by Glynn James
Mayes nodded, accepting this answer, though he’d have much preferred to hear something more reassuring. Evidently, that chunk of electronics was absolutely critical to the final efforts of the American scientist to develop a vaccine, and if it wasn’t in working condition, they were pretty well screwed.
Then again, just few hours ago, he’d thought they were screwed anyway.
Learning that the only known such drug-discovery device was in the middle of a fallen city, hundreds of miles inside Europe, and crawling with millions of dead, had made the mission improbable enough. It certainly wasn’t like they had a second aircraft carrier to park nearby.
But the men Mayes had sent – chosen from among the best he could muster, and that could be spared at the time – had pulled it off. Not without losses, and evidently a near disaster when the building started falling down around their ears. But none of that mattered now. They were sent to do a job and had succeeded, and that was all that counted.
Mayes turned back to the digital map display of the battlefield that was southern England, and peered at the three blips closest to the Zulu Proof Wall (ZPW) built around the M25, the London ring road. These three dust-ups were no more than twenty miles from the wall now, and from the reports he’d had, the Parachute Regiment holding that line were being pushed back even faster than elsewhere, and taking heavy casualties. Mayes decided to put in a call to the ground commander of the Paras, but something else tugged at his memory.
He turned to Broads. “What’s the status of that goddamned aircraft carrier?”
“Last update I saw was a few hours ago. They’ve reached the west coast of Africa, and are making one quick stop to scavenge supplies. Then they’re steaming with all haste for the Gulf of Aden – East Africa.”
Mayes shook his head. “The scientist they rescued – he’s still got them convinced they need to find the Patient Zero of the whole damned pandemic?”
“As far as I know.”
“Well, I guess he’s the expert. That’s the whole point of him.” Mayes looked briefly puzzled. “Where again, exactly?”
“Somalia. Hargeisa. That’s their best shot.”
Mayes shook his head again, disbelieving. “And how long is that going to take?”
“You really want to know?” Broads asked.
“No, I guess I don’t. Especially if it’s not going to be fast enough to save our arses here.” He paused and scratched his gray-stubbled chin. “Speaking of Somalia – did you find out if we know anyone down there?”
Broads perked up. “Yes, meant to mention it.” He blinked and shook his head. Mayes didn’t need to ask, or chastise the man. All kinds of things were falling through the cracks, and nobody was keeping up.
Broads went on. “I had someone check the survivor registry, not expecting anything. But, amazingly enough, it turns out there’s actually an American Special Forces team. Half of one of their ODAs somehow survived, right in the middle of all that, from the very beginning of the fall.”
“Jesus,” Mayes said. “Right in the heart of the sun.”
“Yeah. They first checked in with us two years ago – and have been camped out in the bush ever since.”
“No shit?”
“None.”
“And you got this information to the carrier?”
“Not yet,” Broads said. “There’s a protocol. We need approval before identifying survivors to other survivors – who might not have their best interests at heart.”
Mayes looked gobsmacked. “Are you kidding me? Jesus Christ, man. Having the Americans link in with people who already know the ground would be invaluable. Consider it approved! Overridden. Get it done.”
Broads nodded. “Yes, sir. Right away.”
He had just turned back to his station when a sharp cracking sound pierced the hum and chatter of the JOC.
“What the fuck was that?” said Mayes, rising from his chair.
A few others in the massive room stopped what they were doing and looked around at one another, concerned. Broads, a few feet away, glanced toward the security station at the outer door, and the two site security personnel manning it. Mayes also turned to them.
“Was that a gunshot?” he asked, but both men looked equally puzzled.
The sounds erupted again, but this time louder – and not a single shot like that of a handgun, but a burst of automatic fire. From what Mayes could judge, it came from below them, maybe on the lower floors, or even in the sub-basement, but distant enough that he couldn’t accurately place it.
Mayes started to move toward the door, but stopped when the gunfire cut off, and didn’t resume.
Then sirens all across the base came to life, blaring out a noise that no one there had ever heard before. There was no time for luxuries such as alarm tests or security drills, and the old prison sirens were the only system even in place. No one ever expected to have to use them. Not in such a totally locked-down and heavily guarded military facility.
Not here. Not in the inner sanctum.
“Get down there and find out what the hell’s going on,” Mayes ordered the two guards. They saluted and rushed off down the corridor, heading for the stairs. A Royal Military Policeman (RMP) Mayes hadn’t noticed before took up a position at the security station.
Mayes turned to the nearest ops officer.
“You! Get me a radio check with the security stations on every floor. And you,” he said, pointing to the next man. “Hospital wing and quarantine. I want updates from every duty station. I want to know what the hell is going on.”
Was this something to do with those teams coming back from Dusseldorf? he wondered.
But no, it couldn’t be them. The landing area was half a mile away, and those Marines had been shunted directly into quarantine. But why the hell would someone be firing inside the walls? Nothing could get through their perimeter, not with the defenses they had.
This was perhaps the single safest place left in the world.
Mayes stepped toward the security station, where the RMP was flicking through CCTV channels, trying to find something, anything that could be the cause of the disturbance. The display passed over multiple locations rapidly, then showed a brief image of the old prison cell blocks. But the MP didn’t spot what Mayes did.
“Go back,” he said, and the MP flipped back to the cell block. There on the ground, just on the left edge of the screen, was what had jumped out at Mayes. A pool of dark liquid.
“The atrium,” he said. “Go to the atrium.” That was just north of the block now shown on screen, and was the connecting structure between the old building and the new. The guard flipped again, then settled on the main hall of the atrium.
Utter chaos raged.
Bodies lay strewn across the floor, still twitching, many of them wearing medical scrubs.
Of course, thought Mayes. That atrium also adjoins the hospital wing.
As he watched, a lone figure dashed across the large high-vaulted room – out toward the main doors that led to the JOC. Mayes stepped forward and punched a key on the desk in front of him, and the image of the speeding figure froze. He peered at it, but didn’t need to look for very long. The dead man’s features, even uglier than they had been in life, were immediately recognizable.
Grews.
Mayes unpaused the video. Grews vanished again, lost in the few seconds the recording had been paused, and Mayes watched as a dozen other figures poured out of the hospital wing, running across the atrium toward the ground floor – of the very building he stood in.
“Everybody grab a weapon,” he shouted. “And prepare to defend yourselves.”
He rose to his full height, drew his side arm, dropped and checked the magazine, then reseated it.
He drew a steadying breath.
“And alert all stations. We have an outbreak in progress.”
All Go Boom
CentCom Airfield, Wandsworth Common
“I thought that was it for you,” said Eli, as he and Jameson st
ood off to the side of the parked-up helos. Nearby, a dozen techs hurried to secure the Biacore 4000 to the bed of a flat-top truck that had been waiting for the expedition to land. The two Marines watched, amused, as men and women in lab coats or coveralls strapped down the housing and cardboard packaging – the only container Eli had been able to find as they rushed to get the machine and its hundreds of parts out of the target building.
But which had absolutely not been fit for the job.
For a moment, Eli wondered what the reaction would be in the lab complex when they finally opened the box and found everything shoved inside in one great pile. He hoped to hell they’d found all the pieces, but mentally shrugged. It was out of his hands now, and someone else’s problem.
Jameson exhaled. “Yeah, I thought it was it for me, too. But you know me. Too damned stubborn to die.”
Eli shook his head, still amazed that his friend was even here. Jameson’s run from that building in Dusseldorf, across open ground and chased by hundreds of Romeos and Foxtrots, had scared the hell out of him. And he hadn’t even seen the action, but had been racing away in the second helicopter at the time, listening in on the radio. He had overheard Jameson in furious conversation with Charlotte – the Apache pilot who had disobeyed orders to stay and try to save Jameson’s bacon, against ridiculous odds.
The waiting had been the worst of it, silence falling over the cabins of both aircraft while they waited to hear if Jameson would emerge from the fast-flowing river after his desperate swim. When he did, there was a chorus of wild cheers from the Marines, and Eli had breathed a long sigh of relief.
They hadn’t lost their commander, and he hadn’t lost his long-time friend.
Now, as they stood watching what Eli presumed was a scientist or maybe operations manager officially taking receipt of what they had all nearly died to recover, he hoped it had all been worth it. They’d lost good men, and great friends, back in that building. It had been a hellish couple of hours, and Eli counted it a miracle that any of them made it out at all.
That damn machine better work, he thought.
Once the Biacore was secure, and the truck began a slow trundle toward the bright white buildings a few hundred yards away across the common, Eli and Jameson and the other Marines headed up the dirt track toward the quarantine buildings. They knew the drill. Charlotte and the other pilots were ahead of them, already moving toward the ugly concrete compound, not having waited for the techs to finish.
As Eli stepped ahead of him, Jameson noticed the slightly protruding shape of the pistol-grip Benelli shotgun he habitually kept in a padded and waterproof scabbard cinched to his backpack. “You just keep carrying that shotgun all over creation. Any plans to ever use it?” In all their years together, Jameson had never seen him take it out.
“When you need a shotgun,” Eli said. “Nothing else will do. Believe me, its time will come.” He carried on walking and scanned the hulking buildings up ahead. “So. Back into quarantine!”
Jameson nodded. “Looks like it.”
“I guess they’re tightening up around here. Though I’m not sure how they’re going to keep up with quarantining everyone who comes into contact, if the outbreak keeps spreading.”
“They won’t,” said Jameson. “Or they’ll soon have more people in quarantine than on the field. I imagine soon there will be no return from outside the wall. Just stay out there – and fight until you die.”
Eli slowed, frowning at the Lieutenant. It was unusual for the man to be so pessimistic about anything, even during the adrenaline rush of a battle that wasn’t going well.
“You think it’ll come to that?” Eli asked.
“I don’t know. But it’s like you said before. The spread is out of control. Britain’s going down.”
“I was just on a downer. I don’t really think that.”
Jameson nodded. “You? Mr Brightside? Down?”
“Hey, I think I earned the right.”
“True. I guess we all get that way sometimes, don’t we?”
“But not you,” said Eli. “Not you.”
Jameson sighed. “I have my moments. I’d like to think we can still win. Back in that building, while I was hiding in the lift, waiting for Charlotte to give me the go, there was this dead guy – properly dead. He must have been there since the city fell, stuck up on top of that lift with whatever supplies he’d managed to scavenge, before it was too dangerous to venture out. I think from the rubbish and cans he had, he must have been there for months.”
“Shit,” said Eli. “That’s harsh.”
“Yeah, well. I figured I was going to end up joining him. But fate decided otherwise. I figure it doesn’t matter if we end up dying out in those fields. We’ll just have to deal with it when it happens, and until then take the free rides when they come. I never really thought much about the folks who got trapped and lived out their last days stuck on top of a lift, or in some back alley, or a shopping mall. Not until I had to sit with that guy for ten minutes.”
As the pair approached the quarantine building, they suddenly stopped, hearing an almighty torrent of noise from the main complex. As they stood and stared, their mouths open, nearly every window in the uppermost floor of the main Strategic Operations Command building blew out, followed by flashes and the rattle of gunfire.
“What the…” muttered Eli, who then turned to see Jameson, wide-eyed, take an unsteady step back, the man’s expression mirroring his own. Confused, dazed, unable to fathom how such a thing could be happening.
Not here, for the love of God. Not here.
But then they were both running flat out, hefting rifles from their slings even though they had little ammunition left for them, pounding along the dirt path and rapidly overtaking the pilots. All around them, the other surviving Marines of One Troop kept up their frantic pace, all of them racing together into the fray.
Time to deal with it, Jameson thought.
Bugs Rule the Planet
The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains
A half-hour after infecting the first test subject, and fifteen minutes after admitting the two “healthy” ones into the same enclosure with it, Oleg Aliyev could not yet see any signs of cross-infection.
It was too early to start worrying, but not too early to start getting bored, as ADD was a well-understood and long-running problem with him. So he stood up again, and while he waited… he lectured.
This was a slightly eccentric habit he’d fallen into, during the long hours of the Apocalypse, alone with only his dead test subjects for company. It was due to boredom, and also loneliness, it was sheer black humor and perversity. Maybe it was only natural – most scientists talked to their lab subjects. Though a mouse or white rat, never mind a chimp, showed a lot more understanding and camaraderie than a dead human.
But maybe it also had to do with Aliyev being a natural pedagogue. Simply, he liked teaching.
It had come as a surprise when he first discovered how much he enjoyed the academic world. His professorship at Novosibirsk State U. had been more of a sinecure or honorary role, and his teaching load had fluctuated between light and none.
But there was just something wonderful about standing up at that lectern, at the bottom of an echoing lecture hall filled with bright and rapt young minds, that had filled him with energy. Maybe he liked being the expert. Or maybe he was still in love with knowledge, and with science.
Over the years, he had learned to his cost that both knowledge and science were completely neutral with regard to morality. And that both could equally be put to good uses, or utterly horrific ones. Somewhere along the line, like many people he guessed, he’d fallen into cynicism, or even nihilism. But buried down underneath it all was still that spark of childlike enthusiasm, for the bright light of science.
These days, his lecture hall consisted of the lab area facing the glass enclosures, and his students were groups of dead Mongol and Uyghur villagers, none of whom comprehended anything, or ever asked questions,
and all of whom were soon destroyed and dumped unceremoniously back down the side of the mountain. Now, on this particular morning, his class consisted of three corpses who, God willing, were soon to become even more dead.
But before he began, Aliyev stepped away into the residence, opened up the dark-wood bar, and poured himself a Scotch – a nice twenty-year-old single malt, from the Glengoyne Distillery, way up in the Scottish Highlands. He was down to his last few bottles of this stuff – and he had started with four cases. Luckily there was no shortage of ice up there.
“Now,” he said genially, stepping lightly back into the lab, “shall we pick up where we left off last time?” He nodded, took a sip, then spat an ice cube back into his glass. “Those of you who are new to the course can borrow and copy the notes of your classmates later.”
He paused to check out his students. All three were pressed up against the front of the enclosure, biting and pawing at the glass. Truly a rapt and captive audience. The one on the far left, which he had infected with meningitis Z (or MZ), still seemed to be exhibiting normal symptoms for this stage of the disease. It would take him between thirty and sixty minutes to succumb.
Aliyev had a little time here.
“So,” he said, feeling the Scotch warm all the way down, “our topic was microorganisms – or, rather microbes, which we know include not just bacteria, but viruses as well – which are not really alive, but just squishy bags of DNA or RNA.”
He paused to drain the rest of the Scotch. The first one always went down fast.
Looking up, he squinted, then slid off his stool and stepped closer to the plexiglas. Had he seen a tremor run down the arm of one of the two healthy ones? He couldn’t be sure. He paused to look in its gelatinous eye. The milky and opaque lens and pupil revealed nothing. And, as the stringy, wet, and decomposing mouth gnashed at the glass, pushing teeth loose from rotted gums, Aliyev turned and stepped away again.
“But whether bacterial or viral, fungal or parasitic, microbes are what I personally like to think of as… the bugs. And the bugs, it must be remembered, rule the planet. And always have.”