Sustainable Earth (Book 2): Death by Revelation

by Jack J. Lee

  This wasn’t the first time I’ve faked an aerial drone attack. I’ve been wondering for the past few years what percentage of the successful drone attacks in Afghanistan were actually planted explosives. Bahsir’s surviving men were wounded and were in shock. I sent a couple villagers off to get help for the wounded. A larger village 20 miles away had a doctor. I knew that in the process of getting help villagers would spread the word that Bahsir was dead.

  I yelled that I was going to tell my Taliban superiors what had happened. I got on my old Soviet military motorcycle and took off. About an hour away, I got my cell phone out and sent the picture I had taken of Bahsir Baglani along with text message that included the time of death, and my special recognition code. Once Bahsir’s death was confirmed, the bounty would be deposited in my Swiss bank account.

  Chapter 3: Ari Levin, March 16, Year O

  It wasn’t until after I was served lunch that I remembered it was my birthday. I was born 30 years ago. I was on an Emirates Airline flight from Lahore, Pakistan to London, Heathrow airport. My passport said I was a British citizen of Pakistani descent; according to my passport, it wasn’t my birthday.

  I picked up some newspapers to kill time on the long flight. Lahore is a large city. I was able to buy a copy of the New York Times along with a couple of British rags. The main story was about a zombie outbreak in Kenya. That caught my interest. I paid extra for internet access during the flight and surfed the web for more recent news.

  I checked out the CNN video clip of a news crew being eaten by zombies in Kenya. News organizations were on a feeding frenzy; new posts were coming up every minute. It made the long flight pass quickly. Most of the talking heads thought that an experimental AIDS vaccine was responsible for the zombies. Experts with letters behind their names discussed the dangers of biological science. They claimed that the virus manufacturer had been grossly negligent. Hundreds of US attorneys were flying out to Kenya to recruit plaintiffs for a class action suit.

  Most people dread long plane trips. For the past few years, the only time I could relax was on a plane. Everywhere else, I had to be alert. On a plane, I was either safe, or I wasn’t. If I wasn’t safe, there wasn’t much I could do about it. If there was a bomb on the plane, I was dead. If another assassin was on the plane without my knowledge, I was dead. I was as vulnerable to an attack I didn’t see coming, as anyone else. It was liberating not to have to be constantly aware of my surroundings. This was the most relaxing birthday I’d had in years.

  Eight years ago when I had started my solo career, I was young enough to still be idealistic. I knew then that I was fighting for my country and civilization. I was certain that I was one of the good guys. I told myself that even though I was becoming a mercenary for higher pay, I’d still be one of the angels. It didn’t make sense to be limited to a government salary when I could make millions as a private contractor doing the same job. I assumed that the only thing that would change would be the money. What could go wrong? Regardless of how I got paid, I was still killing bad guys.

  I know now that there are always tradeoffs. When I was working for the government, I had support and backup. I didn’t have to be ruthless because I always had help. No one in my black-ops team ever went into the field alone. Life has taught me that it’s easier to do the right thing when you know someone is watching.

  My illusions didn’t last long. Without backup, the only way to survive was to be invisible. My first innocent was a hotel maid in Kabul. I was on my second solo mission and she saw me. I couldn’t let her cry for help. Her death was an accident; it wasn’t part of the plan. Over the last few years, I have gotten used to collateral damage. A couple of weeks ago, I killed a man and most of his family because they had the misfortune of having a house I wanted.

  If I was the type to make excuses, I could have told myself that I had chosen the house of the worst man in the village and that his family deserved to die; this wasn’t true. There were three homes in the village that fit my needs. I had chosen the house of the man who had the fewest male relatives in the area. I destroyed a family because it was convenient. I had no regrets; I’d do it all over again. My last op had gone perfectly. I regretted losing my illusions. I had enjoyed believing I was a good man.

  I was tired of having to be aware of my surroundings. I was tired of killing for money. I knew that I wasn’t doing the right thing for the right reasons. Bahsir Baglani was no worse than me. Most of the men I had killed in my years in the Middle East were guys who were making a living. Their job was killing minions of the Great Satan and my job was killing them.

  There aren’t that many true believers. On my last job, I pretended I was a religious fanatic. From what I could tell much of the Taliban faked their religious fervor too. It’s ironic but I think the worst atrocities in Afghanistan were committed by guys who were pretending to be religious. Truly religious people tend to be centered; they have nothing to prove and they tend to be merciful. The ones that are faking it try too hard and overreact. It was certainly true in my case. Whenever I’m undercover as a religious fanatic, I always try to be the biggest asshole possible. I think this works because most of the guys in the groups I’m infiltrating are faking just like me.

  If there is a God, he has a sick sense of humor. Atheists refuse to believe in God because of atrocities done by people who don’t believe. It makes me laugh.

  In the last eight years I had made enough money to live comfortably for the rest of my life. It was time for me to retire. When you’ve lived the life that I have, you can’t just turn in a resignation letter. I may have been done with dealing with my enemies but they weren’t done with me. There were multiple men and organizations that would go out of their way to kill me. This wasn’t necessarily because they hated me; it’s just bad business practice to let guys who hurt them survive. Most terrorist organizations have global reach. I needed to go where I couldn’t be found, or at minimum, where I could see my enemies coming.

  In addition to the British passport I was using currently, I had a US Passport and documents proving that I was Ari Levin, an American citizen. According to my paperwork I had been born in Israel to Hannah and Aaron Levin. My mother was an Iranian Jew who immigrated to Israel when she was 16. This explained my ability to speak Hebrew and Persian fluently. Farsi is the variant of Persian spoken in Iran; Dari is the version spoken in Afghanistan. My father had American and Israeli dual citizenships.

  If you have one American parent, even if you are born in a foreign country, it’s easy to get US citizenship. Hannah and Aaron Levin were both dead and had left enough money to their only son. He was independently wealthy. Ari Levin did not have any living relatives and had spent most of his life living outside the US so there was almost no paper trail of his earlier life.

  Spies often make the mistake of choosing fake names and life histories that are similar to their real ones. I didn’t make this mistake.

  I already knew where I would retire. I spent the last 12 years of my life living in the deserts of the Middle East. I was comfortable in deserts. I was moving to Arizona, next to the Kaibab Paiute Reservation. I’d been planning my retirement for a while. Assassins, who don’t plan, don’t live long. A couple of years ago, a small 200 acre ranch had been put up for auction because of failure to pay taxes. The ranch didn’t have enough water to be run as a viable business. The previous owner had been in his late 80’s when he died. None of his children wanted the ranch. Most years when he was running the ranch, he hadn’t made expenses. I ended up being the only bidder at the auction. I got the ranch for almost nothing, just the unpaid back taxes.

  There were 192 Paiutes living on 188 square miles of desert just west of me. Any stranger in the reservation would stand out. It was unlikely that an assassin or hit squad could hide out among the Paiutes without me finding out about it.

  My ranch was 16 miles due east of Colorado City, a town of six thousand people that straddled the border between Arizona and Utah. The side in Arizo
na was Colorado City and the side on Utah, Hildale. Most of the locals were members of a cult.

  The Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints were polygamists who had a habit of marrying underage girls to their close relatives. FLDS uncles routinely married their nieces. If a Utah cop tried to arrest the uncle, he could walk across the State border and be out of the cop’s jurisdiction, vice versa for an Arizona cop.

  As a non-FLDS person living near Colorado City, I would stand out. Anyone who wasn’t a local stood out. The population living in Hildale and Colorado City was small enough that I could get to know all the locals by face. I knew how to blend in, after a few months I could probably get the locals to almost forget I was a newcomer.

  There was no tourism in Hildale and Colorado City, and hardly any outside commerce. People traveled through these towns but they almost never stopped. The main reasons for strangers to come to these towns were to arrest one of the FLDS or to do a news expose about the wacko polygamists. Any stranger in these towns would be treated like an undercover cop or reporter. They would be under intense scrutiny and easy for me to pick out.

  Chapter 4: Mike Kim, March 13th, Year 0

  My name is Mike Kim. I’m a first year medical student at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. If you picture a typical overachieving Asian immigrant family, you’ve got a pretty accurate picture of my family. My father is an Ob/Gyn, my older brother graduated from medical school last year and is currently training as a specialist in Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and my youngest brother is pre-med.

  There is a part of me that is not stereotypical; for as long as I can remember I’ve had the conviction that in my lifetime the world as I knew it was on the knife edge of destruction.

  My parents emigrated from Korea to the US before I was born. I grew up hearing stories about my parents’ experiences during the Korean War. When the war started, they were both 12. In an instant their world changed. They went from having stable lives in the northern end of an undivided country to becoming refugees in a country at war with itself. Their families fled the communists, leaving with just the things that they could carry. My parents were lucky. Their families made it to US controlled territory before the war ended. Their friends and neighbors that hadn’t were stuck in the cloaca of the East, North Korea.

  I learned from my parents that peace and stability can’t be taken for granted. If my grandparents hadn’t been smart enough to know when to start running, I’d probably be starving in some mud hut north of the DMZ. Families are funny. I learned from my parents’ stories that life was fragile. My brothers thought that the stories about the Korean War were just pieces of family folklore that had nothing to do with them.

  I love Science Fiction. Many of the books I read are apocalyptic. The best of these are grounded in reality. I read a book once about what would happen if a small nuclear bomb, the size of the one set off over Hiroshima, was exploded in the stratosphere over Kansas. According to the story, this would set off an electromagnetic pulse that would be strong enough to destroy every computer chip in the United States. I did some research and found out that the US military set off a series of high altitude nuclear explosions over the Pacific Ocean in July through November of 1962. Similar high altitude explosions were set off over Kazakhstan in the same year by the Soviets. The threat was real. Ever since 9/11, we’ve known that terrorists are out to get us. Learning that one small nuclear weapon could destroy the United States freaked me out.

  I’m a medical student and come from a family of doctors. It doesn’t take much medical knowledge to understand that as a society we are creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria faster than we are finding new antibiotics. Sooner or later we’re going to have a pandemic that makes the Black Death of 1348, which killed 60% of all Europeans, look like tiddlywinks.

  I have friends and family that know the same facts I do, that don’t have a care in the world. They’re absolutely certain that our world was safe and stable; I am certain of the opposite. I want to make it clear, I’m not the Unabomber. I don’t live in a cabin in the woods making bombs. I’ve never stood on a street corner preaching that the end is near. So far to date my preparations for the end of the world have been limited to trying but mostly failing to have close to two months worth of food in my pantry at all times, buying two high quality pistols, and having a 500 gallon six-person hot tub in my back yard. When I saw an ad on Craig’s list for a used hot tub for $300, I knew it would be a great source of emergency water. The fact that the tub helped me throw killer parties and it helped convince women to get into bikinis at my house had nothing to do with why I bought it.

  Despite my conviction that our way of life was doomed, I hadn’t done much about it. Maybe I’m just rationalizing but I think most people who are worried that the world is headed for a bad end, live standard typical lives. It seems ironic that the people who try to prevent an apocalypse are usually labeled as being crazy. The people who know the end is coming, yet do little to nothing about it, are supposedly sane.

  The day started like any other. I had no idea when I woke up that on March 13th my life would change. I went to class as usual in the morning and got home at 6 pm. I poured myself a bowl of cereal for dinner and turned on the tube. Every channel was showing a video of an honest-to-God-real-life zombie attack. The video started in a village eighty miles due east of Nairobi, Kenya. The reporter introduced himself as Nigel Usher and said he worked for CNN. The video began with him sitting in a rear passenger seat of a small van. He was being filmed by a camera man sitting in the front. He said that he was checking out reports of a zombie outbreak. The dead in this village were supposedly rising from their graves and attacking the living. Usher had a grin on his face. He thought it was a joke. He announced that they had just arrived at the village.

  The van stopped moving and Usher and his crew got out. You could see the amused grin drop from Nigel’s face. The village looked like it had been through a war. A couple of the houses looked like they had recently been burned and the only person in sight was a small child; she looked about 8. Usher started acting like this could be a serious story. He walked over to her and knelt down so he could get to eye level with her. He then asked, “Are you from this village?” in an African language. The screen displayed a subtitled translation.

  The child opened her mouth but instead of speaking, she ripped into Nigel’s face. The camera was close enough that I could see her swallow a chunk of his flesh. Usher screamed and threw her away from him. The girl at most weighed 50 to 60 pounds. Nigel was a large man and he had hysterical strength. She was tossed at least 6 feet and landed on her head. Her head hyperextended and twisted as she hit the ground.

  The camera then swung back to Nigel. He was holding both hands up to his face trying to stop the flow of blood from the ragged hole in his right cheek. His eyes grew wide as he looked past the camera man and he mouthed, “No” as he staggered backward.

  The camera swung again to the little girl. Her head had been twisted 270 degrees. She was trying to get up. Her head flopped on her neck as she moved. Her neck was broken. There is no way she should have been able to move. Past her, out of focus in the camera, people could be seen coming toward the news crew. None of them were walking normally. They had the same dead eyes and pallor as the girl. The camera started to shake and I could hear the cameraman say, “Oh shit!”

  Nigel Usher screamed. This time, when he came into view, four zombies were tearing into his flesh. The camera then showed an extreme close up of a zombie. The cameraman was using his video equipment to try to keep a zombie off of him; it didn’t work. The camera fell to the ground. There were cries of agony and then just the sounds of flesh being torn and chewed. The video stopped.

  The local Salt Lake news crew said that the camera had been transmitting the video stream wirelessly while the CNN crew was being attacked. All attempts to reach the crew had been unsuccessful. Within minutes of the attack, the Kenyan authorities had been notified. Kenyan police had be
en sent to the village, but as of yet there was no news back.

  As soon as I saw the zombie video I knew that this was the disaster that I had been worried about for years. My initial reaction wasn’t fear or even anxiety; it was relief. I didn’t have to wait for the other shoe to drop. I no longer had to worry about everything. I knew what would destroy our world.

  The US, the UN, and every other organization in the world would try to keep the zombie outbreak quarantined in Kenya. My understanding of history told me that they would likely fail. International borders are too big and too porous. Even if the world built a wall around Kenya surrounded by armed men, someday an infected person would get past the wall. Look at what used to happen with the Berlin Wall. It was a 12 foot tall concrete wall covered with barbed wire and men with orders to shoot anyone trying to cross. People still got across. Sooner or later the zombies would arrive in the US. I didn’t know how long it would take. It could be a few months or if we were lucky, years. I was certain that it would eventually happen.

  Chapter 5: Mike Kim, March 14th to August 25th, Year 0

  On the 14th I skipped class. I went online to SallieMae.com and applied for a student loan for the first time in my life. Most of my friends had to take out loans to pay for their schooling. I was lucky to have parents that had the will and the means to pay for my tuition, books, and living expenses. My father had his education paid for by his parents. As payback he was doing the same for my brothers and me. He asked us to continue the tradition when we had our own children.

  The average medical student graduates with $156,000 in debt. I had excellent credit. I was able to get $160,000 government backed low interest student loan. If the world didn’t end, I was no worse off than most of my fellow medical students. If the apocalypse came, I wouldn’t have to pay back the loan.