A bullet entry wound on his scalp, just under his helmet.
He was gone. Kate gasped, but swallowed it back down.
Now the truck roared off again, their acceleration swinging shut the door Kate had left open. As they bounced around the uneven road she scanned the cabin.
That was it. This was everyone.
She turned forward and shouted at Baxter. “Turn it around! We’re going back!”
Not slowing in the least, Baxter shouted over his own shoulder. “Are you out of your mind?”
She yanked free her M9 and stuck into the base of his skull. “We’re not leaving Todd. You don’t want to come, you can exit the goddamned vehicle.”
Baxter eased off the gas, just to keep from being shot in the head. And he said, very carefully, “He’s here Kate. He’s in the very back.”
Kate spun and dove half over the partition. Todd was lying in the small truck bed, curled up. He looked like he was sleeping. He looked beautiful, and peaceful. She checked his pulse and breathing.
Then she crawled back there with him, got his vest off, rolled him on his back, did two emergency breaths – and started the first set of thirty strong chest compressions.
Glancing up and out the back window, she just caught a last sight of the Stronghold receding behind them. Her final image was of al-Shabaab guys fighting to seal the hole in their wall – as waves of dead converged on it from all directions.
It was going to be a singularity – a bad one.
Kate wished them all the worst with it.
Vengeance
The Last Gun Truck - Heading north-east Through Sanaag
Rolling and bumping, the hissing of tires.
The sun slowly going down, and the cool breeze twisting in through the shot-out windows.
Plus the world around him swimming and weaving.
Jake cracked his crusted eyes and the first thing he saw was a clear IV bag tucked in by his side, as well as the tube snaking into his arm. From the warmth and weightlessness of his body, and the dull pain and throbbing of his leg, he figured someone had put some morphine in with the plasma drip.
Struggling to raise his head, he looked down the length of his body and saw someone had unrolled the tape from around his calf – which was probably a good thing, as it was now swollen to the size of a prize watermelon. When he looked back up and between the seats into the front compartment, he saw the backs of Baxter driving and Zack riding shotgun.
Only when he laid his head back again did he realize it was lying in Kate’s lap. Despite the morphine, his heart twisted as if squeezed by a strong hand.
“You’re alive… how?”
She looked down and stroked his hair. “I’ll tell you later. Take it easy for now.”
“Bren?”
She shook her head no.
“Todd?”
Kate had done her full thirty minutes of chess compressions, as she had silently sworn she would, before giving up. “They’re both in back,” she said.
Jake swallowed. His mouth was paper-dry. “What about Kwon?”
This was harder. Kate also swallowed before speaking. “We pulled over near where Baxter thought you dropped him off this morning. And I tried to find his OP. But the herd was coming in. We had to go.”
Jake’s face fell even further. He couldn’t believe they had left him behind.
“There’s something else,” Kate said. “When Baxter and I were outside the walls, by the tunnel entrance, I saw al-Sîf. And he had Kwon’s rifle. That SSR.”
Jake’s mouth opened in confusion and sorrow.
But I killed al-Sîf, he thought.
Then he remembered that he hadn’t. He’d merely thrown him twenty feet down into a giant herd of the dead. It would be just like that son of a bitch to survive.
Jake closed his eyes. So damned stupid…
He also didn’t say something like, Just because al-Sîf had Kwon’s rifle, that didn’t mean he was dead. Because that’s almost certainly what it meant. Kwon wouldn’t have it taken from him in any other circumstance.
A pair of hot tears leaked from the corners of Jake’s eyes, for the second time today – and for the second time in probably thirty years.
“I did this,” he croaked. My ego, he thought, my need for vengeance.
It had been his refusal to compromise, to act or think more objectively, more strategically. His failure of leadership. Ultimately, this was all his fault.
He choked back the beginning of a sob.
All because I had to kill al-Sîf and Godane. And because I thought I knew more than everyone else. Thought I was good enough to do the impossible.
It was his failure to master his ego had brought them all low.
Kate looked down at him, her eyes shining with kindness. “No, Jake. The bad guys did this. You were doing your job.”
He shook his head weakly. “No. It was me who brought everyone here. To this place of madness and death.”
“They were following Brendan, too. Because he wanted to do something to help save humanity. Everyone did. Each of them knew exactly why they were there. And they’d do it all again, exactly the same.”
A pair of fresh teardrops rolled down the sides of Jake’s face. “Yeah. And look where that got us.”
Kate grabbed him by the sides of his head and leaned down to look right in his eyes. “None of your guys ever gave up. They died fighting for each other. So are you going to quit now? Just because some people got hurt? Or because you’re probably going to lose your other leg? I didn’t realize you were such a pussy.”
Jake blinked once. It looked like there was the ghost of a smile buried down there somewhere. But it couldn’t find its way to the surface.
“We’ll be home soon,” Kate said, more gently now. “And there’s one good thing. With that singularity closing in, even if he survives, Godane isn’t going to be launching any attacks anytime soon. Not on us, not on anyone.”
Jake let his head loll on his neck, and his eyelids drop.
And he let sleep and merciful oblivion take him.
* * *
“Son of a BITCH!”
Jake came awake again as the truck careened off the road in darkness and crashed down into a culvert, then ramped back up and out the other side. The six-ton gun truck went airborne, then slammed down again, skidding over loose dirt and uneven ground. Bouncing crazily, Jake fought his way up into a sitting position – just in time to see an absolutely hellacious explosion devastate the road up ahead of them. It was blinding, and gigantic, and it went in less than fifty feet ahead of them.
Superheated air and debris shot in the open windows, stinging their skin, and shrapnel and rocks pelted the outside of the truck, as Baxter battled to regain control. They were still driving off the road and at a forty-five degree angle to it, in darkness illuminated by the gigantic flames at the impact point.
And then a loud buzzing roared in above them and from behind, then zoomed directly overhead, also barely fifty feet off the ground. As it passed by, following the line of the road, its underside and distinctive shape were illuminated by the flames.
It was the Predator.
“What the fuck?” Zack yelped from the passenger seat.
“I fucking knew it!” Baxter shouted back. “The GCS – it survived!”
This was like The Honeymooners. But they had other problems – big ones.
Kate was already thrusting her head and torso into the front compartment. She clapped Baxter on the shoulder. “Great reflexes—”
“Yeah, I’d know the sound of that engine anywhere—”
“But now you’re gonna have to do it again – because there’s another Hellfire on its rails. And they’re gonna come around again and finish us.”
Baxter shook his head as he wrestled the wheel and pedals and got them angling back toward the road, intersecting out past where the first missile hit. “No they’re not.” He pointed up ahead.
Kate looked around and quickly recognized wher
e they were from the steep and forested hillsides. They were no more than a couple of miles from Camp Price.
Which was exactly where the receding noise of the Predator was heading.
They saw the second explosion less than a minute later. It was bigger than the first – and was followed by a whole series of blistering secondaries.
It was all of their cached ammo, explosives, and ordnance cooking off.
It was the second Hellfire – destroying everything they had.
By the time the survivors in their ravaged gun truck reached the nearby garage, the flames over Camp Price rose a hundred feet in the sky.
* * *
“There will still be things we can salvage,” Jake said, steeling himself to unass the vehicle – and to try to stand and walk.
“Not tonight there won’t,” Kate said, even as she was pulling herself up through the roof turret and hefting Brendan’s suppressed rifle. She brought it to her shoulder and took four shots, which put down two runners that had heard the truck pull up and angled toward them.
The forest was filling with dead – all running toward Camp Price.
The edge of the herd had reached the mountain. And those giant explosions were like catnip to them. Even if the survivors had wanted to go back, it would have meant certain infection or death.
When Kate climbed back down again, Baxter was already backing them out and turning the truck around. Pulling his NVGs down and bumping back down the forest path he said, “I actually have no idea where we’re going.”
Zack looked back at Kate. He didn’t either.
Safetying the rifle and propping it at her feet, Kate said, “Head for the top of Mount Shimbiris. We’re going to the summit.”
“Can we even get up there?” Baxter asked.
“With the truck? I doubt it. We’ll have to do the last stretch on foot. But I’m pretty sure the dead won’t either. It’s too steep, and the sheer side faces west, toward the incoming herd. We’ll climb up the back. They’ll go around to either side.”
Zack was still turned around in the passenger seat, eyes wide. “Yeah, but we’ll soon be dead ourselves – of hunger, thirst, and exposure.”
Jake looked at Kate with half-lidded eyes. “He’s got a point,” he said. “We won’t last a week without supplies and shelter.”
It was obvious to Kate that Jake was still wracked with guilt, grief, and sorrow – and, reflecting the enormity of their losses, perhaps also indulging that unforgivable sin: despair. But she knew he would soon snap out of it.
Because he was made that way.
She squeezed his arm and smiled.
“One problem at a time, Sarge. One problem at a time…”
EPILOGUE
“Into the riven village falls the rain;
Days pass; the ashes cool; he builds again”
– Edna St. Vincent Millay,
- “Epitaph for the Race of Man”
Epilogue
Camp Davis - Near the Summit of Mt. Shimbiris
[Six Months Later]
Jake flipped a page of Brendan’s book, Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. It wasn’t precisely the kind of thing he would have chosen to read back in the world. He was more of a Tom Clancy and Stephen King guy.
But the pickings were often slim in the post-Apocalypse.
He looked out the half-open flap of his tent. The late autumn sunlight on the mountain was pretty and peaceful. They were up above it all now – above everything, all the death and destruction and despair. It was almost as if they had finally escaped this fallen world. Now Jake saw a flash of Kate walking by, doing a circuit and checking on the fortifications.
They were no longer surrounded by a ten-foot wood-post stockade – merely a five-foot tangle of concertina wire, which was anchored at intervals by wooden poles driven into the ground. There was no longer a weight/fitness room. Now it was all body-weight exercises, calisthenics, and mountain runs. That suited Jake well enough. He liked to billy-goat around up there. He hadn’t lost his good leg in the end, but instead made a more or less full recovery. He had a bit of a limp when he walked. But not when he ran.
And his five-mile time was almost back down to where it used to be.
Their new outpost had a few of the other comforts of Camp Price. There was one bag shower, as well as a slit-trench latrine. This one emptied into a nearby stream, a bit downstream of where they drew their water from it.
“That’s not very good wilderness stewardship,” Baxter had said, as they started digging the run-off channel.
“The entire world is infected with a super-virus and overrun by walking corpses,” Kate said, jamming her spade into the packed earth with a Hanwag boot. “Who exactly is going to suffer from a fouled mountain stream?”
Jake laughed now to remember this.
He steepled the book in his lap – and remembered how surprised he had been when he dug it out of the embers of Camp Price, singed but intact. They’d finally gone back a few weeks later, after the dead had passed through and the fires burned out. And they’d actually been able to salvage a great deal in the end – all of the long-life stores in their underground cellars, plus a lot of weapons, tools, and supplies, especially those stored in Tuff-Boxes, which turned out to be aptly named. Most were scorched but intact.
It was enough to make a new start.
They’d also managed to trade in the world’s most bullet-riddled gun truck for a V8 Toyota Land Cruiser with a Level III armor package, previously used by some private security contractors, so they could do scavenging runs on a small scale. They even had a small portable generator, which sat wrapped in four layers of sound insulation, and modest fuel supplies to run it. They didn’t have power most of the day. But they could charge their devices when they needed to.
And the herd had finally cleared out of their part of Somalia – but not out of Godane’s. The survivors of Triple Nickel had mounted a couple of long-range recon patrols to get eyes on the Stronghold. And they had found the singularity there still going strong – cresting and falling over time, but always heaving up against the tall walls. And evidently al-Shabaab was still going strong inside, too, or at least surviving. They had not only rebuilt their damaged walls and cleared the dead out from inside.
They had kept themselves alive all this time.
Zack and Baxter had reported that Godane kept what might be as much as a year’s worth of supplies on hand. And now that his manpower was down to less than half what it used to be, that might last a long time.
Occasionally, Jake still felt that rage – against Godane, and al-Sîf, and about everything that happened – felt it rising and burning in his chest. Part of him still wanted to go back there and finish it. Extract some payback. Make things right. Show that it was the righteous who wielded the greatest might.
Part of him still felt those things – and probably always would.
But he also knew it was exactly that part of him that had cost them so dearly.
And SF guys were learning creatures.
What Jake had learned was this: only the humble man gets to rule.
* * *
As Kate finished her circuit of the wire and came back to the improvised gate, she noticed the little hand-carved CAMP DAVIS sign had fallen down on one side. She went and found a hammer, wrapped it in cloth, and made the repair.
As she did so, she found herself for the thousandth time missing Todd. There were probably a thousand reasons to miss him. But the one that came up most often was this: because nobody else, nobody left alive, was nearly as good at this construction and engineering shit as he was.
But, as always, they just had to learn as they went along.
And Kate knew they’d do as Todd had always done.
They’d make it work.
* * *
Zack hoed his garden patch, sweating lightly in the cool mountain air.
The garden was located a few minutes from camp, between the forest and the bare rock crown of the mountain, in a patch of
dark earth they had turned and seeded. It was now getting to be harvest time and they would soon see if anything they planted came up.
Right now Zack was weeding. Everything grew like crazy in equatorial Africa. Especially, it seemed, the stuff you didn’t want to.
Zack reflected that he himself had sprung from this soil.
Maybe he had even grown a little along the way, after all those years of believing he would never get out of Africa alive. Maybe he was right. Maybe not.
Maybe it didn’t matter.
He paused his labors and leaned on his hoe, the sunlight shadows of the waving trees dappling his face, and he reflected. There was a lot of time for that lately – due to him having survived his eighteen-month sentence in Godane’s underground prison. And, even more remarkably, surviving their return to the Stronghold and the hellish battle that ensued.
From where he stood, Zack could just see the two grave markers where they had buried Brendan and Todd. They lay underneath a pretty stand of boxwood trees.
Zack shook his head. The fact that he had lived, while four of the six members of Triple Nickel had fallen… well, it was a hell of a thing. And it really made him think. And what he thought was this:
Maybe I’m the only one Africa CAN’T kill.
The evidence seemed to be on his side.
* * *
Rifle held at low ready, Baxter moved fast and silent through the ground cover and thick foliage just inside the treeline. He was staying under cover while circling around the bare rock summit of Mount Shimbiris – moving from the seaward side around to the inland side. Back to Camp Davis.
He always moved quietly. But today he was also moving quickly.
He had been out on one of his one-man patrols, which he had been mounting regularly, and with growing skill and efficiency. They no longer had any UAVs, of any size, range, or service ceiling. Their reconnaissance consisted of what they could see with their own eyes.
On the upside, they happened to hold the highest ground in Somalia.
Mount Shimbiris towered over the north part of the northernmost region of the country. And situated as it was in the middle of Somalia’s long northern coast, it looked out over virtually the entire Gulf of Aden.
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