by Sawyer, JT
Carlie pulled her head back from the scope and activated the radio mic in her ear. After relaying their whereabouts to Boyd and telling her two teams to move up to their location, she switched the channel over to the XO on board the Farragut.
“Commander, we will be exfilling to the secondary point upon picking up the package. I will radio back in two hours with an update on our progress.”
“Copy that. This storm is clearing out and you’ll only have a narrow window of darkness left to slide by those creatures.”
Carlie thought back to the carnage below. “Day or night, I don’t think it’s going to matter anymore. We just witnessed a cluster of swift-moving creatures destroying a group of nearly two-dozen smugglers in minutes,” she said, leaning back to look at the moon. “Something has definitely changed.”
Chapter 41
Once the rest of both teams had joined Carlie and Shane, they headed down the opposite side of the hill and walked in a wide arc away from the road. Carlie felt this would give them plenty of space between them and the cluster of fast-moving mutants that Matias’ SAT-com device indicated were heading down the road to the beach where their Zodiacs were located.
After an hour of difficult movement through the dense jungle, they made their way back to the road near a convoluted fork in the muddy terrain. The storm was starting to ease up and every few minutes the moon would stab fingers through gaps in the jungle canopy to illuminate the slick substrate below.
“Carlie, hold up,” said Matias, who was staring down at the faint red screen of his SAT device. “This thing is fading in and out,” he said, tapping the polycarbonate screen. “This road to the right heads into the airstrip. The smuggler encampment looks to only have a handful of creatures over the next half-mile though there are larger pockets of them moving through the forest beyond this region. Other than that, I’m not getting much of a reading as to any survivors in the vicinity of the airstrip.”
She came over and analyzed the digital topo map as the screen kept fading. Carlie took off her boonie hat and scratched the back of her head. “Alright, we need to neutralize some of those mutants along the road before we can go any further. I want to dispatch them from here in case there are others lurking around that we don’t know about.”
She motioned for Shane, Matias, and Boyd to come up next to her. “It looks like thirteen creatures about six hundred meters ahead,” she said. “Let’s do some headhunting.”
“Copy that,” the three men said, getting into a kneeling position and resting their M4s on fallen logs for support.
The rest of the group gathered around them while peering through their rifles’ nightvision scopes. Boyd was next to Carlie and she could hear his muffled breathing.
She stabilized the rifle on the moss-encrusted log in front of her, feeling for the familiar cheek-weld of the stock and then adjusting her sights. The first mutant was a thin figure wearing bent glasses. Carlie centered the red dot on the forehead and then eased her finger over the trigger. She steadied her breathing and then felt the slow depression of the trigger followed a micro-second later by the creature’s head splattering on a tree trunk.
She could hear the suppressor rifles around her as the others went to work. Carlie continued the same methodical pattern of shot placement until the road ahead was devoid of movement.
“Any other tangos?” she said, scanning the terrain with her nightscope.
“Negative,” said Boyd, pulling his head back, his streaked camouflage face paint looking like someone had dragged a muddy rake across his cheeks. He was giving her a surprised look and Carlie thought it was because she had dropped four creatures in the time it took him to kill two. She ignored his stare and strained to hear any movement coming from around them. Carlie leaned back from the log and whispered to her left:
“My team will head to the airstrip and see if we can locate any survivors there. Bravo Team will head to the other beach location and procure one of the boats.” She pointed to the left fork in the road. “If all goes as planned, my team will exfil along the road back to this fork and regroup at the new dock. Those other jacked-up mutants are a few miles out from here so we should only have a handful of the normal undead creatures to contend with,” she said, looking at each team member. “If things heat up, I’ve instructed Commander Young to hammer the jungle shoreline upon receiving our coordinates from either myself or Boyd. Any questions?”
“What about the Farragut sending in a helo to extract us?” said Jared.
“The XO indicated that this storm won’t clear up significantly for another six hours so airborne ops are going to be out of the question until then. That mile distance to the ship that we did in the Zodiacs shouldn’t be a problem in the choppy conditions if there’s a decent boat at this other dock.”
“Ah, the joys of unknown variables. Combat wouldn’t be combat without ’em,” said Shane.
The teams split back into their separate groups and headed out, running their separate directions to the fork. As they trotted, Carlie kept her vision focused on the narrow road which was squeezed in by the green grip of dense foliage. She saw truck tracks in the mud and thought about the earlier scene of carnage with the convoy of smugglers. She had trained for a lot of bizarre scenarios over the years with the Secret Service but the bad guys were always human, with normal reflexes, weaknesses, and identifiable capabilities. Those fast-moving creatures made her shudder and she felt her right palm gripping the handle of her M4 tighter as she placed each foot forward. She glanced down at the luminescent dial of her watch and hoped that, in an hour, her teams would all be safely back on the ship and free from such monstrous horrors.
Chapter 42
As they arrived at the jungle airstrip, Carlie motioned to everyone to squat down inside a tight cluster of trees. “According to the XO, this is the general area where the transmission came from. We don’t have a lot of time to sweep through this entire region so let’s start with that small building adjacent to the airstrip. Matias, Amy, and Shane—you take the door on the right. Jared and I will sweep the building to the left.
“Shane—you and your group go first while I provide cover,” she said as the others stood and began moving out of the treeline.
Carlie focused her rifle’s scope along the drab cement building as Jared moved up alongside her.
“My last tarot-card reading never mentioned any of this,” said Jared.
“Tarot cards—you buy into that hokey shit?” said Carlie.
“When the lady across from me is a lovely blonde with green eyes, I’ll buy into anything she says.”
“Sounds like women are your jelly spot.”
“Yeah, well, given all of life’s vices, that’s not a bad thing to be afflicted with,” he said as Carlie felt his eyes float over her.
Once Shane was inside the building, he waved to her that it was clear to proceed.
Carlie and Jared sprinted to the back door of the low-standing structure. Unlike the room next to it, this one had no windows, just cement walls and a steel door. Carlie stood at an angle to the opening while Jared grabbed the tarnished metal handle and tried to turn it. He tapped on the center and then ran his fingers along the edges. “This is a reinforced steel door. The kind I’d want to be hiding behind if you were on the other end serving a warrant.”
“Alright, let’s regroup with Shane.”
“Hang on,” Jared said, kneeling down before the lock and removing a bandanna from his vest. He laid it on the ground and unrolled it, revealing a half-dozen dental instruments.
“So, you had a toothache, eh?”
Jared frowned, picking up a curved tool and then one that had a thin straight edge, and began manipulating both tools in the lock. “The first lock pick set I ever had was a bunch of old dental instruments. That stuff you see on TV about using a paperclip is a bunch of bullshit. I tried that—once. A man needs good tools if he’s gonna stay alive, regardless of his profession.”
“How long is this g
oing to…”
The lock clicked and Jared depressed the handle before Carlie could finish her sentence. “You have your moments, don’t you?”
Jared placed his tools back in his vest and they both entered the ten-by-twelve-foot room which had nothing more than a staircase leading down and a few empty crates behind the door.
Standing in the right corner were a stack of canned goods and an AK. Jared leaned over, grabbing the rifle and looking it over. “Sweet, now I feel like one of those rebels in the movie Red Dawn.”
“I think most of those guys died, as I recall?” whispered Carlie.
She nodded for him to move aside so she could lead. As Carlie descended the damp concrete steps she saw another steel door below. “With these reinforced walls, they must’ve used this vault for securing their contraband or as a holding cell,” she said, staring at the door lock. “Let’s see if you can get lucky more than once.”
After Jared gained access, Carlie moved forward to begin opening the door. Jared stood frozen against the wall to the right, his eyes nervously shifting to the door and then back up the stairs.
“You afraid of the dark?”
“No, I’m afraid of what lives in the dark.”
“Just stay here then and watch my back.”
“No, no, I’m cool.”
As Carlie swung open the door and thrust her rifle up, a penetrating stench of rotting flesh washed over them. Jared moved in alongside her and they both readied their weapons as Carlie swept the room with her rifle-mounted flashlight. Lying before them was a decomposing body lying on a cot, the contents of its head sprayed onto the mattress and wall. A few feet away was the crumpled form of a man with a similar headwound with only the faint trace of a goatee to indicate where his lower jaw had been.
“Looks like the one in the bed may have offed the guy on the floor before taking his own life. Though their skin color looks like they were both infected,” said Jared.
She moved up and took out her phone then snapped a close-up of what was left of the two victims’ faces.
“Damn, sister, that’s messed up. I’d hate to see what your work office used to look like. No wonder you were never married.”
“This is for General Adams, dumb-ass,” she said, stuffing the phone back in her vest pocket. “We always document the faces of tangos so we can match them with our recognition software for terrorists.”
Carlie looked around the room and gathered up a few notebooks resting on the desk and then went over to the radio equipment.
“This is where the transmission came from,” she said, brushing aside the receiver with her gloved hand. She looked back at the two bodies. “So much for the rescue of a high-value asset.”
She nodded to Jared to move up the stairs. Once they were outside they stalked along the back until they met up with Shane. As they approached the adjacent structure, she could hear the forest floor behind them rustling with faint movement.
Chapter 43
They exited the room and then rejoined the others in the building next door. “He’s dead—the guy we came for is dead,” she said, squatting down and leaning her right shoulder against the wall of the building. She could feel the weight of these past few days squeezing down on her, like there was a clamp torqued around her soul. What was the point of even coming here since our one best lead is splattered all over the walls? This whole goddamned mission was for nothing. Carlie pulled her arms back and took a deep breath. She reminded herself of her training—to remove doubt as doubt kills and erodes willpower. Replace doubt with action and immediately go to Plan B, then Plan C & D, doing whatever it takes to prevail.
She moved towards the entrance and glanced across the grass-riddled airstrip outside and then up at the moon shining over the watchtower.
“We retrieved some journals from the lab below that may be of use but, other than that, our primary objective now is to get the hell off this rock without incurring any losses.”``
She gripped the handle of her M4 and gritted her teeth. “Alright, listen up. The road heading out of here is where those other super-mutants were at, plus I just heard noise in the forest that could spell trouble. We’re gonna skirt along the encampment to the right and then duck down into the ravine alongside it. That should provide us with some cover. Then we’ll hoof it to the beach,” she said, looking into the weary eyes of the people huddled beside her. “Shane, I want you to…” She paused, squinting her eyes and gazing over Shane’s shoulder towards the jungle.
“Hold on. I’ve got movement at my three o’ clock. I saw something skirt across the treeline that we just came from.”
Everyone turned and stared intently. “Great, we got more of those fucking cabbage heads moving in on us,” said Jared.
“Let’s just hope it ain’t a trigger-happy smuggler,” Amy said.
Shane was peering through his scope. “Looks like four of those slow-moving creatures ambling around the forest. They’re not focused on this area though so we’re probably in the clear for now.”
“Let’s move up to the rear of the hangar by the lookout tower,” Carlie said. She inched out from the building and then bounded towards the hangar, keeping within a few feet of the dense jungle in case they had to conceal themselves quickly.
When they arrived at the corner of the dilapidated hangar, Shane set up his rifle on top of an empty oil barrel and instructed Jared to position himself alongside him and Amy to cover their rear. Matias hung back by the hangar with his rifle fixed on the treeline where the creatures had been spotted.
“Cover me while I skirt up the ladder of the lookout tower. I want to get a better fix on our egress route and see if anything else is out there. If all goes well, we will head into the ravine after that and be on our way.” Once they were set, Carlie bolted to the closest upright post of the tower and then suspended her rifle off her vest. She climbed up the rickety wooden ladder and could see the entrance in the floor was ajar. She paused outside the hatch to listen for any sound coming from inside. As she entered and stood up, she saw the silhouette of a 2x4 coming at her head. Instinctively she dropped on her left knee while snapping her right foot into the groin area of the figure beside her then she lunged forward while swiftly removing her pistol. Carlie heard moaning from the curled-up body below as she stood with her weapon hand outstretched.
“Please, don’t shoot…don’t shoot,” the man whimpered, raising his hands defensively over his face. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I thought you were one of those things,” said the frail figure with a familiar voice.
Carlie kicked aside the 2x4 and then moved back towards the wall. “Who are you—how long have you been hiding in here?”
The man sat up and took a deep breath while holding his lower abdomen. “Pavel Dimitrikov is my name and I am….”
Carlie lowered her pistol and raised her chin up. “You are the NATO inspector who worked on the KAD97 virus,” she said as her breath quickened and she moved forward to help him up. She repeated the same words in fluent Russian, to which he nodded.
“I never worked on the virus, though we did discover its presence here. All of these rabid creatures you’ve seen are the victims of that monstrosity.”
“It’s not just here—this has spread through the world. Most of the big cities have been decimated by this virus.”
She felt the man wobble and noticed his hands trembling. Carlie leaned him against a table in the corner. “The world…no…no. This can’t be. I have a family back in Germany…they couldn’t have…”
“I realize this must be difficult to hear but I need you on your feet. We have to get the hell out of here before this place is overrun.”
She could see his expression was frozen, his eyes adrift. “Come with me,” she said, prodding him to stand and moving towards the ladder.
He looked at her, his eyes watering, then he exhaled deeply and tried to regain his composure. “Who…who are you?”
“My name is Carlie. I’m with the Secret Ser…”
She paused, realizing that there was no longer a reason to indicate her agency connection. “I work for the U.S. government. I thought you were already dead as several bodies were discovered in the buildings below surrounded by lab equipment.”
“One of them was Viktor, my old friend. He died a few nights ago along with one of our former security operatives who I was forced to shoot.”
“Let’s head down. We can talk more after we’re out of here.” As she climbed down the ladder into the shadow cast by the tower, Pavel followed behind her, whispering to himself, “Men’s evil desires of times past have now come to bear their scars upon this world.”
Chapter 44
Carlie was peering around the edge of the tree towards the narrow drainage that was behind the smugglers’ encampment. “We’ll drop down into that passage which will conceal us better than running straight through the jungle. Once we’re in the ravine, it’s bounding moves from there until we get to the beach,” she said. “Pavel, Jared, and Amy, you’ll stay between Shane and myself. Matias, you take the rear.”
The six of them cleared the treeline and dashed to the side of the rusted metal hangar then slipped down into the drainage. They slid across the muddy embankment until they were at the bottom, fifteen feet below.
Carlie tapped on her ear-mic to relay their plan to Boyd but the confines of the drainage prevented any transmission and only static gurgled in her earpiece. As she turned to check on the others, she saw Pavel limping. “You OK?”
“Yes, I injured my leg trying to escape from the building by the watchtower.”
“Whoa, wait a minute,” said Jared. “You been bit?”
“No, it’s just a bad bruise from falling down.”
Carlie moved towards Pavel. “Sit down for a minute so Amy can look at your wound.”
As Amy squatted down and pulled out a small flashlight, the rest of the group took up defensive positions on either side of the ravine. Pavel rolled up his khaki pant leg while Amy scanned his upper right calf. Shining the red light on his leg revealed a grapefruit-sized contusion. “Yeah, I can see why you’re limping. This is a nasty injury alright.”