Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  Seven minutes. With a whir and a telltale machine thrum, the helicopter passed over Lord Mantil’s head and the Agent waited, judging the moment when he was just underneath it and thus lost in their blind spot. In that instant, he broke into a run once more.

  The pilot and spotter saw him standing there in his ragged garb as they approached, noting his presence on their search log as they passed overhead, dismissing him as a nomad as they continued on. Flying on their search vector, they were unaware that directly beneath them the seemingly harmless man had now accelerated into a breakneck sprint, kicking up a whirl of sand as he used their shadow to circle around the crash before arching away from them, using their shadow to head out and away from the site, searching for his friends still out there on the plains.

  - - -

  She had awoken to an all-body pain, emphasized and amplified by utter silence. Her body was sending her signals that her mind could not process as she tried to bring herself around. Barely conscious, she started to check herself. She was a pilot. She remembered that she had been deployed to fly a sortie with an armed payload over the Southern Atlantic.

  But something had gone wrong.

  Shit! Memories came to her like slaps to the face and she flinched with equal parts pain and anger. She had never gotten to the cockpit. An old colleague had been waiting for her in ambush, and she had awoken many hours later on the floor of the flight deck. The moving floor.

  She had known instantly that they were airborne. She had been kidnapped, as had her flight commander. She turned her head with the effort of a weightlifter, straining with all her might to get her muscles to respond to her commands. She couldn’t hear anything, but that was to be expected. They had done a high-altitude ejection at near supersonic speed and they had been trained to expect their eardrums to either blow out or at least be severely battered by the wrenching pressure change. She would know which in a few hours, but either way, deafness was going to be at least a temporary setback, possibly a permanent one.

  She felt the tug of the parachute still beating in the wind and she registered that she was still attached to the ejection seat. The B-2 she had ejected from only had two seats, but there had been four people aboard, two pilots and two usurpers, so they had followed emergency procedure and double strapped themselves to the seats. It was not comfortable for the seat’s primary occupant or the person strapped tightly in their lap, but those were the breaks.

  She tasted sand in her mouth, blown in by the dry wind gusting over her, and realized she was thirsty. Then she registered that her captor was still strapped beneath her. He wasn’t moving. She suppressed an instant urge to elbow him in the ribs and felt instead for the clips that were still holding her down. Her left arm did not respond so she focused on her right, finding and detaching the steel clasps at her waist and shoulder before reaching over with a cringe to her left side.

  The movement brought a strained groan from the man under her, one forced through the bounds of unconsciousness to spill mindlessly from his cracked lips. She rolled off him, trying to be as delicate as possible, but her attempt at finesse ended with a thud on the packed dust of the plain, a shout of agony bursting from deep within her. Catching her breath as demons of pain raged inside her, she gripped the side of the ejected seat and wrestled the physical pain under control.

  Lifting her head, she came face-to-face with the man who had tranquilized her and kidnapped her. His face was badly bruised, his nose broken, his lips swollen, no doubt from when her unconscious head had whipped back and forth as they fell to earth. Years of training and military fraternity overcame her anger and she set to tending to his wounds and attempting to revive him, reconciling this with her hatred of him by saying that only he had any real idea of where they were.

  She did not hear the other man approach, despite the speed of his footfalls, or his screeching halt in the sand, but she felt his shadow fall across her at a primal level and instinctively swung around, her right hand grasping at the standard-issue firearm at her side … a firearm that had long since been taken by her kidnappers.

  In his haste, Lord Mantil had not even factored in that there might have been others on board the B-2 he had striven to protect, and he was momentarily taken aback by her presence. But his quick-firing mind took in her uniform in a flash, assessed the situation, and was listing probable scenarios before she had completed her turn.

  She stared into the black eyes of the shabby-looking man and was taken aback by the way that they surveyed her in return. She was being assessed, and not by a local farmer or nomad as his dress might suggest. This man had purpose. This man’s appearance at her side was not a coincidence. He carried no weapon and made no threatening gesture. When words started to spill from his mouth, she heard nothing. After a moment he stopped talking, registering her lack of comprehension, and bent to the ground, his finger moving with swift strokes in the sand.

  ‘friend

  US Agent

  we must go’

  She stared back up at him, trying to assess whether to trust him, and then, leaning on her knees she wrote something in the sand as well.

  ‘uno ab …’

  He stared a moment, clearly thinking, and then nodded, bending and finishing her sentence:

  ‘… alto’

  “One over all.” It was the unofficial motto of the US Air Force. A kind of Semper Fi for pilots.

  The confirmation was like an elixir to her and she relaxed, almost losing her balance and he bent and wrapped his arm under her shoulders, lifting her easily to her feet. He did not let her go once he had her standing, but bent slightly again and she felt his hands moving over her body. For a fleeting moment she thought that she was being sexually assaulted as his fingers roamed over her, feeling more surprise than alarm. But she quickly recognized the skilled hands of a field medic and helped his check of her, mumbling with deaf imprecision as he hit sore points. A few moments later his hands completed their search and he left her leaning against the ejected seat again and bent to the sand, sweeping away their previous words and replacing them with:

  ‘broke collar

  + 2 ribs

  need sling 4 arm’

  She nodded when he looked up and pointed to a compartment in the back of the chair above its spent boosters, which was marked with a small, red cross. But he was already there, unclipping the compartment door and extracting the box inside.

  Working with impassioned speed, Lord Mantil opened the field med box and extracted what he needed. As he did so he turned his attention to the Major. He couldn’t know how much the woman knew about what was happening, but he needed to look inside the man and find what was causing his unconsciousness. Staring with increased intensity, he scanned his limp friend with his powerful eyes. He saw it almost instantaneously, a swelling against the front portal lobe, heavy sub-cranial bruising and a hairline fracture of the parietal.

  Mentally he checked his time. A list of tasks appearing and prioritizing in his mind as he assessed how much he could do before the approaching Iranian army were upon them. As he did this he speedily fashioned a sling with the expertise and secured it around Captain Jennifer Falster’s shoulder, manhandling her as he worked but carefully avoiding aggravating her wounds. He thought of the Major. Lord Mantil needed to relieve the pressure.

  Turning back to the captain, he looked at her a moment and considered his next move. Deciding a course of action, he touched his finger to the sandy floor once more and began to write.

  ‘I now do strange thing

  trust me?’

  He looked at her imploringly. She nodded. Gently, he reached his hand up to her face and touched her cheek. She instinctively went to flinch but his eyes stayed fixed to hers, and she tried to mirror their steadfastness. His index finger came to rest at the entrance to her ear. Inside the finger, he activated the tendrils that were wired into it to enable him to open locks, or worm their way into any other tight spot the Agent needed to probe.

  The tiny fiber
s snaked out of slits in his armored skin and into the captain’s ear canal, sensors at their tips reporting back to Lord Mantil on the rip in the thin tympanic membrane of the woman’s eardrum. The cataclysmic drop in air pressure when she and Major Toranssen had ejected from the B-2 had torn through the woman’s eardrums. They would heal, to a degree, but for weeks she would hear nothing more than thrumming and mumbled thumps.

  He could help the healing along by cauterizing and sealing the wound, but it would still take time for her hearing to mend and adjust, and he needed to speak to her now. The fibrous black wires surveyed her eardrum and the tiny, jointed ossicles behind it that linked it to the cochlea, her brain’s microphone. With infinitesimal care, one of the thin wires slipped through the tear in her eardrum and wrapped around one of the tiny ossicles known as the malleus or ‘hammer.’ In doing so, he literally took hold of the very mechanism of her hearing and, with his finger firmly planted against her ear, he held her head still with his other hand and started to send infinitesimal vibrations through the tiny little joint.

  She felt it instantly, like a blind man opening transplanted eyes. With disjointed clarity, the voice of Lord Mantil projected itself directly into her ear without his lips ever moving an inch.

  “Captain, please do not be alarmed. I must ask that you trust me when I say that this will all be explained in time.”

  She stared at him dumbfounded. She tried to nod but his firm grip did not allow her head to move even slightly, so she mouthed her assent. He smiled at her. And while his face begged for her trust, his voice echoed in her head once more.

  “We need to move … immediately. We are currently in Iran and helicopters are searching this area. When they find us, troops will no doubt be close behind. While I could easily handle them, I do not want there be anymore killing unless absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, before we can leave I have to operate on the major. He has a cranial hemorrhage that needs to be relieved before it does permanent damage to his brain. I can do the operation now, and I can do it relatively quickly, but in order to do it I am going to have to use some tools that may … alarm you.”

  She looked at him, her mouth repeating his words: alarm me? He nodded. “Like I said, this will all be explained soon enough. I am going to make a quick repair to your ear. Your hearing should begin to return within the hour. But for now I am going to have to ask you to trust me.”

  Silence returned as the tendril from his finger released her malleus and then gently cauterized the tear in her ear with a minuscule laser built into one of the tendrils. With her eardrum sealed once more, he gently removed his hand, allowing her to watch the fibers retract into his finger. She looked back at him amazed.

  His smile was sympathetic, like he was looking at someone who is about to discover they are the butt of an elaborate but tasteless practical joke, and with one of his many ‘talents’ stowed, he engaged another. Her disbelief doubled as his left eye twisted, unlocked, and rolled aside to leave a black cavity beneath. Despite having already seen the tendrils in Shahim’s hand, this new wonder hit at her on a more primal level, and she recoiled. As she stared at the hole in Shahim’s face where his left eye had been, something in her told her that her life as she knew it was over.

  Somehow the utter silence from her damaged ears made the few seconds even more surreal, but also, in a way, more digestible; and so she allowed curiosity to take over and leaned back in to look more closely into the black socket that had been revealed behind Shahim’s false left eye.

  From within, a black lens extruded itself, surrounded by a host of spines and needles. Lord Mantil did his best to make his expression gentle and unthreatening but the sight was, without doubt, the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. And yet she was transfixed. She stared at it. A second more passed.

  With an apologetic expression, he turned away from her. He had only a couple of minutes left, at most, before the helicopters came, and so he turned his attention to his other ward, bringing the apparatus that was his Tactical Contact Weapons Complement to bear on the sleeping major.

  Gripping the unconscious man’s head with both his hands, he focused in on the center of the hemorrhage he had detected inside the man’s skull, and set his machinery to work. His scalpel was invisible. A mere flicker of bluish green in the dusty air as it lanced the major’s skull. Watching in awe, Captain Jennifer Falster saw the major’s hair singe and burn away before she saw the black spot appear on the top of his forehead. A small circle of the skin flayed away along with the thin layer of flesh beneath it and in a moment she was staring at a tiny patch of her colleague’s bleached white skull.

  The hole that the laser then burrowed in the unconscious major’s skull was barely two millimeters across, but as soon as the laser broke through, the sudden release of pressure caused a spurt of blood to squirt from the gap. It sprayed across Shahim’s chest and lap, a line of red relieving the oppression of the major’s mind.

  With the skull penetrated, Lord Mantil lifted his index finger and pressed it to the tiny hole. Once more, the minute fibers wormed out, this time into the major’s head, fanning out as soon as they passed through the hole in his skull into the gap between the brain and the cranial bone that cradled it. As they spread out, they found the broken capillaries and veins that were causing the hemorrhage and they began to heat up. The heat from them singed the tiny blood vessels, making them contract and seal and then the wires began to rotate in Major Jack Toranssen’s head, cauterizing the other broken blood vessels as they went.

  After a moment, he withdrew his finger and focused his left eye once more, sealing and anaesthetizing the small wound even as his hands prepared a bandage from the med kit. Jennifer watched in fascination as the Agent worked, his hands moving with speed and precision, her mind working to keep up with him. In a moment it was over and he turned to her once more, his hand rising to touch her other ear this time. She let him touch her, giving in to the strangeness of it all and his voice sounded in her deaf ears once more.

  “It is done. I do not know how long he will sleep, but we must move, and we must move now. Captain, can I ask you to trust me one more time?”

  She paused a moment, more surprised that she was even being asked than actually debating her answer. She had just seen a man perform brain surgery with his eyes, and now that man was talking to her with wires in his fingers. What was she going to do? Run away? Ask the Iranians for help? Wait here for a cavalry that she knew would never arrive?

  She mouthed yes to him, and followed it with a hesitant shrug, like a child trusting her mother before she pulls off a band-aid.

  “Thank you,” his voice rang in her ear. He quickly performed the same simple but incredibly precise surgery on her right ear as he had her left, and then he removed his hand from her cheek and stood. She stood as well, a little unsteady, but her strength returning with every minute. He turned and motioned for her to climb on his back. Sparing a thought for how they were going to move the major, she shook her head, mumbling that he should carry the major, she would be fine.

  But his face became insistent, the face of a father not wanting a child to argue, not this time. Just do it, his expression said, and she reacted with a trust born of a lack of options. Wrapping her good arm around his neck, she climbed meekly onto his back, wrapping her legs around his waist as she did so. He anticipated her movements and bent to meet her, lifting her easily, and then bending at the knee to scoop up the major. She felt amazement blossom afresh inside her as he stood with ease, bearing their combined weight like they were but rag dolls.

  He turned his face to her and he mouthed, ‘Hold on’ and then he winked, a conspiratorial smile spreading across his face.

  And with that, he leaned into the wind and leapt forward, bounding with a single momentous thrust into a headlong sprint, their negligible weight upon him like feathers on an eagle’s back as he flew across the plain.

  They were fleeing the helicopters. Fleeing the innocent Iranian soldiers he l
onged not to fight. Heading north, they sprinted toward the large city of Mashhad, kicking up dust in their trail as his herculean legs pistoned under them, propelling them forward.

  He did not know how they were going to make it to safety. He would figure that out as they went. He would have to circle the city and try to find a way to the sparsely populated border with Turkmenistan and then across it and on to the American embassy in that nation’s capital, Ashgabat. But that was a long way off; first he had to get them away from the closing Iranian troops.

  Chapter 2: Floods of Exodus

  “Aw, gimme the damn remote, ya silly bitch,” said Jason to his wife. She stared at him with indignant fury at the use of the ‘b’ word and he rolled his eyes, knowing he was about to get the bitch speech again. “Here we go …”

  “Here we go?!” she shouted, “I’ll give ya somethin’ to roll ya fuckin’ eyes about, ya jackass. I told you thousand times, I do not appreciate bein’ called a bitch. Now, if ya don’t mind, I am tryin’ to watch the pastor.”

  Jason sat sullenly for a while, staring at the screen while a smiling man in an expensive suit fabricated from broken promises explained the vast benefits of his unique ministry to his viewers, “So you see, ma children, only through the voice of God can you be saved from the terrible plague sweeping our great nation. For the sinners have brought this down upon them, and are reaping the rewards of their godless ways.”

  The pastor went on at some length about how the purchase of his particular version of the bible, with his particular audio CD, would help ensure salvation, hinting at but never actually promising that it would save people from the terror that was indeed sweeping the nation, killing thousands as it went. Jason watched begrudgingly, unaware that the pastor’s well-placed words were sinking into his psyche, unaware of how many of them he would be repeating when he had another argument about this at his local watering hole the next day.