Arisen : Genesis (22 page)

He decided he goddamned well
was
going to get out of the Horn of Africa alive. Whatever it took. He wasn’t going to die there. He just wasn’t. Not after all this. He had an obligation to the two incredibly brave men who had spent their last breaths getting him this far. And he had another one to the young man who rode with him, and who depended on him, and who presumably trusted him. He was going to get out alive – somehow.

And he was going to get Baxter out with him.

“Hey,” he said. “Phone still have power?”

“Two percent.”

“We need news. Try to get nytimes.com.”

Baxter complied. The icon throbbed fruitlessly for most of a minute. “It’s not coming in… no, wait… Front page… that’s strange…”

“What?” Zack asked impatiently.

“It doesn’t look like news. It’s like a big info box. It says, ‘Hargeisa Advisory: Stay in your home, workplace, or FEMA shelter. Do
not
admit friends or loved ones. Direct them instead to…”

“To where?”

Baxter exhaled. “The phone’s dead. But it said ‘direct them to the NDMS site for your catchment area’. What’s NDMS?”

“National Disaster Medical System.”

“And then it had a list of locations. I only saw the first two. Central Park and Battery City Park.”

Baxter put the phone down, and hefted his M4. Zack adjusted his grip on the wheel, and squinted into the rising sun. Neither seemed inclined to say anything. There was nothing to say. So they just drove on into the new day, though verily it felt to them like the End of Days…

At their left hand, the sun rose over the sea, oblivious to it all.

Epilogue – Six Weeks Later

Zack Altringham – dirtier, more exhausted, heavily bearded – walked hunched over, covering the length of poorly lit, horrifyingly damp subterranean hallway for what felt like the thousandth time. He had only been in this place a relatively short time. But he had traversed every inch of the complex, excepting one particular area, many times now.

And it turned out you really did get used to anything.

Surprisingly quickly.

Zack had also fallen into a sort of a permanent nocturnal pattern, performing the same tasks day after day, but going many days without ever seeing the light. But this pattern was also one of undoubted usefulness, almost a respected place in the community, if a community was what this was.

Zack was the one who flew the Predator UAV, on its critically important and near-daily scouting flights – to map likely locations to send scavenging expeditions, to track the migrations of herds of the dead, to work out the least dangerous roads and routes. His access to Agency intel systems, as long as they stayed up, was also a critical value-add. And, finally, his general knowledge and savvy about the region were proving valuable as well.

And it
had
started feeling something like a community – and Zack a valued member of it. Certainly these guys, the fighters and camp followers of al-Shabaab, were people who already knew a hell of a lot about surviving on the margins of civilization – as well as staying alive while being hunted. They'd been doing both for over a decade.

And Zack also knew something else: this whole set-up actually comported a hell of a lot better with his psychological hardwiring, as it had been designed by evolution and our ancestral environment. Here he was, now part of a small, semi-nomadic band of hominids, perhaps 150 or 200 of them, everyone known to everyone else, everyone knowing his or her role within the tribe. And every one of them hunted, every hour of the day. All working together to survive.

This was exactly the environment which humanity had been in for the 99% of its history before civilization. The environment it was evolved for.

Granted, these people who now surrounded him, the same a-S guys he had been energetically blowing up just a few weeks earlier, hardly felt like his brothers – certainly not at first. There was a good deal of professional and cultural distrust built in to their relations. But, then again, these cats could fight. This was something Zack knew well from having been on the other side of the war from them. But now they had a fair bit of common ground… And there was a hell of a lot less tension than there had been at the outset. He and Baxter had even gotten their weapons back, only a couple of weeks in.

And perhaps this was all less strange than it seemed.

Because it was now every man together, all against the dead. Faithful-Islamist-jihadi-militant versus western-secular-capitalist-infidel just didn’t seem like much of an important distinction anymore.

They all felt like what they had in truth always been.

Brothers.

* * *

But there were still secrets.

And Zack wanted to get to the bottom of one now. There was still too much of the Agency analyst in him – still too much love of the game, and its attendant thrills. He had to get to the bottom of this one.

He nodded at two men he knew in the hallway. They wore their AKs slung over their shoulders, as almost everyone went armed, almost all the time. Zack didn’t know if they had always been this way. But the al-Shabaab stronghold, deep in the bush of Galmudug, lay far from any population centers, and not on any real roads. Those dead that did wander by would either eventually wander off again; or, if they didn’t, could easily be taken down from the walls.

The stronghold had been built mostly underground, burrowed into a thickly forested hillside, to keep it safe from U.S. bombing. But it also had above-ground structures, which were enclosed by a tall, stout, heavy-timber fence. The fence was dotted with guard towers, all of it covered in foliage to disguise it from surveillance drones and satellites.

No more snooping drones flew by now, with the exception of the single one of their own. Though the satellites stayed in their orbits. For now.

Zack passed these two men in the dank hallway, walked another ten meters, then looked back over his shoulder. They had gone, so he reversed course, stopped in front of a padlocked door, and got down on one knee. He took out his Leatherman multi-tool, as well as a bent bit of metal he had scavenged, and hurriedly had at the padlock. This was the kind of thing they’d taught him to do at the Farm. And the kind of thing he thought he’d go his whole life without ever needing.

His arm had even gotten better, albeit slowly and incompletely. It still ached at night, and he doubted it would ever regain its full range of movement. But that was a damned small loss, in the current scheme of things…

The lock finally popped, and he removed and pocketed it, hoping its absence wouldn’t be noticed in the bad light of the hallway. He opened the door quietly, stepped in, and pulled it closed behind him. He stood now at the top of a black stairwell, pausing to tune in to the darkness. He brought his hand up to his cheek, to scratch his increasingly thick and itchy beard in the dark. In the enclosed space, he could also smell himself. It wasn’t that he never got to wash. But he only had one set of clothes to his name, with the addition of a couple of pieces of warmer outerwear he’d scavenged. The winter, such as it was, was coming on now, and penetrating into the earth.

Zack flicked on his mini-Maglite, keeping it half-cupped, but illuminating the dirt and timber stairwell. He had only been here twice before – once going down, with a hood over his head. And then a day or two later, coming back up again – after the al-Shabaab commander was convinced that Zack and Baxter were not there to target them. That they were no threat. And when the prospect of getting the UAV in the air started getting really irresistible.

Zack padded down a step at a time, coming out on the short hallway of “cells” – really just dirt dugouts with padlockable doors built into them, and only four of those. Zack had only been here once, and only for a while, but he had known someone else was down there with them. And from the noises, he felt he knew what kind of someone. Now he was going to verify it. He stepped to the outside of the last cell in the line. And, much braver now than he had been before, he knocked heavily on the door.

The result was immediate: thrashing, grunting, and moaning. By this point, these were sounds Zack had heard too many times. There could be no mistake. Al-Shabaab were holding one caged here. Why keep one of the infected in your stronghold – particularly when the entire world outside your gates was heaving with them? Zack was going to find out.

He couldn’t let it rest.

He went and found Abo, his erstwhile CI, and boyhood school friend from long before that. Abo was outside, pulling sentry duty on the wall. Luckily it was nighttime – Zack often lost track lately – so he didn’t have to try and deal with sunlight. And his luck was even better: Abo was alone. Zack climbed up the half-corroded aluminum ladder, to the little wooden platform built into the wall. Abo – small, medium black-skinned, with a thick Afro and a knowing grin – smiled at Zack’s approach.

Bringing the Americans into the stronghold, along with their drone, had sent Abo’s stock soaring. Zack considered this deeply ironic, since if it were known that Abo had once been an informer for the CIA, he’d be out of the stronghold and neck-deep in the dead before he could moan in protest.

“Zakwani, my brother,” Abo said, reaching out a hand to help him up onto the ledge. Zack emerged into the night air, considering that he had found one of the very few people left in the world who still called him by that name. He wondered if that meant something. It was quiet up there, though a slight breeze threatened to bring in unseasonable rain. Zack wasn’t sure how he knew this.

But he was somehow feeling his power in East Africa. Maybe even finally reconciling himself to his past. In that one moment when he had resolved to survive, no matter what, years of frustration and hopelessness had fallen from him like a heavy mantel. Maybe this whole weird, fractured, non-belonging life of his had been leading up to something… though for reasons that were still obscure to him. But he felt he knew what he was doing now.

It was just it had taken the end of the world to get him there.

“Abo,” Zack said. “I know you’re keeping one of the dead down in the cells. I’ve seen it. And now you’re going to tell me why.”

Abo’s smile evaporated like morning mist – and it wasn’t nearly morning yet. He looked away and out into the deep space of the nighttime bush. “You should not ask about that. I know nothing of it.”

Zack gripped Abo’s upper arm, and not gently. “I’m not fucking around, Abo. You tell me, or I tell them. About who you used to work for.”

Abo sagged in Zack’s grip. He turned to face him, then pulled them both down into a huddle beneath the parapet. They sat cross-legged, while Abo leaned in and whispered.

He spoke in hisses and breaths.

Zack just listened. For the better part of half an hour.

When it was done, Zack got up without another word, climbed down off the wall, and went to look for Baxter. He found him asleep in his chamber.

“Baxter.” Zack sat down on the edge of the cot and gave the young man a nudge, upon which he came awake smoothly.

“Yeah, Zack. What’s up?”

Zack paused to breathe for a few seconds. “I went back down to the cells – where they had us those first days.”

“Okay.”

“And we were right. They’ve definitely got one.”

Baxter nodded in the near dark. “Any idea why?”

“I went and talked with Abo. I got it out of him.”

“So?”

“Well, basically… everything I’ve ever been terrified of has come to pass.” Zack paused. He looked down at the younger man, considering the profound clannishness of human beings. Here they were in a strange new group, and of course they had immediately formed an in-group of two. His trust in Baxter was now total. And Zack wondered how much of that was because it had to be. It didn’t matter. “You remember when I told you about the attempted biological attack, on the deminers at Camp Lemonnier? Which we thwarted with about five seconds to spare.”

“Yeah,” Baxter said. “The chimera virus, right? The one that Sheikh Atom bought from the Kazakh scientist. Smallpox and myelin toxin. But you bumped him off, and destroyed the virus stocks.”

Zack nodded. The job
was
good for the memory. “That’s it. We verified at the time, and Abo just reconfirmed, that everything was seized and destroyed – equipment, centrifuges, autoclaves. And mainly the virus stocks. But there was something we missed.”

Baxter propped himself up on his elbows. He was to the point where he could now recognize the slight
The-shit’s-come-down
variation on his boss’s normal inscrutable expression.

Zack continued. “They were doing testing of the virus. Animal testing, mainly on baboons. They wanted to see the effects of the agent, as well as make sure it worked. Before paying off the Kazakh.” Zack looked down, and Baxter was starting to develop his own dismal expression. “The baboons all died. Badly, needless to say. But there was a single one still alive when we dropped the hammer on the plot. They had it out in a bamboo cage, near one of their remote outposts. Kind of a guard station, out in the boonies. Deep in the bush – of Somaliland.”

Baxter grimaced. He didn’t really miss Somaliland.

Zack nodded. “Yeah. So they had the baboon there basically to keep distance between the virus and them, not to mention their families. They had one guy at this guard hut. Evidently no one remembered to bring him up to speed as the operation was collapsing. So he’s just hanging out, watching his baboon. From a distance.”

“And Abo knew all this?” Baxter asked.

“Yeah, well. We paid him to know things. And he’s a very enterprising guy.”

Baxter smiled. “He’s Kikuyu. I gather most of them are. They did throw off the yoke of the British.”

If this was a tribute, an especially American one, Zack didn’t acknowledge it. “I was thinking more of curiosity and cats as a precedent. That’s until Abo started talking about dogs. So at about the same time everything here was going kinetic, when Atom was killed, the guy radios in. Says he’s being attacked. By dogs. Mad dogs.”