A Time to Die

by Mark Wandrey

  None survived in the overlapping fields of fire inside the house or on the porch. Outside where Tobey had set them up with less overlap, there were some still alive. All were wounded though, some missing arms and legs, others with huge holes punched through their torsos as they staggered or crawled about rapidly bleeding out.

  For a second there was stunned silence, then a deafening cheer went up from the house. Kathy stared at the scene of death with a mixture of elation and horror. It looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse she’d once visited in Kansas City for a story on Mad Cow Disease. Only it wasn’t parts of cows that writhed on the ground, it was men, women, and some children. This time she did puke, though there was little more than yellow slime that came out.

  She wiped her mouth on her already filthy shirt and spit to clear her mouth, then went back to her rifle. “More out there!” she yelled through her half deafened ears.

  “I see them, hold fire,” Tobey replied from above.

  Dozen, hundreds more came up and this time they stopped to feed. “Oh Christ,” Kathy moaned as she watched a girl of eight or nine pick up a severed arm and start to tear at the flesh like it was a chicken drumstick.

  The uninjured descended on the dead and dying to feast. In only minutes Kathy realized their victory was no victory at all. She’d thought Tobey’s mines and machinegun fire had slaughtered most of them. She saw just how wrong she was.

  “More from behind!” Tobey called above her.

  Kathy picked up the rifle, careful to avoid the red hot barrel, and ran to the back of the house. Women and children cried out in alarm where they were packed into the upstairs spaces. By the time she reached the back room that had been set up as a firing position she could see them clearly running through the grove of trees. “Got it!” she yelled. “Shoot!”

  “Yes!” he answered as his machine gun began chattering. He’d had quite a job manhandling the overheated gun and almost four hundred rounds of ammo to the rear of the captain’s walk. He’d almost fallen over the side once. He’d also hoped for a few minutes respite to let the weapon cool. The barrel was designed for sustained fire, but this took it to an extreme! As he resumed firing he could see the occasional sparks from the barrel. Not good, not good at all.

  Luckily the combined fire of himself and Kathy below stopped the rearward group. Confused by so much death from their other numbers, they stopped their assault and crouched behind trees and under bushes. “Cease fire,” Tobey yelled, “Cease fire!” He lifted the gun off the railing and set it on its bipod on the walk’s deck. As he did he noted that the railing where he’d rested the barrel was smoking.

  He made sure the barrel wasn’t touching anything flammable and swung in through the captain’s walk window and down the stairs. It took a minute to push through the crowd of panicked people to reach the back bedroom. He found Kathy sitting there, the rifle propped up between her knees and held by the foregrip with both hands. It almost looked like she was praying. “Are you okay?”

  She looked up in surprise, then calmed when she saw who it was. “Yeah,” she said, even though he noticed the puddle of puke at her feet. “You think that licked them?”

  “No,” he admitted. “I don’t think they’re smart enough to get beat.” He pulled out his canteen and took a long drink of the lukewarm water before handing it to her. She took a little drink and swished it around before spitting out the window, then a much bigger one which she swallowed. Next he fished into his pack and came out with a couple foil pouches. “Here,” he said and handed one to her. “Protein bar.” She ripped it open and immediately started eating.

  “What’s our chances of getting out of here?” she asked when the bar was devoured.

  “Depends on how many of them there are.”

  “And if its thousands?”

  “I’d say close to zero. I went through about a third of the M-240 ammo, and that was all the Claymores. Our Mexican allies shot through half their ammo as well. Unless we can get some help…” he let the last part just hang there.

  “Where’s my bag?” she wondered. He got up and brought it to her from where it had been stuffed into a closet. She fished around and brought her laptop out again. Still over 80% power. Good thing too, since her solar charger was with her condoms. She swallowed and tried not to think about it. She settled down with the computer and her box of SD cards and began dumping them into the computer as backup. Tobey watched her for a time then headed off to do something else. She knew she should be doing something too, but what else was there but to wait and see if the enfermo left them alone?

  The computer’s USB3 allowed her to upload the many gigabytes in only minutes, even when she got out her hub and had three cards dumping at once. The machine possessed a four terabyte drive. There were files from a dozen stories archived there and room for a dozen more after she was done.

  Once that was done she started sorting. First they went into a file folder she titled Enfermo. It just seemed apropos. The files were all time stamped so she knew immediately which ones went into the archive and which ones to review. The laptop had a power video editing suite that allowed her to rapidly move through a video by just sliding her finger along the glide point. By marking one point with a mouse click then another she could drop a clip into a new video file, or save it in a background clipboard. It took only a few minutes to have twenty minutes of footage assembled representing her trip.

  It started with her talking to the camera as she set the mount on her ATV a few miles from Tobey’s farm. “This is Kathy Clifford in Texas, and I’m about to break the law to try and find out the truth.” Her self-interview had been short. She pulled out her little Bluetooth mic and headphones, slipping on the set she began adding commentary as the story quickly came together. Just after starting her career she’d spent two years as a stringer producer. She’d been good at it. So good a major network had offered her a job. She’d passed. Reporting was her passion.

  The story progressed with some shots of rugged desert. Next the border fence, rusted and broken, she easily found a place to ride through. “Now I’m in Mexico,” she said into the mic, dubbing it over the sound of the ATV motor, “the truth is just ahead.” Another minute of rugged arroyos, dry creek beds and distant mountains. Then the road, signs of civilization.

  “There’s nothing as far as the eye can see,” she dubbed. “Everything I come across is abandoned. Even this gas station.” And there she is pulling into the station. The camera catches her going inside. She cuts and shows herself coming back out, arms laden with supplies. “I left payment, even though no one was there. It’s an eerie scene that brings to mind Pompeii. The grill in the little restaurant attached to the station is still hot.” Then the camera shows the Army truck approaching. “I’m relieved to find signs of life, but my relief is short lived.”

  Here she mulled what to show several times. The bike had been parked in just the right location to catch it all. The Mexican officer going for her throat, and then being blown apart by the big machine gun. It was brutal in a way that would have made her violently ill only a day ago. Now, she mechanically edited the footage into the story. “This is my first encounter with what the Mexican people call the Enfermo. If these soldiers hadn’t been there, I would have certainly been seriously injured or died.”

  The men began mounting up and their commander asked her to come along and she refused. This was off camera. She left it untouched because it showed her decision while the visual showed more army trucks coming into view. Soldiers went by with arms loaded with energy drinks and snacks. Then the bike roared to life and she turned down the road.

  “I’d seen what I came to see, now I needed to get out of there alive. That would prove harder than I thought it would.” Next came her desperate flight from the enfermo. And the battle on the hill. Her panic as they began overtaking her. She was shocked to see it all play out in only a couple hours. It had felt like a lifetime. Then it had ended with Tobey riding in like the storied cavalry. �
��Major Tobey Pendleton, US Army, retired,” she said. “A friend I’d made before crossing into Mexico had decided to follow me. Either out of attraction or curiosity, it didn’t matter. For the second time in as many days, my life was saved by a US soldier.”

  A few cuts of them riding, some recorded while she slept, and their arrival at the house. “These are some of the no doubt millions of refugees fleeing out of Mexico ahead of a veritable human wave of horror.” They meet and talk to Enrico and his son Manuel. “They didn’t come to break the law like many before them, they came just trying to survive. The house is on a property belonging to Mr. Pendleton. He offered them his hospitality.” She cut in a scene inside the house just showing the vast number of people. Then she began the interviews.

  “I had the opportunity to talk with these brave people about their experiences fleeing the enfermo.”

  “It was my cousin,” a woman said in broken English, “he went enfermo while we were eating dinner. Went to the bathroom and when he came back…he bit his own baby on the neck!”

  “My wife tried to kill us,” a man said, “my son hit her with a shovel and we ran.” Tears were streaming down his cheek as he spoke. “I never saw her again.”

  “The government came into the village. I watched from the hill of our vineyard. Everyone was gathered in the town square. Then they started shooting!”

  The interviews went on, including the women describing how it started north, went south, and changed to the cannibalistic behavior. She included how those bit then became enfermo, and how some just seemed to change without reason.

  “Many were eager for the chance to tell their story during that respite from fight or flight,” she dubbed. “Unfortunately it won’t be a respite that lasts very long.”

  “Here they come!” someone yelled and the camera was snatched up and you could see her running in its jogging view until it came to the window. She sat it on its little tripod and then the rifle barrel appeared. Outside, they came in a human wave. She’d decided to leave out the earlier brief attack on the boy. It didn’t work without showing her holding the dead boy, and that was an affront to her grieving. Kathy knew she was somewhere in the house, still feeling that little boy in her arms, still hurting, was a mother still wishing it was her instead of him. “Fire!” she yelled, and the footage ended.

  Kathy set the camera to live feed and pointed it at herself, checking the focus through the computers. She gasped at how gaunt and wretched she looked. It reminded her of women she’d seen in Chechnya or Yugoslavia during the war. Torn, beaten, and defeated. “That attack lasted several minutes. As you saw there were hundreds, maybe thousands of them. They are the enfermo, and you cannot reason with them. They have no compassion, they have no mercy. All you can do is run, or fight.” She had a cut she would add, a little unfocused gratefully, of the bloody aftermath and the stragglers feeding on their slain brethren.

  “It is an unspeakable horror we face. What is this disease? Where did it come from? Does our government understand the magnitude of the tragedy that is coming our way as fast as insane feet will carry it? Or are there already enfermo in our own country? The fact that the government detained me and tried to suppress this story speaks volumes on the potential truth. Frightening, horrifying even, if you consider it.”

  “If you encounter a person acting like the enfermo, I beg you to avoid them at all costs. Call the police, run away, and defend yourself. This is life or death now. They’re in the United States for sure, only in what numbers? Our soldiers have faced them, and in at least one incident died.” She’d cut in the downed and burning chopper, but leave out the soldier. She owed him that much, and she was afraid of talking about the machine guns and explosives. Even now, she was fearful of the government and their laws. “This is Kathy Clifford, coming to you from somewhere in southern Texas.”

  Another few minutes of work and a high speed run through and it was finished. Total run time just under 25 minutes. Perfect, she thought with a nod. Out of her bag she brought her last burnable asset. Unfolding it she pressed the power button. The little LCD screen came alive with an animated Earth. Across its surface a meteor traced a path of stars around an orbit, the stars spelling the word Iridium.

  Kathy linked the phone with her computer via a special USB cable and extended the big antenna then waited. “Acquiring satellite,” the phone displayed. “Ready” it said after a minute. The data connection wasn’t great by modern standards, especially uploading. She didn’t dare risk sending the story directly to a news service. Instead she uploaded it to a prepared Dropbox account. The phone showed 50% power when she started. Twenty minutes later when the story was finished it read 15%. “Damn, that was close,” she said and started typing an email. That, thankfully, only took a minute. Then she sent it to a preset group of accounts. Twenty news agencies, stringers, and freelance aggregators. “Done.”

  “They’re poking around closer to the house,” Tobey said from the door then stopped when he looked over her setup. “Is than an Iridium satellite phone?”

  “Yep,” she said, “don’t ask me where I got it.”

  “Jesus girl,” he said and ran over, “why the fuck didn’t you tell me you had one? I’ve been checking my cellphone every couple hours praying I’d get a signal!”

  “What difference does it make?” she asked. “It’s not like a few cops could help us. Besides we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “There are always options,” he said. “May I?”

  “Sure,” she said and handed it over. “They might turn it off really soon, once they find out what I just did. And there’s only 15% power left. Long odds.”

  “Better than no odds,” he said and accepted the phone. He had his own cellphone out and was looking up a number. Once he had it he punched it quickly into the satellite phone and pressed transmit. The phone rang for a moment then picked up.

  “Fort Hood, Third Corps Ops,” she heard a woman’s voice answer, “authentication please.”

  “Thank you, authentication follows. Victor, Charlie, Romeo, Tango, Tango, Zebra, one, three, niner. Pendleton,” and he spelled his name using the same lingo.

  “Thank you, please stand by.”

  “Army Fort Hood?” she asked. He only nodded, listening for the controller to come back and hoping against hope.

  “Major Pendleton,” a gravelly voiced man came on the line, “if this is him, care to tell me where I caught one?”

  “Left ass cheek, General Rose, sir. Your favorite cocktail party conversation topic.”

  “Tobey, you mother fucker!” the man laughed. “Where the fuck are you and why the fuck are you using the secure ops line?”

  “Just across the border from Mexico, east of Monterrey. And that should answer both questions.”

  There was a long silence. “Jesus jumping Christ, Tobey. I could lose my star if you’re involved in what I think you’re involved in.”

  “So you know about it?”

  “Only a little bit. Where you near Monterrey when it went?”

  “Went? What do you mean, general?”

  “You don’t know? It’s all over the news, son.”

  “Sir, we’re so deep in the shit a snorkel would just feed us more shit.”

  “I see.” Another pause. “Well, it’s on the God-damned news. I can neither confirm, nor deny if it is true that Monterrey Mexico was destroyed by a nuclear weapon.”

  Kathy’s hand went to her mouth and her eyes went wide. “Oh no!”

  “Who’s that with you, Tobey?”

  “Girlfriend, sir,” Tobey said.

  “No shit? First good news I’ve heard in a couple days.” Even still digesting the news of Monterrey’s fate, Kathy felt a flush on her cheeks at that. “Ann has been gone for years.”

  “Who dropped the bomb, sir?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny that the Mexican government nuked their own city.”

  The phone beeped and vibrated. He looked down and saw the power bar said 10
% and was now red. “General Rose, I’m going to give you some information. What you do with it is your decision.”

  “Proceed,” the man said.

  “I’m on my property in Texas, coordinates are—” and he read off a series of numbers from memory. “In addition to myself and my girlfriend, we have in excess of 100 Mexican nationals, refugees from the…incident, who are requesting asylum.” The phone beeped, 5% remaining.

  “Son of a bitch, Major, what are you doing to me?!”

  “Asking you for help, sir. We have hundreds, perhaps thousands of hostiles on our six. They are currently occupied with us, but we cannot hold out much longer. When we are gone they are heading north. I repeat, they are in the open into our territory, behind the wire.”

  “Okay, I’ll see what—” The phone buzzed and displayed “Battery Depleted, Shutting Down.” Tobey shrugged and handed it to her.

  “For what it’s worth,” he told her. “Thanks.”

  “Thank you for trying,” she said. “Girlfriend, eh?”

  He blushed, actually blushed, and rubbed his short cut hair. “It seemed the thing to say at the time.”

  “I’d be happy to be your girlfriend,” she said, a little surprised at herself. She hadn’t had an official boyfriend in many years. No time for that as a big time reporter. Or as a fugitive from justice, for that matter. “In fact, I’d say I have been for a while. I’ve never had a boyfriend invade another country to come and rescue me.”

  “You take care of yourself pretty well,” he said, “if you’d had some better firepower you might not have needed rescuing.”

  “Daddy didn’t raise no idiots,” she said with a wry smile. “So what now?”

  “We wait.”

  * * *

  Aka Sushi on Madison Avenue, New York City, just south of 79th Street, was one of the newest and trendiest of a thousand sushi shops on the island. Opened by a Japanese sushi master named Koru Akahori, he set out to create a traditional shop that served both the best Japan had to offer, but also not afraid to try new trends. Koru received daily air shipments of tuna and salmon caught the day before in Japan and sent packed in ice. People who tried his sushi said it was the best sushi experience in their lives.