by Brian Parker
The memory hit him hard. “Shit,” he muttered aloud. “I’m infected.” He was supposed to go into the building and see if he could capture one of the Iraqis— Iranians, Jim corrected himself. He was going inside because the infected wouldn’t attack him since he was already infected.
The memories brought a level of clarity for Jim. His vision, while still blurry, seemed to clear enough that he recognized the open door on the back of the building. He made his way toward it at a slightly faster pace than a brisk walk.
When he arrived at the doorway, he saw that it opened into a long hallway. Shadows bounced wildly off the walls at the far end and sounds echoed toward him. Intermittent crazed shrieks punctuated the steady, rapid panting of the infected, as they searched for prey.
Jim stepped into the building and swallowed the hard lump in his throat. His mouth was extremely dry. He didn’t know for sure that the infected wouldn’t attack him. It was more of a feeling that he had, but it wasn’t a solid bet.
He checked his rifle. There was a magazine in it, and he didn’t remember firing it—not that it meant anything, since he could have shot the damn thing two minutes ago and not remembered it.
The doorway at the far end of the hall darkened and Jim brought the rifle up. He fired a round directly into the creature’s chest, the weapon kicked against his shoulder as the suppressed report reverberated off the close walls. The man staggered and fell.
The intermittent screams became a consistent wail as many voices picked up the cry. The suppressed shot had been too loud.
Sounds of flesh hitting chairs, tripping over potted plants, and bouncing off counters reached him. Even if they didn’t attack, the press of bodies in the hallway would keep him from doing anything. He knew that he needed to get into the main room or his mission was over.
Jim began walking quickly, staggering forward. The wails of the infected became louder, more confusing and disorienting to him. He screamed in response as he emerged through the doorway. He wasn’t sure if he shouted in defiance of the others or if his brain was responding to their calls.
There were many more infected in the building than he’d thought there would be. There must have been hundreds of the creatures in the main terminal, and they were all coming directly at him.
Jim gritted his teeth and braced himself for the impact. It never came.
The mob broke around him, not cleanly as several errant arms hit him accidentally as their owners streamed by him and knocked him sideways, but it was enough that he knew he’d be fine—until he died from the infection.
He walked away from the hallway, further into the terminal. Several of the windows closest to the town were broken and covered in blood. Emaciated bodies lay impaled on the glass and more were scattered both inside and outside of the building. The infected had paid dearly for their entrance into the terminal.
The soldier’s eyes roved across the terminal floor. Bodies of soldiers wearing tan camouflage patterned uniforms were mingled with the bodies of infected. They’d been torn to pieces. Oddly, there was what appeared to be an overturned stretcher, the kind like they used in ambulances. The presence of the stretcher itself wasn’t odd, since there were probably thousands of those things lying around as first responders attempted to work on the wounded in the first couple of days during the initial outbreak.
The odd part was that the sheets on the stretcher appeared fresh, completely white and undisturbed, except for a few wrinkles where it had held a patient at one point. He filed the image away into his growing mental folder that he’d labeled “What the Fuck?” and continued searching.
Jim stumbled around, and in some cases over the mounds of dead, following what appeared to be a trail of dead deeper into the facility. He made his way through the defunct security area into the recesses of the building. It was already hard enough to see through his blurred vision, but the near total darkness made it nearly impossible to see beyond the ends of his outstretched hands.
He remembered that he had a small flashlight attached to his vest and fumbled with it. The process took several seconds as his fingers refused to cooperate. He screamed his frustration, the action making his vocal chords strain and his throat raw. Finally, he pulled it from the pouch, wincing at the sound of the Velcro separating.
When he turned the flashlight on, he found himself in another hallway. This one was substantially less crowded than the main terminal with only two of the infected wandering aimlessly in the dark. Jim wondered what the others would do if he killed these two. Would they smell the blood and come running, or would they simply go about their business without even noticing the deaths?
“Does it matter?” he grunted loudly, eliciting an excited response from the nearest of the infected. It looked in his direction, toward the sound of his voice, but it didn’t appear to be looking at him. It was as if the creature looked through him. Strange fuckers, he thought, careful not to let himself utter it aloud.
He yelled a challenge to the infected. They responded by screaming back at him, unsure what he’d seen and whether they should follow him. He pulled the combat knife from its sheath, remembering that he’d used it only a few hours ago to kill the infected bastard that had pinned him to the ground. He didn’t hesitate. Walking up to the nearest infected, he wrapped a hand around its mouth and sliced its neck open. Hot blood spurted onto his forearm as he held onto it until its movements ceased. Then he dropped the body.
He flashed the light, clicking the button to check the position of the other one. It hadn’t really moved too much, it was still standing there, waiting for something to attract its attention. Jim smiled at his newfound knowledge that the infected were completely oblivious to one another’s death, but then realized that it didn’t matter what he learned if he didn’t get back outside and tell Whatshisname.
The second creature went down as easily as the first and Jim used the flashlight to ensure that there were no more of them in this section. When he was satisfied, he followed the trail of dead infected. He hadn’t seen any of the other soldiers in a while, so whoever was left was a damn good shot.
As he walked, he became aware of a scratching noise. It was hard to tell how far away the sound originated from since the hallway made everything echo strangely. He walked on, no longer afraid of being attacked by the infected, and turned a corner to a dead end.
Four more infected stood in front of him, pawing at a closed doorway. They twisted around at the sight of his flashlight, but none of them attacked. One stumbled toward him while the others turned back to the doorway and resumed their hopeless efforts to open the door.
That’ll be me in a couple hours, he thought, making himself angry. “This is bullshit,” he shouted, once more making the infected turn. Jim buried the combat knife up to the hilt in the nearest one’s chin, stabbing into its brain. Then the bloodlust took him and he let himself be consumed by it.
“They’re going to get through,” Grady warned his newfound companion.
The man looked at him in confusion and the operator pantomimed the devils breaking through the doorway. He adjusted his grip on the broken broom handle, a weapon more suited for the close fighting that he anticipated than the empty AK leaned against the corner. The soldier beside him passed the strange dagger he held from one hand to the other as he wiped sweat from his palms, despite the chill in the air.
Grady Harper didn’t know who the man was, or how he’d even gotten to wherever they were. There hadn’t been a lot of time for discussion. The last thing he remembered was a village in South America, somewhere in Brazil. Havoc diverted his team from an operation in North Korea after they reported seeing evidence of human experiments taking place in one of the tunnel complexes they’d infiltrated. The drugged up super-freaks in Brazil had attacked his team and he remembered people getting killed, but not who. Then he got…separated? Ambushed? That part was still fuzzy as well.
Grady had awoken to the sound of gunfire, here in an airport. He’d been strapped down t
o a table or hospital gurney. Men in strange uniforms were firing AKs at others who didn’t care about taking cover or getting shot. They appeared to be similar to the crazies he’d seen in Brazil. And they were losing the battle.
He’d screamed for them to untie him, to give him a gun. One of them finally did, and they’d fought a retreat back to this closet. Now they were out of ammo and out of time.
“What’s your name?” Grady asked the tall man beside him. Again, the man shook his head, not understanding. Grady put a hand on his bare chest and said, “Grady. Grady Harper.”
The soldier nodded and mimicked his actions. “Taavi,” he said, smiling through his close-cropped beard.
“Taavi? Do you speak English?” It was a dumb question, but he had to ask. It was hard to see in the dim lighting, but he thought the man’s face twisted into a grimace for a moment. Then, Taavi shook his head no. “We need to sit tight and wait for these things to go away,” Grady said.
The scratching at the door continued for a long time, the creatures outside never seemed to get bored. Every once in a while, one of them would jiggle the handle, but Grady suspected it was more a matter of them accidentally touching it instead of actually trying to open the door with it.
He tried to make small talk with the soldier, but it was hopeless, the man didn’t know any English and didn’t seem smart enough to carry on a conversation with hand signals, so Grady settled against the wash basin at the back of the closet to think.
He still had no clue where he was or how he’d gotten there, and his memories were spotty at best. He didn’t know what happened to his team, Hannah, Baz, Knasovich—actually, he remembered the sniper getting his throat ripped out, so there was one of them that he knew about. Rob Carmike had been with Alex when it happened and called it over the team net, but what happened to the communications expert or Chris McCormick, their mechanic, he had no clue. The Brit, Simon, was yet another missing person that disappeared somewhere in that Highlands village.
There were flashes of memories, fleeting, confusing images of him being in a small, brightly lit room and needles. Lots of needles. He remembered moving around the room at times, at others, he was strapped to a table, like he’d been here in this building. None of it made any sense to him.
Taavi’s uniform bore a symbol he’d never seen before and when Grady pointed to it, the man whispered something very quickly. He’d done a lot of time in Iraq and Afghanistan, even picked up a little bit of the language here and there, but nothing the soldier said sounded even remotely familiar.
As he was trying to puzzle out the mystery of how the two of them had ended up in the closet, the scratching outside abruptly stopped. “That’s different,” he mumbled, pushing away from the sink.
About thirty seconds later, the door handle jiggled once more, making Grady jump. He grinned in spite of himself then lowered the broom handle to chest level as he crouched. An errant thought occurred to him as the movement stretched the muscles in his calves. He had to have only been out of action for a couple of days, otherwise, he’d have experienced muscle atrophy, the wasting away of the body after being sedated for a long time.
That fact gave him hope that he’d be able to find his team once he got out of his current predicament. Once he found them, he was going to Texas to get his daughter, Lucy, from Kim and take her somewhere safe until he could figure out what was going on.
The door swung outward, revealing another of the creatures. Grady paused before he struck to examine the thing since it hadn’t tried to attack him. It was covered in blood and gore, the clothing across its chest and arms was dark and glistened in the light cast off from a discarded flashlight. Blood oozed from its eyes and the mouth opened and shut oddly.
“Bad…guys?” the thing croaked.
The crazies didn’t talk, Grady remembered that much. This one wore a US Army uniform and held a large combat knife in one hand. The other twitched rapidly. An M-4 with an oversized suppressor dangled from a sling across his body. Grady wasn’t sure what the guy’s story was, but he was a goner, that much was evident.
“I’m Grady Harper, with the Havoc Group,” he said, not offering the man a hand.
The older man’s eyes seemed to focus on him and he shook his head slightly. “I’m… Colonel Jim. Need to find… A bad guy.”
“Bad guy?” Grady whispered. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The colonel pointed at Taavi. “Need to take back.” The officer struggled with his words. The infection that he carried was almost complete. “UN not friends.”
“UN?” Grady felt stupid. He was lost in the sauce and wondered if he was dreaming. That had to be it. He was drunk and passed out somewhere, maybe even in his Petworth apartment, and he’d dreamed this whole stupid scenario. Time to wake up, he told himself.
A scream echoed down the hallway, followed by another. The creatures had returned. “How do we get out of here?”
”I came through…terminal.”
Grady glanced beyond the colonel. He’d only seen the large room and then the hallway. If the soldier said he came through the terminal, then it made sense that they were in an airport. He hated not being able to remember what the hell had happened to him.
“Okay, let’s go, Taavi,” he said, tugging at the foreign man’s sleeve. “You coming?” he asked the bloodied colonel.
They ran, quickly passing by the hallway that they’d came down when they’d gotten themselves trapped in the closet. The inhuman sounds drifted from somewhere down that passage, so Grady thought it was best to avoid it. The colonel screamed, making Grady jump and whirl around, broomstick in hand. The man fired three rounds down the hallway. He was panting heavily, even though they’d only run for fifty meters.
“Go,” the colonel’s voice came out dry and raspy.
Their route took them around a corner and along a corridor made of floor-to-ceiling glass windows that overlooked a runway. There was a C-130 outside, looming large. It was parked dangerously close to the building, the nose almost touching the glass. Beyond it were two small fighter jets of a make that Grady had never seen before.
As he went, he wondered just what the hell was happening. The colonel was obviously pretty fucked up, but what did that mean? Had he been through a fight or was he infected with whatever the villagers in Brazil and the others in the terminal had?
They reached the end of the glass wall and the hallway opened up to another small waiting area. It was a dead end except for the door leading to the runway. “This way!” Grady hissed, sprinting to the door and depressing the handle.
Thankfully it opened, revealing a set of covered stairs leading to the tarmac below. “No,” the colonel said. “I’m done.”
Grady turned around to see the man standing in the center of the hallway. “What?”
He tapped himself on the chest. “Infected.”
“No shit, man. Let’s go.”
“No,” the other man repeated. Screams bounced down the glass wall hallway. The others were almost there. “Outside…fence. Lieutenant Murphy.” He pointed at Taavi. “Give him…bad guy.”
Grady’s head swam with questions that he didn’t have time to ask. He settled on the most pertinent one. “There’s a lieutenant at the fence waiting for us?”
Colonel Albrecht nodded and smiled. Blood glistened on his teeth. “Yes. At crash.” He lifted his rifle over his shoulder. “Take…this.”
Grady rushed over and grasped the suppressed M-4. “You don’t have to do this, Colonel.”
“I’m dead…already. Go.”
Taavi tugged at his sleeve, the tall man was obviously ready to leave. “Fuck it. Go with God, Colonel,” he said, then whirled around. Four quick steps and they were through the door, then bounding down the steps to the ground below.
When they emerged from the covered stairway the cold hit him like a ton of bricks. The wind howled, tearing into his exposed skin as heavy snowflakes eddied around them. Where the hell were they? As far as he
remembered it was March, maybe even April if he’d been out of it for a couple of weeks. And he was supposed to be in Brazil.
Grady looked around. The colonel had said there was a soldier waiting for him at the fence and something about a crash. He couldn’t see a fence anywhere through the swirling snow. Several gunshots rang out from the terminal and in his peripheral vision he saw the muzzle flash through the glass windows above. He turned to look up.
The colonel stood there, arms extended holding a pistol. He fired at point blank range into the scores of the crazies that had surrounded him, and then dropped the magazine, calmly inserting another. They paid him no mind, as if they didn’t even see him. He fired again and again until the slide locked back once again.
Grady watched in fascination as the colonel shoved the bloody, diseased creatures away roughly, making his way to the glass windows. He looked down at them and pointed beyond the C-130, telling them that they needed to go that way. Grady nodded, watching as the older man inserted a single bullet into the chamber of his pistol with shaking hands.
Colonel Albrecht placed the gun against his temple and Grady screamed for him to stop, waving his arms above his head. The crazies inside saw his movements and began beating wildly on the glass, their screams muted.
Once more, Taavi tugged on his sleeve. He was right, the door leading out of the terminal opened outward with a push bar handle. All it would take was for one of the crazies to bump into it and they’d be able to get out as well.
Albrecht’s eyes focused on Grady and he pulled the gun away from his temple, then placed it under his chin and squeezed the trigger.
14
* * *
NEAR LIBERAL, KANSAS
FEBRUARY 13TH
The Stryker bumped and rattled as it turned down one of the many roads leading around the countryside. They were on a circuitous route to the Campbell farm. Jake had shown Sergeant Turner the location on his map and the grizzled NCO input the coordinates into their Blue Force Tracker system. Once they were input, he turned the column of vehicles in the opposite direction. There were far too many infected around to go directly to the farm, so they would try to trick and confuse them by taking every back road marked on the map.