Juice picked one up off the floor and held it up where everyone could see it. Its body was only three or four inches long, and mostly covered in mottled fur. It had tall dog-like papery ears with holes torn in them, rodent-like teeth, and leathery wings with a single claw at the joint. Creepiest of all was a long slit running down the center of its face between the eyes.
“I’ve seen these before,” Juice said. “Nasty piece of work. I think it’s called the Hairy Slit-Faced Bat, believe it or not.”
“Why’d they call it that?” Pred asked, wide-eyed.
“Becau— oh.” Smart-ass.
“Yeah,” Pred said. “My real question is: are these ones dead?”
“Who gives a shit,” answered Henno. “They’re fucking bats, there are thousands of them, and they’re trying to eat us.”
Handon pulled out two chem-lights, broke and shook them, and put them on opposite ends of a nearby shelf, then flipped up his NVGs. The others did the same. Then he started trying to assess and dress the wound on his neck, but he couldn’t really see it or get to it. Pred pulled his hands away and said, “Lemme deal with that.”
“Who’s going to deal with yours?” Handon countered. He could now see blood dripping down the front of the big man’s plate carrier.
“I’ve got it,” Juice said, gently pulling Pred away from Handon, while Homer angled in and started on Handon’s wound.
And for the next minute they sat still and did combat medicine. And nobody said out loud what everyone was thinking – until Handon looked over and saw that Pred’s right hand was resting on the butt of his pistol in his chest rig.
“Oh, no,” Handon said, “just put that hand somewhere else, right now.”
Pred gave him a look – not reacting to Juice’s careful and astringent cleaning of his ugly wound.
Handon spoke intently. “Listen, that bite is not going to turn you. Any strain of the virus in another species is unlikely to be infectious to humans. Park told me this – in no uncertain terms.”
“Yeah, sure,” Pred said. “No doubt getting bit by a zombie bat is perfectly safe.”
Handon’s neck stung like hell from Homer’s work on it. But he was grateful. Zombie virus or no, those bite wounds were ragged and scary-looking, and already looked like going septic. Hargeisa was probably not the only virus or bacteria coating the foul surfaces of Hargeisa. Never mind in a bat cave with two feet of piled-up guano.
And on top of all that, now Handon had to worry about Pred checking himself out – terrified as he was of turning, and then turning on his teammates.
As Homer finished taping down the bandage, Handon dug out his serum pouch and got a syringe and two vials out. “Look,” he said. “I’m going to give us both the serum now. Even if, against the odds, we’re infected, this will keep us from turning.” Implicit in this, though Handon didn’t say it, was that it might keep them alive long enough to complete the mission.
Pred just grunted, sounding distinctly unconvinced.
Filling the syringe, Handon’s voice grew serious as he looked Pred in the eye. “Bottom line: you do not do a goddamned thing – at the very least until we see some symptoms. You got it?”
As Juice finished up on him, and Handon jabbed him in the ass, Pred just petulantly muttered, as if to himself: “Damned hairy slit-nosed bat took a chunk out of my neck. This some bullshit.”
Nobody there disagreed. Also, nobody had any good ideas for getting them the hell out of there. They were well and truly trapped.
With every possible clock still ticking.
Sinner
Jizan - Genomics Building
The NSF team, cowed by the raging inferno and menaced by the swarming dead, and finally driven back inside, now took cover behind lobby furniture and the front desk and got busy waiting – either for instructions on how to get the hell out of there, or for things to get a lot worse.
Sarah took up a position closest to the blown-out glass windows of the front wall, so she could cover it and silently dispatch any Zulus who took an interest or tried to wander in. But none did. They were too obsessed with the world-on-fire inferno of the plant out in front of them. For the living, there was only the blaze, the unnerving darkness surrounding it, the relentless march of the dead, and the black cocoon of the building around them – with its relative silence and peace inside. It was almost dreamy and soothing in there.
Surely it was an illusion. But it was real while it lasted.
Scanning tirelessly over her scope, but with nothing active to do just then, Sarah Cameron found herself getting into her own head. And not for the first time on this mission.
For some reason, the whole time she had been shooting those runners back in the power plant, singlehandedly defending the team, all she could think about was her behavior back on the Kennedy. Flirting with Henno as she’d done, her intimacy with Homer before that, when they had been alone on the road – and which Handon seemed to suspect had crossed over from intimacy to indiscretion…
Basically, she had risked everything – not just her relationship with Handon, which was precious enough, but also Handon’s ability to command his team, and thus complete his mission. It was unforgivable, really. But, suddenly, at least the causes of her inexplicable behavior were starting to become clear to her.
It wasn’t just the giddy freedom of having escaped that prison-like cabin in the woods, and escaped the life of thankless and dull labor keeping her husband and son alive. Sure, she had resented all the sacrifices she had made for them – and, later, resented having to feel guilty about their deaths. And, yes, she had also been intoxicated by being around all these super-capable, confident, self-reliant military men – and by the fact that she had a role among them, that she was accepted as something like an equal. And she’d become jealous of her newfound and unexpected freedom.
So she had done whatever the hell she wanted to do. Cutting loose. Flirting – and verging on sleeping around – and basically being reckless and irresponsible. Being cruel to the one who really loved her. And, mainly, being deeply selfish. In the self-regarding hall of mirrors of her ego, she thought she deserved it.
But it was deeper than that, and worse.
And she only realized it now: she had been turning into her father – her gambling, womanizing, reckless father. Maybe also turning into her crooked cop boyfriend, who had also put himself above everything and everyone else.
Just like those two, she had been irresponsible, and reckless, and gambled with the lives of those around her – and the lives of everyone on the planet. She had risked hurting not just Handon, but all of humanity. Maybe it was hard-wired deep within her, by her birth and upbringing. But none of that mattered.
As the distant but gigantic flames reflected on her face, making it into a smooth and emotionless porcelain mask, Sarah cursed herself for this now. She’d always known what was important. Hell, she’d sacrificed her own family for their mission. That was why she’d done it – right? But she now appeared to have forgotten – that it was the only thing that mattered. Now, she urgently needed to remember.
Moreover, she could see now that she had sinned.
She was already repentant. But the time might soon be coming when she would have to atone.
* * *
Wesley stood behind the front desk where he could keep an eye on his people, scattered as they were under cover throughout the lobby.
He had told them that Lovell and the staff of CIC were going to find a way out of there for them. And hopefully they would. But Wesley was still furiously racking his brain to think of something himself. He was very grateful to have the support back on the carrier. But ultimately all of this, including getting his team and mission objective safely out of there, was his responsibility.
It was all on him.
He desperately wanted to confer with the others, to try and talk it through, to hear some new ideas, or at least some reassurance. But he was terrified of admitting he didn’t have any answers for them
– of looking irresolute, weak, indecisive. So instead he tapped Burns on the shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “I’ve got to know. What did you do back in the world? Don’t say pizza delivery.”
Burns grinned, his black neck tattoo glistening in the reflected firelight. “Oh, sure – you figure we’re all about to die, so everyone will come clean, huh?” He evidently thought this was funny, though Wesley was mortified – too English again. But then Burns said, “Fair enough, I guess. Here it is. We were bank robbers.”
“What? You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“What, all of you – your whole group of survivors?”
“Nah. Just five of us, the core group. The rest we picked up along the way.”
“Damn,” Wesley said, shaking his head. “I brought a bank-robbing crew on board a U.S. Navy warship.” He was thinking if that got out he might lose his lieutenant’s bars almost as soon as he’d got them.
Burns nodded. “Well, how’s it worked out so far – for you and for the ship?”
“Pretty good,” Wesley had to admit.
“Mutant from CIC,” came Lovell’s voice in his ear.
Wesley’s face lit up. “This is Mutant One. What have you got for us?”
“Nothing yet, Wesley. We’re still working on it. Hold tight for now. I’m just checking in, since we can’t see you from the drone. Everyone still okay there?”
“Affirmative.”
“Okay. You guys hang tight.”
As he signed off, Wesley’s expression darkened again. Because now the full force of their situation hit him all over again: this was his fault, for leading them to this place, for causing whatever had set off that explosion in the plant, or at least for not preventing it. He figured it must have been Sarah doing all that shooting in and around those fuel vats – how stupid was he to have allowed that? But it had seemed necessary at the time. In any case, he had caused this and now he had to fix it – himself.
And if he didn’t… not only would he be a failure as a leader of these people who had trusted him. But if they didn’t come back with that DNA sequencer, he might actually, personally be responsible for the downfall of humankind.
Which was a hell of a situation to be in.
For a security guard from Peckham.
* * *
Someone shouted from the rear of the lobby. “Guys!” he yelped – it turned out to be Browning – and then, “Sarahhh…!”
When Wesley and Burns skittered into the dark back corner of the room, they heard what Browning did: the sounds of dead coming from the interior of the building. In seconds, they had stumbled into the hallway that ended at the lobby.
“Don’t shoot!” Wesley hissed at Browning. They still couldn’t afford the noise. Live gunfire would bring the dead in through the open building front. Attacked from both sides, they’d be dead in minutes.
Now, they didn’t so much see Sarah arrive as sense the long suppressor at the end of her barrel poke between them and start chugging. In a few seconds and fifteen fast shots, the dead in the hallway were all dead again. But there were more coming in behind them.
“Come on!” Wesley said, deciding in a flash. They had to push them back and have some buffer room – the hallway itself. He led the charge down the hall and got the door at the end of it closed. Jesus, why the hell did we not think to close every door behind us? he thought. Note to self: close ALL doors in future.
“Get some of the lobby furniture down here!” he yelled.
Jenson and Burns complied, dashing away, then coming back with a leather couch. They stood it up and wedged it in behind the door, then retreated back to the lobby and did another barricade in front of that door, using most of the rest of the furniture in the lobby. Though Wesley had no military education, he was intuitively providing for defense in depth. The theory was that attackers usually broke through any given line of defense – so it had better not be your only one.
By the time they were done, Sarah was back in her position guarding the blown-out front glass walls of the lobby. The dead were still streaming by outside, showing only their backs. They seemed not to have heard the commotion. The dead in the interior could still be heard banging on the barricade, but it was faint.
“Where the hell did they come from?” Browning asked.
Burns shrugged. “Most of the outer walls of this building are glass. They probably just broke through on the opposite side. More direct to go through the building than around it. ” He shrugged again.
Wesley considered that Burns was a cool customer in a crisis, which was a damned useful trait to have in a situation like this. Bank robbing clearly had its advantages.
Jenson wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?”
Browning sniffed the air. “Ah, hell – it’s gas, I think.”
“Oh, God,” Jenson said. “There’s a natural gas leak… We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”
“I don’t know,” Burns said. “With those front windows gone, we’re pretty well-ventilated. I don’t think we’ll asphyxiate.”
“Yeah,” Jenson said, “but that doesn’t mean we won’t explode.”
Wesley knew he had a point. If there was really a gas leak, with a gigantic fire burning close enough to them that embers could easily float over, then they were going to have to go – go out into that. Otherwise, they could all be blown up at any second.
“What do we do, LT?” Jenson said, looking younger by the minute – like he was a Boy Scout in some merit badge exercise gone horribly wrong.
Wesley racked his brain. They could go try to find the source of the gas leak and get it sealed up – but that would mean taking down the barricades they had just put up, then fighting through however many dead were back there now. They could go try to find another building to hole up in. But that would mean going outside. And if they attracted the Jizan zombie marathon running by, they’d just bury themselves in a singularity in the new building.
Every second Wesley didn’t speak, didn’t issue orders, didn’t take command, seemed like an age. And every silent tick of the clock made a mockery of those lieutenant’s bars on his collars. Everyone was looking at him, even Judy.
The clock kept on ticking.
And Wesley had absolutely no idea what to do.
Decision
Jizan - Genomics Building
Finally, something tickled at the back of Wesley’s brain. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Why would the Saudis have natural gas? They’re floating on a sea of crude oil.”
The others had no answer to this. But Sarah had heard him. Now she backed into the lobby, still facing and pointing her weapon out. And she sniffed at the air. “Wesley’s right,” she said. “It’s not natural gas. I think it’s actually hydrogen sulfide – Park uses it in his lab. Smells a lot like natural gas, but it’s not.”
“Thank God,” Jenson said.
“The bad news is it’s equally explosive and flammable. Maybe more so.”
Jenson looked like he was going to cry.
“But the good news is it’s probably just a canister in one of the labs that caught a stray round, or got knocked over by a zombie, which means there’s only so much of it. See, it’s getting fainter already.”
Wesley looked around and saw the others were still looking to him for answers. The gas threat might have subsided. But the dead were still banging on the barricade and it wouldn’t keep them out forever. Moreover, they were sure to draw more eventually. And as soon as they all started shooting, they’d be done for.
Basically, their minutes in that sanctuary were numbered.
Wesley turned and looked out at the undiminished inferno burning between them and any kind of escape or safety. They were totally trapped: between the dead within and the dead without, in a gas-filled glass house with the world’s biggest bonfire burning close enough that they could feel the heat on their faces. They could go bumbling around out in the dark, around the fire and through the streaming throngs of dead, trying to make
it to the waterfront. But, with no night vision, no silencers, and particularly trying to move with the DNA sequencer, they’d be slow, blind, noisy, helpless prey.
They couldn’t stay and they couldn’t go.
And Wesley had absolutely no idea how to get them out of there.
He pressed his teeth together and tried to stop his eyes from tearing up. This was simply too much pressure. He was totally unqualified for this. What the hell was he even doing here? Sure, Alpha or the Marines would find a way out of this. But he wasn’t them, not by a long shot. Even someone like Lieutenant Campbell would have been an infinitely superior choice for leading this mission – with her effortless air of command, her big side arm, the I-don’t-give-a-fuck manner in which she always spoke.
But not Wesley. Not him.
He had nothing left in the tank. He’d taken them as far as he could go. He wanted to crawl under something and hide. Withdraw. Resign. Lie down and die.
But if he lay down… he knew he surely would die. They all would.
And then… and then an image flashed before his mind’s eye. It was that broad English field in Kent, with the big helicopters landing and taking off, and the paratroopers retreating slowly across it, all of this playing on the television in the galley of the JFK, a news broadcast they had managed to pick up from the UK, shortly after the battle. And those refugees Wesley had seen, streaming through the field and boarding that helicopter.
And the one who turned her face to the camera for just a second – showing herself as Amarie. Wesley couldn’t believe it. But he had been sure of it. It was her.
And all he could think now was: I’ve got to make this mission succeed, somehow – FOR HER. Sure, he knew there were fifty million people back in Britain all depending on them. But millions of faces were just too abstract – and a burden that size too crushing even to think about.
But this was personal. This was real. Amarie was totally real to him. Somehow, against all odds, she had stayed alive this long.
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