I looked at Prit, who was as absorbed as I was in the officer’s explanations. If the reports were true, tons of drugs had been seized from the warehouses of Bayer, Pfizer, and other manufacturers nearby during the last chaotic days and must still be there. Those drugs were as important as fuel or weapons. Maybe more important. Our health care system was already shaky due to a lack of medical staff. Without those drugs, it would revert back to the eighteenth century. The situation in Tenerife’s hospitals was grim. They needed antibiotics, insulin, serums, opiates, painkillers, sedatives—the list went on and on. Supplies were running low and production wasn’t keeping up with demand. On top of that, some medicines were impossible to produce, due to the lack of materials and know-how. We had no choice. We had to go there.
The hospitals on the other islands were either infested with Undead or had already been looted by teams like ours. To make matters worse, casualties on those trips had been very high. So they’d decided to try for the jackpot—Madrid.
Before the communication systems failed, Spain and France had shared a spy satellite, Helios II. Its central control was in France, but there was a substation on the Peninsula.
After several attempts, the few surviving computer programmers finally created a replica of that substation in Tenerife. The Helios II’s cameras were now our eyes on southern Europe. The fact that they hadn’t had any problems taking control of the satellite convinced me that either France wasn’t interested or there was no one left at the helm.
Aerial images of Madrid showed that the city was intact for the most part, except for some neighborhoods that had burned to the ground. The warehouse seemed to still be standing, but who knew what we’d find when we got there?
In the half dark before the sun was completely up, we took off in an Airbus A-320 headed for the Peninsula. Nearly every seat had been removed, transforming that bird into a gigantic cargo ship. Our destination was Cuatro Vientos Airport, the former military airfield, about ten miles from the capital. Months before, someone had noticed via satellite that the fence around the airfield was intact; additionally, there seemed to be no movement on the site. After weeks of observation, they concluded that the facilities were empty and probably safe. That word probably bothered me the most.
The only way to access the complex was through the main building. The last radio communication, received as the Safe Haven was falling, reported that the airfield was locked up tight. If that report was reliable, the complex was safe and empty.
Our first objective was to secure the airport. To accomplish that, we were accompanied by a platoon that comprised a few surviving Spanish legionnaires, battle-hardened commandos who’d be armed to the teeth. Once the area was secured, they would station themselves around the perimeter and seal off the area. Then it would be our turn. That’s when things would get really rough.
21
TENERIFE
“Fuck!” Lucia grabbed the pan of milk off the stove so it wouldn’t boil over, spilling half the contents on the burner in her rush. The acrid smell of scorched milk instantly filled the room.
Tears welled up in her eyes. She felt like such a fool! She’d only looked away for a moment. She knew perfectly well how strictly milk was rationed—one liter per person every two weeks. But she got distracted and spilled almost half a liter. How could she have been so stupid? Where the hell was she going to get more?
She slumped into a chair and glanced around, discouraged. Since they’d come to the Canaries, everything had gone hopelessly wrong. First, they were quarantined on that damned ship for a month, stuck in a tiny cell, not knowing what was going to happen next. She’d wake up at night, breathing hard, covered in sweat, feeling the walls of the cell closing in on her. The only break in that routine was visits from doctors swaddled in their spectral hazmat suits. Out of the blue, they’d been released. Then, she was horrified to learn that a sadistic guard had beaten Sister Cecilia almost to death like those sadistic guards in Nazi concentration camps.
They’d filed a report against the guy the minute they set foot on land, but three weeks had passed and nothing had happened. The island’s bureaucracy was stretched so thin trying to settle the avalanche of refugees and minimally feed them, they didn’t have the staff or the time to investigate an alleged crime. And all they had to go on was what she’d seen before she passed out.
Since that day nearly a month ago, the nun had hovered between life and death in one of the island’s crowded hospitals, just one of the thousands of sick and wounded cared for by a handful of overworked doctors and nurses and a few exhausted volunteers with very few resources.
And that damned apartment! Before the Apocalypse, Lucia lived with her parents in a big three-story house. The apartment she lived in now was tiny and had practically no furniture. It reminded her of the Krakow ghetto she’d seen in Schindler’s List, where dozens of people were crammed into very little space. There weren’t any walls or guards in Tenerife, but it felt oppressive just the same.
They were lucky; they lived in a “good” sector. Since Prit was one of the few pilots on the island, he’d been classified as essential personnel, entitling the three of them to some advantages, such as better rations and a “luxury” apartment with fewer cockroaches. Lucia knew there were thousands of people living in overcrowded conditions that were much worse. Even the smallest village was crammed with refugees. Famine was a threat to everyone, regardless of housing or classification. Unless you had contacts in the black market—and something interesting to sell.
With her boyfriend and Prit around, Lucia felt safe and didn’t dwell on the terrible circumstances that weighed on her like a two-ton slab. She’d been carefree and blocked out everything she disliked. She’d focused instead on her brief, impromptu honeymoon with “Mr. Lawyer,” the nickname she’d given him because he rambled on about the injustices of the system and problems the government needed to address.
Lucia was deeply in love, as only a romantic seventeen-year-old girl can be. Some nights she’d lie in bed, trying not to wake him up, and watch him toss and turn, plagued by the monster-fueled nightmares. Lucia knew that she was the best medicine for him. Since they’d arrived, he’d slept better and even smiled a couple of times. Then suddenly, he and Prit had had to leave with almost no time to say good-bye.
They’d all known it was just a matter of time until authorities recruited the “guys from the helicopter” to head back to the Peninsula in search of God-knows-what essential supplies, but that didn’t make it easier to say good-bye.
And although she was on an island full of police and soldiers, with no Undead within hundreds of miles, Lucia was more terrified than ever. For the first time since this nightmare began, she was alone and had to rely on herself.
A knock on the door roused her from her thoughts. Dragging her feet, she went to the door and came face-to-face with Miss Rosario, the building manager. She was a small, dumpy, fifty-something woman with terrible varicose veins. She wore her steel gray hair in a tight bun on top of her head. Her dress was made of coarse brown fabric that made her look much slimmer than she actually was. Miss Rosario studied Lucia with her little owl eyes and tried to get a glimpse inside the room.
“Are you all right, dear? I thought I heard voices.”
“Don’t worry, Rosario,” said Lucia, pulling the door half-closed behind her. “Nothing’s wrong. I just spilled a little milk, that’s all.”
Miss Rosario had been given the title of “block leader” by the government and proudly wore her plastic badge. One of the first things Lucia discovered was that there were snitches everywhere. Last week, one of her neighbors, an agricultural engineer who worked on one of the farms at the northern end of the island, stopped her on the stairs. He told her that Miss Rosario was an official informer who was granted oversight of the buildings on that block by the authorities. Just like in East Germany, every building and every neighborhood had a “block leader.”
“That’s not the worst part,” the n
eighbor added, after looking cautiously over his shoulder. “Besides block leaders, there’re dozens, maybe hundreds of undercover informants. Even your boyfriend or roommate could be working for Information Services. It’s like the fucking Stasi in the GDR back in the old days.”
His bitter comments still echoed in Lucia’s head. She hadn’t paid much attention before. Everyone was almost obsessively paranoid. She thought his furtive comments were just the ravings of an old man who saw conspiracies everywhere. But now she knew her neighbor was right. Too bad she couldn’t tell him. Two days before, he’d been “transferred” to a different housing complex. That wasn’t out of the ordinary, but that transfer took place at four o’clock in the morning. And in an army truck instead of one pulled by a team of horses. He must’ve confided in the wrong neighbor.
“Don’t forget, young lady, no visitors are allowed on this block after four,” Miss Rosario’s jangling voice droned on. “If you have a guest, you’ll have to fill out a report.”
“See for yourself. There’s no one here,” grumbled Lucia and reluctantly opened the door wide to let the snoopy woman look inside. Just then, Lucullus materialized out of the dark hallway with speed that belied his size and slipped inside the apartment, brushing against Lucia’s legs, back from one of his mysterious walks.
Miss Rosario sniffed with a look of disgust that struck Lucia as really funny. The biddy’s face reminded her of a bulldog sniffing a particularly smelly turd on the sidewalk.
Lucia made a heroic effort to keep from laughing. She already had enough problems with that old hag and she didn’t want to add to the list. She was a newcomer and the only one in that housing complex who didn’t have a job in an “essential” sector. That made the manager especially suspicious of her, coupled with the fact that she was one of the few people in Tenerife who still had a pet that hadn’t been cooked up in a stew.
While her boyfriend and Prit had been in the flat, old lady Rosario had stayed away, but since they’d been called up, she’d mounted a ruthless siege. Because her apartment was especially coveted, Lucia suspected that Rosario was watching for the smallest slipup to justify evicting her. Or the old woman just had a wild hatred for a younger, prettier woman. In any case, she had to tread carefully.
“I swear there’s no problem,” repeated Lucia with a forced smile. “I have to leave right now. I have to go to hospital. My job, you know.”
“Yes, yes, of course, the hospital.” The old bat shook her head, and with a look of you’re not fooling me added, “It’s a good thing your husband got you that job at the hospital. That way you can take care of your mother and get out of the mandatory Agriculture Brigade. It’d be a real shame, dear, to ruin your delicate hands with a hoe.”
“She’s not my mother, she’s a nun,” Lucia said pointedly, as she grabbed her bag and slammed the door behind her. Rosario had planted herself like a tree in the hallway. To get past her, Lucia had to nudge the old battle-ax aside. The caretaker smelled of strong perfume and stale sweat. “And he’s not my husband; he’s my boyfriend. About my work…”
“Oh, stop your flimsy excuses.” Rosario shot her a poisonous look and changed her tone. “You may have fooled Information Services, but you can’t pull the wool over my eyes! You and your friends show up one day out of the blue, claiming you’re from the Peninsula! You get to live in a good sector, while people better than you have to break their backs in the fields! Ha! What a load of shit! I know you’re filthy Froilist spies! Hear me? Froilists, that’s what you are!”
As Lucia made her way down each flight of stairs, she could hear the manager shouting, “Froilist scum!” But the girl didn’t pay any attention. She’d heard it all before. She knew she hadn’t given the old bag any reason to write her up, but she knew she was under surveillance. And Rosario might not be the only spy. Lucia was convinced someone was following her. But she was no Froilist. As far as she knew, anyway.
22
MADRID
That smell… the smell of the burned flesh of dozens of bodies thrown on a pyre.
I thought it would be like grilled meat, but it was a denser, heavier smell, a little spicy. It was unsettling, as if your nose somehow knew it wasn’t a normal scent. Strange, after five minutes or so, I didn’t notice it anymore. But when I got on the plane and then came back out a few minutes later, the smell assaulted me again, suffocating me.
Sitting on the steps of the Airbus, I watched the legionnaires throw body after body into a pit at the edge of the runway. The first bodies were doused with gasoline to start the fire. After that, the bodies’ fat fed the fire, which flared up every time a new body landed on the flames.
I couldn’t believe we’d only been there for three hours. It felt like a century. The flight and the muffled drone of the plane’s engines had lulled me into a strange calm. Everyone seemed strangely elated. I finally realized why—we were thousands of feet above the ground, safe from the Undead. The entire crew had relaxed, knowing it was impossible for those damned things to reach us.
It was like the break in a horror movie when the actors sit around chatting on the porch in the daylight after surviving the horrors of the haunted house overnight. But that’s just a prelude to a night of even more horror. Was that what we were in for?
Our group was made up of a platoon of twenty legionnaires, two officers, three civilians, plus the pilot and copilot. The mission’s bombastic leader had called us the “infiltration team.” Judging by the forced joviality, you’d think we were on a routine flight over the equator, not flying into the heart of that hell.
The commanding officer was an amazing character. His name was Kurt Tank, but he told us to call him Hauptmann Tank or just Tank. Before the collapse he was in the German army. The Apocalypse caught him, like many of his countrymen, at his vacation home in the Canary Islands. When he realized he couldn’t return to his country because there was none to go back to, Tank enlisted in the army of survivors, along with many other foreign soldiers. Risky and dangerous, sure, but at least they were armed and could defend themselves.
You might assume that a German guy with such a militaristic name would have a commanding presence, but he was far from the archetypal Super Arian. Tank was skinny and pale, with green eyes that bored into you. His deliberate, low-key manner gave the impression that he was soft and meek. Nothing was further from the truth. When I shared a cigarette with the legionnaires on our team, I learned he’d led his men into unimaginable situations. On an “infiltration mission” he led two months earlier in Cadiz, he and two other guys were the only survivors. A real tough guy.
Landing at Cuatro Vientos Airport was a real experience. Built in the early twenties as an airbase, its runway was too short for large civilian planes like the Airbus A-320. But we weren’t bound by any regulations and didn’t have to follow a flight plan.
We could fly over the city at low altitude without getting a ton of complaints and approach very low at the slowest speed possible to improve our chances.
We circled about three thousand feet above the suburbs of an absolutely dead, desolate Madrid as we made our approach. Out the window I could see the huge bedroom communities that ringed the centuries-old capital. Normally those areas would be pretty dead during the day when most of the residents were at their jobs in the city, but the total lack of activity generated a feeling that was hard to explain. All our jokes and laughter stopped. A silence, dense and thick as oil, replaced it and a sticky fear settled in everyone’s heart.
I was amazed at how everyone faced that situation. The soldiers seemed to cope better, the way they’ve done for centuries, at least on the surface. Most of them painstakingly checked their gear. The four legionnaires in Team One napped in a corner, enjoying those last moments of calm. They’d deplane first to secure the perimeter and were taking the biggest risk. We all knew that if things got out of control and they couldn’t secure the runway and nearby building, the mission would have to be aborted and we’d have to take off in a hurr
y, leaving them stranded.
As for the others, those with military experience—like my buddy, Prit—kept busy to distract themselves from the anxiety I’m sure they were feeling. The phlegmatic Ukrainian popped his gum loudly. Using his razor-sharp knife, he carved a wooden figurine with more good intentions than skill. That was the same knife he’d used to kill an Undead in Vigo and save my life.
Next to him were two people I hadn’t recognized until I heard the woman’s nervous chatter and her brittle laugh: Marcelo and Pauli, from the team that had plucked us out of death’s jaws at Lanzarote Airport. Someone must’ve decided that, since we’d flown together then, we’d work well together on the infiltration team. I wondered if it was our fault they’d been picked for that God-awful mission.
The other civilian was David Broto, a quiet guy from Barcelona, in his twenties, stocky, with black hair. His faraway gaze didn’t hide his pain. I assumed he’d lost loved ones in those dark days, like everyone else, and hadn’t gotten over it.
Most of the survivors were like that. They seemed normal, healthy, and well adjusted until you looked into their dull eyes. They ate, breathed, talked, laughed, even joked, but they were just going through the motions. Their spirit was dead; they were completely destroyed, lost and broken, looking for a reason to live. They never got over losing their way of life, their family and personal history, and felt guilty for surviving. Nothing had any meaning now.
Post-traumatic stress some said, but that was bullshit. It was a much deeper pain that no one could define. I’d heard that despite such widespread emotional strain there hadn’t been a single case of suicide on the islands. Not one. Despite the horror, we survivors were endowed with a will to survive. Or instinct. Or maybe it was faith.
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