The Tide_Dead Ashore

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  The sounds of acid splashing against the stairs sounded behind him. He never looked back, even as the warm liquid splattered against his legs. He burst through the door at the top of the stairs.

  More gulls squawked overhead. A few swooped low, their eyes looking hungrily at him. Hamid’s eyes searched the roof. His vision became tunneled as he looked for an escape. Each building butted up against the next. It wouldn’t be hard to leap and run from roof to roof. The drooling thing couldn’t follow them, could it? Surely it would get stuck.

  But it wasn’t the drooling one he was worried about anymore. Adil’s continued wailing was a siren call to all the other Jnun milling about the streets, sure to beckon them from kilometers away. No amount of soothing or pleading would quiet him. Hamid frantically looked over the edge of the roof.

  Where to go? Where to go?

  The sound of helicopter blades thumping the air pierced the din of the Jnun.

  Then a pair of growls echoed over the roof. He spun on his heel, and Adil went limp in his arms. Passed out from pain or from what he saw, Hamid couldn’t be sure. He did know that the two Jnun climbing onto the rooftop were much faster than the drooling one.

  Adil’s body blocked the knife on Hamid’s hip. He briefly thought about dropping his brother and fighting the creatures, but he was outnumbered, and Adil would be defenseless. He would almost certainly die.

  No, I must run.

  The helicopter blades called to him again. He knew what he had to do.

  Over the roofs he sprinted, jumping and hurdling, never looking back. He was heading toward the port, knowing full well he was going to run into more of the Jnun. But what did it matter now?

  He didn’t dare look behind him. All he would see were more and more of the creatures. He spotted their bloodshot eyes peering over the rooftops, their claws digging into the plaster and wood. They charged, angry and hungry and rampaging. Never stopping. Nothing but death would stop them.

  Built-up lactic acid burned in his muscles. Everything hurt, and his vision started to turn red. His arms were shaking under Adil’s weight.

  Brother, I will not let you die.

  He could practically feel the hot breath of the Jnun on the back of his neck. Their wails and growls hit his eardrums in a relentless cacophony.

  Must keep going.

  Then he reached the end of the last roof. There was nowhere else to run. Below, a street led toward a warehouse. The monsters seemed to be avoiding the place and its high barbed-wire fences.

  “Please, help us!” Hamid cried, hoping someone, anyone was listening.

  A pair of helicopters churned the air just beyond the warehouse, landing or taking off, he didn’t know.

  Hamid looked behind him. The monsters were too close. He couldn’t stay on the roof. He had to get behind that fence.

  With a prayer, he jumped off the roof. The fall seemed to stretch for an eternity. Then he slammed into a canvas awning. It barely withstood his weight, rotted by weather and neglect. It tore then spilled him into a pile of moldy rugs and carpets. He scrambled to regain his footing and stumbled forward with Adil still unconscious in his arms.

  “Please, save us!” Hamid said. “In the name of Allah, save us!”

  He held up Adil like an offering to the massive gate. The first of the Jnun dropped to the ground behind him. It searched the road as if it wasn’t sure whether to cross. But the sight of fresh meat was too tempting. It crept toward Hamid. He had never seen a Jnun hesitate like this, but he did not have time to wonder about it now.

  He called out again. “Please!”

  A window slid open at the top of the warehouse. A man in some kind of strange, almost demonic armor leaned out with a gun in hand. He very nearly looked like a Jnun himself. With a single shot, he dropped the creature creeping up behind Hamid.

  More gunshots lanced into the ranks of the Jnun. Their bodies fell.

  Hamid whispered his thanks. The pain returned as exhaustion crept up on him and the adrenaline faded. The burns from the drooling thing ignited in fresh agony. If he didn’t get help soon, he would collapse in the street.

  “Please let us in!” Hamid called to the armored gunman.

  The gunman continued firing, blasting the Jnun. Hamid studied his face and saw that the man wasn’t from Morocco. It wasn’t just his armor that was out of place; it was the sandy-blond hair and pale skin, too.

  The gunfire quieted, and the man yelled something in a language Hamid didn’t understand. His words came out in trenchant bites and gasps, something so foreign to Hamid he couldn’t begin to guess what the sounds meant. But then the man made a motion that made his intent clear enough. A simple wave of dismissal.

  “Please,” Hamid moaned.

  The man waved him off again and then slammed the door shut.

  Then down the Jnun came, plunging from the rooftops toward the dirt-covered road.

  Hamid curled around his brother, shielding Adil. There was nowhere else to run and no one else to turn to. Closing his eyes, he whispered a prayer. They would be in paradise soon. Reunited with their father and mother. Away from all of this. Free from the pain.

  A tear escaped his closed eyelids. “Goodbye, Adil.”

  More gunfire exploded all around him. The Jnun dropped in pluming red clouds of mist. Splinters of broken bone sprayed. The monsters collapsed in heaps. Some still writhed, injured but not defeated. A host of men and women, shemagh scarves wrapped around their faces, formed a circle with rifles pointed at the beasts.

  One of the men stretched a hand toward Hamid. “Come with us, boy.”

  Another grabbed Adil.

  Hamid didn’t think twice. He staggered to his feet and followed the group away from the onslaught of more mobbing Jnun into a shadowy alleyway. Onward they ran, winding through the medina, passing many empty storefronts and bodies, Jnun and human alike, until they reached an iron door. Someone opened it, and the armed strangers spilled in. Soon claws and teeth were scraping uselessly against the outside of the door. The sound was jarring, but Hamid breathed a sigh of relief. The tears he had held for so long flowed out as the men and women unwrapped their scarves and threw their rifles over their backs.

  “You’re safe,” a woman said as she began to attend to Hamid’s wounds. “You’re safe.”

  He heard the words, but he didn’t believe them. The monsters were still howling outside the door.

  Maybe he and Adil were safe for now. But how long could it last?

  -1-

  The Huntress

  300 Nautical Miles off the coast of Mauritania

  Dominic Holland took a sip of coffee. The burned aftertaste reminded him of the student-run coffeehouse he used to haunt while studying for his international relations degree and Foreign Service exams.

  Simpler times, he thought. No Skulls. No Oni Agent.

  Long before he had joined the CIA and then run off to start his independent covert ops groups, Dom had imagined he would find a place in the United States Foreign Service. But a thirst for doing something more than sitting behind a desk, talking about diplomacy and pushing papers, spurred him to apply to the Agency. After a year’s worth of background checks and interviews, he found his spot as an analyst, working beside a cute redhead.

  He caught Meredith Webb’s green-eyed gaze.

  “You ever miss the office?” he asked.

  She laughed then brushed a hand through her hair. Or what remained of her hair. Half her head had been shaved during the emergency surgery she had endured after they had retaken the Huntress. The hair was growing back, but although Dom’s medical team was talented, there was still a nasty scar left where her ear had been.

  “I don’t think they’d let me in the office with this rock-star ’do. Too unconventional for them.”

  “You’re going to keep it?”

  Meredith gave him a mischievous smirk. “Why? You think it’s sexy?”

  “Gorgeous,” Dom said. “You’re just missing the leather pants.”
/>   “Oh, do you think those are mission appropriate?”

  Dom shrugged. “We’re independent contractors. We set our own dress codes.” He leaned toward her, circling one finger around the rim of the coffee cup. “But the real question is whether it’s actually appropriate to wear leather pants in any context. I think that’s another discussion entirely.”

  Miguel Ruiz thudded into a seat beside them with a tray of food. “Leather pants are never cool. They trap all that sweat in there. The chafing. Not to mention the smell.” He shuddered and waved his hand in front of his nose. “Worse than a Goliath’s breath.”

  Footsteps followed as another person joined them. “Are you talking about your junk again, Miguel?” said Andris Jansons.

  “Now where in the hell did you get an idea like that?” Miguel asked.

  Andris shot him a look. “You talked about chafing, sweat, and a terrible odor. These are all things you frequently complain about in the locker room. It sounds like you may want to speak to one of the doctors about these issues.”

  “Hey, man, my junk is my concern. Not yours.”

  “Good. Then let us agree not to talk about it while I eat.” Andris spooned a mound of formerly freeze-dried noodles into his mouth. “It is something that—how do you say?—interrupts the appetite.”

  “Close enough,” Dom said.

  “When we get that Spitkovsky dude, you going to interrogate him?” Miguel asked Andris. “You know, being a Soviet and all, I figured you’d want a crack at him.”

  Pyotr Spitkovsky reminded Dom of a stereotypical villain straight out of a Cold War-era flick. The geeks in the electronics workshop had recently translated intel from the facility in the Congo they’d raided. Apparently, Spitkovsky called his group the Forces of Global Liberation. Spitkovsky and the FGL had some bad blood with the Russian government. It probably had something to do with Putin sending him to a Siberian prison. Other than that, they knew almost nothing about him.

  Worse yet, Spitkovsky had known who Dom and the Hunters were before they’d ever met.

  “I am not Russian,” Andris said, his eyes narrowing. “I am Latvian.”

  “Pretty much the same thing.”

  Andris stopped chewing his noodles. “You are joking, yes? You are trying to get on my nerves.”

  “Damn right, he is,” Meredith said. “If I’ve learned anything on the Huntress, it’s that Miguel does nothing so well as being a jackass.”

  “Amen, sister,” Miguel said, holding up his prosthetic hand for a high five.

  “You don’t deserve a high five,” Andris said. Dom couldn’t tell if Andris was serious or just giving Miguel as much smartass flack as he was receiving. Even after years of serving beside the former French Foreign Legionnaire, Dom found it difficult to parse the man’s bone-dry European humor. “You are a sad man, Miguel.”

  “If I’m sad, it’s only because I miss bashing Skulls’ brains in with you, brother.”

  At this Andris smiled. “It is true. That is what you would call a premium bonding experience.”

  “I’d rather bond over a glass of wine, but I guess everyone has their quirks,” Meredith said.

  “You have to admit, the Skulls have brought us closer.” Dom gave her a shit-eating grin.

  “You know what else would’ve worked?” she asked. “A few shots of tequila and a goddamned beach on the Gulf of Mexico. But yeah, sure, Skulls are great too.”

  “Chief, I like this girl,” Miguel said, clapping Meredith’s shoulder. “You picked a good one.”

  “She reminds me of that every day,” Dom said. “And I’m not trying to be cheesy. Literally, she tells me every day.”

  And he did count himself fortunate for each of those days she was with him. For everything they had gone through and survived. Hell, he owed her his life. She had helped save his daughters, Kara and Sadie, and even Maggie, the golden retriever, when Skulls had overtaken Maryland. She had risked everything—her life and career—to stop the spread of the Oni Agent and find the parties responsible for developing and spreading the devastating biological weapon.

  Dom finished the last of his coffee and started to stand. Pain lanced through his leg.

  “You good there, Gramps?” Miguel asked.

  Dom waved him off and straightened. Dr. Lauren Winters, his chief medical officer and scientist, had warned him this would be a painful injury. “Remind me to shoot Spitkovsky a couple times when we see him next. See how he likes it.”

  Miguel’s face scrunched in concern for a moment before morphing into his normal, self-assured cocky expression. “You got it, Chief.” He mimed shooting gestures with both hands as if he were a cowboy from a spaghetti Western. “Ol’ Spitkovsky’s gonna regret the day he crossed us.”

  Dom left the mess with Meredith by his side. The pain of his injury was only eclipsed by the agony of reliving the moment Spitkovsky had escaped. He longed for answers. Why and how was the Oni Agent released? What was Spitkovsky’s motive? And were there others above him, a shadow group pulling the strings of the apocalypse?

  The FGL base hidden deep in the Congo had been manufacturing nightmares. The Titans they had created were grotesque perversions of science, blending Frankenstein-like horror with the military industrial complex. Dom wouldn’t be surprised if there were other macabre secrets to be uncovered in the FGL labs, but their mission had been cut short.

  His fingers clenched into a fist, quivering slightly. If only they had Spitkovsky.

  “Leg still hurting?” Meredith asked, misinterpreting his gesture.

  “No,” Dom said. “More like my brain’s hurting.”

  “Headache?”

  “Regrets.”

  Meredith nodded. She didn’t ask any other questions as she led them up the ladders to the open deck. He had told her over many a sleepless night about what he could’ve done differently, how he could’ve executed the mission better to ensure they captured Spitkovsky. She had patiently listened and offered reassurances that they had done what they could. There was nothing more to be said, and all the regrets in the world wouldn’t change the fact that the Russian had escaped.

  Sun glinted off the blue Atlantic waves. Hardly a cloud passed in the sky. If Dom forgot about everything inside his ship, if he forgot about what lay waiting for them on the land, he could almost pretend this was a beautiful day to sail the ocean.

  He walked beside Meredith, hand in hand with her. Each step he took ached. But each day, he hurt a little less.

  Soon they would be at Lajes Airport to meet the Portuguese Air Force colonel that the Huntress’s pilot, Frank Battaglia, had befriended. Dom wondered where his physical rehabilitation would be by then. Lauren had warned him it would be slow. But he damned well couldn’t sit on the ship while his Hunters ventured into cities ruled by flesh-hungry Skulls.

  He let out a sigh. “I guess I should be thankful I’m still alive.” He felt guilty at once, remembering Renee Boland. She had made the ultimate sacrifice in the jungles, and the emotional wound was rawer than the gunshot in his leg. “And by God, we didn’t come away from the Congo empty handed, either.”

  “Far from it,” Meredith agreed.

  In addition to the intel they’d retrieved from the FGL computer network, the Hunters had rescued a hostage. Shigeru Matsumoto had originally created the Oni Agent, and he might hold the key to stopping its spread. But he was also a feeble old man who had been alternating between unconsciousness and bouts of delirium for days.

  “When that bastard can talk,” Dom said, “we’ll have a long-overdue conversation.”

  ***

  A soft beeping echoed from the biomonitors in the medical bay. The bay was finally, and thankfully, empty of most of its patients. The civilians from Boston—the Weaver family and Alex Li—had recovered fully from their Oni Agent infections. And there were no injured Hunters that needed to be monitored with more than a daily check-in. The sole patron of Lauren’s services was a man who was causing her to question her obligation to
the Hippocratic oath: Shigeru Matsumoto.

  The wizened man was thin as a pipette and more wrinkled than a first-year lab student’s attempt at a histological sample. His lungs rose and fell in a slow rhythm that left Lauren constantly wondering whether each breath would be his last. This was the old man whose so-called invention had resulted in countless long days and nights in the Huntress’s labs. The man whose scientific work had caused so many of her friends and colleagues to lose their lives—some right in front of Lauren in this very bay.

  “Some days, I wish that pruny old bastard had become a Skull himself,” Sean McConnelly, the resident epidemiologist, said.

  “Practically looks like a Skull,” Peter Mikos said. The ship’s surgeon glared at their one and only patient.

  “True that,” Sean said. “He’s got a face like a blind cobbler’s thumb.”

  “Usually I would say not to judge a person based on looks,” Divya Karnik chimed in. “I think it is a fair assessment in this case. In fact, his soul must be far uglier. If reincarnation is as real as my mother insisted, I imagine this man would come back as a tapeworm.”

  Sean cringed. “I’m not sure a life living in someone else’s shit factory is bad enough for this guy.”

  “Whatever he deserves,” Lauren said, “it certainly isn’t the Phoenix Compound.”

  “Shame we had to use a dose on him,” Sean said.

  “I’d rather cure him than let him turn Skull,” Divya said. “At least if we keep him alive, maybe we can get some answers.”

  “Answers would be good,” Lauren said.

  Everyone aboard the ship had been exposed to a particularly resistant strain of Oni Agent nanobacteria that didn’t respond to their old chelation treatment. The last-minute development of the Phoenix Compound had saved them. The compound was the only thing preventing the entire crew—and Matsumoto—from turning into Skulls. Lauren shuddered, wondering what would’ve happened if they hadn’t had the help of her medical team’s newest member, Navid Ghasemi, who specialized in the delivery of pharmaceuticals to neural tissue.