by Z. A. Recht
“Ah, shit, man. You’re telling me you’ll go the rest of the way to Suez in this empty-ass desert without any tunes just to save yourself a buck? Look, there’s a Metallica album duct-taped to the bottom of your seat. No real American can say no to that, eh, comrade?”
“I’m Canadian,” Denton revealed, smiling.
“Double fucknuts. The Captain didn’t tell me I’d have a Canuck in my truck. Damn, man, no respect at all for us low-ranking types, I swear . . .”
“Hey, you want these batteries or not?” Denton said, chuckling at the private. “Even a Yank like you can appreciate that I’ve got the power in my hands.”
“That’s a terrific pun, mon frere. But fuckin’ A. No, make that fuckin’ double-A,” Brewster said, beating one hand against the wheel of the truck. “Bring on the metal.”
Denton fumbled with the cassette deck. Brewster watched as the photographer slid the backing off the old player and popped out the dead batteries.
“Be careful, man, the wires in there are loose ever since I—”
Denton glanced up in time to see the deuce in front of them slowing sharply.
“Brewster! Brake!” he yelled.
The private’s eyes shot forward and he cursed, slamming the brakes on the heavy truck. Sand kicked up all around them as they skidded to a stop, and the tape player slid out of Denton’s hands as he scrambled for something to hold on to. Brewster managed to spin the truck’s wheels to the right and they came to a rest beside the truck that had been in front of them moments before.
“I think you’ll listen the next time I tell you to watch the road, eh?” Denton said, laying the Canadian accent on thick, just to irk the private.
Brewster coughed Sinai dust from his throat. He fished a handkerchief from his BDU pocket and held it over his mouth.
“That’s not funny, man. I’m responsible for this piece of taxpayer junk,” he said, voice muffled by the cloth.
“Brewster! What in the name of all that is holy and democratic are you doing to my truck?” came a voice from outside the cab. Brewster swung the door open, still coughing, and looked into the livid face of Colonel Dewen. He seemed impervious to the dust cloud that still hung about the deuce.
“I couldn’t see through the sand, sir?” Brewster said tentatively.
“Bullshit!” yelled Dewen. “You’ve been driving this deuce for a month now, and this is your third bang-up! I’ll article fifteen your sorry ass, soldier! Get it together!”
Denton decided he was staying out of it. He said nothing, and instead picked up the tape deck from the floor of the cab, inspecting it for damage.
“Sorry, sir,” Brewster said, dropping the funny-guy act. “I let myself get distracted. It won’t happen again.”
“That’s more like it. Now dismount and get up-front. We’re having trouble raising Suez,” Colonel Dewen said, scowling at Brewster before moving on down the line to the next truck in the convoy.
“Come on, bud, step lively or face the wrath of Dewen,” Brewster said, slapping a hand against Denton’s shoulder.
Brewster landed deftly in the soft sand outside, slinging his M-16A2 over his shoulder with practiced ease. Denton slid out the opposite side of the cab with a little less luck, catching a camera strap on the door and cursing as he struggled to untangle it. He met up with Brewster in front of the vehicle.
“What’s this all about?” Denton asked, wiping sweat and dust from his forehead. The convoy had ground to a halt all along its mighty length and soldiers were climbing out of vehicles in confusion.
“Don’t know,” Brewster said. “Hey! Darin! What’s the Sitrep?”
“The Sitrep is this sand blows camel balls, and your mother’s blowin’ em, too, Brewster, you honkey bastard!” came the shouted reply from a few trucks over.
“That means he doesn’t know,” Brewster translated.
Denton spied a group of figures near the head of the convoy, the heat waves making them appear distorted. There was a radioman Denton made out easily enough—the bulky field radio on the man’s back gave him away, as did the wobbly metal antenna that bobbed over his shoulder. The only other man Denton could identify had to be General Sherman—the older man held the radio’s handset to his ear and had his other hand on his hip. Even from a distance the photographer could tell that Sherman was frustrated.
“Looks like the party’s up ahead,” Denton said to Brewster.
“Let’s crash it,” replied the private, making Denton flinch. The mention of crashing so soon after the overzealous private’s driving wasn’t reassuring.
The pair shuffled through the sand towards the lead truck in the convoy. Other soldiers had already gathered around, waiting to hear the update on the situation. The convoy had been traveling for almost two hours—slow going on the dirt and sand roads of the Sinai desert. Most of them were glad for the chance to stretch their legs.
As they approached the head of the convoy, Denton could make out General Sherman’s words.
“Suez, Suez, this is Echo Lead. Do you read, over? Respond on any channel. Suez, Suez, this is Echo Lead . . .”
Denton had seen enough military campaigns in his years as a photojournalist to know that losing contact with an advance base was never a good thing. He wondered what had happened in Suez. Thoughts began to race through his mind, most of them unpleasant. Maybe the carriers broke through. Maybe there had been an ordnance malfunction. Or maybe the radio operator just wasn’t paying attention.
Brewster took a knee near the edge of the group, motioning for Denton to join him. The photographer declined, instead popping the lens cap off his Nikon camera and lining up shots while he could.
General Sherman gave up on trying to reach Suez and dropped the handset into the radioman’s pack. He sighed heavily and turned to the officer next to him. Denton glanced at the uniform, saw it read ‘U.S. Navy,’ and surmised this was Commander Barker. He tried to get in closer to hear what they were discussing, but Sherman and Barker had lowered their voices. The murmured conversations of the gathered soldiers weren’t helping either.
Colonel Dewen came marching back up from the rear of the convoy and joined the conference. Denton was getting annoyed at not being able to hear the words of the three officers. He tried to edge his way around the semicircle of enlisted troops, but didn’t want to appear too nosy—his press credentials were limited and the state of affairs in the world wasn’t the best for messing with Lieutenant Generals.
Denton had an idea of what they were discussing, however. Two other times he’d seen advance bases go down—once in Bosnia, when a guard post had failed to check in, and again in Mogadishu, when a forward intersection stopped reporting. Both times the decision had been made to hit the spot with armor and artillery.
Just as Sherman seemed to be wrapping up the conversation with a grim look on his face, the radio clicked on. All the soldiers, including Denton, jumped a little. It was the last thing they had expected.
“Echo, Echo, this is Suez. Are you still there, over?”
General Sherman snatched the handset from the radio pack and held it to his ear.
“Suez, where the hell have you been? We’ve been trying to raise you for a quarter of an hour. Be advised we were two minutes from shelling your position into dust, over.”
“Sorry, sir. We had a bit of a situation here,” came the reply. “Area is secure now. It’s safe to proceed, over.”
“I expect a damn good story when I get there,” said General Sherman. “Start thinking up a good sitrep. We’re on our way down.”
“Oh, man, this isn’t good,” Brewster said out of the side of his mouth to Denton. “Sounds like Suez is a clusterfuck. Sherman’s gonna be pissed.”
Denton frowned. He asked, “Clusterfuck?”
“Everything’s gotta be FUMTU in Suez,” Brewster explained.
Denton raised an eyebrow.
“Fucked Up More Than Usual,” the private said, groaning. “Come on, man. Everyone knows FUMTU.�
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“It had better not be,” Denton said. “I’d love to see how well we can defend the canal if our defenses aren’t up to snuff.”
“Oh. Yeah,” Brewster said, fingering the strap of his M-16. “Forgot about the whole virus thing.”
Denton cringed. The cream of the United States Army, indeed.
Suez
January 7, 2007
1634 hrs_
SUEZ BASE WAS a mess.
The first thing that the convoy from El Ferdan noticed as they rolled through the security checkpoint was the pile of burning corpses near the water’s edge. Thick black smoke poured from the macabre bonfire, blotting out the sun. Soldiers supervising the burning turned to look at the newcomers, faces obscured by heavy Middle-Eastern style handkerchiefs they’d tied around their noses to help guard against the stench of roasting flesh.
Wire fences had been overturned, sandbagged bunkers were half-collapsed, and the sandy streets were pockmarked with black rings of carbon and debris from hand grenade explosions. The buildings were peppered with bullet holes.
“Fuck,” breathed Brewster as the convoy pulled up to the base HQ. “What the hell happened here?”
The ranking officer present was a sergeant first-class named Decker. He had greeted the arriving convoy at the edge of the HQ’s perimeter, waving them down as they approached. He cradled a wounded arm and his face was grim.
“Glad to have reinforcements,” he’d said. “There’s only fifty of us left.”
General Sherman had balked at the number, and had asked just how they had taken so many casualties without command getting wind of the situation.
“It was the refugees, sir,” Decker said. “We had a ship arrive out of the Red Sea this morning. We saw people on the deck. We helped them off and then sent a team onboard to clear the ship. They opened a bulkhead to a lower deck and were overrun. There must have been sixty, maybe seventy carriers in that ship.”
Decker went on to explain how the carriers had almost immediately brought down the boarding party. The shore guards had tried to cut the ship loose and set it adrift on the Red Sea, but the carriers were too fast. They’d run down the gangplank and spread like angry hornets through the camp, attacking the nearest living, breathing thing they set their eyes on.
“That ship was the Charon, and opening that bulkhead let the demons loose right in the middle of us,” Decker said, eyes distant.
The soldiers had mounted a resistance, shifting the razor-wire fencing that surrounded the base to block off access from the docks. They’d formed a firing line behind the relative safety of the wires and hammered down.
“We killed them all. It only took us a minute or two,” Decker said, casually referring to the deaths of nearly a hundred victims of the disease. “And then we started gathering the bodies for burial.”
Decker and his fellow soldiers had donned their MOPP gear and began neatly lining the bodies up. They slung their rifles, gritted their teeth, and took care of the dirty work. They also let their guard down.
“Sir, you can chapter me if you want to, but I swear I’m not insane,” Decker said next.
“Nobody is saying you’re insane. This isn’t Vietnam, and these weren’t innocent civilians,” General Sherman said.
“You did good, sergeant,” chimed Colonel Dewen.
“No, wait, listen,” Decker said, eyes flashing. “We killed them, but . . . we didn’t kill them.”
“What?” asked Commander Barker.
General Sherman said nothing, but knew in his heart what he was about to hear.
“They got back up,” said Decker. “They got back up, and they slaughtered us.”
At first it was just a couple. The soldiers had figured they had wounded—but not finished—the targets. They had put three-round bursts into the chests of the risen carriers. It didn’t even slow them down.
“At that point, sir, order disintegrated,” Decker said.
Some of the soldiers had lost control immediately, screaming about the impossibility of what their eyes were seeing. Others flung their rifles into the sand and had run off into the desert. A few kept their heads and had emptied entire magazines into the shambling dead, rocking the bodies with lead, but those that were knocked down crawled back to their feet and continued the slow, relentless assault. Soldiers were surrounded or trapped, then pulled down, shrieking, as grasping hands scratched at their skin and teeth clamped onto their arms.
And all the while, more and more of the carriers were reawakening.
“Soon the whole lot of them were back up and moving,” Decker said. “Then me and a couple others noticed that some of the infected personnel weren’t getting back up. Those had head wounds, broken necks, that sort of thing. Thought that might be important intel, sir.”
Decker had organized a last-ditch offense near the edge of the base camp. He was certain the soldiers had been routed and the day belonged to the Morningstar strain and its victims. He armed his soldiers with the remaining ammo and told them to aim for the head.
The soldiers turned the tide.
It had taken nearly an hour of bloody fighting through the dusty streets of Suez to kill the remaining carriers. When the attackers were down, Decker and the other soldiers had performed a tent-by-tent, house-by-house search of the base, finding and eliminating six more carriers, each one a potential death sentence for the parts of the world that remained uninfected.
“This time we made sure, sir,” Decker said.
“Made sure?” Commander Barker asked.
Decker fixed him with a gaze. “We shot the bodies in the head, sir. All of them. Even our own. Then we piled them up, doused them in kerosene, and torched ’em.”
For a moment, the new arrivals were silent. Finally, General Sherman spoke up.
“Where’d you get that arm wound, son?” he asked.
Decker flexed his right arm. His bicep was sliced, and blood coated the arm of his BDU top. The wound was superficial, and someone had tied a bandage around it.
“Can’t rightly remember, sir. I believe it was shrapnel, friendly fire. Accidental,” Decker said.
“You weren’t bitten, scratched, anything like that?” Sherman asked.
“No, sir. None of them got near me. I made sure of that,” Decker replied.
“Good enough for me,” Sherman said. “Now I need you to assemble your men, sergeant. I’ve got bad news for them. The fight’s just started.”
1911 hrs_
The battle lines were drawn.
The soldiers had spent the past two hours reinforcing their foxholes and dragging the broken remnants of razor wire to the edge of the canal to bolster the fence line.
The Satcom operators had set up their mobile transmitting station and were working on downloading updated images of the desert east of Suez. Ammunition and grenades were re-distributed. Wounded soldiers were given a painkiller and told to walk it off—every rifleman available would be needed on the banks of the Suez Canal.
Brewster grunted as he heaved another sandbag onto the rim of his newly-dug foxhole, pausing for a moment to wipe sweat from his forehead. Denton crouched nearby, taking the opportunity to snap a photo of the soldier.
“Picture this,” Brewster said, flipping the finger to Denton.
Denton snapped a second picture in response.
“You could be helping instead of taking Polaroids,” said Corporal Darin, another soldier from Brewster’s unit.
“I don’t get paid to fill sandbags,” Denton said. “You guys do.”
“You won’t be getting paid to shoot the carriers of Morningstar, either, Denton,” said Colonel Dewen, surprising all three men as he loomed up behind them. “But you’ll be doing it anyway.”
Dewen tossed a rifle to the photographer, who caught it deftly with one hand.
“I haven’t fired one of these in years,” Denton said, working the bolt of the M-16 and checking the chamber before slinging it over his shoulder in one swift motion. His familiarity with the
weapon startled Dewen, Brewster, and Darin. All three had assumed him to be entirely civilian. “I’m not sure if I’ll do any good.”
“Try,” said Dewen. “If you only hit one of those shamblers, it might be enough to win the day.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Denton said. “I’ll do what I can.”
“How’s it coming, soldiers?” Dewen asked, switching the focus of his attention from the photographer to the two enlisted men shoulder-deep in the sand.
“Slow, sir,” Darin replied. “Ground’s a little sandy.”
Brewster smirked, but cut himself off when he noticed Dewen glaring at him.
“Dig in good. The carriers might not be shooting at you, but you’ll be glad you’ve got a stable firing position when they come over those dunes,” Dewen said, glancing across the canal at the seemingly infinite sandy expanse beyond.
“Yes, sir,” replied the two men.
“I’ll be back in ten. Denton, come with me,” Dewen said, turning on his heel and heading toward Suez HQ. Denton rose from his crouch and followed the Colonel, struggling a little to keep up. The man was a fast walker.
“What’s up, Colonel?” Denton asked.
“Let the General explain.”
Denton couldn’t get anything else out of the recalcitrant officer, and gave up trying after a few more futile attempts. The pair reached the base headquarters—nothing more than a ripped and battered tent surrounded by sandbags—and pulled the door flap aside. It took Denton a few moments to blink the sudden darkness away when the flap fell closed behind him. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the Satcom team had settled in nicely. Computers hummed and keyboards clicked away as the soldiers synched their machines with the satellites orbiting somewhere overhead.
General Sherman was standing in the corner of the tent, resting one hand on a folding table while he spoke with a third party over the field radio.
“No, one of each,” he was saying. “I’m not looking for a strike force, I’m looking for a rescue team. Yes, that’s right. One Huey, one Apache. That should do. Can you manage that?”