“To the one place left in the entire Horn of Africa that might be left standing. And the one place where they can be counted on not to be weak or sentimental and let infected people inside the wire.”

“And where the heck’s that?”

Instead of answering, Zack just dug out his phone, powered it up (precious power!) and handed it back to Baxter. “I need you to log into the telecoms and asset geolocation server.”

Baxter grimaced. That wasn’t an interface really designed for the small screen, but it could be done. Baxter checked the signal – no cellular, one bar via satellite. He called up the app. “I need your Agency ID and password,” he said.

Zack was still alternately swerving, braking, and accelerating, but the ranks of ravening infected were beginning to thin. The border with Somalia now lay just ahead. As Zack drove, he read his credentials out loud – security hardly mattered now… “ID is two, one, tree, niner, eight, zero, X-ray, Oscar.”

“Got it. Read-back: 213980xo.”

“Correct. Password is four, lower-case Golf, upper-case Romeo, lower Golf, lower Victor, upper Juliet, lower X-ray, upper November, two, lower Charlie, upper Whiskey, one, lower Foxtrot, upper Sierra, lower India.”

“Got it. Read-back: 4gRgvJxN2cWlfRi. Now you want to tell me what I’m geolocating? And make it quick, you’re down to six percent battery…”

Zack paused to reflect on how being an Agency analyst was awesome for the memory. If only his had worked a little better, a little earlier, they wouldn’t now be driving half the length of Somalia, right back the way they came. But only if his hunch proved correct…

“My tablet PC,” he said, finally. “We’re finding my tablet. It should be listed on the My Assets menu…”

Baxter thumb-clicked. “Okay. But why? Where is it?”

Zack grinned. It had been that weird feeling of déjà vu, seeing the blood-splashed Humvee over on its side in that culvert. He knew he’d seen that tableau somewhere before. In fact, he had lived through it – when he had been kidnapped by the al-Shabaab fighters, and then rescued on the road by Dugan and Maximum Bob. At the time, the three of them had been focused on hightailing it out of there, knowing that a-S guys always came back for their dead…

But what Zack never thought about until now was… that his tablet was a $2,000 piece of kit, and the a-S guys almost certainly would have taken that with them as well. Just as the original kidnappers had been oblivious to the device’s trackability, Zack was willing to bet that the others were as well.

Anyway, he had nothing else left to bet on.

“Got it,” Baxter said. “It’s not turned on now, but it was last used yesterday at 14:26.”

“Show me.”

Baxter held the phone with its display map out to Zack’s side.

“I knew it,” he said quietly. “In the bush of Galmudug. Looks like about 50 clicks out of Gaalkacyo.”

Baxter’s face slowly lit with comprehension, and then disbelief. “Wait a second. You’re seriously taking us to the
al-Shabaab stronghold
…?”

Zack’s face settled back to his old historical unflappability – his Rushmore. “You got a better hole,” he said, “you go to it.”

Baxter smiled. He recognized the quote from Dugan, the warrior and protector who had taken them to Lemonnier – and who now had probably found his final rest there. Or maybe he hadn’t been so lucky… But Baxter wrenched his mind from that thought, and instead analyzed Zack’s totally insane idea for five seconds. “Okay, that could work. It might just be batshit crazy enough to work. Is your CI still there?”

“Abo. Yes, at last contact, he was headed there.”

“And you think he can talk them into not shooting us on sight?”

“No. But I think we might be able to buy our way in.”

Baxter nodded, while also scanning out across the slanting morning light for threats on their flanks. “Okay, let’s see… we’ve got weapons. Some ammo. The truck itself. Ah – the antibiotics! Those are invaluable at any time, maybe doubly so during a pandemic…”

Zack shook his head as they crossed over the border back into good ole, familiar, horrible Somalia. “Valuable, yes. But they could just as easily kill us and take those. However, we’re lucky enough to have something
even more
valuable – and which they’ll need us alive to make use of. We’re just going to have to find a power inverter somewhere…” Zack checked his watch. “And we’ve got to do it in the next twelve hours, before it runs out of fuel and drops out of the sky.”

“The Predator,” Baxter said. “Genius. Absolute genius. They’ll love it. Maybe they’ll even give you back your tablet. But, if not, look what I got…” He held forth another small electronic device.

Zack stole a glance. “Is that Bob’s e-reader?”

“Yes. I found it in a pouch in his vest when I went to switch out magazines. And it’s got his whole library on it. Including the book he was reading when he died.”

Zack just nodded solemnly, squinting into the glare of the low sun. It was pretty obvious Bob had meant for Baxter to have it. Just as he had gifted the two of them with their lives to keep on living. And in that moment, on that lightening road, and heading back into the heart of darkness, Zack decided something.