The Dire Earth: A Novella (The Dire Earth Cycle)

by Jason M. Hough

  “Stay away!” Finn shrieked. “It’s all … falling.”

  “Open the door, Captain. I’ll help you.” Sedate you, more likely. Skyler racked his mind, unable to recall the contents of the medkit on board. Surely there must be something suitable in there.

  “The door,” Finn said. “The door.”

  “That’s right. Come on now, everything’s—”

  Hydraulics hissed to life, then an incredible rush of air that sucked the cabin door open enough for Skyler to get his hand through. Frigid wind buffeted his hair and clothes. He should have acted more quickly. Should have known instantly what Finn intended. With all the shocks that afternoon the sudden loss of cabin pressure just left him numb, baffled. Frozen for precious seconds, tugged against the door by a violent sucking rush of air out through the back of the plane. By the time Skyler had the presence of mind to override the cargo door and seal the aircraft, Finn was long gone.

  Skyler found himself standing alone in an empty cargo bay. The pilot and everything else had been yanked unceremoniously from the aircraft, four thousand meters above Madrid. All parachutes accounted for, still in their locker. Captain Finn Koopman had committed suicide. Skyler swayed on his feet, unable to concentrate. Nothing that had happened this day made sense.

  And yet it did. The realization hit him so suddenly he felt his knees buckle. Seated on the floor, Skyler forced himself to say the words aloud. It was the only way he could believe it.

  “It reached us. The disease. Finn … we both were exposed.”

  I’m a dead man, Skyler thought over and over. The next few hours went by in an erratic blur. He took the co-pilot’s chair—couldn’t bring himself to sit where Finn had. The radio he turned off. To check in now, to report what had happened, would probably result in the aircraft’s immediate destruction. He wouldn’t blame them, either. He didn’t want to be the man who brought this ailment home. But he could see beyond that, could see himself differently. A sample, racing ahead of the infection, that could be studied.

  He set to work.

  _

  Two hours later an aircraft set down in an empty field three kilometers outside Volkel air base. A message, automatically sent upon touchdown, brought swarms of soldiers in hazmat suits and a small armada of vans emblazoned with disease-control logos.

  When the engines cooled sufficiently a huge tent was erected over the quiet vehicle. Quick-drying cement sealed the special structure to the ground.

  The rear cargo door opened. Soldiers readied their weapons. Orders were to take the single occupant alive, if possible.

  When the heavy door finished its rotation downward and crunched into the dirt, the warriors in yellow suits hesitated.

  The man inside—a Lieutenant Luiken, co-pilot with a spotless service record, noted for his levelheaded conduct—crouched on the floor of the aircraft with his hands chained and locked to a tie-down. A set of keys lay a few meters away, well out of reach. He wore a full-face mask attached to a tank of air. When he spoke, his muffled voice sounded apologetic. “False alarm, perhaps,” he said. “I feel fine, but take all precautions.”

  One of the suited people came forward, carrying a small tube instead of a rifle. “Sorry about this,” she said, and pressed the cylinder against Skyler’s neck.

  The world melted away.

  _

  When his senses returned, Skyler found himself lying on a bed of white sheets in a white room. The air smelled like plastic. Brilliant LEDs on the ceiling brought tears he blinked away. His neck hurt, as if something had bitten him. The tube, he recalled. Sedated, then, which meant they’d taken him seriously. “Good,” he said aloud. More of a croak, really.

  “What’s good?”

  Skyler turned toward the woman’s voice. She stood nearby, wearing the white and blue uniform of the medical division. Unsuited, unmasked. He wanted to shout at her for her carelessness, until he realized what it meant. “I’m okay, then,” he said.

  “Yes. How, exactly, we’ve no idea.”

  He tried to touch the bruise on his neck only to find his hand, both hands, cuffed to the gurney. The chains rattled when he yanked. “I suppose these are unnecessary?”

  The doctor stared at him. Karres, the name on her uniform read. “Are you one hundred percent sure you were exposed, Lieutenant?”

  He’d explained what happened in his message. It dawned on him suddenly they might not believe it. They might think …“Ninety-nine,” he said. “I don’t know how it spreads. I was in the cockpit with him, though. We were both in Africa—shouldn’t you have your mask on?”

  “The tent is sealed.”

  “But you’re inside.”

  The woman’s lips tightened. She came closer. Her voice fell to a whisper. “Not just Africa, Lieutenant. It’s … spread.”

  He studied her face, saw fear and fatigue.

  “They’re calling it SUBS,” she said.

  “How far, dammit?”

  Her lower lip quivered. She bit it, then stood and crossed the room. “I’ve maintained the seal on the tent because I don’t want it to get in.”

  The weight of the words seemed to press him down on the bed. “Uncuff me.”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She turned back to him, another tube in her hands. “Because I don’t want you to try to stop me.”

  “What? What are you doing?”

  She stepped closer, priming the syringe. “Listen to me carefully. You’re immune. You may be the only such person, so you must survive. You have to get to the WDC facility in Abu Dhabi. They’ve got the best chance of finding a cure for this thing.”

  “Then release—”

  “Be silent.”

  Before he could speak again she jabbed the tube against the side of his neck.

  _

  He woke to an utterly silent room. The cuffs had been removed. A note waited for him on a rolling table beside the bed:

  The worst may be over, but now there’s little time. I’m sorry for that. I had to keep you from leaving too soon.

  Survive. Remember the World Disease Control offices in Abu Dhabi. They can study you. It might help.

  Please, Skyler. Hurry.

  —Lotte Karres

  She lay on the floor a few meters away, head propped against the wall, chin resting on an unmoving chest. Her lips were blue, her face unnaturally pale beneath the splay of blond hair that hung across her cheeks. She’d cuffed herself to a cabinet rung on the wall, and an open bottle of pills lay on the floor beside her.

  Skyler lay still for a long moment, letting a wave of nausea and grief pass.

  On a chair opposite the doctor’s body lay Skyler’s neatly folded uniform, boots on top. He swung off the bed and lifted the footwear away. Beneath lay a set of keys and a hand-drawn map of the nearby air base with one hangar circled.

  Skyler dressed in silence, trying not to look at the dead body. She’d killed herself rather than breathe air from the outside. The idea made his gut twist.

  Clothed, he lifted the first boot and paused just before inserting his foot. The memory of Finn, of the panic attack he’d suffered, rushed in. He’d leapt from the plane because of some imagined terror in his goddamn boots. The disease, SUBS, had turned the most casually confident man Skyler had ever met into a gibbering maniac in mere hours.

  Whatever was happening outside, this woman had judged it so dangerous that she’d sedated Skyler to prevent him from rushing outside to help. He would have, too. She’d seen it in him.

  Mind reeling, he left the room, which turned out to be a portable unit mounted on a flatbed truck. His aircraft still rested where he’d landed it, under a massive white tent just like those he’d seen in Africa days earlier. They’d sprayed it with something, leaving a milky residue on every surface.

  He left it there. The airlock at the edge of the tent lay open, unguarded.

  Outside he found bodies. The sun had just risen, and the air was cold. Soldiers and doctors
alike lay in the grass. Many had pressed their hands to their heads before succumbing. Those with their necks exposed showed signs of a rash on either side of the spine.

  Skyler went to the nearest soldier and took the man’s assault rifle.

  Lotte’s note rattled in his head. He should listen to her. Fly to Abu Dhabi and help if he could.

  His eyes were drawn north, though, toward Amsterdam, where his family lived. He couldn’t just flee. He had to know if they were like him. Immune, a genetic trait. It was possible, wasn’t it?

  Somewhere in the darkness a person screamed with inhuman terror. Another sound answered. It could only have been called a roar, yet he knew this to be a human as well. Both sounds ended abruptly. Then a third, farther off, just at the edge of hearing. Laughter.

  If his family shared the immunity, and they were stuck in a city with sixteen million diseased …

  Skyler stole the nearest truck and drove toward Amsterdam.

  _

  The world had fractured.

  Fires dotted the landscape. Flames no one fought. Bodies were everywhere. Splayed out on the road or still in the seats of smashed cars run astray.

  Not everyone had died, though. The dead outnumbered the living, but the survivors … something was horribly wrong with them. Most that Skyler glimpsed were either fleeing, terrified at the sight of his truck, or rushing toward him with snarled features and blood on their clothes.

  He swerved away from the aggressive ones at first. But their numbers were too great, and the roads were already crammed with the crumpled husks of vehicles. Eventually he just focused on avoiding the cars.

  Each thud of a body against his truck drained a little more of his compassion until he felt cold, almost robotic, in his quest to reach home.

  On the outskirts of Amsterdam the expressway became too clogged. He left the truck and moved on foot along a canal. Away from the hellish landscape of the road, his numbness began to fade. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. The weight of the calamity lurked behind it, anxious to crush his determination. He paused at the bank of a canal and stared at the gentle current.

  You may be the only such person …

  He had no idea what he would do if that were true. It was not, he found, something he wanted to consider. Not something he would accept until he’d searched every corner of the globe for another like him.

  A splash in the narrow canal focused his attention. An elderly man crouched on the opposite bank, one hand thrust into the murky water. He had filthy gray hair matched by an unkempt beard. Sores dotted his face and arms. As their eyes met, the ragged man pulled his fist from the water, drew it high over his head, and slammed it down again. The water that splashed into his face did not break his intense, icy gaze.

  “It’s leaving me!” the old man cried.

  “What is?” Skyler asked.

  “Everything …”

  He toppled forward into the lazy current, emerging a heartbeat later in a dog-paddle swim, steel gaze utterly locked on Skyler. The man’s lips curled back in a snarl, revealing crooked yellow teeth.

  Skyler raised his rifle, then stopped. Despite the malice in the old man’s eyes, he swam slowly. He might not even make it across. “Forgive me,” Skyler said, and ran north along the bank.

  He kept to the canal, relying on his mental map of the city to guide him. The sloped embankments became concrete walls, with a narrow walkway just above the waterline and the occasional stairwell leading up to the streets above.

  A riverboat floated by, its lone occupant sprawled facedown on the foredeck. Closer to the city he began to see corpses drifting along in the current, too. At one bridge he saw a city bus, nose in the canal and tail end resting against the concrete span above, clasped by the twisted wreckage of the railing.

  Skyler couldn’t bring himself to look inside the vehicle. Doing so might force him to acknowledge what his heart already knew: The scope of this, the scale of death and destruction, was absolute. He focused on the narrow passage between the bus and the canal wall, turning sideways to squeeze through.

  As he passed the bus a mewing sound came from inside, barely audible, like a wounded animal. Skyler sidled past. Shards of broken glass crunched under his feet. In the shadow of the bridge, darkness enveloped him. He kept going until the sound of glass beneath his boots ended, and then rushed to the far end of the underpass.

  The mewing turned into a feral cry. Skyler surged forward, turning back only at the edge of the bridge’s shadow. Behind him, a body slid out one of the shattered windows and fell to the concrete with a grunt. He could see only a silhouette. It looked—

  Another body slid from the bus, then a third. The trio stood in unison. They all faced him, waiting as if sizing up their prey. There was something primal in the way these diseased behaved. The old man’s words came to him then. It’s leaving me! Everything … Everything that made him human?

  The trio rushed Skyler together. One ran low, using its hands like two extra legs, an odd way for a person to move, yet somehow it looked natural.

  Skyler raised his gun, but thought better of it once again. He’d never shot anyone before. So he turned and fled, racing along the walkway, the sound of baying savages closing behind him. A stairwell ahead. He sidestepped into it and bolted up the steps three at a time. At the top he turned, intending to shoot the lead pursuer and hopefully trip up the other two. A better use of ammo. But his foot caught on a crack in the pavement as he spun, sending his right leg slapping against his left, his body twisting as he fell to the ground in an awkward roll. The gun clattered away, sliding beneath a van.

  Skyler crawled to the vehicle. Lying on the asphalt, he reached into the darkness underneath, toward the rifle. The people chasing him were close. He glanced toward the stairs in time to see the leader’s head appear above street level. Panic gripped him. His fingers probed for the weapon, his mind caught between the ancient instincts of fight or flight.

  His fingers brushed the gun, and in his haste he only pushed it farther away. There were footsteps on the street now, and new grunting sounds coming from somewhere else. Abandoning the rifle, he stood and ran. Across the bridge, dodging slumped bodies, toppled bicycles, abandoned cars. At the end of the bridge he turned and bolted down a narrow walkway that lined the apartments along the canal. Footsteps followed him like unwanted applause. He slipped into an alley, glancing back as he ran. Six followed him. Seven.

  At the end of the alley he leapt over a bike that lay on its side, limp rider still on it, hands clasped over the sides of a white helmet. A policewoman, Skyler realized. He skidded to a stop, rushed back, and looked for her holster. Her dead body covered it. Skyler heaved with one arm, grunting with the strain as he fumbled along her belt for the holster. The diseased were silhouettes in the dark alley, racing forward.

  His fingers found the gun. Skyler stumbled backward as he hefted it, thumbing the safety as he did so, silently thanking his firearms training. He could barely see the approaching people in the alley, but the space was narrow. Whip-cracks echoed along the passage as he unloaded the clip. The lead pursuer tumbled and rolled, limp. The one behind it went down. The third leapt over the first two, landed in a crouch. It made no effort to dodge the gunfire, as if it had no understanding of the weapon. Skyler shot it in the throat, saw the life vanish from its eyes even before it hit the pavement just a meter away. The realization that he’d killed would only hit him later.

  The gun clicked empty on his next trigger pull. In the alley the infected still barreled toward him. And there were more now. Skyler had emerged on a wide avenue, lined with restaurants and boutique shops. Dead bodies were everywhere, part of the landscape. Here and there, though, some moved. They emerged from below shady awnings or from the doors of smashed storefronts, glass crunching beneath their feet.

  They’re not attacking their own kind, he realized suddenly. They know I’m different.

  He heard the electric motorcycle before he saw it. The sleek bike burst
into view on the sidewalk between Skyler and his pursuers just as the next one emerged from the alley. The rider leaned at the last second, rear tire skidding along the concrete until it slammed into the shin of the diseased person, who lurched backward from the impact, arms flailing, crashing into those behind.

  “Get on!” the rider shouted as the skid ended, the bike facing back in the direction it had come from.

  Skyler leapt on. He slipped one arm around the rider, his empty pistol pressed awkwardly between them.

  The man twisted the accelerator, producing a shrill whine as electricity flowed from the caps to the motor. Skyler almost lost his grip as the motorcycle surged into motion. Immediately the rider swerved left, then hard right, dodging obstacles in the road. The motorcycle barreled through a thick plume of smoke that spilled from a burning shop. Beyond a baby stroller lay on its side, mother and father sprawled behind it. The sight hit Skyler like an enormous weight. Everything he’d seen up until now suddenly became very real. The scope of it all, crashing in. World’s end. Has to be. This is it, and I’m … I’m …

  He focused on gripping the man’s torso as the nightmare blurred by.

  The man wore no helmet. His hair, a mess of long dreadlocks, whipped in Skyler’s face and smelled of incense and pot. “Name’s Skadz!” the man shouted over the roar of wind. He spoke in English, London-accented.

  “Skyler!”

  “You a cop?”

  “Air force. Pilot.”

  “Good.” Skadz made a sharp left, tilting the bike low and accelerating out of the turn into a narrow alley. A stray dog snapped at Skyler’s knee as they roared past. The animal had blood on its jaw. Somewhere an alarm wailed.

  The bike lurched, flew up a ramp. Darkness engulfed them. Skyler glanced back in time to see a metal gate rolling closed across the entrance to a parking garage before Skadz turned again. He slowed their pace now, rolling between rows of identical sedans parked over wireless charging units. The vehicles were all white, with blue and orange stripes on the side panels. Police cars.

  Skadz rolled into an open elevator door, bringing the bike fully inside. He swiped a card through a reader on the wall, then tapped the button for the eighteenth floor. The compartment lurched to life. “I was here when all these blokes started acting strange,” he said. “Some were laughing or crying; most were screaming about the headache.”