Chapter 42
As they arrived at the jungle airstrip,
Carlie motioned to everyone to squat down inside a tight cluster of trees.
“According to the XO, this is the general area where the transmission came
from. We don’t have a lot of time to sweep through this entire region so let’s start
with that small building adjacent to the airstrip. Matias, Amy, and Shane—you take
the door on the right. Jared and I will sweep the building to the left.
“Shane—you and your group go first while
I provide cover,” she said as the others stood and began moving out of the
treeline.
Carlie focused her rifle’s scope along
the drab cement building as Jared moved up alongside her.
“My last tarot-card reading never
mentioned any of this,” said Jared.
“Tarot cards—you buy into that hokey
shit?” said Carlie.
“When the lady across from me is a lovely
blonde with green eyes, I’ll buy into anything she says.”
“Sounds like women are your jelly spot.”
“Yeah, well, given all of life’s vices,
that’s not a bad thing to be afflicted with,” he said as Carlie felt his eyes
float over her.
Once Shane was inside the building, he
waved to her that it was clear to proceed.
Carlie and Jared sprinted to the back
door of the low-standing structure. Unlike the room next to it, this one had no
windows, just cement walls and a steel door. Carlie stood at an angle to the
opening while Jared grabbed the tarnished metal handle and tried to turn it. He
tapped on the center and then ran his fingers along the edges. “This is a
reinforced steel door. The kind I’d want to be hiding behind if you were on the
other end serving a warrant.”
“Alright, let’s regroup with Shane.”
“Hang on,” Jared said, kneeling down
before the lock and removing a bandanna from his vest. He laid it on the ground
and unrolled it, revealing a half-dozen dental instruments.
“So, you had a toothache, eh?”
Jared frowned, picking up a curved tool
and then one that had a thin straight edge, and began manipulating both tools
in the lock. “The first lock pick set I ever had was a bunch of old dental
instruments. That stuff you see on TV about using a paperclip is a bunch of
bullshit. I tried that—
once
. A man needs good tools if he’s gonna stay
alive, regardless of his profession.”
“How long is this going to…”
The lock clicked and Jared depressed the
handle before Carlie could finish her sentence. “You have your moments, don’t
you?”
Jared placed his tools back in his vest
and they both entered the ten-by-twelve-foot room which had nothing more than a
staircase leading down and a few empty crates behind the door.
Standing in the right corner were a
stack of canned goods and an AK. Jared leaned over, grabbing the rifle and
looking it over. “Sweet, now I feel like one of those rebels in the movie
Red
Dawn
.”
“I think most of those guys died, as I
recall?” whispered Carlie.
She nodded for him to move aside so she
could lead. As Carlie descended the damp concrete steps she saw another steel
door below. “With these reinforced walls, they must’ve used this vault for securing
their contraband or as a holding cell,” she said, staring at the door lock.
“Let’s see if you can get lucky more than once.”
After Jared gained access, Carlie moved
forward to begin opening the door. Jared stood frozen against the wall to the
right, his eyes nervously shifting to the door and then back up the stairs.
“You afraid of the dark?”
“No, I’m afraid of what lives in the
dark.”
“Just stay here then and watch my back.”
“No, no, I’m cool.”
As Carlie swung open the door and thrust
her rifle up, a penetrating stench of rotting flesh washed over them. Jared
moved in alongside her and they both readied their weapons as Carlie swept the
room with her rifle-mounted flashlight. Lying before them was a decomposing
body lying on a cot, the contents of its head sprayed onto the mattress and
wall. A few feet away was the crumpled form of a man with a similar headwound
with only the faint trace of a goatee to indicate where his lower jaw had been.
“Looks like the one in the bed may have
offed the guy on the floor before taking his own life. Though their skin color
looks like they were both infected,” said Jared.
She moved up and took out her phone then
snapped a close-up of what was left of the two victims’ faces.
“Damn, sister, that’s messed up. I’d
hate to see what your work office used to look like. No wonder you were never
married.”
“This is for General Adams, dumb-ass,” she
said, stuffing the phone back in her vest pocket. “We always document the faces
of tangos so we can match them with our recognition software for terrorists.”
Carlie looked around the room and
gathered up a few notebooks resting on the desk and then went over to the radio
equipment.
“This is where the transmission came
from,” she said, brushing aside the receiver with her gloved hand. She looked
back at the two bodies. “So much for the rescue of a high-value asset.”
She nodded to Jared to move up the
stairs. Once they were outside they stalked along the back until they met up
with Shane. As they approached the adjacent structure, she could hear the
forest floor behind them rustling with faint movement.
Chapter 43
They exited the room and then rejoined
the others in the building next door. “He’s dead—the guy we came for is dead,”
she said, squatting down and leaning her right shoulder against the wall of the
building. She could feel the weight of these past few days squeezing down on
her, like there was a clamp torqued around her soul.
What was the point of
even coming here since our one best lead is splattered all over the walls?
This
whole goddamned mission was for nothing.
Carlie pulled her arms back and
took a deep breath. She reminded herself of her training—to remove doubt as
doubt kills and erodes willpower. Replace doubt with action and immediately go
to Plan B, then Plan C & D, doing whatever it takes to prevail.
She moved towards the entrance and glanced
across the grass-riddled airstrip outside and then up at the moon shining over
the watchtower.
“We retrieved some journals from the lab
below that may be of use but, other than that, our primary objective now is to
get the hell off this rock without incurring any losses.”``
She gripped the handle of her M4 and gritted
her teeth. “Alright, listen up. The road heading out of here is where those
other super-mutants were at, plus I just heard noise in the forest that could
spell trouble. We’re gonna skirt along the encampment to the right and then
duck down into the ravine alongside it. That should provide us with some cover.
Then we’ll hoof it to the beach,” she said, looking into the weary eyes of the
people huddled beside her. “Shane, I want you to…” She paused, squinting her
eyes and gazing over Shane’s shoulder towards the jungle.
“Hold on. I’ve got movement at my three
o’ clock. I saw something skirt across the treeline that we just came from.”
Everyone turned and stared intently.
“Great, we got more of those fucking cabbage heads moving in on us,” said
Jared.
“Let’s just hope it ain’t a trigger-happy
smuggler,” Amy said.
Shane was peering through his scope.
“Looks like four of those slow-moving creatures ambling around the forest.
They’re not focused on this area though so we’re probably in the clear for
now.”
“Let’s move up to the rear of the hangar
by the lookout tower,” Carlie said. She inched out from the building and then bounded
towards the hangar, keeping within a few feet of the dense jungle in case they
had to conceal themselves quickly.
When they arrived at the corner of the
dilapidated hangar, Shane set up his rifle on top of an empty oil barrel and
instructed Jared to position himself alongside him and Amy to cover their rear.
Matias hung back by the hangar with his rifle fixed on the treeline where the creatures
had been spotted.
“Cover me while I skirt up the ladder of
the lookout tower. I want to get a better fix on our egress route and see if
anything else is out there. If all goes well, we will head into the ravine
after that and be on our way.” Once they were set, Carlie bolted to the closest
upright post of the tower and then suspended her rifle off her vest. She
climbed up the rickety wooden ladder and could see the entrance in the floor
was ajar. She paused outside the hatch to listen for any sound coming from
inside. As she entered and stood up, she saw the silhouette of a 2x4 coming at
her head. Instinctively she dropped on her left knee while snapping her right
foot into the groin area of the figure beside her then she lunged forward while
swiftly removing her pistol. Carlie heard moaning from the curled-up body below
as she stood with her weapon hand outstretched.
“Please, don’t shoot…don’t shoot,” the
man whimpered, raising his hands defensively over his face. “I didn’t mean to
hurt you. I thought you were one of those things,” said the frail figure with a
familiar voice.
Carlie kicked aside the 2x4 and then
moved back towards the wall. “Who are you—how long have you been hiding in here?”
The man sat up and took a deep breath
while holding his lower abdomen. “Pavel Dimitrikov is my name and I am….”
Carlie lowered her pistol and raised her
chin up. “You are the NATO inspector who worked on the KAD97 virus,” she said
as her breath quickened and she moved forward to help him up. She repeated the
same words in fluent Russian, to which he nodded.
“I never worked on the virus, though we
did discover its presence here. All of these rabid creatures you’ve seen are
the victims of that monstrosity.”
“It’s not just here—this has spread
through the world. Most of the big cities have been decimated by this virus.”
She felt the man wobble and noticed his
hands trembling. Carlie leaned him against a table in the corner. “The world…no…no.
This can’t be. I have a family back in Germany…they couldn’t have…”
“I realize this must be difficult to
hear but I need you on your feet. We have to get the hell out of here before
this place is overrun.”
She could see his expression was frozen,
his eyes adrift. “Come with me,” she said, prodding him to stand and moving
towards the ladder.
He looked at her, his eyes watering,
then he exhaled deeply and tried to regain his composure. “Who…who are you?”
“My name is Carlie. I’m with the Secret
Ser…” She paused, realizing that there was no longer a reason to indicate her
agency connection. “I work for the U.S. government. I thought you were already
dead as several bodies were discovered in the buildings below surrounded by lab
equipment.”
“One of them was Viktor, my old friend.
He died a few nights ago along with one of our former security operatives who I
was forced to shoot.”
“Let’s head down. We can talk more after
we’re out of here.” As she climbed down the ladder into the shadow cast by the
tower, Pavel followed behind her, whispering to himself, “Men’s evil desires of
times past have now come to bear their scars upon this world.”
Chapter 44
Carlie was peering around the edge of
the tree towards the narrow drainage that was behind the smugglers’ encampment.
“We’ll drop down into that passage which will conceal us better than running
straight through the jungle. Once we’re in the ravine, it’s bounding moves from
there until we get to the beach,” she said. “Pavel, Jared, and Amy, you’ll
stay between Shane and myself. Matias, you take the rear.”
The six of them cleared the treeline and
dashed to the side of the rusted metal hangar then slipped down into the
drainage. They slid across the muddy embankment until they were at the bottom,
fifteen feet below.
Carlie tapped on her ear-mic to relay
their plan to Boyd but the confines of the drainage prevented any transmission
and only static gurgled in her earpiece. As she turned to check on the others,
she saw Pavel limping. “You OK?”
“Yes, I injured my leg trying to escape
from the building by the watchtower.”
“Whoa, wait a minute,” said Jared. “You
been bit?”
“No, it’s just a bad bruise from falling
down.”
Carlie moved towards Pavel. “Sit down
for a minute so Amy can look at your wound.”
As Amy squatted down and pulled out a
small flashlight, the rest of the group took up defensive positions on either
side of the ravine. Pavel rolled up his khaki pant leg while Amy scanned his
upper right calf. Shining the red light on his leg revealed a grapefruit-sized
contusion. “Yeah, I can see why you’re limping. This is a nasty injury
alright.”
“You’re gonna have to tough it out for
another half-mile or so,” said Carlie.
After Pavel fixed his pant leg, he
struggled to stand. “Hey, Professor,” said Shane, “we’ve seen a handful of
creatures that are different than the rest. They move like pumas and can take a
lot of punishment before they go down. Any ideas on why that would be?”
“That’s probably a side-effect of the
original genetic research which began out of an interest in isolating compounds
that could be used to enhance a soldier’s speed and strength. It never went
anywhere due to a viral mutation rendering the program unsuccessful. The virus
that was borne from those initial tests garnered far more attention and thus research
dollars than the original need to produce a super-soldier. Far easier to kill
the enemy with a small pathogen than to build a new army of genetically
modified warriors. There must be some victims who, because of their unique
biochemistry, are being enhanced by this side-effect of the virus.”
As they prepared to move, Carlie heard
the sound of breaking branches coming from either side of the ravine edge. “Let’s
go, now!”