Operation Caspian Tiger

by Addison Gunn

  “So what then?” Miller asked.

  “For now, go back to your people,” Gray said. “We stay the course.”

  “But—”

  Gray interrupted Miller, this time. “An organization this size is like one of those boats. They don’t turn fast. This is going to take time. Besides, you have to know where you’re going before turning the ship around.”

  Miller nodded, bitterly. “Fine,” he said. “So long as you don’t push us too hard, I guess I can’t complain.” He turned for the door.

  “Alex?” Gray held his hands behind his back.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for getting my hand back on the rudder.”

  3

  IN THE END, orders came down from above: no more chasing the Charismatics across the city. If it didn’t directly impact operations at the compound, it was to be ignored. The bright side was that their replacement duty was cushy, and kept them away from anyone who didn’t understand. As Doyle put it, keep dogs with dogs, cattle with cattle. Mix the two up and neither would be happy.

  These dogs were ride-along escorts on the food trucks. There was a lot of time to sleep, waiting for the trucks to arrive or snatched between Infected ambushes and wildlife attacks. Generally Miller and the rest of his team didn’t even have to dismount—the heavy lifting was handled by a pair of armed Bravos. Their remote turrets, mounting an automatic grenade launcher and .50 cal machine gun each, could clear the road no matter what was in front of the convoy. Sure, ammo was scarce, but five rounds in a thug-behemoth’s ass got the thing moving along pretty damn quick even if it didn’t seem to slow the carnivorous rhino bastards down any.

  What the hell were those creatures built from, if a burst off the .50 was the equivalent of a sharp swat with a newspaper? What was it going to take to stop them? Maybe the 40mm grenades could do it, but they didn’t have enough of those to waste.

  Anyway, didn’t matter. Wasn’t Miller’s—or Cobalt’s—problem. The trucks never stopped long enough for them to dismount, so Miller never had to wake up. If he had trouble sleeping he could always call on Doyle and his drugs, but the occasional burst of gunfire and the jolting ride didn’t bother him.

  It had been a long, long time since Miller had caught up on his sleep. But now he was sleeping eighteen hours a day, making up for the madness in the weeks before.

  He listlessly hung, trapped between day-dreams and sleep, picturing his ex-girlfriend Samantha sitting down with one of her self-help books and explaining, reading aloud section by section, that he was actually depressed. And bit by bit, though he might have claimed she was way off the mark, she’d work through the checklists in her books and get him to open up until he admitted that, yes, he missed the Army, and civilian life was taking a lot of getting used to. Maybe this time she could have gently pried at him until Miller blurted that with enough of Doyle’s drug-drenched paper strips in his system, killing people in cold blood didn’t seem all that bad. That nothing seemed bad, that everything was just fucking copacetic.

  His memories of the killings were an unpleasant, intrusive tangle. But they felt like something that had happened to someone else, mostly, and that seemed like the best possible situation. So he shut his eyes and concentrated, hard, on the hum of the truck’s wheels, curled up in one of the three bunk-beds behind the driver’s compartment. He let conversations between du Trieux and the driver wash through him and vanish, and he thought about nothing in particular. Just pushed everything out of his head and slept, waiting for the next cycle to complete, the truck looping into the city to the compound and back to the checkpoint in New Jersey, where they’d switch to a fresh truck coming in.

  He woke to the ebbing, back-and-forth oceanic roar of humanity. He jolted straight, almost banging his head on the bunk above his. The driver was rolling down his window, while Morland, now occupying the passenger seat, was twisted round to look back.

  “Miller!” Morland pointed out front. “It’s a riot.”

  “The Infected don’t riot, they attack,” Miller snapped, scrambling off the bunk in time to catch du Trieux’s foot in the face. She swore, pulling herself back up on her bunk, while Miller grabbed his M27 and pushed up against the back of Morland’s seat.

  “It’s not the Infected...”

  It wasn’t a riot, either. But it could turn into one.

  The late afternoon light burned across the barrier wall, pouring across the open gates and illuminating a rectangle of the crowd filling the motor pool. It wasn’t the Infected. It was the refugees, tired and sweaty but washed clean of color, their clothes faded white by the delousing regimen. They were chanting, words clear—nothing like an Infected chorus.

  “Hell, no! We won’t go! Hell, no!”

  None of the unified purpose of the Infected, either. Most were there to protest the rumoured evacuations to Boston, while others were scrambling through the crowds, passing backpacks along in fire-gang fashion, rushing out as the gates slowly rolled back, trying to escape into the city before a guard on the streets outside barked at them to stay put. Hell—even the lead Bravo’s turret swung to cover the now terrified would-be escapees.

  The truck stopped halfway through the gates, a few feet from the back of the crowd instead of driving through—something Miller half-expected to see, memories of pulped bodies briefly distracting him, before he ordered the dismount and climbed last out of the truck.

  Hsiung, who’d been riding along in the lead Bravo, was already outside and waiting for them, shrugging helplessly, as if this were her fault. “No one told me, there wasn’t anything on the drone footage...”

  Why would there be? Northwind was keeping an eye on the land routes into the Astoria compound, trying to keep logistics going. Civil unrest wasn’t on their dance-card, or Cobalt’s.

  The motor pool’s guards were the only ones there to handle the crowd that had broken into the parking and repair zone, just about the only open space left in the compound. The wall guards were taking turns staring at the crowd, making sure the machine guns facing the city were all manned.

  “Hey! Hey! Clear a path, we need to get the convoy in!”

  Miraculously, a path didn’t appear. An impulse to lift his M27 and make one, filling the air with bullets, was the first Hollywood solution to present itself. But that wasn’t how the world worked, or even the way it was supposed to work. Miller knew that much, through the red fog of frustration. He tried yelling again, but it fell on deaf ears.

  He marched back to the lead Bravo and leaned into the cabin. “Turn on the siren.”

  “What siren?”

  The driver, one of the guys from Bayonet, clearly hadn’t spent any time in the Army. Miller reached past him and flipped a mode toggle and punched commands into the driver side screen. The Bravo screamed like a cop car on bad methamphetamine, and the crowd backed away from it, covering their ears and hurling their slogans at the vehicles shouldering their way in. The stragglers trying to get out, or who didn’t get out of the way, Morland and the Bayonet team pushed aside.

  At last, Miller and Hsiung dragged the gate shut, bracing it at either end with swinging sets of steel bars. The crowd eyed the truck hungrily, but as members of Bayonet shepherded it through the press to the cargo dock, nobody did anything more than eye it. The refugees were hungry, sure, but they were being fed. They didn’t open a path up as easily for Cobalt. Fighting through, pushing along through the crush, Miller froze in place, staring, searching.

  The past—so much better than the present—was on Miller’s mind, sure. That’s what was going on. Miller hadn’t actually spotted Samantha in the crush. Had he?

  It was impossible. She was one of the Infected, probably. And her light brown hair—impossible for him to match, Miller’s highlights always taking him to dirty blond—simply wasn’t anywhere he looked. Had he seen her? Or had he just wanted to see her?

  He kept twisting around to look, until du Trieux reached out of the crowd and grabbed his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”<
br />
  Miller wet his lips to answer, but he couldn’t. He shook his head, and meekly turned to shoulder through the crowd after her.

  THE REFUGEE PROCESSING office hadn’t heard of Samantha. Their files were a mess, though—boxes of unsorted refugee forms waiting for processing mixed in here and there, and not an electronic device in sight. All handwritten. It was possible she’d been processed and her form simply wasn’t where it should have been in the files, but Miller wasn’t entirely convinced he hadn’t made it all up, anyway.

  At the checkpoint outside the city, curled up on his stretch of bunk in a repurposed truck stop office while they waited for the next truck in, all he cared about was the privacy he had between the wall behind him and his phone in front of his face.

  Getting a connection to the wider internet, any kind of connection, was more through luck than any kind of skill with the phone’s menus. Eventually he connected to a public network, so choked of bandwidth that not even the user icons loaded on his social media pages. And every few profile flips, he had to reconnect. Not that he could use the site, no one could. The friendly cartoon dog that failed to properly load at the top of every page continually informed him, in a small pop-up window, that the site was down for maintenance and available in a read-only mode. Maintenance would be over in a few hours, Barker the dog explained, and had been explaining since the spring.

  It was all more than three months out of date, but he continued to page through each and every profile for ‘Billy R.’ in Los Angeles he could find. Without pictures, and without being able to log on and directly access his contact list or view last names, it was slow going.

  A lot of people named Billy had been very cranky about food, all those months ago. Some had stopped posting months before the site froze, some had the public discussions on their pages filled with ‘miss you’ and ‘rest in peace.’

  Not his Billy, though. Miller was sure Billy wouldn’t be so unfortunate as to starve in a famine. Billy was smart, resourceful. Had... marketable skills, Miller realized, a traitorous feeling in his gut as he thought about it.

  He thought he found the right Billy. Lots of friends—not that Miller could log in and see the list, just the total: a number value for Billy’s grace and charm. Lots of smiling emoticons, lots of cheerful, upbeat little updates. About how he and his boyfriend were packing to leave the city.

  More traitorous feelings bubbled up in Miller. It had been a long, long time since he and Billy had parted ways. Visiting him three weekends a month hadn’t been quite enough to hold things together after Miller was hired by Schaeffer-Yeager. And he’d been too busy to chat with Billy, or send messages back and forth, or play games together. A bodyguard wasn’t much good if he spent his time thumbing at a phone like a kid in love, even if that’s how the bodyguard felt.

  Leave the city, Miller thought. You leave the city, Billy, and get the hell away from anything or anyone dangerous. And make sure that boyfriend of yours is the practical macho type you loved, the type you claimed I was, someone who can live off the land with you on some beach in Baja.

  Of course there wouldn’t be anywhere Billy could get ahold of cheap, sweetened liquor now. That was Miller’s mental image of Billy, maybe the one he’d have to hold onto forever: Billy on a deck chair on the beach, holding a pair of drinks with ridiculous names and a dozen colours and their own little paper umbrellas to keep the sun off the ice.

  Miller let himself wallow in the desire to be the guy keeping Billy safe for a little while, then tried his other friends, his parents. All of them were as he’d left them months before, when the phones still worked. Dad using the public part of his page to discuss how to get pot-luck meals around to the neighbours, dozens of miles away from the ranch but still the closest human beings around. Mom’s page seemed similarly practical, filled with updates on far-flung members of the family. Even an update on ‘Alex staying busy in New York.’

  Busy. Right.

  He tried old acquaintances, friends of friends, until his eyes burned with fatigue and he couldn’t put it off any longer.

  He put in a search for Samantha L. of Philadelphia.

  Philadelphia had, almost, been convenient. Forty-five minutes on the fastest direct train. It was entirely possible for him to stay at her apartment and get to work on time, or, as she often preferred, for her to get back to her job and classes in leisurely time from his studio-apartment in the city, rather than having him disentangle from her at five-thirty every morning.

  It had been good until the question of their future arrived. She’d been a little unhappy when he’d told her that he didn’t consider himself straight, but she’d gotten over that. The question of kids had, for Miller, been one he’d tried to keep distant. Samantha hadn’t liked that, been impatient to move in together more formally. He’d forgotten her favorite kind of flower three times over, turning his make-up bouquets into fodder for fresh fights.

  Maybe she was right.

  Maybe it was unfair for him to have entered into that kind of relationship with her when he knew full well they wanted different things out of it, stringing her along with vague promises that more commitment would be on the horizon. All he’d really wanted was someone he could be happy with, in the now, and all she’d really wanted was someone she could be happy with for the rest of her life.

  Once in a while she turned it around to his bisexuality, sometimes asking if he didn’t want to commit because he still wanted to be with men, or if he was actually gay, and those conversations always left him feeling hurt and misunderstood. But it was easier for Samantha to believe the issue was one of sexuality, than that her confident, strong, gun-toting boyfriend had been too much of a coward to admit that kids, a family, a future, responsibility, scared the shit out of him.

  If only, if only they could have been on the same page about things. Surely this Archaean water stuff could help them figure it all out? Her latest self-help books all said it worked, all of them. And that ended it.

  The most likely Samantha L. of Philadelphia’s last activity had been six months earlier, slavishly reposting a string of protest posts affirming that the Infected—the gifted—had the right to refuse treatment.

  He scrolled back as far as the page’s archive went, but he couldn’t find his Samantha. The Samantha who could sit him down and patiently work through the issues until he finally admitted, both to her and to himself, that he was afraid of committing. Afraid of taking the next steps. So afraid, in fact, that he needed to get away from her. Maybe, if he hadn’t, and if she hadn’t terrified him with the Archaean water, she could have sat him down and gently pried the truth out of him. That walking out on her had been a mistake.

  But that Samantha was gone. That whole chapter of his life was gone, and nothing he could do would get it back. The world had changed too much.

  Miller paged through, curious, to Alex M. of New York. Another long list to search through, but he could recognise the condensed search result more easily for his own profile than he had for Billy or Samantha’s.

  There were unanswered messages on the public part of his profile. He didn’t log on very frequently, too busy with work, not enough friends. Some dating site spam bot had gone wild just before the site had frozen into its eternal maintenance—a string of messages, all repeating, ‘We should get back together, call me.’

  Eventually, scrolling down in search of something an actual human who cared about him might have said, he found the first message in the spam bot’s chain.

  From Samantha L.—We should get back together, call me.

  Miller’s stomach turned cold.

  4

  GRAY’S CONTROL OF the corporation, his hand on the rudder, was all but invisible down on the ground. Miller and the team had received new orders that barred them—barred any security team—from operating further from the compound than absolutely necessary.

  It was a mistake, and Miller intended to tell Gray as much. For such an obvious mistake, though, it looked pretty good
from where Miller was standing. He’d taken his team into civilian country, and it was a pleasant place to be.

  An impromptu market had dropped out of the sky and landed in one of the refugee runs overnight, in one of the semi-public covered walkways that gave the refugees their only freedom to move between sectors.

  More specifically, a titan-bird had been hit by machine gun fire while it was flying low, and the corpse had tangled up on the wire loops overhead. The civilian refugees cutting it down and repairing the fence also had a barbecue running on the side, roasting hunks of the beast’s flesh over barrel fires until it was blackened, then selling it right there. Folks were laughing, bartering, water was flowing freely and a little distilled moonshine not so freely.

  Miller stood huddled in a shadow like a teenager too nervous to join in, watching his team have a good time.

  He hadn’t ever been much of a wallflower. Not in high school, not in his Army years, not even as a bodyguard. When he hadn’t been seeing anyone, he’d been happy to be seen. Get dressed up, get his hair done, find some new bottle of cologne or attack his drawers for an old favourite, and go out on the town. But now, past the end of civilization, he found himself awkward and untalkative.

  His hair was growing out. He wanted to get his highlights back. He told himself that was the problem, not the way he glared at the refugees after stilling the urge to raise his M27 for the dozenth time to point at some vaguely threatening movement in the corner of his eye. It wasn’t as though anyone around him could see the bloody thoughts jabbing for attention in his skull, the swallowed fear, the prickling between his shoulder blades—all irrational. He was inside the wall.

  It was true, the compound’s barrier wall was no longer the imposing, impenetrable edifice it had once been. Stockman’s artillery had blown sections down, those as yet unrepaired patched with wire fences that members of Shank on extermination duty used to display their kills—decaying juvenile terror-jaws with their heads pushed through the fence weave, dangling limbs and heads of larger creatures strung up as effigies against the new ecology.