Bannon scampered across the field until his legs ached and the pain in his chest flared like a furnace. He cried out as he ran, screaming until he could not hear the sound of his own voice above the crushing clatter of mechanical roar that seemed to shudder the very air.
Then – when he had given up all hope and began to stagger in despair – the helicopter seemed to tilt and then jink, lurching almost onto its side to veer and dive towards him.
Bannon waved his arms and cried out in relief. He turned and glanced over his shoulder. Sully was just scrambling through the wire fence, and close behind him came the undead – snarling and howling like a pack of ravenous wolves.
The downdraft from the helicopter’s massive scything blades flattened the grass and swayed the nearby trees. The air flailed at Bannon, kicking up dirt and mud so that he threw up his hands to shield his face and turned his head away. The sound was a roaring cacophony that beat against his eardrums. He felt himself cowering against the violent noise as the helicopter swung suspended in the sky, almost directly overhead.
Through tightly squinted eyes, Bannon looked up and saw the monstrous belly of the beast, hanging from the blurred disc of its giant rotor. He saw a cargo door open and then the distorted helmeted face of a crewman appeared. Bannon dropped to his knees and felt all the strength finally fade from his body. The sound in his ears became a throbbing roar, a rushing hissing bellow.
The crewman’s body appeared, and then hung suspended from the helicopter, dangling in the air like a spider from a delicate strand of web. The man dropped closer, and Bannon dragged himself to his feet. The crewman hit the ground, his legs buckling to cushion his landing. The helmet and visor made him look other worldly. He shook Bannon’s shoulders and felt him sway, as though his bones had turned to jelly. The crewman harnessed Bannon to his chest with the quick efficiency of someone trained in the art, and then signaled urgently with a thrust of his right hand. Bannon felt himself become weightless. His head lolled to the side. He was hanging limp in the air, twenty feet above the wind-whipped ground. He saw Sully, still running doggedly across the field, and the undead all around him. Bannon opened his mouth and shouted at the crewman, but the crushing roar of the rotors and the whine of turbines wrenched the words from his lips before they could be heard.
Bannon watched Sully slow despondently, and then stumble. The big man stopped, his head thrown back, watching as Bannon was dragged inside the belly of the beast.
Then the air was suddenly ripped apart by the shattering roar of machine gun fire.
Sully staggered. The helicopter was pivoting on its axis, spitting gouts of flame as a hail of bullets stitched the ground. Clods of earth were flung into the sky. The bullets caught three of the undead and ripped their bodies apart, shredding them mercilessly. Sully turned and lurched away. The undead paid no attention to him. The helicopter spun again and the sound of machine gun fire in Sully’s ears was like a stick being dragged along a fence of corrugated iron. He felt the air around him rupture with the brutal flailing shred of bullets.
Then the helicopter was rising and tilting, moving off to the south quickly, and fading from sight on the dwindling clatter of its rotors.
John Sully stood forlorn and abandoned in the field and stared warily at the undead ghouls that mindlessly milled all around him.
Part Two.
Chapter 1.
Something shadowy flittered across Bannon’s face, darkening his vision for an instant before moving away like a tenuous veil. He heard himself groan softly, and then his eyes fluttered open.
There was a man hovering over him.
Bannon blinked in confusion. He swept his gaze past the man. He was lying on a narrow uncomfortable cot. There was a tube in his arm connected to a bag of clear fluid, hung from a steel stand beside where he lay, and a lamp glowing above his head. The walls and ceiling around him were white. He narrowed his eyes and frowned for long seconds. The air smelled of antiseptic.
He turned his gaze slowly back to the man. He was sitting hunched on a chair beside the cot, leaning over Bannon with a kindly expression. The man was wearing army fatigues, but Bannon could see no insignia – no identification on the uniform at all. The man had haggard, worn features, his dark eyes set deep into his face and surrounded by spiders webs of fine wrinkles.
“Welcome,” the stranger said in a calm, friendly voice, “to Camp Calamity. Glad you survived your ordeal.”
Bannon licked his tongue across dry parched lips. His mouth felt thick, as if stuffed with cotton wool. He felt his vision come gradually into focus. He tried to lift his hand to rub at pain that stabbed behind his eyes, but his limbs felt unnaturally heavy. He grunted and his head lolled to the side.
There were other people in the room, standing back against the far wall of the infirmary in a shadowed cluster beyond the reach of lamplight. They were faces without definition, gathered on the periphery of his vision, standing quietly and unmoving. Bannon sensed they were all watching him with some kind of strained anxiety.
“Where am I?” he asked.
The man leaning over the cot gave Bannon a benevolent smile. “You’re safe,” he said. “You’re at Camp Calamity. One of our recce helicopters plucked you out of a field just outside of Grey Stone. Do you remember that?”
Bannon remembered.
The horrific memories came slamming back with a rush; he saw the dead bodies scattered across the lawns of the harbor foreshore, the undead ghouls that had attacked as the boat had docked, the macabre slaughter room in the top floor apartment. He saw it all again in chilling detail that made his skin crawl. He nodded his head slowly.
The man beside the cot seemed pleased and relieved. He patted Bannon’s shoulder in some kind of reassurance.
“Can you tell me your name?”
“Bannon. Steve Bannon.”
The man nodded like he already knew. “And what did you do, Mr. Bannon?”
“Do?”
“Your work?”
Bannon swallowed. There was a dry hard lump in his throat. “Skipper,” he said, his voice nothing more than a soft croak. “I was the skipper of a fishing boat. The ‘Mandrake’.”
“What kind of fishing boat?”
“A fucking big one,” Bannon said gruffly. “A seventy-five foot long line boat that operated out of Grey Stone harbor.”
The man turned and glanced over his shoulder at the shadowy figures standing at the back of the room. He nodded his head, and another man suddenly stepped forward, peeling away from the dark shapes. He was a tall thin man, wearing a long white lab coat. The man had a narrow, drawn face, and thick dark-rimmed glasses framed his eyes and bushy eyebrows.
The man didn’t sit. He stood at the foot of the cot and his voice was clinical, devoid of compassion or emotion.
“Mr. Bannon, how do you feel?” the man asked with the kind of perfunctory tone that suggested he didn’t much care about the answer.
“Like shit,” Bannon said. He felt a groggy lethargy holding his body down and wondered whether he had been drugged. The pain behind his eyes was like a brutal stabbing blade.
“Good,” the man in the coat said, as if he hadn’t heard. “Do you feel up to answering some questions about your ordeal? They’re important, and time is of the essence.”
Bannon started to nod his head, and then stopped himself. He tried to sit up, but couldn’t move. He frowned.
“Am I paralyzed?”
The man in the coat shook his head. “Restrained,” he said bluntly. “Your hands and feet are bound to the cot,” and then went on quickly as he saw the sudden alarm flare in Bannon’s expression. “It’s a security precaution only, I assure you.”
Bannon flinched. “Precaution against what?”
The man in the coat shrugged, as though the answer was obvious. “Against infection,” he grunted. “In case you are carrying the virus.”
Bannon laughed suddenly, but it was a cynical and bitter sound, edged with something close to hysteria
. “If I was infected, you fuckwit, I would have turned undead within twenty seconds. I assure you, I’m fucking normal.”
The uniformed man sitting behind the bed cut across the conversation smoothly. He put a restraining hand gently on Bannon’s shoulder and flashed a silent message to the other man with the glare of his eyes. “Of course you’re right, Mr. Bannon,” the soldier said to mollify him. “We’ve had you here under observation for a couple of hours. You don’t actually have a scratch on you. Apart from dehydration and exhaustion, your vital signs are steady.”
“Then untie the fucking restraints,” Bannon snapped. The two men at either end of the bed exchanged another meaningful glance, and then the man in the white coat shrugged his shoulders and nodded his head reluctantly. The uniformed man unfastened the strap around one of Bannon’s wrists and then paused, as though the skipper might suddenly explode into furious attack. When he didn’t, the man let out a breath, like a sigh of relief. He reached across and loosened the other wrist restraint. Bannon sat up, massaging the abraded skin and flexing his fingers until he felt the tingle of renewed circulation.
“How long have I been here?” Bannon asked. There was restrained resentment in his voice.
“Two hours,” the soldier replied.
Bannon nodded. He felt his temper cooling. “What about Sully?”
“Sully?”
Bannon nodded again. “John Sully. The other guy in the field. He was running with me. Did you send helicopters back for him?”
The man sitting beside the cot studied Bannon’s face with a curious, intrigued expression. He leaned closer to the bed, watching Bannon’s eyes with minute fascination. He said nothing for a long time, and it looked to Bannon as though the man was choosing his words carefully when he spoke at last.
“Mr. Bannon, there was no other man in the field. There was just you, running from about a dozen zombies.”
Bannon shook his head and his voice tightened. “There was another guy,” he insisted. “He was one of my crewmen from the fishing boat. His name is John Sully.”
The soldier sat back, his eyes narrowed to appraising slits. He glanced past the tall man in the lab coat and seemed to be frowning at someone else, who was still a part of the shadows. He turned back to Bannon slowly and leaned forward until his face was close.
“We played the tapes back,” he said quietly. “The recce chopper recorded the whole incident. That footage shows you running across a field and several of the undead chasing you.”
Bannon screwed his eyes tightly shut and let out a long weary sigh. “Sully wasn’t entirely undead,” he said. “He got bitten, but he didn’t turn. The infection… or whatever it is… didn’t kill him. He was still alive.”
The uniformed man’s eyes went wide with sudden shock and he recoiled as though Bannon had bitten him. He stared incredulously at the skipper on the bed for long seconds, his mind a whirl. Finally the man got up from the chair and disappeared into the shadows at the far end of the room. Bannon could hear hushed urgent voices, but the words were indistinct and muffled. He pressed his fingertips to his temples and massaged at the ache that lingered behind his eyes. He felt as though he was swaying. He slumped back down on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
The uniformed man came back to the bed, but something in his expression had altered. His eyes were dark and penetrating, the friendly demeanor now hidden behind a furrowed brow and a thin-lipped scowl.
“Mr Bannon, tell me again the name of the man who you allege was bitten, but did not become infected.”
Bannon fixed his eyes on the uniformed man. “First, tell me who the fuck you are.”
The man flinched. For an instant he paused and Bannon saw something dark and dangerous shadow the stranger’s eyes. It was there for just an instant, and then gone again, like a passing cloud across the calm green surface of a lake.
The man smiled without warmth. “My name is Smith,” he said stiffly. “Army intelligence.”
Bannon said nothing and in the silence the soldier made a half-hearted gesture to the man standing at the foot of the bed in the lab coat. “And this is doctor Jones. He’s army too. He’s with USAMRID, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases… which is why we always just use the anacronym,” the intelligence man muttered dryly.
Bannon arched a taunting eyebrow. “Smith and Jones?” he repeated dryly. “And who are the rest of the goons, cowering back there in the shadows?”
“The von Trapp family, from ‘The Sound of Music’,” Smith said without any hint of humor.
Bannon got the message.
Who those people are is none of your fucking business.
The intelligence officer turned the chair around and sat down, straddling the seat with his arms draped over the backrest. He leaned forward into the soft light of the overhead lamp.
“The name of the man?” he prodded.
“Sully,” Bannon said and spelled it out. “John Sully.” He heard the scuffle of footsteps in the shadows and then a door open and close again.
“And he was a crewman aboard your fishing boat?”
“Yeah,” Bannon said.
“Did you know him well?”
Bannon shrugged. “I guess,” he said. “Sully worked the boat with me for about the last three years. He was casual – I called on him when I needed him.”
The intelligence officer looked thoughtful. “So he wasn’t on board the fishing boat every time you went to sea?”
“No. Not every time. I rotated the crew.”
The man nodded. “How old is this Sully?”
Bannon didn’t actually know. “Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five,” he guessed.
“Physical description?”
“Big, muscular guy.”
“Anything else? Any distinguishing marks?”
“Tattoos on his forearms, and a shaved head,” Sully said. “Oh, and now he has a massive gouge bitten out of his fucking neck.”
The intelligence officer frowned in disappointment. He sighed. “I don’t think you’re taking this line of questioning with the seriousness it deserves,” he said stiffly. “Your description of John Sully could help your country. What I am talking to you about tonight are matters of national security.”
The man’s stare was like ice and slowly Bannon felt the edge come off his temper. He felt bone-weary, wrung out by the endless hours of unbearable strain he had endured. He let his tension go in one long wretched breath.
“Sully is about six-two, maybe six foot three. Brown eyes. A couple of scars on his left arm.”
The intelligence officer nodded. Over his shoulder, Bannon saw the infirmary door open again and someone stepped stealthily into the room. The uniformed man heard the noise of the door and glanced over his shoulder. A young woman emerged, her face pale and plain, her dark hair scraped back severely from her face. She was wearing some kind of a uniform. She handed a piece of paper to the intelligence guy and then faded back out of sight.
The man called Smith studied the page for long seconds and then turned it around for Bannon to see. It was a police report.
“Is that John Sully?”
Bannon frowned. The quality of the image was poor – so dark in places that the shadows were inky black patches. Bannon looked carefully. “It’s him,” he said, “but he’s changed since this photo.”
The army officer skimmed the page with his eyes. “This is a police report from about four years ago,” he said. “Sully was arrested on a breaking and entering charge.” He read through the details of the report and then scowled at the photo image. “How has he changed?”
“The hair, for one thing,” Sully said. “His head is shaved now, like I told you. And his face has filled out more.”
The intelligence officer’s frown deepened. He turned his head and spoke into the shadows.
“Do we have anything else on the guy, Stephanie?”
“No, sir,” a woman replied. Bannon guessed it was the same young woman who
had handed across the report, but he couldn’t see her now that she had stepped away from the glare of the lamp.
The man named Smith grunted, like he had taken a solid punch to the guts.
“Mr. Bannon, what was the time delay between when Mr. Sully became infected, and when you were rescued by the helicopter?”
Bannon thought about that. The entire day had been one of such intense chaos and fear that he couldn’t possibly be certain. He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe an hour,” he guessed. “Give or take thirty minutes either way.”
The intelligence officer’s expression stayed blank. “And what – exactly – was the nature of Mr. Sully’s wound?”
“The nature?”
“Yes. How did he become infected?”
“He was bitten,” Bannon said, and resentment began to creep back into his voice. “We were standing in the parking lot of the apartment complex I lived in. We had just been through all the units looking for a sign of my wife – searching for her,” Bannon’s voice became thick and then choked off. The intelligence officer waited patiently. The room was eerily silent pulsing with a sudden tension.
“When we came down to the parking lot, one of the undead fuckers suddenly appeared from behind a corner of the building. It rushed at Sully. Sully went down. The ghoul hit him hard and they both fell to the ground. The thing bit him. It gouged his shoulder as he tried to protect his face, and then it tore a chunk from his throat.”
“A chunk?”
Bannon nodded. “Like it was a wild fucking animal. I shot the ghoul, but I was too late. Sully was lying on the ground bleeding out. He had his hand over the wound, but it didn’t help. Then, he faded.”
“Faded?”
“Yes,” Bannon said solemnly. “His eyes faded, went dull. Then he died. I put the barrel of my pistol against his forehead. We had lost two other crewmen earlier in the day. Both of them had turned into undead killers about ten seconds after breathing their last breath. I expected the same thing to happen to Sully. I had the gun ready – waiting for the instant he turned.”
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