Apache Dawn: Book I of the Wildfire Saga

by Marcus Richardson

  “Tuck, you and Deacon dig in and watch the perimeter,” said the Captain, removing his helmet and face mask. “Three hour shifts. I’ll take next watch with Garza.”

  “You got it, boss,” said the Ranger named Deacon.

  “Here, take the thermal,” said Donovan and tossed his rifle to Deacon, who swapped for his own M4. Chad noticed an odd-looking scope on the rifle Donovan had given away.

  When the door shut again, the remaining Rangers began removing helmets and facemasks. Chad was glad to see there actually were human faces under those masks after all. The men who stood looking at him were all hard-faced individuals with short, close cropped haircuts and sharp eyes.

  “That’s better,” sighed the tall one with red stubble on his head. He removed his gloves and offered an outstretched hand. “We never got to be formally introduced out there…I’m Captain Derek Alston.”

  “Chad Huntley. But you already knew that…” Chad felt foolish. They shook hands. The Ranger’s grip was firm and solid, his piercing blue eyes locked on Chad’s as they greeted each other formally.

  “That there is Sergeant Garza,” Captain Alston said with a nod toward the short, olive skinned man with a close-cropped Mohawk. Garza flashed a grin and began dropping his gear.

  “I’ll get us some heat—there’s a woodstove in the corner,” said Garza.

  “Over here we got Corporal Daniel Donovan—”

  “Call me Deuce,” said the bull-necked soldier in a deep voice. “Everyone else does.”

  “And this here is Zuka.”

  Chad noticed that ‘Zuka’ was the shortest member of the squad. When he pulled his helmet off, his Japanese heritage was obvious. Slightly almond-shaped eyes, jet black hair in a short-cropped brush and a slightly tan skin. “The name’s Preston Onizuka. Everyone calls me Zuka, though.”

  Garza quickly added, “No one calls him Preston. He looks small, but that little hijo de puta is half-ninja. Don’t fuck with him, esse.” Garza laughed.

  Deuce walked past Zuka and laughed, more of a rumble than a chortle, slapping the short man on the back of the head.

  “I know where you sleep, bitch,” said Zuka with a scowl. His face split into a grin a half second later as his comrades laughed.

  Captain Alston squatted on the wooden floor of the cabin and shrugged out of his pack and gear. His rifle leaned against the wall within easy reach to the left of the door. He eased back against the wall and stretched his long legs with a sigh.

  “I—have made—fire!” called out Garza from the woodstove, hands raised in self-praise. Chad saw the warm glow of the fire from inside the open door.

  “Cook me up a steak and I’ll be impressed,” muttered Deuce.

  “Won’t be long now, we’ll get this place nice and cozy,” Garza said as he looked around the meager cabin. “Not much here though. We got plenty of wood for the stove, but I got nothin’ else, Cap.”

  “All right then, guys, we need some chow. Think you can whip up something Donovan?”

  “Do bears shit in the woods, sir?” Deuce grumbled from the stove. The big Ranger was already laying out packets of what Chad assumed to be ingredients on the floor along with a few metal cups and pans.

  “Great. I just got over the runs a few days ago,” muttered Zuka to stout laughter. “Go easy on the axle-grease this time, okay, Deuce?”

  “That was chili…” muttered the big Ranger, to a fresh round of chuckles.

  Chad shivered and put his own pack on the floor, then leaned against the wall and dusted the snow off his ghillie suit. He leaned his lever-action rifle against the wall like the Captain had done. He noticed the snow from his gear already melting on the floor.

  Captain Alston grinned. “So,” he said, bringing his knees up to rest his arms on them. “You mind telling me why the hell we were sent out here in the middle of this godforsaken storm to drag your ass out?”

  Chad shook his head, brushing snow out of his beard. “I have no idea, man. I want to know the same thing.”

  “That’s some bullshit, right there,” said Deuce, shaking his head and stirring a pot of steaming coffee on the stove. He tossed a package in brown wrapping to Zuka. Chad watched the short Ranger whip out a long, gleaming knife from somewhere and slice open the package with practiced ease. In a flash, the knife disappeared again.

  “You honestly have no idea?” asked Captain Alston. He frowned. “I suppose you have no idea why a platoon North Korean soldiers were hunting you, either?”

  Chad shook his head. “No clue. How the hell did they get in here in the first place? The National Guard is out there blocking all the roads…”

  Captain Alston nodded sadly. “They probably cut their way through the Guards, no problem. I got a look at their uniforms. They weren’t just grunts—I recognized the emblems. A recon outfit with the North Korean Special Forces. They call themselves sniper brigades.” He laughed. “Got a lot of fancy names for themselves, but, at the end of the day, they’re still just NKors—a bunch of fanatics. Crazy sonsabitches buy into the ‘North Korea vs the world’ propaganda hook, line, and sinker.”

  Chad sat up. “Special Forces?” He looked at the Rangers. “But you guys took them out, and there’s only, what—seven of you?”

  The Rangers laughed long and loud. “That’s cause we’re fucking hardcore, baby,” said Deuce, flexing his massive arms.

  “Hooah!” said Garza.

  Zuka sat down next to Chad and offered him some sort of food from the brown package he had been working on. Chad didn’t like the taste, but it was warm and it was food.

  “Their expertise is airborne insertions and behind-the-lines kind of stuff. Very high tech,” said the Captain, taking a similar food pack from Deuce. He grimaced but dug in just the same. “Our expertise is taking assholes like them to the cleaners.”

  “Hooah!” called out the others in a throaty roar.

  “SpecOps…” said Deuce thoughtfully after the laughter died down. “That explains the beater-scope.” He shook his head. “I hate those things.” He examined the pot of coffee. “Hey, why the hell do you have one, anyway?” he asked, pointing his canteen at Chad.

  Chad put a hand on the heartbeat monitor. He unhooked from his belt and held it up. “This thing? It’s for my job.” He looked around at the blank, expectant faces. “I work for the CDC. I’m a field retrieval specialist. I gather samples.”

  “Samples?” asked Garza. He smiled. “Of what, snow?”

  “No…Plague.”

  All smiles vanished from the Rangers. Deuce paused, a steaming cup on the way to his mouth. “Plague?”

  “Bubonic plague, to be exact,” said Chad matter-of-factly. “Didn’t you guys know this whole park is under quarantine?”

  “Jesu Christo!” said Garza as he crossed himself, backing away from Chad. “Ain’t that the Black Death?”

  “Yes,” said Chad nonchalantly, unzipping his ghillie suit as the woodstove began to warm the small one-room cabin to a comfortable level. “My job is to track and kill animals infected with the plague, then harvest samples—”

  “Samples?” asked Deuce. He took a sip from his cup and frowned. He passed it to the Captain. “It don’t taste very good, but it won’t kill you.”

  “Yeah,” said Chad, shrugging out of his ghillie suit. After a cursory check that his sweatshirt and undergarments weren’t too thoroughly soaked, he carefully stretched out the ghillie suit to dry on a couple of rough-hewn pegs sunk into the wall as he talked. “I take blood, bone, and tissue samples from harvested animals and check them under the microscope back at my cabin. Then I send the results back to HQ. While I’m out in the bush I also take down as many infected animals as I can to try and limit the spread of the disease.”

  “Aren’t you worried about catching it?” asked Garza. He took a cup of the coffee from Deuce with a nod of thanks.

  “No,” said Chad. His expression went blank. Every single time someone asked that innocent question he relived that cold day years
ago when he buried Mom. “I don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Oh, yeah, they got a vaccine, huh?” asked Zuka, warming his hands by the woodstove.

  “No,” said Chad. “I’m immune.”

  “Uh, say again?” asked the Captain.

  “Immune. As in I can’t get sick from it. Or from anything, for that matter,” Chad said. He shrugged. “Been that way most of my life. There’s something in my genes that keeps me from getting sick. No colds, no flu, no disease, no nothing. At least, nothing they’ve tested me for.”

  “They?” asked the Captain.

  “The CDC, the government, CIA, hell even NASA, I think.”

  “Well,” sighed Captain Alston after a long sip from the mug. “That explains a lot.”

  “So, like you can never get sick…at all?” asked Garza.

  “Not once in my entire life…at least that I can remember.”

  As the Rangers mulled that thought over in silence, Chad scratched his head and ruffled his damp, thick hair. What he wouldn’t give for a nice hot soak right about now. “Would someone mind explaining why those Special Forces guys were trying to kill me, and why you were trying to get me out of here on a helicopter?” He took an empty metal mug from his pack and handed it to Deuce. “Thanks,” he said when the big Ranger returned with hot coffee.

  “You really have no clue?” The Captain shook his head. “What a mind job.” He took a bite from his food packet and grimaced. “Okay, listen up. Our orders were to get in here and extract you,” he said pointing the spork in his hand at Chad. “Then get your ass back over the Rockies to Spokane, Washington. Nobody told us shit about the Black Death in these woods. My CO made no mention of any NKors, either.” He took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “Or why the hell we were supposed to get you in the first place—only that you’re on someone’s list. And that someone is pretty damn high up—if you take my meaning—for us to be re-tasked to dragging you outta here in the middle of a damn blizzard.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Chad.

  “Whaddya mean?” asked Garza. “We could be doing a hundred other missions right now in all this chaos. Something big is going down and you must be a part of it…”

  “What the hell are you talking about? What’s going down?”

  The Captain narrowed his eyes. “You got TV up here?”

  “No,” said Chad, starting to get worried. “No radio either. I like the quiet.” He looked around. “What’s going on?”

  “Cell phone?” asked Deuce.

  Chad pulled his out and showed them the screen. “No signal,” he said. “I have a sat phone, but I’ve never needed to use it. It’s for emergencies.”

  “Holy shit,” muttered Deuce. He looked at Captain Alston. “He doesn’t know.”

  “Know what?” asked Chad through clenched teeth. He could feel the frustration and fear inside him begin to boil over into anger.

  “How long have you been up here without contact from the outside world?” asked Captain Alston.

  “Guess I’ve been up here about a month or so. What day is it?”

  “Saturday the 27th.”

  “Yup, I passed through the quarantine checkpoint on the 3rd.” Chad sipped from the forgotten mug in his hands and winced. It was awful. But it was hot. “We’re still in September, right?” he grinned. He looked at Deuce, who watched him intently. Chad smiled weakly. “Not bad,” he said, raising his mug. The big Ranger smiled.

  “See?” the mountain of a man said to Garza, “He likes it.”

  “So you haven’t heard anything about the flu or Atlanta?” asked the Captain over the foul-mouthed response from Garza.

  “What flu? What about Atlanta?” asked Chad, taking another sip from his steaming cup.

  “It’s hitting some big cities. Kinda strange-like. I don’t know, I’m no doc, but my sister is. She’s in Los Angeles and called me Friday night, after Atlanta... People getting sick in numbers she hasn’t seen since…”

  “The Pandemic?” asked Chad in a quiet voice. “It’s back?”

  No one spoke for a few moments. “I don’t know,” said the Captain in a quiet voice. “My sister said she ran some tests and this strain is related, but it’s…different somehow. It looks like people who were infected ten years ago and survived should be okay, but…she can’t be certain. She said it’s mutated, but in ways it shouldn’t be possible to mutate. They’re still trying to figure it out, but people are starting to die much faster than during The Pandemic.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, man. Like I said, I’m no doctor. But the last thing I heard before we came out here, it’s getting real bad and a lot of the Brass are getting worried. Like, Def-Con 2 worried.”

  “Where?” asked Chad in a flat voice.

  “L.A., San Diego,” said Deuce.

  “San Fran, Portland,” added Garza.

  “Yeah, I guess most of the big cities on the West Coast are like ground zero. Hospitals swamped, that kind of thing. On the East Coast, New York, Boston, Philly, the big ones there are just starting to see cases.” Captain Alston rubbed his eyes but kept talking, “Hardly anything in the mid-west, but last I heard, Chicago and a handful of smaller cities in the Rockies are reporting numbers of sick they haven’t seen since…you know.”

  Chad closed his eyes and put a hand to his face. “How long?”

  “Shit, just in the past week. It’s like it just popped up everywhere in the west at once. Now it’s in the east,” replied the Captain. “Freakin’ unreal. And yet here we sit, trying to protect you from a bunch of ninja wannabes.”

  Eyes still closed, Chad tried to fight off the memories from his past. Burying Mom and Dad, his sisters, his neighbors. “What kind of casualty count worldwide?” he asked, ignoring for the moment that a bunch of North Koreans were trying to kill him.

  “Uh…” said the Captain. “You know…I don’t really know. Hadn’t thought about it.” The others grunted agreement and ignorance.

  Chad opened his eyes and looked around. The Rangers looked genuinely confused.

  “I haven’t heard anything happening outside North America,” said Deuce. “Why?”

  “And even then, it’s mostly in the U.S.,” Captain Alston mused, his frown deepening. “There’s a few cases reported from Canada, but…”

  “Jesus,” Chad whispered. “They weaponized it.”

  Captain Alston sat up. “What did you just say?”

  “Some crazy son of a bitch in a lab coat weaponized The Pandemic strain of H5N1! Don’t you get it? That’s the only explanation. You said it yourself, we’re the only country that’s got it in significant numbers. It popped up in major cities, in waves, at the same time—”

  “Jesus…someone hit the West Coast, then the next round went east,” said Captain Alston, nodding at Chad’s assessment.

  “Why the hell hasn’t CDC gone completely apeshit over this?” Chad demanded.

  “Damn,” said Garza, shaking his head sadly. “He doesn’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “The CDC is gone, Mr. Huntley,” said the Captain. “Someone nuked Atlanta Friday afternoon.”

  Chad’s mouth dropped open. He was stunned. “Wait…when you mean nuked, you mean like a terrorist bomb or something…a—what do you call them?…A dirty bomb, right?”

  “No. I mean some tourists in Florida saw a fucking ICBM shoot up out of the Atlantic Ocean. It damn near wiped Atlanta off the map.”

  Chad looked at the Captain in utter disbelief but the grim look to the man’s face confirmed his words. He looked at Garza who merely nodded. Deuce’s face was dark with anger.

  “My parents lived in Atlanta,” the big man growled.

  “Who?” Chad squeaked in a whisper. “Who did this?” All his friends and co-workers were all at the CDC main campus in the northern suburbs of Atlanta. They were all gone. It was like The Great Pandemic all over again.

  “Don’t know,” said the Captain. He looked ready to crush the metal coffee mug in h
is white-knuckled hands. “But when the Brass figures that out, you better believe we’re gonna be dropping the hammer on somebody’s ass.”

  “Why Atlanta?” asked Chad, eyes closed again. Everyone gone. His home, his neighbors. Again. Wiped out. And now with the Blue Flu apparently visiting the country again… His eyes flew open.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “Holy shit, holy shit…” Chad got up and started pacing, his mind reeling from the thoughts that were spinning in his head.

  It can’t be. It’s too outrageous…but there’s too much coincidence. If I’m right, though…holy shit.

  “What?” asked Captain Alston. “What is it?”

  “Atlanta. The nuke—it confirms that someone weaponized The Pandemic strain. We…the CDC, my division, I mean…they made a vaccine for it the year after The Pandemic, remember?”

  “Yeah, it’s what started calming everything down and stopped the war in Iran from going nuclear,” replied Captain Alston.

  Chad pointed at him. “Right! And do you know where the vaccine came from?”

  “Well, the CDC I would guess.”

  “No way!” said Garza, getting to his feet. He pointed at Chad. “It came from him, man! He said he couldn’t get sick, right?”

  “Right,” said Chad with a nod toward the grinning Garza. “They took so much of my blood I thought they were going to kill me. They needed it to make a vaccine—to kill that fucking super-flu dead in its tracks. Then they started stockpiling it.”

  “That’s great! Where is it?” said the Captain. “They should be able to haul it out and stop this flu so we can focus on getting back at whoever nuked Atlanta.”

  “In the vaccine vaults at the CDC main campus. In Atlanta,” said Chad with a shake of his head. “Oh, the CDC sent samples to the other countries in the world to let them make their own, but without my blood, it was just synthetic, and it wasn’t as good as ours. The bits that I overheard from the virologists, whatever they did to make the vaccine was pretty classified. They didn’t want anyone else out there to find out how we made the vaccine so they built into it a limited shelf-life or something. After a few months all the vaccines we made to kill H5N1 were useless. That kept the entire world dependent on the CDC for the good stuff.”