Outbreak: Brave New World

by Van Dusen, Robert

  It was quiet all through the rest of day. They had to stop a couple times so Amy could pee and so they could refill their water sources from the water cans in the back of the truck. The route was blocked in places due to crashes or stalled cars but at least they did not run into any more bandits…or anything else for that matter… The empty houses and stores seemed like relics from a bygone age. Some of the storefronts had their windows smashed out. Lacey noticed a couple corpses on the ground outside of a place near this little turnabout that looked like it might have been a restaurant or something. He made sure the kids did not see them.

  They occasionally spotted a lone walking corpse in the distance, but none of them were really close enough to be much of a threat. They stopped as the sun was starting to sink below the trees. Amy frowned, frustrated with herself. “Would somebody back to me again?” she asked grumpily. She had to go again and she could feel her feet blowing up like balloons inside her boots.

  Lacey shook his head and smiled. “What were you saying about having to go every ten minutes a couple months from now?” he asked as he opened his door and got out of the truck. “C’mon, I’ll walk Freddie as long as we’re out.”

  Adam put Freddie’s leash on him then lifted the dog out of the back of the truck. He snickered. The dog was hunched up as it loosed its bowels while Frays was squatting a few yards away. Amy finished her business, stood up and came as close to Lacey and the dog as she dared. He smiled slightly at her and started back towards the Humvee after the man was reasonably certain that Freddie had finished.

  The two of them stopped a couple meters from the back of the truck. “Hey, Frays do you hear that?” Lacey asked, his heart leaping into his throat. He gathered up Freddie and almost threw the dog into the back of the Humvee. Amy grinned broadly and clapped the man on the shoulder. There was the loud WHUPWHUPWHUPWHUP of a large helicopter flying somewhere overhead.

  “Heck yeah!” she shouted as she sprinted towards the back door. “Rodriguez! Drive! Carl, pass me back the radio’s handset! C’mon! C’mon! We gotta find a clearing!” Carl scrambled to do what his sister said as Lacey piled into the vehicle and slammed the door. Frannie gunned the engine and took off. “There’s a chopper out there somewhere!”

  Frannie turned on the vehicle’s white lights and started flicking them off and on as Amy tried to raise the pilots on the Humvee’s radio. “Guys! Guys!” Carl shouted, pointing out of his window off to the right of the vehicle “Look! Right there! There it is!”

  “Unknown rotor wing aircraft, this is…” Amy strained to remember what the heck last call sign she had was. “Bravo Three Four.” It was the call sign of the Humvee she had signed for at the beginning of the crapstorm. “We have wounded personnel and need exfill TIME: NOW. How copy?” Frays repeated this message as loudly and as clearly as she could while Frannie steered the truck down the road. Hopefully the bird had the right channel open. Hopefully they were friendly…

  “We read you lima charlie, Bravo Three Four. This is Vulture One Actual.” a tinny, distant sounding voice said over the radio. Amy leaned across the children’s laps to peer out their father’s window, hoping to see the bird’s running lights in the night sky. “We have eyes on. Turn around and head south for about three miles, Bravo Three Four. We’ll pick you up at the soccer field.”

  “Negative that, Vulture One.” Frays answered. She could not see the helicopter out of Lacey’s side of the vehicle so she tried her window again. “There’s hostiles in that area. We just passed by there. Armed civilians opened fire on us. Need a secondary LZ, over.”

  “You let us worry about that, Bravo Three Four.” Amy could almost hear the slight grin on the pilot’s face. “We’ll be on station in two mike. Turn around and we’ll have them cleaned out before you arrive.”

  The vehicle’s occupants exchanged nervous glances. Could they trust whoever was in the helicopter? The bird could not stay in the air forever, so what about wherever their base was? Everyone looked at Frays, waiting on her decision. She frowned, suddenly feeling the weight of those stripes that should have been on her uniform. “Roger that, Vulture One.” Frays said as she held on to the back of Rodriguez’s seat. The woman slammed on the brakes and did a hasty U turn, sending up a shower of dust and gravel from the side of the road when Frannie smashed down the accelerator. “ETA ten to fifteen mike.”

  “Good copy, Bravo Three Four.” Vulture One verified. “Need know disposition of your wounded.”

  Amy looked around the truck for a moment. “We’ve one Caucasian male, age four years. Break.” she looked at Paulie and smiled slightly “Gunshot wound to right hand, two fingers amputated. One Hispanic female, age early twenties, gunshot wound left thigh sustained about four weeks ago. One Caucasian female, age twenty one, approximately three months pregnant with…break.” In the distance they could hear the helicopter’s rotors accompanied by a distinctive heavy rattling bark. Frays and Lacey looked at each other when the both of them recognized the deep chatter of an M240 being fired. “neck injury and suspected nerve damage. How copy?”

  They roared down the road and rounded a bend, the most horrifyingly beautiful sight greeting their eyes. A Black Hawk helicopter was circling the area where the road gang had tried to ambush them earlier in the day, its door gunners sending jets of angry fire at targets on the ground. “Holy…” Carl muttered then whooped excitedly and punched the roof of the Humvee. “YEAH! GET SOME!”

  “Vulture One, Bravo Three Four.” Amy said after keying the mike. She could not take her eyes off the sight of the helicopter ‘bringing the hate’ like a thoroughly pissed Archangel Michael waving his flaming sword. “We have eyes on. How much longer you going to be?”

  There was a brief pause. “Roger that, Bravo Three Four. We just finished up takin’ out the trash. Bring it on in.”

  The helicopter sat down on the center line of a soccer field near the buildings it had previously been raking with fusillades of 7.62 NATO rounds. Amy counted two or three burning vehicles in the dark. She could not see how badly damaged the buildings were or if there were any hostiles left in the area.

  “Okay, guys.” Frays said quickly as she checked her weapon and prepared to grab her gear. “Here’s what we’ll do. Lacey, Rodriguez and the kids will get on the chopper first. Me and Carl will get as much of our gear on the bird as they’ll let us. Food and water first then ammo and weapons, Carl. And guys…please don’t let them take off without us, alright?”

  Chapter Nine

  23 June 2011 2235 hours NorthCom Forward Operating Base Freedom Sanford, Maine

  The Black Hawk had whisked them away from that field, the ground falling away into the night as the helicopter lifted off. A couple of big burly men had hopped out and helped Frays and her brother as they loaded their supplies into the chopper along with Freddie. One of the soldiers had to hold the dog, the man’s arms straining to contain one bony old dog. Amy might have found the sight funny under different circumstances.

  As they had planned, Lacey and Rodriguez got on first with the kids. Thankfully the pilots did not try and leave anyone behind. Once they were safely airborne Amy felt an overwhelming sense of relief. If these guys had a working helicopter and the necessary infrastructure to keep it that way, then they had a safe FOB or something somewhere relatively nearby. Somewhere they might have missed on the way north.

  Amy offered the nearest soldier her hand. “Senior Airman Amy Frays.” she said, grinning. The man looked at her as if the woman was sticking a weapon in his face. Frays slowly let her hand fall back into her lap as she settled into her seat. “Well, thanks for the extraction anyway. You guys are the first people we’ve seen in a really long time that didn’t try to eat us.”

  They exchanged nervous glances as the chopper made its way north. None of the crew seemed to hear them but then again it was pretty hard to even hear yourself think over the noise of the rotors and they were all wearing flight helmets with earphones built into them. The soldier who held the
dog while they loaded the chopper down gave Freddie back to Lacey. He was doing his best to keep the animal in check and calm the children down. Amy smiled reassuringly at her brother and clapped him on the shoulder. He took her hand and held it. It was hard to tell what was making him more nervous: the helicopter ride or the strange men with guns.

  The chopper started to descend, headed towards a handful of lights twinkling in the dark below. Frays peered through the open door and grinned at the sight of the activity waiting to meet them on the ground. She shook her brother’s arm and pointed. Amy could make out what looked like ambulances and ground crew, little specks guiding the Black Hawk onto a smaller triangle in the middle of another larger triangle, which Frays guessed to be the runways of an airport.

  One of the crewmen leaned in close to them. “When we land you’ll be taken to the Aid Station.” he shouted his voice barely audible over the noise of the helicopter. The guy was closest to Frannie but she could barely understand him. She doubted very much that the others could understand a word of what he was saying. “You’ll be handed off to the docs and they’ll take it from there.”

  As soon as the chopper’s wheels hit the ground the aircrew practically shoved their passengers into the waiting hands of a group of medics. They had obviously gotten the report that Frays had given to Vulture One. “Ladies, please leave your weapons with your friends.” a young man in blue scrubs told Frays and Rodriguez. “We’re here to take you two and the boy to the Aid Station. The others will be along directly.”

  Amy and Frannie looked at each other, then at the two or three armed personnel standing behind the medics. Frays nodded and did as the man asked. The medics packed them up in the back of the waiting ambulance and drove off leaving Carl, Lacey and Becca on the tarmac. Behind them people in green coveralls started unloading the supplies they had brought.

  “Gentlemen, this way.” a man in Navy camo and wearing a respirator called out to them, motioning towards what looked like some kind of golf cart or something. “The emergency docs are taking care of them. I’m dropping you off at inprocessing.”

  They got in the cart and the Navy guy drove them away from the airport towards a group of low buildings sort of north east of where the chopper set down. “Okay, we’re off to see the corpsmen.” the man explained once they were far enough away from the airport “They’re just going to check you out and make sure you don’t have the measles or whatever. After that comes the chain of command’s gonna wanna have a talk.”

  Lacey blinked in disbelief. “Chain of command?” he laughed, shaking his head. “Where are we?” Adam looked around and saw that he could make out more buildings. It looked like there was some kind of industrial park or something. What did they stumble in to?

  “This used to be Sanford Regional Airport.” the Navy man steered the cart towards a large rectangular building surrounded by a low wall. “Right now, it’s NorthCom Forward Operating Base Freedom.”

  The ambulance arrived at an unassuming single story brick building surrounded by the sort of fortifications Frannie recognized from FOBs in Afghanistan: tan fabric probably filled with dirt and debris. They passed by checkpoints manned by people with M4s and machineguns. She found the flurry of activity and sheer number of voices really sort of disorienting after being on their own for so long. She glanced across the ambulance and grinned at Amy. Her friend had this kind of dazed look on her face as if she was trying to figure out if the whole thing was really happening or not. There were two medics in the back of the ambulance with them. She smiled at the way one of them, a handsome young man with dark eyes and short brown hair kept joking with Paulie while he examined the boy. It was amazing to her how he could get the little guy laughing and smiling after only a few minutes.

  At first the poor little man was stuck to Frannie like glue but by the time the ambulance dropped them off Paulie was giggling and talking with the man who gave his name as Tom. Tom and his partner, a short and scruffy guy with a month’s worth of patchy beard on his face named Mike went inside with them. Mike went over and talked to a tall, attractive young woman in Multi-Cam trousers, sand colored tee shirt under a white lab coat. Frays found herself almost instinctually jealous of the strange woman, as if she were somehow invading her territory even though the exact opposite was in fact going on.

  “Okay, folks.” Tom said as he finished glancing over their paperwork. The woman in the lab coat stopped talking to Mike and started towards them. “We’re gonna leave you guys here with Lieutenant Haskins. Don’t worry she’s a great doctor for a squid.”

  The woman took the clipboard from Tom’s hand and swatted him on the shoulder with it. “Go on, get outta here.” she said, giving the man a little smile. “Alright, so…we got a mom to be, a gunshot and some poor little guy missing a couple fingers…” the woman said as she flipped through the paperwork. She knelt before Paulie, the woman’s dark brown eyes regarding the boy with the utmost seriousness. The boy’s eyes flitted to the butt of the pistol in a shoulder holster he saw under her lab coat. The woman followed the boy’s gaze then shifted the garment to hide the gun. Lieutenant Haskins smiled awkwardly at the kid. “So how long have you been pregnant?”

  “No, Amy’s gonna have the baby.” Paulie said with a giggle and pointed at Frays. The woman blinked at him and frowned exaggeratedly at the paperwork in her hands. She nodded and flagged down an orderly. Two men came over with wheelchairs and whisked them off to an examination room, Paulie riding in Frannie’s lap as Lieutenant Haskins followed.

  Lieutenant Haskins put on a pair of latex gloves, safety glasses and a paper mask from a steel cabinet mounted on the wall. “Alrighty.” she said as she walked over and picked up Paulie. “Let me take a look at your hand there, Paul. It won’t hurt a bit I promise.” The doctor checked the boy’s pulse and circulation in his remaining fingers, glancing up at Frays as she worked. “Are you his mom?”

  Amy stood at attention. “No, ma’am.” Frays said quickly. She paused, unsure of how to explain the situation especially in front of the boy. “His dad’s in my squad…flight…thing…and I’m just looking after him till we link back up with him.”

  The doctor glanced at Amy, an amused light in her dark brown eyes. Frays noticed that the lieutenant looked as if she had been awake for days. “At ease, Airman.” she said, seemingly barely containing a chuckle. “Sorry, it’s just that I think you’re the first person to do that in months.” Haskins nodded and looked at the boy on the exam table. “Looks like you’re alright, Paul. Some malnutrition maybe, but then we’re seeing a lot of that with the few people they bring back.”

  Lieutenant Haskins examined Frannie and Amy next, making cursory checks of their vitals and making notes on their charts. She went to Frays and examined her neck, nodding to herself. “Okay, Airman.” Haskins said calmly as she carefully positioned her hands on the back of the woman’s neck. “It’s alright. Just relax. Looks like you’ve got a bulging disk in your neck.” The lieutenant made little comforting shushing noises, waiting for her patient to calm down a little and feeling like kind of horrible.

  Amy almost blacked out when the doctor twisted her head, sending flaming lightning bolts covered in salt encrusted angry bees shooting all the way to her toes. She let out a strangled cry and, most embarrassing of all, Frays loosed a long loud and rather noxious smelling MRE fart. It made Paulie laugh however and her neck already felt a little better. The lieutenant got a stiff brace out of the cabinet and put it around Amy’s neck to keep her from moving her head. Frays could not help but feel like it was one of those plastic cone things that veterinarians put around a dog or cat’s neck to keep it from ripping out its stitches.

  Lieutenant Haskins helped Amy back into her wheelchair then had Rodriguez get up on the exam table. Frays covered Paulie’s eyes when the doctor had Frannie remove her trousers so she could check the wound on the woman’s upper thigh. She frowned at the gouge torn out of Frannie’s leg but was surprised to see no signs of infection and that i
t actually seemed to be healing pretty well, considering it should have been stitched closed. When Haskins finished she chucked her rubber gloves into a waste bin in the corner of the examination room. Paulie smiled when Lieutenant Haskins furrowed her brow and stuck the tip of her tongue out of her mouth as she made notes on her patients’ charts.

  Lieutenant Haskins and another orderly, a stocky older black man in blue green scrubs and white sneakers, rolled their patients down the hall. “So you guys are going to at least spend the night here.” Haskins told them. Frannie found herself marveling at how clean and normal everything looked. The walls were clean, the tile floor of the hallway obviously swept and mopped regularly, the air reeked of antiseptic products…it was kind of shocking actually. “I’m going to stop by the dispensary and pick up some stuff then be back to see you guys again before lights out.”

  They got rolled into a small room with hospital beds where Lieutenant Haskins and the orderly helped them get situated. “Mister Jones, have the desk call over to Inprocessing and see if they can send those other new people over in the morning.” Haskins said as the two of them moved towards the door. She gave Paulie a wink over her shoulder. “I’ll start their medical exams first thing.”

  Mr. Jones came back a few minutes later with some blankets and some loose fitting hospital pajamas. “I’m Daryl, the night nurse around here.” he explained as he handed out the blankets and clean clothing. “I’ll be right down the hall all night long.” The nurse picked up a little white plastic tab that was connected to the wall by a wire off of the small table next to Frannie’s bed. “You push the button on this if you guys need anything.” He demonstrated and they could hear a faint buzzing down the hall. “It sets off a buzzer on my desk.” He opened a door a few feet from the hall. “You’ve got a latrine right here, so you can change in there. I’ve got bags here for your gear. I’ll seal them and lock them up so nobody steals your stuff. Your uniforms and such will have to be burned. We’ve had a lot of people coming in covered with lice and other critters so Doc Haskins isn’t taking any chances. There’s some stuff in Supply, so don’t worry we’ll have some fresh stuff for you. It’ll be here by the time that you’re ready to be discharged.”