by Sean Deville
He was surprised moments later when he had heard his name called. He didn’t know that having a potentially broken arm had moved him up the triage queue, past the sprained ankles, the lacerations and the blisters that most of those forced to march for their lives had presented with. The comfy Western lifestyle had made the majority unable to deal with the harsh realities of life after civilisation, and hundreds had died on the flight to Cornwall. Only the serious cases were bussed up to the small hospital, which would within days become the largest remaining medical facility in the country. As luck would have it for those on board, he hadn’t even touched anything in the bus’s interior that anyone else had touched, and had acquired a seat with no handrail to grab onto.
“Gavin Hemsworth!” Gavin looked over to where the voice had come from and saw the nurse who had spoken.
“That’s me,” he said, raising his one good arm. He quickly picked up his pack and wormed his way through the crowded room, spotting angry stares that he was getting seen before other worthier causes. He suspected that if it was not for the several machine gun-toting police officers in the room, the atmosphere would have been a lot more unpleasant, even violent. People had not yet realised that their sense of entitlement had actually died along with their country, and they mumbled under their combined breaths about how long it was all taking, how incompetent the medical staff were, and how they could obviously run things better if given the chance. Fortunately, the armed presence that controlled this small corner of England was very noticeable, and it negated the threat posed by tired, scared, and confused people who, only a day ago, were traumatised when they couldn’t get a decent signal on their phones. He reached the nurse, who smiled tiredly.
“Follow me please.” She turned and he fell in step behind her, through some double doors which he again didn’t touch, and deposited him in a small curtained cubicle. “The doctor will be with you shortly,” she said and then disappeared, closing the curtain behind her. Shortly turned out to be fifteen minutes, by which time Gavin was lying back on the bed with his eyes closed, the virus eager to infect whatever came near it. He was exhausted and was close to sleep, but he stirred as he heard someone enter.
“Hi, I’m Doctor Holden,” the doctor said. She carried an A4 folder, and extracted from it an X-ray of his arm. He had had it taken when he had first arrived. “So the bad news,” she said, sitting down next to his bed, “is you have a fracture. The good news it’s incomplete, which means all you need is a cast and time for it to heal.” She held up the X-ray for him to see and pointed at a particular spot. “If you look here, you can just see the break in the ulna bone, which is that one there. I assume you did this in a fall?” Gavin looked blankly at the X-ray, not seeing a damned thing.
“Yes,” he said, “a fall.” Gavin looked around the cubicle, then back at the doctor. “How long will I be in a cast?”
“Well, if any of us are still alive by then, six weeks.” She noticed the look of shock on his face and realised the inappropriateness of what she had just said. Time to take a break, she thought. “Sorry, shouldn’t have said that.”
“That’s okay, we’ve all been through a lot.” Gavin reached out his good hand and Holden shook it. For the first time all day, she touched a patient without wearing gloves.
Stan stood in the hospital waiting area, watching over the throng of damaged humanity. They were traumatised people, many of them close to their breaking point, and the waiting was making several of them potentially dangerous. So he stood there, the imposing presence that he was, making eye contact with those he suspected were the most likely to snap. He made them know by his facial expressions that he was not going to have any bullshit on his watch. And if that meant subtly pointing the barrel of his fully loaded machine gun at them occasionally, then so be it. They would behave on his watch, because he was too tired and too past caring to have to deal with anybody’s shit.
He caught the eye of one of his fellow officers, a man he didn’t know well, and pointed to one of the side doors. Making a drinking gesture with his right hand, he waited for the other officer to nod his consent, and he wormed his way around the side of the seated masses, entering the restricted part of the hospital. He was dehydrated and was absolutely gasping for a cup of tea. Ten steps and one more door, and he was in the hospital’s staff canteen, which was a small cramped affair in a room with no windows. Opening the door with a gloved hand, he found Holden in there, already pouring boiled water into a cup. The virus on the door handle had already withered.
“Make that two, eh, Doc?” Stan said.
“Hi, Stan,” she said, smiling as he entered. Holden picked up another cup from the counter she stood against and plucked a tea bag out of a box at the side of the kettle. A minute quantity of skin oil and sweat transferred to the surface of the tea bag, but the virus thriving within it quickly died when she picked up the kettle and poured hot, liquid death onto it. The pathogen was not able to exist in such extremes of temperature, but without the heat, it could survive several minutes outside the host body. Waiting, just waiting. Everything Holden had touched in this room was now contaminated, and she picked up the mug by its handle, passing it over to Stan, microscopic death waiting to spread and infect. Before he could grab it, she pulled it back. “Sorry, forgot the milk.” She put it back down on the counter and suddenly seemed to stagger slightly. Stan gave her the once over, a look of concern spread to his face.
“You alright, Doc? You look a bit peaky.”
“Just this damned headache. It’s been threatening all day, but it really hit about five minutes ago. Would you believe I’m in a hospital, and I can’t find any bloody Ibuprofen anywhere?” Most of the lower level painkiller stores had been shipped to the refugee access points. The hospital was left with the harder stuff, but opiate-based narcotics were hardly the right thing for a mere headache, especially as she had to able to function for at least another few hours yet.
“As it happens,” Stan said, reaching into one of the pouches on his utility belt, “I always carry some around with me.” With his gloved hand, he lifted them out and threw them over. “Here, catch.” They twirled through the air and she almost caught them. But just as her hands were about to make contact, her body shuddered and her arm spasmed. The small cardboard box landed on the floor and slid several inches, coming to a rest nearly under the room’s only refrigerator. Something in Stan caused him to take a step back.
“Oooh, that hurts,” Holden said clutching her side.
“Doc?”
“Stan, I’ll be alright, just give me a moment.” But she wasn’t alright. Holden suddenly doubled over inhaling deeply. Her head began to pound now, every second bringing a thunderous beat to her temples. She felt her guts churn, and a knife suddenly twisted in the small of her back. She cried out, barely staying on her feet. “Stan? Oh my God.”
“Shit,” Stan said. He resisted the temptation to grab hold of her, because he had seen this before. One of the very first things he had been shown in his indoctrination was a video showing the first signs of the infection, the signs that Doctor Simone Holden was now displaying. With a gasp, she finally collapsed on the floor. “No, not this,” she managed. As much as he hated himself, Stan fled the room and closed the door. It was the only thing he could think to do, self-preservation winning over him again.
“Code 99!” he shouted loudly. A nurse poked her head out of an office and looked at him. He didn’t see her, too intent was he on grabbing the radio on his shoulder. “Dispatch, this is security at the hospital. Code 99, I repeat Code 99. Possible infected individual in room 10C in the hospital.”
“Confirmed. Containment team has been dispatched,” came the response in his ear piece. He let go of the radio. “I need fucking help here,” he roared. Turning full circle, he saw nobody, so he picked up the whistle that had been handed to him at the end of the induction video. Dangling around a chord on his neck, he blew. If you see an infected, you blow to alert those around you. If you hear t
he whistle and you are armed, you run towards the sound. If you aren’t armed, you run in the opposite direction.
15.03PM, 17th September 2015, MI6 Building, London, UK
“Target locked. Weapons free.” Clarice Sterling brought the A10 in low, and as her thumb pressed down on the fire control, the GUA-8/A Avenger cannon began to unleash the thirty-millimetre calibre bullets into the crowd of infected. Nothing in the path of those bullets stood a chance, and within seconds, dozens of infected who were massing to cross the bridge were reduced to chewed-up flesh. Clarice, call sign Syndrome, banked up to go in for another pass.
“You are free to take out the bridge. I repeat, your primary target is now the bridge, over,” came the voice over her headphones.
“Roger that, over.” She pulled the plane up into the sky, bringing it round in a wide arc. She would lay one more pass into the fuckers and then her wingman could take out the bridge. She switched channels on her radio. “Bridge is all yours, Badger.”
“Thank you very much,” came the response. It was rumoured that Badger had a fetish for making things explode.
Rasheed watched the planes descend out of nowhere and witnessed the devastation they dropped onto the infected. The death of the infected didn’t concern him in the slightest. He felt nothing for them. What concerned him was the bridge, he needed that. As powerful as he was, he had no intention of swimming across the fucking Thames. And whilst there were other bridges he could cross, he had even less desire to take a detour to get to his ultimate destination because who was to say they wouldn’t be blown as well. He wanted across that river, and he was going to use this bridge to do it.
The vibration in the building stopped, and Rasheed staggered backwards almost in relief. The concentration and effort that he had needed to put into the destruction surprised him, and his head ached with an intensity that worried him. The vision in one eye was still blurred and his lower abdomen throbbed with a fire that suggested everything wasn’t as healed as it should be. But no matter, this was God’s work. Mere discomfort was irrelevant, the pain only proving that his fight was worthy. He had no illusion that he would be alive for much longer, and he could almost hear the bliss of the afterlife beckoning. Soon, he would join his brothers as the Prophet had promised, but first, he had work to do to earn that place.
But he needed the bridge, and so he turned his attention to the two specs in the sky. They were both turning now, coming back to attack again. He could tell instantly that they were too far away—even his power had limits—and he waited for the first plane to come into the range of his influence, feeling for it, testing his limitations. For a second, his entire vision blurred out, but then it quickly returned to the one good eye.
“There you are,” he said to himself, and he concentrated on one of the wings, his mind examining the shape and changing it, distorting it, crumpling it. He didn’t even realise he had brought his left hand up, his eyes now closed. He didn’t see the fist clench, barely even felt the nails digging into his palm. The first plane bucked in the air, then swung violently to the right. It was done, and he quickly turned his attention to the second plane.
Clarice watched in horror as the plane of her wingman spun out of control. From where she was, she could see that one of the wings had crumpled in as if a huge invisible hand had reached out and squashed it. The whole thing had happened in seconds.
“Badger, come in. Badger, do you read me, Goddamnit?” There was no response, and she watched in horror as the other plane went into a spiral. Then her own plane began to vibrate, the controls suddenly becoming unresponsive. The plane dropped sharply, and her stomach felt like it was in her mouth. Cockpit alarms started to blare at her, and she knew she had only one chance to live. Whatever had happened had caused her plane to become dead weight, the flight stick completely unresponsive, so she did the only thing left to her. She reached in between her legs and pulled the lever to activate the explosive ejection.
Everything happened in a whirlwind. Clarice almost lost consciousness as the ejection ripped her out of the cockpit and into the air. She felt herself forced down into her seat, felt the dread that comes with knowing that this might not work, that the chute might not activate and that she might end up hurtling to her death a thousand feet below. But as the chair stopped its upward momentum, the drogue chute did engage, and she began to rapidly descend, the fall stabilising. Then the main chute opened and the chair fell away from her, now no longer needed. Clarice found herself floating in the air above the river, and with the limited time she had, she knew there was only one destination to aim for. The MI6 Building, the roof of which was quickly hurtling towards her. She didn’t see her plane crash, but she heard it off in the distance. Shit, she loved that plane.
Croft had been thrown forwards off his feet by the force of the blast, and lay dazed face down as dust settled all around him. Fortunately, he had been far enough away to escape the brunt of the explosion, but it wasn’t something he wanted to experience again in his lifetime if he could avoid it. He’d had too much of that shit in the past.
His head groggy and swimming, he felt hands grab him and almost reluctantly pushed himself up off the ground. It would have been so easy to just lie there, to just give up, to let the darkness come. But he was not the kind of person to give up like that. His ears still ringing, he cast a glance behind him and saw that the rocket had brought the whole ceiling down and blocked off the corridor. There was no sign of Fabrice.
“You alright, Major?” Snow asked.
“I’ll live,” Croft said, picking debris out of his hair. “Check me over, will you?” Snow looked over Croft’s body, but was relieved to see he couldn’t see any bleeding or wounds. Snow gave him the thumbs up. He’d be sore tomorrow though…hell, he was sore now.
“Captain Savage is round the corner. We need to leave.” Croft nodded his agreement at Snow’s advice and limped after him. Snow clearly knew the layout and he struck Croft as being a competent field agent. The major therefore had no hesitation in following his lead.
“Since when did MI6 stock bloody rocket launchers?” Croft asked, following the man who had probably just saved his life.
“Probably since the things were bloody invented.”
“Fortunate for us, but not very James Bond though, is it?” Croft added.
Durand had heard the explosion, but was still surprised when he turned the corner and found the lights out and the way blocked. The air was filled with smoke that burnt his throat, and he retched briefly, retreating from the destructed corridor for a moment to consider his options. The ground around him still shook slightly, every ten seconds or so fresh tremors running through the building. A large crack appeared in the wall to his left.
“Shit.” He had only been here a day, and he still wasn’t fully in tune with the layout of the building. The place was like a maze, and his foe was nowhere to be seen.
He took a step forward, wondering if he could somehow climb over the mound in the middle of the corridor, just enough light filtering in from the undamaged corridors behind him. But then some of the rubble moved. Pieces fell down to the floor, followed by a metal support structure that had been balancing precariously. No climbing over that, it was too unstable, and he’d probably have to dig his way through. He was a scientist, not a damned labourer. Turning around, he made off in another direction, so he didn’t see the hand that suddenly emerged, didn’t see the pile swell as the force within it pushed outwards against the weight. Durand heard more concrete shift, but didn’t see the head of Fabrice emerge unscathed from beneath the debris.
But Fabrice saw him, if only briefly, and even though the light was far from ideal, the Warrior of God recognised the scientist instantly.
“You!” Fabrice seethed through clenched teeth. By the time he had pushed his way free, however, the good doctor had a good minute’s head start and was well out of sight. Fabrice considered going after the doctor so as to enact some sort of vengeance, but that could wait. He h
ad more important things to do now. The three were coming and he had to be ready for them.
15.06PM, 17th September, Newquay Hospital, Newquay, UK
Brian had been stationed at the other side of the hospital, and he heard the Code 99 broadcast go out over his earpiece. He hadn’t been expecting that, not here, not now. Then he heard the whistle, and he did what he had been instructed to do—he ran towards the sound. He navigated around the side of the small hospital and entered the A&E department through the main entrance. A frightened nurse saw him and pointed the way he needed to go. A minute later, he saw Stan and two other officers, weapons raised, outside a closed door. The door shook as something on the inside threw itself at it, the door having been locked by one of the other officers, the keys still in the door.
“Stan?” he said, coming up beside his mate. Stan didn’t look at him at first.
“Brian, you don’t need to be here. Let us handle this.”
“I’m here now, I…”
“No,” Stan said forcefully, giving him a look he had never seen before. “You can’t be here. Go before the containment team arrives.”
“Why?” Brian could sense the despair in his friend’s voice and ice travelled down his spine. “It’s not…” he couldn’t finish the words.
“It’s Simone. She’s infected. That’s why you can’t be here.” Stan flinched as the door was hit by another jolt, the wood cracking slightly. It would hold; it had to hold. He let go of his gun and grabbed his friend and began guiding him backwards. “Bri, seriously, get the fuck out of here.” Stan could see his friend wanting to argue, but then there was the sound of running feet. Everyone turned to see five guys armed to the teeth charging down the corridor towards their position. Stan recognised one of them as possibly the man he had watched get off the helicopter yesterday. He couldn’t tell for sure because they all wore black gas masks.