“Into the hospital,” Handon said. He felt Henno looking at him – and knew exactly what he was thinking: We go into that hospital, we ain’t coming out. He was probably right. There was a singularity descending – and this one had heavy cavalry, in the form of the plague-infected baboons, supporting the good old regular infantry, namely dead humans.
But at least they’d be alive – for a little while longer. Maybe they could clear a way out with air support, or sneak out, or wait for the dead to disperse… but of course Handon knew as well as the rest of them.
The dead almost never dispersed.
As the team dashed for the nearest entrance, and the first baboons came into visual range and started that blood-chilling screaming, Joe Shit the Somali Ragman followed after them. He was yelling at the operators: “Waxaad kale ma aadi karo in ay jiraan! Vampires in ay jiraan! Vampires!”
Pred looked over his shoulder. “Wait – did that dude say vampires?”
Ali, running alongside, shrugged. “He’s babbling. He’s incoherent. But, yeah, he said vampires.”
“Dude,” Pred said, looking at the emaciated little man. “You’re in the wrong horror movie! We got zombies in this one.” He obviously thought this was hilarious. As the operators blasted through the door into the pitch-black hospital, Pred held it open for the Somali. He couldn’t just leave him outside for the baboons.
He pulled the door closed seconds before hurtling bodies slammed into it, shrieking and barking. The others started pulling over nearby heavy crap to barricade it. And there they all were.
Trapped in the Hargeisa hospital – ground zero of ground zero.
And the only Somali they’d found was alive.
Plus a pain in the ass.
* * *
Handon didn’t need to find a window. He just had Juice flip his monocle around. It was obvious. They were already surrounded a quarter-mile thick on all sides. And with the animal dead leaping through and around and over the human Zulus and Romeos, it was perhaps the most inescapable singularity any of them had ever seen.
They could try to put in some air strikes – the F-35 had plenty of ordnance.
But with the MRAP gone, and the team exhausted already, there was virtually no chance of getting out of there on foot – even if they did get out of the hospital alive. But there was one thing Handon could do.
“Cadaver Two from One.”
When Fick answered, it was with a lot of engine and rotor racket in the background. That was good – at least he had followed Handon’s instructions, gotten on the helo, and was now winging it the hell out of there. “Go ahead.”
“What’s your location?”
“Five hundred feet up, thirty clicks north of you, and doing a hundred and fifty knots due north.”
“Copy that. Listen. When you feel you’re a safe distance out, I want you and your team to re-insert for the secondary target site.”
“What makes you think there’ll be local dead there, when there were none in Hargeisa?”
Handon sighed. “We won’t know until you get there.”
Also, this was all they had left. The designated secondary target site had always been a little town called Gebilay, formerly with 80,000 residents, and located 35km to the northwest. It would have gone down soon after Hargeisa. And it was where their mission plan had them heading to – if everything went to shit at the primary target site.
Which is pretty much exactly what’s happened, Handon thought.
“Anyway,” he said into his mic, “it will keep you a safe distance from the amusing multi-species singularity we’re building up here.”
“How bad is it?”
Now Handon let a long pause drag out on his end.
“You shouldn’t count on us getting out of here. Not on this one.”
* * *
Fick sighed and cast around the blacked-out helo cabin. Taking up most of the room in the middle was Graybeard, now off his folding stretcher and strapped into a more high-tech Skedco rescue litter. He also had an oxygen mask on, a variety of medical monitors strapped to him – and his second liter of typed blood mainlining into him via high-gauge needle. Most reassuringly of all, he was being worked on by Doc Walker herself – the Kennedy’s top-ranking flight surgeon and CO of the hospital.
When she’d heard Fick’s call come in, she insisted on jumping on the Seahawk and leading the medevac mission herself.
Fick now grabbed her by the upper arm and stuck his face into hers. “Listen, Doc! He wasn’t bit by human dead. It was monkeys.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Dead ones. But Doc Park said getting bit by infected animals probably wouldn’t infect a human. You got me?”
LCDR Walker looked skeptical. She also looked at the straps holding Graybeard to the litter, in addition to the ankle and wrist restraints she’d brought in her medical bag. “We’ll see,” she said, going back to work on her patient.
Fick nodded, looked up front toward the pilots, and willed the bird to go faster.
The helo, call sign Firehawk One, was the same aircraft and crew that had conducted non-stop ammo runs, as well as gun runs with its minigun and Hellfire missiles, during the Battle of the JFK. It had also ferried the nuclear engineers from the USS Washington over to the Kennedy just in time to get her reactors started and get them the hell out of the path of the storm of the dead.
Now, assigned a medevac mission, they had scrambled and gotten airborne in minutes, then flown to meet the Marines at slightly higher than their safe top speed. Between these guys and Walker, maybe Graybeard would have a chance. Nonetheless, he needed to get back to the hospital ASAFP. So Fick hesitated now. Then he remembered their mission – and that 50 million lives were riding on it.
He flipped down his NVGs, scanned the ground below to the left, which was the west, and then pulled on an ICS headset to give instructions to the pilots. “Hey, guys, I’m gonna need you to set down again and re-insert my team.”
Doc Walker gave him a mean look.
Fick kept talking. “That road north out of Hargeisa is just a couple of klicks to the west. You can touch and go and get back in the air in seconds. We’ll hump overland on our own to get where we’re going.”
The pilot paused before answering, but complied. “Wilco.”
The Seahawk banked sharply to the left and started descending. In less than a minute it was flaring in low over the dusty black road.
Fick kissed Graybeard on the forehead and then leapt out, Reyes and Brady right behind him, before the helo’s tires even touched the ground. They squatted and covered up their heads as the Seahawk’s 2,000hp twin-turboshaft engines wound all the way up and the rotors threatened to bury them all in dust and flying debris, and then roared off again into the pitch-black night. Soon the airframe itself was only a smudge on the black of the sky, lights blacked out, and quickly becoming nothing more than a fading echo of power and speed.
Fick scurried off the road into the bush, his two remaining Marines following him. And they all hunched down, facing outward, and stayed there for ten minutes – just tuning in to the night.
Brady and Reyes thought about what was waiting for them next.
Fick thought about what they had to do next – and how they were going to do it.
Vampires
Hargeisa Hospital
“I’m gonna have to kill this dude,” Predator muttered, as the crazed non-undead Somali continued to follow them through the bottom-of-the-ocean black corridors of the deserted and ransacked and gore-strewn hospital.
Handon had sent Ali up to the top level of the three-story building, to look for some way to the roof, or other suitable overwatch position. So she wasn’t there to translate the man’s torrent of Somali babble. Juice had a little Somali, but not a lot, and he had other shit to do right then. But as the man ranted, the word “vampire” kept cropping up. This was hardly the first batshit crazy survivor they’d encountered in their travels, so nobody was too perturbed.
“I’ll slot him,” Henno muttered. “Happily.”
“Yeah, sure,” Juice said. “The dark-skinned Africans can die in droves, and nobody cares. Or we could just tie him back up.”
Henno shook his NVG-adorned head in the green-and-black darkness. “I don’t give a shit if he’s got orange polka dots – or if he’s lily-white and second in line for the throne. I don’t care if he’s the Prince of Wales himself. What does it take to get this through your skulls? One person doesn’t matter – nor a hundred, nor a hundred thousand.”
Handon got it. They all pretty much got it now. But they also had a core of essential humanity that it was impossible to entirely tamp down.
And right now Handon just wanted the group to pipe down, so he didn’t say anything that might add fuel to the fire. What he wanted right this second was to find the cafeteria, which was their best chance of finding water. His own CamelBak was dry, and he was pretty sure the others’ were as well, after their long-running battles, the first part in the heat of the day. Also, it would probably be the biggest room in the hospital, where they could spread out, do a supplies manifest, make plans – and, if it came down to it, Alamo up.
“At least he’s actually Somali,” Pred said. “Can we just stick his head outside, get him infected, and then take him back? No one would have to know.”
“Yeah, and you can be the first to be inoculated with the resulting vaccine.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Handon finally said it.
The door they’d entered through by the quarantine tent was midway along the lengthwise axis of the building. The front entrance was off to their right and they’d already covered most of that area. So Handon took them left. He was soon rewarded with a sign pointing to the cafeteria. He didn’t know the Somali word, but recognized the universal coffee cup with crossed fork and knife pretty quickly.
They were moving fast again, those green IR illuminator beams panning over every surface and giving the scene the vague air of a spec-ops fire sale on a used car lot. Still in the lead, Handon startled and spun when he heard a crunching sound to his left – it was the dead outside bashing in a wire-reinforced glass door – the wire probably being the only reason the glass had survived this long. But it was also pretty clear that eventually these guys were going to bash their way through.
Trying to catalog options, Handon stuck his weapon into an open room on the right – it was some type of linen closet, with a shitload of piled-up, and somehow still starched, white bedsheets, towels, etc. He withdrew and kept moving, knowing the team would be right behind him.
Another room on the right, another quick look – this was a slightly bigger storeroom, with what looked like random crap and medical supplies. How med supplies had survived two years without being scavenged was another mystery. Or maybe it wasn’t. It said to Handon that the survivor last-stand they’d found earlier was from the original fall. This place had been wiped out – fast and completely.
And nobody living had been in there for two years.
* * *
Another ten meters of corridor bought them to double doors, also with the cafeteria sign on them. Before Handon could reach the doors to open them, Joe Shit the Somali Ragman beat him to it. Handon shook his head – this guy was still here?
Now the man used his body to block the entrance, standing between the team and it. How he could see to do so was anybody’s guess. But there was probably now a little moon- and star-light leaking in some of that wire-reinforced glass. Also about to leak through was the Arab Legion. From the fury of their pounding, they wanted in. Handon could also see globular shadows leaping by.
The simian dead were rampaging around and above the human dead.
It was a pure shit-show out there, and Handon wasn’t in the mood for any insane survivor theatrics in here. He reached out to haul the wiry little man out of his way – but then hesitated, something tickling at his brain. Local knowledge is king – an idea he’d recently been flogging.
And always listen to the man on the ground.
But before he could act on this, Henno stepped to the front, grabbed the little man and hurled him back down the hallway. And before Handon could protest, he yanked open the door on the right – which came off its hinges and fell to the floor.
Henno moved inside, rifle up.
Handon moved to support him – but was instantly assaulted by an absolutely crushing stench. Even in a dead world, this was something special – a rancid ammonia smell, billowing out at them in waves that threatened to knock them over. Swallowing his rising bile, and out of long habit moving to confront any threats and clear the room, Handon went left as Henno went right. Nothing was standing or moving, though the floor was inexplicably two or more feet higher inside, and rose and fell in lumps and swells.
Squinting in slowly growing comprehension, Handon pointed his rifle and IR illuminator at the high ceiling, following it with his NVG gaze.
And the ceiling was moving – every inch of it. It twitched and rippled, little triangular protrusions flicking in a thousand places.
And then, with no other warning or preamble, it fell on them.
The whole dark mass blasted down and toward them and out the double doors in a whirling, flapping, shrieking nightmare of leathery wings and sharp little flashing teeth and mottled fell fur and dead black eyes – all of it green and black and even more terrifying for it.
Handon ducked and covered his head and turned back to the team – who’d had a fraction of a second more to react and now were somehow defending themselves with melee weapons. Handon saw Pred swinging his bat wildly, which looked only a little more effective than trying to bash away a cloud of mosquitoes. Then he stopped swinging and grabbed at his neck, where one or maybe two of them had landed and latched on.
“Son of a BITCH!” he bellowed at a volume that tore through even the chaos swirling around them.
But as Handon watched, he felt a hot pain on his own neck – and his NVG vision started strobing as wings flapped at high speed in front of his face. He dropped his rifle on its sling and started tearing at the horrible leathery bodies that had landed on his neck and shoulder and were now piling up.
He was being swarmed. And enough of these things would bring him down.
Enough might bring them all down.
They had to get the hell out of there.
* * *
Ali heard none of this from her OP on the roof, three floors above. A small open-air pavilion topped the three-story building, and Ali was up on the very top of that.
It was way too far to hear the chaos on the first floor, and the others hadn’t troubled her with a radio report, so she was instead monitoring the growing singularity around the building. Where the hell this many dead had come from, and how they’d been missed in aerial surveillance, was anybody’s guess. But in a long career of scavenging dead zones, it was hardly the first time they’d had this problem. Half the time the dead came out of nowhere.
Ali was also trying to keep her profile down – not least because she was pretty sure baboons, even dead ones, could climb right up the outside of the building if they saw her up there. Other than that, she was just staring half-numb out over post-Apocalyptic Hargeisa, looking upon the ruins of her childhood.
Oh well, my childhood sucked anyway, she thought.
But that was really just a distraction. What she was really trying not to think about, albeit without a ton of success, was the chimera virus mentioned in that CIA report Juice had recovered. It had specifically cited that exact bioweapon – the stocks of which, as well as their rogue Kazakh designer and dealer, Ali had personally watched go up in great licks of purifying flame two and a half years ago.
Or so she had thought at the time.
But if it really turned out to be true that the Hargeisa virus was some kind of mutation of that chimera virus… and if the bioweapon she had been tasked with stopping hadn’t been stopped at all, but instead had gotten out, mutated, and then taken down the whole wo
rld… well, then Ali’s perfect service record, and her generally untroubled conscience, were about to become things of the past.
And she might have more to answer for than she could bear.
* * *
The last thing Handon saw, looking back toward the horrorscape of the cafeteria, was their Somali survivor, writhing on the ground and beating his arms against his face, with dozens of the swarming, flapping, remorselessly biting creatures carpeting his body, more of them piling up every second, and all relentlessly gorging on his flesh. And with no bite-proof assault suit, just about every part of his body was fair game. They seemed to be going for all of them at once.
He had been taken down – and was being eaten alive. And the answer to the mystery of his presence, strapped down to that gurney, would die with him.
More importantly, his death made the parameters of the engagement clear: more than a few of those things landed on you at the same time and you were done.
But instantly Handon faced forward again and got fighting – because he also knew the assault suits wouldn’t be enough to save them. Their hands, faces, and necks were all exposed to the biting aerial swarm. They’d all had to ditch their face shields when NVGs became necessary. The two didn’t work together. They’d never made them work together, because they almost never went out at night in the ZA – it made zombie-fighting harder, unlike terrorist-and-insurgent fighting.
Now they might be paying the price.
Alpha’s dust-up with the gigantic, thick swarm of bats quickly became a running, fighting, screaming, suffocating retreat back down the corridor, battling as they went. Pred was still swinging his baseball bat, and Henno his cricket bat – which with its wider and flatter edge worked a little better. Handon had got his sword out and was slicing the air in front of him, bifurcating tiny nightmare hairy flying bodies, which fell at his feet in black-gunk-spewing chunks. Juice and Homer were pretty much just running, their melee weapons of virtually no use.
Luckily it was a short running battle – only back to that storeroom Handon had found up the hall, on their left now. Everyone piled in, Handon yanked the door shut – and then they danced around like crazy people, killing the dozen or so that had flown in there with them before they got the room sealed.
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