Plague of the Dead

by Z. A. Recht

  Without warning he wound his arm up and viciously backhanded Julie. She cried out, mouth hanging open in shock. Her calm gaze changed into one of fear, and a bit of blood slowly trickled from her lower lip.

  “Pain, Miss Ortiz,” Sawyer said, dropping the folder. “It turns into pain. At our hands. But don’t get me wrong, Miss Ortiz. We’re not sadists. We don’t like seeing you in pain, even if you betrayed your fellow Americans. All we ask is that you tell us how you got these documents, and this can end before it even begins. Of course, we won’t be able to let you go free, but a cell is much better than this room. And much less hazardous to your well-being.”

  Julie licked the blood from her lip. The coppery taste spread across her palate, as sickening and alluring as the agent’s offer. The thought of turning in Dr. Demilio was quickly banished from her mind.

  “My sources are protected by law—” she began.

  Sawyer backhanded her a second time, then a third. This time Julie didn’t cry out. She had been expecting it. She was no less fazed by these attacks than by the first one, however, and her vision swam as she tried to shake off the pain.

  “We are the law, Miss Ortiz. Don’t fuck with us,” Sawyer said, voice going hard. “You’ve only been getting my good side. Don’t make me show you the bad. I’ll ask one final time—who gave you the information about the Morningstar Strain?”

  Julie said nothing.

  Sawyer stood, sighing, and brushed his jacket with his hands.

  “Very well, Miss Ortiz. Derrick. We’ll start with the sodium pentothal.”

  “Right,” said Agent Derrick, turning and popping open a metal case. He withdrew a syringe and plunged it into a medicine bottle, carefully extracting a dose.

  “You’re just too stubborn to learn,” Sawyer said to Julie as Derrick tapped the needle. “We’ll see how dogged you are after we try a few more professional methods.”

  1621 hrs_

  Julie was thrown roughly into a tiny, damp cell. She slumped to the ground with a moan. Behind her, the federal agents slammed the iron bars closed and locked them.

  “Have a good rest, Miss Ortiz. We’ll be back soon to continue our little chat,” said Sawyer.

  Julie heard them walking away, chuckling and ribbing one another. Their voices grew fainter until finally there was silence. Julie tried to pick herself up, but her arm gave out with fatigue and she crashed back down to the floor. She rolled over onto her back slowly, blinking her eyes in the dimness.

  The past few hours were a blur to her, but she remembered certain details all too well. The sodium pentothal had worked at first—but the agents had made the mistake of trying out a few control questions first, namely simple ones about herself and her childhood. The drug had warmed her, made her feel incredibly good about herself and her situation, and so she answered the questions. She refused to move on to their pressing questions until she had told them nearly every detail of her young life—including stories about her cat, Pogo, and the disaster that was her tenth birthday party.

  When the agents had angrily demanded she answer their questions, she had become pouty, insisting that they didn’t need to know because they didn’t want to hear about Pogo.

  Perhaps, she thought in retrospect, I should have just told them then.

  As the drug began to wear off, they switched to other methods.

  As Julie lay on the damp floor of the cell, she gingerly reached a hand up to the side of her face and touched it. She gasped, pulling her hand quickly away. The right side of her head was burned—not terribly, but second degree. She remembered the agents pulling the spotlight closer and putting it almost against her head, leaving it there for most of an hour. The heat had been agonizing.

  There had been other attempts to get the answers out of her. The agents had developed an incredible talent for finding new, creative, and painful uses for paperclips. Julie flexed her fingers slowly, barely able to make out the red lines of blood under her fingernails where the agents had used those paperclips.

  She knew she had gotten off light today. Aside from her red face and the dried blood on her lip and hands, she was virtually unscathed. She’d heard stories about interrogations—real ones, not the Hollywood dramatizations. There would be no cutting off of limbs or serious damage—they would keep their suspect alive and in good health while they tortured them.

  Electrocution. Sleep deprivation. Starvation. Isolation.

  Outside, the world was slowly coming apart at the seams. Inside—wherever she was—Julie Ortiz was beginning to be taken apart as well.

  Sinai

  January 8, 2007

  1523 hrs_

  Mbutu Ngasy blinked the brightness of the desert sun from his eyes and squinted into the distance.

  “I do not see them,” he said. His English was excellent, and though his accent was thick, Rebecca Hall could understand him perfectly. He spoke Swahili naturally, but in Kenya, English was the official language, used in government and education. He had learned it at an early age, and it aided in his old duties as the air traffic controller in Mombasa.

  “They’re supposed to be here already. I hope nothing happened,” she said, pacing back and forth. She kicked a small stone across the ground and folded her arms across her chest.

  “They will be fine,” Mbutu said, as if that explained everything.

  “Soldiers aren’t superhuman,” Rebecca replied.

  “They are running late, maybe. But they will be fine,” Mbutu repeated. “This is a blessed place. No harm will come to them here, or to us.”

  “What? Not more of that religious mumbo-jumbo, Mbutu! I’ve had about enough of it from the refugees, yammering about the end of the world . . .”

  “Not religious. Well, maybe religious a little. I believe in spiritual power, though not in God as many do,” Mbutu explained. “This place has much power.”

  “Why? It’s nothing but sand and rocky hills. It’s desolate and hot and empty.”

  “There,” Mbutu said, pointing over Rebecca’s shoulder.

  She turned and looked.

  “What?” she asked, spreading her arms wide. All she saw was an expanse of dust and rock. They were in the foothills of the desert, and here and there outcroppings of boulders sprang up from the sand as if by magic.

  “There,” Mbutu said again. “That mountain is Mount Sinai. In your mythology, this is where God spoke to men. So, I say there is much power here.”

  “Oh, yeah. The Ten Commandments. Charlton Heston,” Rebecca said. “I remember now.”

  “Charlton Heston?” Mbutu asked slowly. “This is another name for the mountain in your country?”

  “No, we call it Mount Sinai, too. It’s just . . . never mind,” Rebecca said. She resumed pacing.

  Mbutu watched her from the corner of his eye.

  “You are very impatient,” he said after a moment. Rebecca glared at him, and he smiled broadly in response.

  “I’m used to doing things, not standing around,” she told him. “I need some action! That’s why I came over here in the first place!”

  “Your country,” Mbutu began, “It is boring?”

  Rebecca laughed. “You have no idea.”

  “You do not have fun? There are no games? No books? You do not have a husband?” Mbutu asked, ticking the items off on one hand.

  “A husband?” Rebecca interrupted. “Are you kidding? I’m only twenty-two!”

  “No, I am not ‘kidding’,” Mbutu replied with a straight face. “You are not married?”

  “Hell no!”

  “Ah. I forgot—many in your country choose not to marry until later. Yes, now I can see why you are bored.”

  Rebecca laughed. “Shut up.”

  “Perhaps I will,” Mbutu said, falling silent.

  “Oh, you know I was joking,” said Rebecca, punching him softly on the arm.

  “Yes. Though now is a bad time for such things as joking.”

  “No,” Rebecca said. “Now’s the best time for such
things. I can understand being humorless when everything’s going just peachy. There’s no need. You have everything you need, the world’s perfectly sane, you’ve got a car and a house and two-point-five kids and there’s no real reason to joke about stuff. I think when things are falling apart or you find yourself in a tight spot is the perfect time to make fun of stuff. I keep hearing the soldiers talk about facing death. If I have to face death, I’m going to laugh at him. Otherwise, I’ll . . . just fall apart.”

  “Death is not a laughing matter,” Mbutu said.

  “No, it’s not, it’s serious, and that’s why we should laugh at it.”

  “I do not follow your logic.”

  “Oh, hell,” Rebecca said, brushing her strawberry blond hair out of her eyes. “How can I explain it? It’s sort of like a way of saying ‘I may be about to die, but I’ll laugh and go out with dignity.’ ”

  “Laughing is not a form of dignity.”

  “Jesus, you’re stubborn,” Rebecca said. “It is in my book, okay?”

  “If you insist.”

  “Why? Let me ask you something. If you were dying, or knew you were going to die, how would you want to go?”

  Mbutu seemed to ponder the question for a long time. He then answered, “I would want to die in my sleep, like my grandfather. He did not know, so he felt no regret or grief at having to leave us behind. And those of us he left felt comfort in knowing that he died at peace, dreaming, perhaps, of something good.”

  Rebecca nodded slowly.

  “That is a good death,” she said.

  Mbutu looked over at her expectantly.

  “What?” she said, after a moment.

  “It is now your turn to answer the question.”

  “Oh,” she mouthed. “Well . . . I guess I’d like the whole dying in my sleep thing, too. But I mean, it’s not guaranteed. I could go out in a car wreck or be shot or drown or be electrocuted. If it had to be like that, if I had to be awake and aware of it, I still say I’d die laughing.”

  “Perhaps. You have made me think of something my mother said to me when I was a child, after a roofer died in Mombasa. He had fallen from the roof because he did not tie himself down. She said he was foolish, and this was his reward. She said to me, ‘In deaths like this, fools die screaming, and nobles die laughing at themselves.’ Perhaps you are not really laughing at death, Rebecca Hall. You are laughing at yourself for maybe dying in such a foolish manner as falling from a roof.”

  Mbutu put a hand over his eyes, shading them from the sun, and squinted into the distance.

  “They are coming,” he said finally.

  Rebecca spun, staring in the direction Mbutu was looking. She could make out several tiny specks in the distance, wavering in the heat. They looked like ants. She knew from her short time in the desert that the flat, open expanses created a kind of optical illusion. The convoy she was looking at was still dozens of kilometers away, but it was definitely the one they had been waiting for.

  After they had received word of the battle at Suez, the soldiers had broken camp at El Ferdan and El Qantara and moved southeast towards the heart of the Sinai desert. It was out of the way, almost a hundred kilometers to the south of the last-ditch defensive lines the Corps of Engineers had set up for the sole purpose of ensuring a safe, secure rendezvous point for the defenders. They had enough fuel to spare to make the decision worthwhile and no one minded the extra effort expended in return for the added safety from carriers of the Morningstar Strain.

  Behind Mbutu and Rebecca, the call was taken up in the makeshift camp that the survivors of Suez were approaching.

  Sharm el-Sheikh

  January 10, 2007

  1203 hrs_

  Rebecca Hall was tired, dirty, hungry, thirsty—and most of all, hot.

  The trip from the base of Mount Sinai to Sharm el-Sheikh had been in haste. The remaining soldiers of the battle at Suez had linked up with the small company that had been waiting for them in the desert, and General Sherman had promptly ordered a retreat.

  Rebecca wanted nothing more than to head for home, but her options, unfortunately, didn’t include a trip stateside—yet, anyway. Apparently the situation in the desert was deteriorating. The carriers had broken the coalition’s best line of defense, and at the last second the final lines had received word from Washington to pull back. Defensive lines one and two had been abandoned.

  Sherman had been furious, making calls all day to try and convince the politicos that it was not in their best interests to abandon the defense of the Middle East.

  He had been right and wrong in his assertions. Over the past day, reports had been coming in that the carriers were weakening and slowing from the heat and uncompromising landscape of the desert expanses. Satellite images and recon flights had reported that there were numerous carriers falling by the wayside as the horde advanced, this time staying down permanently. It seemed extreme exposure to the elements was an effective way of dealing with them.

  Sherman had been skeptical.

  “I’ve seen these things take a round to the heart and get back up a few minutes later,” he had said. “What’s to say the dead ones won’t start walking around again here soon?”

  Either way, the United States was now betting that the wires, minefields, and trenches they had dug as the second line would at least slow down the carriers long enough to allow Israel and the other Middle Eastern states to form a solid defense.

  Rebecca had been surprised to hear about the apparent truce between the two ancient enemies, but only mildly so. Disaster always brought out both the best and worst of human nature. Apparently, in the Middle East, the best was showing through. She regretted being so out of touch with the soldiers in the desert—she would have loved to have seen an Israeli soldier and an Arab militiaman fighting side-by-side instead of with each other.

  Sherman had plotted the route to Sharm el-Sheikh as the best possible exodus from the continent. There was a naval battle group stationed at the south end of the Red Sea that was going to send a destroyer over to pick up the remaining soldiers and refugees like Rebecca and Mbutu. The plan was to rendezvous with the battle group and catch a flight back to civilization.

  Rebecca would have liked to have talked with Sherman about the battle at Suez, but his duties had kept him occupied during the trip. Instead, she spent her time kibitzing with Mbutu and a soldier named Decker. He was a sergeant who had been part of the original group stationed at Suez. She and Decker had become fast friends. As a medic, she had helped re-bind the wound on his arm.

  Sitting in the back of one of the trucks as it rumbled out of the mountains toward the coastal town, Rebecca remembered her first meeting with the sergeant. She had been helping the Army medics as they tended to the battle scrapes and scratches of the soldiers at Sinai when Decker had sat down in front of her.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’ve got a small problem.”

  He had held up his arm, bound with a dusty and dirty bandage that was half-soaked through with blood. Rebecca had grimaced.

  “What are you trying to do, suicide by gangrene?” she asked, pulling on a pair of latex gloves before gingerly unwrapping the bandage.

  “Yeah. Thought it would be better than catching the virus,” he replied.

  “So debilitating, blinding pain that slowly spreads throughout your whole body while you watch your arm rot off piece by piece is a more appealing fate?” Rebecca asked, dumping the used bandage into a sterile container.

  “No, actually. Think you can save me, doc?”

  Rebecca laughed.

  “I’m not a doctor. I’m not even a nurse,” she told him as she cleaned the wound with hydrogen peroxide. He winced as she poured the liquid over the slice.

  “You have a doctor’s touch,” he uttered through gritted teeth.

  “It can be a lot worse,” Rebecca said with a grin. “I could dump the whole bottle in there.”

  “I’ll pass,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Rebec
ca.”

  She smiled at him. He smiled back.

  Then his grin had faded as she held up a needle and thread.

  “That’s a nasty cut,” she said. “And I think it could use a few stitches.”

  Decker taught her a few new ways to swear before she finished re-binding his wound.

  The truck hit a rock and the occupants in the back were jostled roughly. Rebecca managed to use a few of those new swear words before the truck bed settled and the passengers had rearranged themselves. She wondered if the driver was even qualified to be operating the large vehicle.

  In the truck’s cab, Denton rubbed the back of his head ruefully.

  “Fourth massive boulder in an hour, Brewster,” he said. “Let’s not go for five, eh?”

  “It wasn’t a fucking boulder, it was a little rock in the road. A boulder is big. That was little,” Brewster said. “Besides, the truck in front of us hit it and they didn’t fucking bounce like that.”

  “What’s it going to take? Are you going to have to see someone come flying out of the back of that truck before you decide they’ve hit a rock too big for your tastes?” Denton asked.

  “Yeah, man, pile it on. We’re five miles out. You can bitch and whine about my driving only for a few more minutes. Then it’s boat time.”

  “If the destroyer is even waiting for us. I’m starting to learn to expect the worst.”

  “It’ll be there,” Brewster told him.

  They were to meet the USS Ramage, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, in the waters outside of Sharm el-Sheikh, inside the hour. The ship was all that the Naval battle group could spare, but it would be more than enough. There were a little over two hundred soldiers and refugees coming out of Sinai. It would be cramped quarters onboard the destroyer, but it would suffice.

  The trucks bounced and rumbled into the deserted town, chugging towards the harbor. The plan was to take a few civilian vessels out to the destroyer, since there weren’t any docks large enough to accommodate her at the city’s shoreline.