The vehicle stopped outside the mud wall of the base and two men got down before slowly making their way through the thousands of bodies of their comrades. At one point one of the men was forced to his knees and was sick in one of the few patches of bare ground not covered by the leg or arm or body of a man. As they came closer Abdul Aziz moved through the small knot of remaining men to greet them as he would a brother as opposed to someone who served under him.
“Jarid, Haroon salam al alaikum. Peace be upon you brothers. You see before you what remains of the division. What news do you bring us amongst our inconsolable grief and horror?”
Jarid the older of the two men spoke up “General Allah in his mercy has continued to spare brother Haroon and myself. Though whether this is a blessing or a curse I am not sure.” Looking around him he bowed his head humbly before jerking his head up. The sudden movement causing the flies that had begun to feast on the bodies of his friends to rise up in a crowd around his head. “Perhaps it is because we are the greatest sinners that we have been saved General?”
He nodded in agreement. “Perhaps you are right Jarid. None of us is free of sin. Whether my sins were lesser or not than the brothers who now lie dead before us I cannot say. It is not for me to pass judgement on this, the only person with whom that conversation can be had is with Allah the Merciful. But please tell us was it all in vain? Did the others travelling with you manage to strike any sort of blow against these Al Ayn evil eyed ones?”
“General they did but whether the price we are now paying is worth what they achieved I don’t know. As was suspected we were able to pass through the silvery creatures who appeared shortly after we crossed into the affected area without incident. Despite the evidence of a cataclysmic event on the roads we were able to approach the black tower standing in the desert just outside Riyadh without any additional contact. Seeing the tower for the first time caused many of us to feel a great fear in our hearts and had it not been for your instruction to hold hands when approaching it I don’t think we would have been able to do so. While I and Haroon hung back a hundred metres or so the rest of the group moved forward to hug the sheer black walls and linked their arms together. We then prayed as they prayed and at the end of the Salat Captain Jaffa tore off the airproof strip on his jacket and there was a large explosion. We ducked so as to avoid the shock wave but surprisingly no shock wave was felt by us – it was almost as if there were a barrier between the structure and us which prevented the force of the blast from radiating to where we stood. Nevertheless before the dust caused by the explosion cleared thousands and thousands of the silvery robot crabs appeared from circularly holes which opened down the entire length of the structure. As they dropped to the ground they rushed towards us and I was sure that we were fated to die but instead they simply surrounded us and then milled around not quite seeming to know what to do.
It was at this point that we were able to see that our brothers in paradise had breached the shell of the structure with their actions. There was evidence of movement inside the structure but within 2 or 3 minutes the breach appeared to be repaired and the surface of the structure appeared as it had been before. Shortly afterwards the ground, which was carpeted in every direction by the silvery crabs, cleared as they headed off in all directions North, South East and West. It looked like they were leaving to expand their evil purge further out and returning here to camp would seem to confirm this. Unfortunately our actions have come at great cost.”
“Jarid. Thank you. Though the price has been unimaginably high your words do bring us hope. Hope that whatever is in the black structure is vulnerable and therefore if not now then at some point in the future ‘beatable’. Now please I ask that you and Haroon return with Lieutenant Karim to the communications station to broadcast what you have found to those that remain to listen. I only pray that some do.”
Raising his voice he then turned to include the rest of the remaining men who had silently listened as Jarid had spoken. “My brothers, Jarid has returned with news that the Evil Eyed ones can be hurt.” There were ragged cheers at this. “But now is not the time to consider what this means. Today we must do what we can to try to bury our brothers in a manner that befits those who follow the words of the Prophet (peace be upon him).”
One of the eldest of the remaining men came forward at this point. The man had the look of the Bedouin about him and he knew him as a man of the desert. “General permission to speak?”
“Of course brother I am afraid your name escapes me?”.
“It is Tahnoon Sir”.
“Please Tahnoon speak”.
“Well your excellency in the tribe in which I was raised we bury our dead in the traditional way, by placing the body of the deceased at the foot of a great dune and letting the Dune move over them to act as the earth upon them. Perhaps given the numbers of our dead brothers we might use the same method? There are a number of great dunes situated to the East of the base.
“Tahnoon thanks you. I commend you for providing this solution. I would be grateful if you could coordinate our efforts as you’ve described.”
“Yes of course General”.
At this he and the other men began, under the direction of Tahnoon, the terrible and backbreaking work to remove the bodies of their comrades to the great dunes. Despite using all the vehicles they had at their disposal it was well into the night by the time all the bodies had been removed from the fort and lain as respectfully as possible in neat piles at the foot of the dunes. As the final truckloads of men were laid to rest a light breeze sprang up from the West and the sand particles at the top of the dune slowly began to cascade down towards the prone figures. It would not take long for them to be covered, hidden from view by the desert. Finally he turned and staggered back towards one of the now empty trucks but before he got there the exhaustion and trauma of the day caught up with him like someone flicking a light and he fell unconscious.
He looked back for a moment at the convoy of vehicles travelling behind him in the lead land cruiser. Their 200 man patchwork army had now been joined by an array of other vehicles and behind them he knew came an even longer caravan of camel drawn carts and wagons. These additions to their convoy held a mixture of Saudi Arabian men, women and children. These were the other survivors they’d come across along route 65 - the road they now travelled. There had been survivors from other races as well, notably Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Filipinos – a legacy of all those who had previously been employed in the country. Much as these other races wanted to join his particular convoy he had largely refused them. The exception to this rule being those men who looked young and fit enough to fight were allowed to join them. These he had tasked Tahnoon, newly promoted to Major, to form into a non-Saudi infantry unit. His men were uneasy about this, speculating about whether arming non-Saudi’s was a good idea but his instinct was that they might need them over the coming weeks and he’d much rather have them fighting for him than against him.
For the rest of the non-Saudi’s they had left provisions and promises but this was all they could do. Fortunately they were in a position to be generous given they had more than enough food, tents and blankets. The desert base had been provisioned to feed and look after 5,000 men for a year and most of the food was in dried or vacuum packed form. Before they’d left they’d stripped the base bare and loaded the supplies into large HGV transport trucks. They hadn’t dispensed with all the heavy equipment these trucks had previously been used to ship around and had retained a number of artillery pieces and a couple of tanks on the largest load haulers. Most of this heavy weaponry however had been left at the base so they could take as many perishable supplies as possible.
Despite his wish to gather the remaining Saudi Arabian’s to his desert convoy when they passed through larger places like Al Qurayyat a significant number of people had decided to stay where they were. Groups of survivors preferring to believe the ‘government’ would soon sort things out and ‘get things back to how they wer
e before’. It was difficult for him to comprehend how they thought there was still any functioning government left, or that the country could ever be the same again but if they wanted to stay put he couldn’t stop them. They didn’t seem to realise that over 95% of the population had been wiped out in one fell swoop.
When he had first woken after falling unconscious Lieutenant Karim had informed him that they could no longer contact the Saudi forces commanded by Colonel Faris. This did not surprise him. He’d immediately assumed that Faris and most of his men were dead. Though he suspected most had been killed by the expansion of the silvery creatures’ defensive boundary he took the decision to proceed into Jordan in order to attempt to join up with whatever of Faris’s forces remained. After 2 days on route 65 they reached an unmanned border crossing point and had proceeded to take route 40 up towards Amman. Faris and his men had been stationed at the military base at Sahab 10 miles outside of the city.
When they got to Sahab any living Jordanian forces were long gone, there was however evidence of a number of mass graves. Corporal Razib was now commanding what remained of Colonel Faris’s forces – 189 men and 10 women. The women had mostly been part of specialist signals and medical corps. He wasn’t sure he approved but obviously the Saudi Army had been attempting some form of modernisation process with regards to women serving that he had been unaware of. It was Corporal Razib who’d informed him that those Jordanian forces that survived the onslaught of silvery creatures had been recalled into the centre of Amman in an attempt to get bodies off the street and prevent looting.
He had already seen the evidence of what the silvery creatures left behind. They hadn’t yet come to a town that hadn’t been almost entirely wiped out – bodies left to rot on the street while rats pulled at their decaying flesh. In a way it was this realisation that everywhere within at least a 1000 miles had been hit by the silvery creatures that decided their current destination. Rather than head due north to Amman he and his officer had discussed a number of possibilities including making their way to the Gulf and trying to find or commander a boat to take them to some less effected destination . Unfortunately to get to the Gulf they would have had to travel through a 1000 miles of desert – and they just didn’t have the fuel or water to do this. Though they had plenty of food the base had still been re-provisioned with fuel and water once a month. The appearance of the black tower had of course stopped all this. So the decision was to head North West. There were a series of springs and oases along this route as well as a number of towns where they would be able to obtain fuel and water for the increasingly large caravan now snaking its way behind them like a giant python.
What the enlisted men didn’t know was that he and a few of his senior team, Sergeant Jaris Major Tahnoon and Lieutenant Karim, had been able to make contact with the Turkish army. They reported that the second purge appeared to have halted somewhere in northern Syria and Iraq. Of course this meant that the cities of Baghdad, Beirut, Amman and Damascus had now also been wiped out. The Turks who had so far been unaffected by the silvery creatures had formed a large O negative division – they were cagy about exactly how many men but he knew it couldn’t be more than 10,000 and quite possibly less. Despite his suggestion that this unit be thrown into battle against the black structure in the Arabian desert the Turks had decided that this was of no interest to them strategically – they had instead decided the time was ripe to take back the lands they had previously held under the Ottoman empire. Their first target being the most obvious – Jerusalem. Apparently Israeli forces had been wiped out almost to a man. The Jews having even less of their population with the requisite O Rh D negative blood type than the Arabs. It had also been suggested that if he and his remaining men wished to find a safe haven in Turkey then they would first need to prove their worth by helping the Turks retake their historic Empire. This meant they were now on the road to Jerusalem.
Chapter 23 – TESSA – February 2016
The first deaths were put down to an unusually severe outbreak of flu; but when the body count began to rise people realised there must be more to this than a simple spike in flu infections. The health services tried to isolate their existing patients but within a few days services were overwhelmed and no new cases were being accepted. This lead to ugly scenes of people trying to force their way into hospitals while being pushed back by policemen in riot gear. The government issued a public health advisory notice across terrestrial television and radio telling people who became ill to stay inside so as not to infect others but it was too late. The infection rates had reached pandemic levels and the only hope of stopping it seemed to be with a vaccine. As with the apparent immunity to the silvery crab like creatures those with O Rh D Negative blood didn’t seem to catch the disease.
Given her contacts with the ‘New Confederacy Group’, or NCG for short as she had begun referring to it, she’d had access to all the latest information. As soon as the ‘flu epidemic’ looked like it could be something more serious Chad had ordered her to lock down her Pharmaceutical facility on the outskirts of Houston. He’d already locked down his own ‘operations centre’, as soon as David reported the government had instigated their ‘survival protocol policy’. As a result none of the leadership team other than herself had been effected so far. She had also been down to be in Chad’s bunker but the day he’d ordered the lock down she’d been out of town passing a message to David. Ironically the message had been that maybe it might be time for him to leave Washington and come back to the South. She’d had to go in person to tell him this as the events in the Western US had pretty much knocked out the satellite and mobile phone networks. Landlines were still holding up but security conscious Chad wanted the message delivered face to face. Even the landlines were predicted to fail shortly as engineers succumbed to the mystery illness or simply failed to show up at work.
Despite being outside of ‘facility one’ she had maintained contact with Chad through the shortwave radio he’d installed across the various institutions and bases he controlled. It had been a couple of weeks since he’d contacted her and told her to retreat to the lab, which should be shut off from any outside contact. Fortunately this was relatively simply to put in place as the facility had been built to make sure the animals couldn’t get out and the animal rights protestors in. So far so good and they hadn’t experienced any problems with this. Pharmaceutical labs not being number one on the list of buildings to raid when food was getting short. Because she was O Rh D Negative she didn’t have the same level of fear that most of her staff had but there was no doubt in her mind that there was a sense of urgency to the work they were doing in attempting to find a vaccine.
Given her qualifications were relatively minor compared with most of her team (a basic pharmacy degree from the University of Arkansas), she wasn’t able to provide much technical assistance to the finding of a vaccine. However she was working hard to keep the building running smoothly – mainly sorting out sleeping, eating and toileting arrangements. Some of Chad’s army associates were keeping her up to speed with what was going on in the outside world but she didn’t share much of this information with her staff. In summary the world was going to pot and they’d all be lucky to survive the next few weeks - she didn’t think this message would help with morale so she peddled the line that the government was doing all it could to coordinate emergency aid and devote its own resources to finding a vaccine.
Some of the staff despite the obvious dangers pushed to be let out, or insanely, given they were mostly trained scientists, for their potentially infected families to be let in. In the end she’d the two members of the lab security team Eddy and Mack ‘reassign’ the most vocal staff members in the basement. Not ideal, but she didn’t have a lot of choice. As she sat at her desk working out how long their food supplies would last (probably not much longer) she wondered how the people she knew were faring on the outside. Her own close family consisted of her older sister who was married to Chad and was safely tucked away wit
h their grown up children in the house bunker. She wasn’t close to her relatives on her mother’s side and hadn’t seen them in years, those on her father’s side were more familiar to her but mostly lived in San Diego and so were in all likelihood dead. The friends she had here in Houston were probably running around like blue arsed flies. She hoped some would have the sense to hole up while the mystery illness ran its course. As to the people she knew up in Washington she had no idea. David had told her that he’d leave as soon as he could but not the same evening she was flying out. He was awaiting Megan’s return from New York where she’d gone to visit her mother and wasn’t going to leave without his new fiancé. Unfortunately shortly after Tessa’s flight left for Houston the government had grounded all air traffic in an attempt to slow the progression of the pandemic. So if David was going to get out of Washington it wasn’t going to be by air. At least he had a better chance than most as he too was also O Rh D Negative. She wasn’t so sure about Megan though.
As she sat around a pop up aluminium table with some of the exhausted lab technicians that evening she wasn’t feeling too hopeful. For a start she wasn’t sure whether she could stomach another meal of boil in the bag hamburger and dried potato mush nor did she expressions of joy on the team’s face. They looked beaten. None of the vaccines developed by her team had taken and it seemed like Brian Macintosh the Chief Scientist was running out of ideas. Given this she once again didn’t mention anything to those chatting softly around her that the number of radio stations she could now pick up had dropped significantly – the virus was wiping out hundreds of thousands probably millions of people. The government network was still live and kicking but it wasn’t 24/7 as it had been before. Some of the personnel tasked with keeping the wider populace informed had obviously fallen by the wayside.
O-Negative: Extinction Page 31