by Sean Deville
“I’ll give you a fucking can opener,” he said out loud as he picked himself up. The can he salvaged and instead of pouring, began to throw it over the APC and the infected climbing upon it. When it was two-thirds empty, he dumped the rest on the road, and watched as it flowed beneath the belly of the mechanical beast. That should be enough to get the party started.
He retrieved the propane tanks and brought them round to the frenzy. Any second he expected the top of the APC to open up, for a soldier to come out firing, but it didn’t happen. Such an action would be almost suicidal. Ducking down, he squeezed himself between the legs of two infected and wedged the first tank under the APC. It wasn’t a tight fit, and it rolled about a bit. The second one he opened the valve just ever so slightly, and put that under too, the hiss of the gas just audible over the rummaging of the attackers who sounded almost ecstatic. It was almost like those news clips that showed the first few seconds of the American shoppers on Black Friday.
All this had taken him less than a minute. There still wasn’t any reaction from the other APCs, and he took the book of matches out of his pocket and looked at it thoughtfully. There was a trail of petrol to the APC from where he had fallen on the road. That was his ignition point.
“We can’t help them,” Croft said. Through the small periscope window that allowed the driver to see, Snow witnessed an infected crouched on the hood of his APC. It was punching the glass in front of him, smearing everything red. Snow put his foot down and lurched the vehicle forward, toppling the infected into the road. A second later, the tracks of the vehicle crushed the creature beyond any chance of resurrection. His vision was obscured, but not catastrophically.
“Clever bastard,” Snow said. “We can’t stay here long.” Croft nodded and picked up the radio mike.
“I don’t see there’s anything we can do.”
“I know,” said Hudson on the other end of the radio. He’d lost so many men, seen so many die, and yet with so few of them left, the six men in the rear APC were a loss he couldn’t account for. Even if they had decided to go back and help, the screams from the fourth APC ended all chances of that. Hudson ordered his APC to start moving forward.
Gavin had no comprehension of what would happen. He expected a huge explosion, but that didn’t occur, at least not initially. As the petrol he had poured caught fire, it engulfed the APC and the infected around it. The flames licked under the vehicle, igniting the stream of gas from one of the tanks. Gavin backed up, not knowing what safe a distance he needed to be at. To his left, the other APCs were moving away now. If only he’d hit the first one, this would all be over. They were ahead of him now, and even on his mountain bike, he wouldn’t be able to keep up. Because soon the urban areas would give way to fields, ideal environment for an armoured personnel carrier. Tragic for a mountain bike.
There was a sudden bout of flame that shot out from under the APC as the safety valve on one of the propane tanks kicked in, turning it into a glorified flame thrower. The tank began to spin as the force of the expulsion acted on it, and the flames erupted every which way. The valve on the second tank caught moments later, and Gavin watched in awe as the flames mesmerised him by their violence, the bodies of the infected quickly consumed by the flames.
Safety valves do not stop propane tanks exploding. The liquid inside absorbed the heat, and the expansion caused the valves to activate. As the liquid evaporated, the metal of the tanks themselves began to buckle. The first propane tank exploded five seconds before the first, actually lifting the APC off the ground a fraction, the burning infected around it being hurled backwards with the blast. The heat washed over Gavin, and he felt a searing pain across his cheek as a piece of metal came within inches of taking his eyes. The rage from the explosion singed his eyebrows.
The APC was engulfed in flames now, and the heat inside it must have been becoming intolerable, and that was made even more so when the second canister exploded. One of the tracks of the APC was blown off, and just as Gavin’s mind was noticing that, he felt something smash him in the leg causing him to fall down on a patch of grass, the limb just buckling under him. Reaching down with his good arm, he felt the hot jagged shard sticking out of him. God it hurt.
Gavin tried to pull himself up to see the damage, but fresh pain shot through him. He brought his hand up and saw that it was coated with blood. Lady luck was not with him today after all. A piece of shrapnel had embedded itself in his right inner thigh, severing the femoral artery there. He didn’t know that, of course. So long as the shrapnel was there, it slowed the escape of blood, but Gavin didn’t want that in him. He wanted it out, and he grabbed it with his hand, ignoring the cuts that developed on his palm and fingers. With a scream that would have woken the dead if they weren’t already wandering around, he yanked the metal from his leg, a fountain of blood shooting up into the air. He actually saw it pulse upwards, and he realised the fatal error he had just made.
“Oh shit,” Gavin said.
11.25AM GMT, 21st September 2015, Brussels, Belgium
Her army grew. From the nuclear ashes of Caen, thousands of her infected killed by the blast and the heat had risen up from the radioactive debris. They came to her now as best they could, many missing limbs, all missing the life of humanity. And they were not the only ones. As each of the infected Owen commanded had fallen to the forces of the Overmind, they had been born again, leaving the field to gather with her.
She could sense the strength of the Overmind now, its reach spreading to places Rachel’s former human self had never even known existed. Across the globe, beasts with colourless eyes attacked the living spreading the imposter, the pretender. Strong and intelligent it may be, but it could not account for its seminal weakness. The London virus was stronger, more virulent, more potent, and easily overpowered those infected with the new contagion.
There was another weakness that she had discovered to her delight. Delight? Perhaps that was the wrong word. Such a basic human emotion was as yet still beyond her, but she felt something just the same, and she revelled in it. Whilst she had no power over the fallen of the Overmind, the dead that had returned from its ranks, neither did the Overmind. They were free spirits, able to wander the land as their reptilian instincts dictated. As big and as powerful as the Overmind was becoming, his cause was ultimately lost. Even if it took a decade, every one of the Overmind’s followers would be lost to either her or to death. How sweet that was, to know victory before you had even really started.
11.27AM, 21st September 2015, East of Newquay
Six men. They had left six men back there, all radio contact with them now gone. Croft sat next to Snow, despair welling within him again. He forced it back down; this wasn’t the time for self-pity. He was a soldier, for Christ’s sake, this is what he was trained for. Death and madness was the nature of battle; he either had to accept that or get the fuck out.
He didn’t know when it happened, but at some point, he had assumed command. Croft would have expected Hudson to lead them, but although it wasn’t explicitly stated, Croft had been elevated to that position. It wasn’t the rank; that meant nothing now. It was character and experience. As a former officer in the Special Boat Service, as a veteran of wars he would never recount, he was it. It was an “honour” he could have done without quite frankly. Leaders appeared when they were most needed, and in such circumstances, it was rare that they actually wanted the job. That was what he had always been told by people who seemed to know what they were talking about, many of them having been in that very position themselves. The APC began to slow, their speed at the rear of the diminished convoy determined by the two vehicles in front.
“Trouble ahead, guys,” Croft heard over the radio.
Hudson in the lead APC couldn’t see what was going on, but Fairgood was giving him a rundown of everything he was seeing. Ahead, the road crossed a railway line, the barriers up because there wouldn’t be any trains travelling past this way ever again. He hadn’t seen any infected
ahead of them for several minutes, but just as he approached the crossing, a large white van rolled into the road ahead, colliding with the warning light on the other side of the track, blocking the road. To the right of the APC was a line of tall trees, to the left a detached house.
“Full stop,” Hudson said. “Let me see.” Fairgood moved over to let Hudson have a go at the driver’s periscope. He couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t fucking see anything.
“Vine, can you see anything behind us?” Hudson said into the radio.
“Negative,” came the response.
“We need to move,” Badger said from the rear. Hudson looked behind him and nodded.
“Take the railroad tracks. We’ll see where that takes us.”
The lead APC started to move, only for there to be an almighty thump on its roof, the vehicle rocking with the impact. Something had obviously dropped down upon them. Infected began to appear into the road ahead, and it was clear to Hudson that it was they who had pushed the van into their path. By human standards, they weren’t very smart…but they were certainly smart enough and they were winning.
Croft had told Hudson about the large muscular infected that had been able to punch holes in the side of Alexei’s yacht, and even though the source was reliable, there was a part of him that couldn’t believe what Croft had told him. All doubts were about to be extinguished on that regard. Above, they heard footsteps on the metal, then heard a horrible grating, tearing sound. It came from the upper hatch.
He had once been known as Brute. That’s what people called him, more out of a sense of irony than anything else. Because although he had looked like something that had once raided the English countryside with his other fellow berserker Vikings, his bulk hid a gentleness that did not match his external persona. Six foot four and built like a brick shit house, he was a behemoth of a man. Much of it was natural genetics, but seven years ago when he had taken up weightlifting to increase his already substantial frame, he had succumbed to the temptation of chemical enhancement. Juicing had become his life.
Ironically, because he had been big to start with, nobody even believed he was a juicer. But his own self-worth became part and parcel of how big he was. Despite not being capable of even saying a bad word about most people, the weightlifting became an obsession that had started to affect his health. The roid rage never visited him, but his liver and kidneys all began to suffer the abuse he was venturing onto his body. He got so big, it even prevented him from surfing. He had loved surfing, but he loved his new obsession more.
So when the Army came, he had been in the hospital with severe kidney stones. He’d never known pain like it, even worse than when he had torn a ligament doing squats a few years back. It had been the general sound of shock from those around him on the ward he was staying on that had woken him up from his drug-induced slumber. Sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed, a monumental task considering how he was feeling, he had tried to ask those around him what was happening. But although he was as meek as a kitten, a general side effect of his size was the way people were intimidated by him. It was only when one of the nurses came, who knew him for who he was, that he learnt that the unthinkable had happened. There would be no treatment for his kidney stones that day, or any.
The next day, the military had arrived and had nearly chucked him out of the hospital.
“Don’t be so fucking ridiculous; he’s a sick man.” That had been the same nurse, who had insisted he stay in his bed, rather than being sent to build their damned wall. The same nurse he had watched be ripped apart in one of the hospital corridors several days later, just before a child of four pounced on his back and bit deeply into his shoulder.
Now, one of the infected, he truly was a Brute. With the agility of a primate, he had climbed the stronger of the trees lining the road, and waited for the APCs to approach. As the lead vehicle arrived, it slowed to a stop allowing him to safely jump upon it. He was bigger now if that was even possible, his muscles bulging with veins carrying poisonous blood. His neck, now thicker than his head by several inches, strained as Brute looked around at the metal. He was naked, the clothes he had been wearing restrictive and ripped by his expansion. Despite his now forgotten illness, the virus had latched onto the cells of his steroid-enhanced muscles, and had begun the growth anew.
Brute looked at the hatch, the only weak point on the vehicle as far as he could tell. He did what the collective told him, any semblance of his humanity long since gone, his brain more feral than most, another side effect of the steroids. He gripped the rim of the hatch, placing the other hand on the top of the APC, and he pulled. At first, nothing happened, and there was the very real danger that the joints in his fingers would give way before the metal, but that was a meaningless reality to him. All that mattered was getting into the metal box, the metal box that his food was trying to escape in. Slowly, and agonisingly, the hatch began to give way.
Badger saw the light in the ceiling as the hatch opened a fraction. The sound was awful, and he shouted for them to speed up and break to try and shake off whatever was on top of them. Fairgood would have done that, but he didn’t have much road to play with. If he could get onto the railroad, he might be able to shake their unwanted passenger off. The APC began to move, the ripping noise got louder and then, light flooded into the APC as the reinforced steel hatch was torn from its hinges.
11.29 AM GMT, 21st September 2015, Mount Weather, Virginia, USA
Davina walked along with a level of seduction that would have probably shocked even her. The inside of the Mount Weather complex was huge, the part she was in now almost resembling a city street. The almost was down to the fact that above her was carved rock, and there were no shops here. There were small libraries, coffee houses, and restaurants, all to try and give some semblance of the life people had once lived. In times of crisis, people needed normality, something from their old lives to cling onto. Davina, walking along the sidewalk, male and female heads turning as she passed, and made her way to where she knew the one piece of leverage she could acquire in this place would be found.
Inside her mind, a part of her screamed for her to stop. This was not the road to self-preservation; this was the road to ruin and obliteration. There was only one way something like this could end. But that part of her was locked away now, the Overmind completely in control. No more manipulation, no more nudging and prodding, this was outright domination. It decided where she went, how she looked. It had forced her to kill the guard she had lured into her room with the promise of sex. That had probably been the greatest violation of them all, the guard being black, something she would never have allowed.
It was not that she was racist so much. But in her memories of the abuse inflicted upon her by her father and the gangs, there was one face that stood out, a man so cruel, that the evil sneer would always be with her. Sometimes, when she really needed to break a subject, she would imagine the man suffering under her torturous fingers was the man who demanded she call him Honey. The man who had scarred her, who inflicted such torture that even her father had been forced to leave the room for fear of vomiting. Honey had been the man who had ultimately created the woman she was, and to this day, she couldn’t look at someone of African heritage without feeling the urge to kill. She would never have let a man like that inside her. And yet today, she had stripped for such a man, had rode him, all against her will. And yet part of her had enjoyed the experience, had enjoyed the power. Killing the man by strangling him between her things had been bittersweet.
The Overmind didn’t care about any of that. It cared about the coffee house it was making her walk to, the gun packed safely in her designer purse, the gun she had pilfered off the corpse that had been left in her room. It ignored her voice, found it nothing but an irritation. It had found itself facing a threat it couldn’t defeat, and knew there was only one way for it to win against the new foe, and even then, its logical mind calculated the odds were stacked against it. Even as it
grew its numbers from the human population that fell before its virulence, those numbers would all eventually be stolen from it. And with each mind lost, it would lose a part of its identity. It had to protect itself. It had to maintain what it was.
The humans still didn’t know about the Overmind. All they knew was the virus was running rampant through their cities and their populations. No matter how many bullets they used or bombs they dropped, they could not admit that their plight was hopeless. Even within such refuges as Mount Weather, the tentacles of control reached out, guiding people to do things they wouldn’t naturally have done. For everyone except Davina, that control was limited, fleeting, and sometimes even temporary. But it had been enough to put the idea into the mind of the target.
“I need to have a look around this place if I’m going to be staying here,” the First Lady had said to her security detail. Being in a secure facility, only two of her secret service detail had gone with her. Why would they need anything more, in a place where everyone was vetted to a greater degree than the White House? So Mrs. Rodney had ventured out of the presidential apartments, and had begun her tour, guided by a female sergeant who was honoured to be asked to show such a distinguished resident the home the First Lady was going to be living in for the foreseeable future.
So the Overmind knew where Mrs. Rodney was going to be, knew the layout of the facility due to the minds it had infiltrated, knew where Davina had to be for the plan to be effective. Stepping off the sidewalk, Davina crossed the road, the only traffic a slow moving electric cart carrying three soldiers. Behind her, an assortment of bookstores, a bar, and a bowling alley, places for people to meet, to form a sense of community, to beat the feeling of desperation and loneliness that could form when one is forced to live underground. Ahead of her, the First Lady could be seen with her small entourage. Davina strode up to them, a smile painted on her beautiful face. That was the one part of her body Honey hadn’t worked on, not wanting to cut into her eventual resale value. Honey was dead now, dead at Davina’s hands. The man had not had an easy death.