Now he looked up at the Emir and wondered when he was next going to do something completely unhinged. He still wore that same long scraggly beard – Somalis were not known for impressively thick facial hair – and the black turban, framing wild eyes and a cruel mouth. His black robes disappeared beneath his desk. He was younger than it seemed like he ought to be, which somehow contributed to his air of menace – like he was a very mean kid who’d just been put in charge in Lord of the Flies.
Almost directly behind his desk was a second exit from the chamber. Not only had Baxter never been back there, he had no idea what it led to. Maybe Godane’s quarters, where he slept, or pulled the legs off insects, or whatever he did for fun in his spare time – watched infidel porn on his laptop, naughty Russian teen secretaries, probably…
It didn’t matter. What did matter right now was that Baxter had to find something to say to keep Godane from going out and either converting or killing the new survivors he had just found. It also had to be something that wouldn’t get him and Zack killed.
But he was drawing a blank.
As usual, Godane sat behind his big wooden desk on a slightly raised platform at the back of the big subterranean room. Also as usual, there were no chairs, so anyone summoned here had to stand.
It was also gloomy as shit. The Stronghold did have a crappy old generator, and decent supplies of fuel for it. But it didn’t produce enough juice for them to light most areas. And Godane tended to hoard power for the Ground Control Station (GCS) for the Predator, which was his “precious” and which he prized above all things. It was also what he believed to be one great source of his power.
That… and what he had locked up in the basement.
He also tended to use the power to run his own devices, particularly his laptop – which he now swiveled around on the desk so Baxter could see the screen.
“And not just any survivors you’ve found, kaffir. Americans. Soldiers… and if my eyes tell me truly, inshallah, these ones are al’Shyatyn Allyl.”
Baxter tried not to react again. He knew this Arabic phrase had been used by many jihadis to refer to the special operations units that were decimating them back in the counter-terror wars. It had gained currency when the Americans and the Brits put the band back together with Task Force Black – including elements from Delta, Seal Team Six, and SAS – to hunt ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
Which they almost always did in the dark.
Shyatyn Allyl – it meant: Night Devils.
On the laptop screen, Baxter could see the overhead footage from the drone playing in a window, showing the isolated military encampment below. He guessed Godane had watched it a dozen times already. Baxter sighed quietly.
He had agonized about whether to tell Godane what he had seen – had stumbled upon by chance, on the long flight back from his drone mission out to track the progress of the new herd. He decided he’d damn well better keep it to himself – pretty much the instant he worked out who the guys in that camp were. His mistake had been reviewing the video several times himself, while the drone winged its way home.
And, just as happened later in the shed, he’d realized al-Sîf was looking over his shoulder, stealthy as hell as usual, watching the footage right along with him. So the jig was up. At that point, for Baxter to try to conceal what he’d found would probably come at the cost of his own neck on the chopping block.
Sorry, guys, he silently pled to the men on the ground. It’s you or me.
And as soon as Godane found out, he’d had Baxter refuel the Predator and put it back up – to do another more careful overflight of the encampment in the mountain forest. And to see this himself, Godane didn’t even have to go to the trouble of climbing up to the south-east guard tower, where Baxter kept the GCS and flew the Predator from – and which it amused him to privately think of as the air traffic control tower.
No, Godane simply had the video piped to his laptop over the wireless network.
Godane said, “I will find out what Zack knows about these men. Who they are, what they are capable of. The things that they have.”
Baxter kept his response measured. “I don’t think Zack will know anything about them. And his health—”
Godane blew up anyway, sweeping a bunch of crap onto the floor, though carefully sweeping around the laptop.
“The man is useless! For why do I keep him, feed him, protect him? Why?”
Baxter drew a breath. “Zack helps us find the things we need when we go out scavenging, especially at the American and UN facilities. He has the access, the passwo—”
“You can do those things! And all the American systems have been down for months. His access is worthless now. His knowledge, too. And you fly the drone.”
It occurred to Baxter that living at the sufferance of a megalomaniacal asshat was a rather poor kind of life. He tried desperately to think of something placating to say, something that would conduce to keeping Zack alive…
Godane stood. “You will walk with me.”
Having no choice, Baxter followed the Emir through the cramped and dark tunnels, passing moldy columns of timber that held up the ceiling at the junctures. These were strung at intervals with dim and flickering lights. It was, in every way, like living down in the mines – except with no gold or even coal to be brought up. Only their own flickering lives, sheltered down there from the storm of death that had blown across the earth.
They soon reached the nearest ladder and climbed up two levels, then up two more, finally emerging at the top of one of the north guard towers, where Baxter never had occasion to go. As he stepped out into the darkness, he could see almost nothing. But it was quiet and still, and what he could hear were some kind of faint and vaguely horrible sounds coming from the front. It sounded like snuffling, or quiet moaning, or maybe even sobbing…
And as he peered into the darkness and his eyes adjusted, a shape finally resolved. It was a person, a small one, upright, with his arms spread out to either side. Baxter drew in a sharp intake of breath, and turned around to face the giant courtyard of the Stronghold that spread out below them. And he realized with horror that, when the sun rose in the morning, this figure up here would be visible to the entire encampment.
As a message, he would be totally unmistakable.
Baxter turned back around slowly. Neither he nor Godane spoke.
The figure resolved into more detail as Baxter’s eyes adjusted. It was Abo. Though covered in blood, he was obviously still alive.
And he’d been nailed to a cross-beam of the guard tower.
He had been crucified.
* * *
Jesus fucking Christ… Baxter tried to keep his head as he descended the ladders back down into the bowels of this ill-starred place.
He hadn’t even told Zack yet about the soldiers he’d found in the forests around Mount Shimbiris. He simply hadn’t a chance to get away, to climb down to the little room they shared. Maybe he should have found a way. Maybe Zack would have told him to handle this differently.
But he’d played it the best way he knew how.
What he hadn’t done, back up in that guard tower cum execution chamber, was ask Godane why he’d done this… this thing he’d done. Why Abo had ended up like that. He didn’t ask for a couple of reasons. For one, his throat had been stoppered with fear – and Godane hadn’t volunteered anything, while Baxter stood there shaking and unable to speak. Like the best villains, Godane let his work speak for itself. He finally just exited the guard tower without a word, leaving Baxter standing there soaked in horror.
And for another, Baxter pretty much knew the answer anyway. It had to be because of what Abo had done for Zack before the fall – and on behalf of Zack and Baxter’s employer. Baxter just didn’t like to think about it. Because if Godane had outed Abo, and then offed him… it meant the two of them were probably next.
Baxter had to talk to Zack.
And he had to talk to him now.
Down in a Hole
; The Stronghold - Zack and Baxter’s Room
Darkness.
Or so close to darkness as made no difference.
That’s what Zack Altringham sat in now. That’s what had engulfed him. He lay unmoving on the prickly abomination that passed for a bed. On the roughly hewn table beside him lay a paperback copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. But he wasn’t even making the pretense of holding it, or steepling it on his lap.
There wasn’t enough light to read by anyway.
He sniffed and held the back of his hand to his forehead. He’d been nursing some mild but tenacious respiratory tract infection. The slight fever told him there was an invader in his system, a pathogen, a bug. The raised body temperature was one of his immune system’s tricks for fighting it off. Basically, it was making the environment inhospitable to the invading force, as the pathogen sought to multiply, to feed, to take over….
At least it wasn’t Hargeisa. At least it wasn’t the zombie virus.
The mild illness was also Zack’s excuse for not getting out of bed today.
But it wasn’t the reason.
Zack let his mind range back and pick over the remains of the hope he used to feel. He had once made a powerful lunge at hope, during their escape from the imploding gravity well of the town of Hargeisa, when the shit had come down. For years prior to that, Zack had been haunted with the certainty that he would die in Africa. He’d been born there, briefly escaped to college in the U.S. – and then been stupid enough to take a job with the CIA, who instantly sent him right back again. And there he had toiled, tour after tour, mission after deployment, year after decade, convinced the universe was telling him something:
That he would never get out of Africa alive.
But then, oddly, when it started to look like no one was going to get out of Africa alive… that’s when Zack had found his hope. As he and Baxter fled overland, he made himself a silent pledge: that he was going to get out of there, somehow, some day, whatever it took.
Simply, he hated East Africa too much to die there. He wasn’t going to let it win.
But that was a long time ago now.
Zack’s eyes scanned the dirt walls that were the extent of his existence now, and the rough-hewn and crooked timber supports in the corners and overhead, and he snorted, nearly amused. What amused him was that, over the eighteen months after his pledge, it had become clear that there was nowhere to get out of Africa to. There was no place else.
This was it.
And, even if there were anyplace else, he couldn’t leave the Stronghold, for a number of reasons, each compelling on its own. One, Godane would kill him if he tried. Two, even if he escaped, the dead would devour him. And, three, even if he dodged the dead, he would simply perish in the wilderness.
His situation was about as hopeless as hopeless could be.
And his future prospects: nil.
* * *
For months, a year even, Zack had nursed hope. Kept his spirits up.
Virtually every day he thought about Maximum Bob and Dugan, and what those two unflappable and super-skilled operators had sacrificed for him and Baxter. They had given them the gift of survival, at the cost of both their lives, a gift of which he had to try to be worthy. Zack thought constantly of what he owed to their example, and how he could live up to it.
At first he focused on survival – making sure he and Baxter integrated into the daily life of al-Shabaab in the isolated fortress. Making sure they contributed – and were too valuable to get kicked out, beheaded, or just fed to the dead.
But time had passed. And survival became a chore. And resolve had faded.
For a while, Zack nursed hope for the outside world – that the rest of the world might have somehow held off the Apocalypse. Later, he thought maybe some of the countries farthest away, and most isolated, might have survived – America maybe, or Australia. New Zealand. Something.
Finally, his hopes were reduced to imagining there might at least be other pockets of survivors. Out there, somewhere.
Zack had begged, wheedled, cajoled, to try and get access to the long-range radio he knew Godane had. But of course just about the last thing that paranoid, batshit-crazy, jihadist son of a bitch was going to do was hand over a transmitting radio to the likes of a senior CIA analyst. Zack didn’t know who Godane thought he was going to call. But the Emir certainly wasn’t taking any chances.
And, as usual, the religious fundamentalists displayed a stunning lack of curiosity about the outside world. Zack and Baxter had learned enough to know the big picture – that the whole world had fallen. And they had talked to enough other al-Shabaab guys, ones less monumentally cracked than Godane, to learn the broad outlines.
The outside world was gone.
All there was now was the Stronghold. Zack knew they would never be allowed to leave. And it was unlikely in the extreme, certainly in his lifetime, that there would be anyplace else to go. It had started to look like a very mean and worthless survival he had arranged for the two of them.
And it all piled up over time. The boredom, the tedium, the endless darkness and confinement and claustrophobia. The foreignness, the human sounds – and the smells. Al-Shabaab guys hadn’t been huge on regular showers even when they had running water. Now it was a whole new level of stench. And the oppressive weight of an entire dead world, pressing in against their walls.
There was nowhere to go, and nothing to do – just wait for the end. In fairness, everyone had always had to do that – wait for the end. Long before the Apocalypse, Camus said the only important question in life was whether to kill yourself. He’d concluded no. But, then again, he’d never had to live with the dead. And he’d had Paris cafe culture and the occasional attentions of Simone de Beauvoir to distract him. For Zack, with virtually no pleasurable distractions, and with absolutely nothing to look forward to…
Well, hope had finally drained away.
* * *
The door opened quietly and Baxter stepped in.
“How you feeling, man?”
Zack dredged up a smile as Baxter sat down facing him on the opposite bed. He belatedly realized Zack had his grenade, and was tossing it from hand to hand. Not a great sign. He snatched it out of mid-air.
“My grenade, dude.” And it was. Baxter had boldly five-fingered it out of a crate left lying open in the courtyard, a few months earlier. He’d been saving it for… some special occasion, maybe. He didn’t know. He liked having something explosive. Some kind of power. Now he snatched it from Zack mid-toss and slipped it back under his own mattress.
And then, in an efficient briefing, he reported the new developments: the American soldiers living out in the bush. Godane’s awareness of same. And the horrifying fate of Abo.
Zack took all this in silently, then sat and pondered, working to get his head around all this – and to work out the ramifications. After months of deep torpor, suddenly he was having to think clearly, and perhaps act decisively. It was very possible their lives depended on it.
“There’s something else, Zack.” Baxter looked across at him, his expression pained. “I’m not sure how to put this. Godane is… not a big fan of you right now. He said he doesn’t know why he’s keeping you around. Obviously, I’m talking you up at every opportunity…” Baxter trailed off.
Zack blinked once, heavily. “I’m going to have to give him something.”
“Yeah, probably.” Baxter exhaled. “How much do you think he knows about Abo? About you and Abo?”
Zack sat up. “I don’t know, but it’s critical we find out. I’ll talk to him.”
Baxter nodded. “Okay. I gotta go. I’m on garden duty.”
Zack shook his head. “Why is that dumbass using you for manual labor?”
“Because he’s a dumbass.” This caused them both to smile.
Baxter rose and left. Zack watched him go, and tried to face the prospect of getting himself cleaned up, dressed, and out the door.
And then facing Godane.
&n
bsp; * * *
But first he sat there for another minute, thinking. And only as he started to emerge from his torpor did he realize for the first time what it had really been about. Yeah, there was the hopelessness. But one could live without hope. All kinds of people did.
No, what it really was about was: survivor guilt.
Zack had failed to catch it – the plague. He had known al-Shabaab was buying bioweapons from the Kazakh bioscientist. He knew about the chimera virus they had bought, and he knew what they were planning to do with it. He’d even stopped their planned attack – and he thought he’d destroyed the stockpiles of the pathogen, in licks of purifying flame, along with the lab around it.
But he hadn’t. He hadn’t caught it all.
Because al-Shabaab had already infected a test animal – a single baboon, kept out at a remote site, and watched over by a single guard. But rabid dogs killed the baboon, and then mauled the guard, after the virus had mutated somehow. And that guard had gone off on a flesh-eating rampage in the nearest village.
And the rest was history – or, rather, the end of it.
Zack shook his head. It was unbelievable that, even in this instant, the original victim of the virus was locked up only a few dozen yards away, in one of the underground cells. After long months of not being able to understand why, Zack had finally had one of the al-Shabaab guys explain it to him: the dead guy, this original carrier of the virus, was a kind of talisman to Godane – the imagined source of his power.
Not only did Godane think his God had taken down the whole world, while sparing him and his minions, he also thought he actually couldn’t be killed. And couldn’t be infected. And that his little empire there could never fall. Not as long as he held onto the first undead man – the first of seven billion.
Zack didn’t understand how Godane had gotten that idea into his head. But there was a lot of weird shit in there, and Zack had no better idea how most of it had originated.
Now, at night sometimes, he imagined he could hear Godane’s talisman, this first victim, thrashing around in his subterranean cell. Of course, that was impossible – there was too much dirt between them. Maybe it was in his dreams, or just his half-waking fancy, his fever-driven imagination getting the better of him. Maybe it was the uneasiness of soul, his guilty conscience – haunted by the part he had played in the genesis of the outbreak, and the downfall of man.
Arisen : Nemesis Page 14