Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm (24 page)

“What is it a cure for, then, if not the plague? It is not the ingredients for Sex on the Beach.” The cracker laughed aloud at his own joke, showing a conspicuously missing tooth.

Aliyev could feel the circle tightening – literally. These guys were edging in toward him. And every nerve in his right arm and hand ached to reach under the down jacket he’d put on against the chill, snake up inside his waist band… and take hold of the FN Five-seveN autoloading pistol holstered there.

“Why do you keep secrets from us? Do you think we’re not trustworthy?”

The farm boy slightly behind him spoke up, his voice low and sinister. “I think maybe he thinks he is above us. With his shiny helicopter, and his expensive gear, and his fine foreign accent.”

Aliyev was now too scared to speak – and worried that he was visibly trembling, and not just from the chill of the night air in late-autumn Russia. He was also torn with irresolution, with conflicting thoughts and fears, with his own inadequacy. With his inability to out-think these idiots.

What?
he wondered frantically.
What is their game?

This was not an idle question. They were all visibly armed – but none had drawn their weapons, or even touched them. They had taken his belongings out of the helicopter and rifled through them – but so far they had stolen nothing. Did they plan on killing him and roasting him on a spit on this very fire for their dinner – before fighting each other over his weapons and equipment?

“Or maybe he is okay,” the leader growled. “Maybe he will share and share alike.”

That fully stocked bug-out bag – with its survival essentials, GPS, NVGs, tools, batteries, and particularly ammo – was worth much more than its weight in gold, particularly now that the Apocalypse was actually here. And never mind the Benelli Tactical shotgun – which was pretty much like Wōden, Achilles, and Thor had all gotten together over beers one night and designed the zombie-fighting weapon of their dreams.

No, there was no way Aliyev could see himself just walking out of here – never mind still in possession of all his invaluable shit.

Actually, there
was
one scenario in which he saw himself surviving – and it involved the most valuable item of all: the helicopter itself. Which Aliyev alone among them could fly, and in which he could easily see himself turned into a permanent slave chauffeur in order to ferry these brown-bear-fuckers around.

Or, then again… maybe they actually were just nice farm boys who were happy for the diversion of some company for a change, and were just giving him good-natured shit – and maybe hoping to get lucky and get in on an antidote to the plague. There was just no way to tell. It totally eluded him.

Aliyev tried to control his ragged breathing.

And then, finally, the truth of it hit him.

He knew that any shred of humanity he hoped to hold onto depended totally on maintaining his ability to regard and honor the essential humanity of other living people. These guys were survivors, just like him.

And he also knew that any remote chance he had of getting out of there alive, never mind with all his stuff, almost certainly depended on him gunning them down like rabid dogs before they did the exact same thing to him first.

It was that simple.

In a word, he had to start, and then somehow win, a gunfight.

The leader picked up a bit of dirty rag, lifted the coffee pot out of the fire, stood up, and moved to stand directly over Aliyev.

“How about some more of our nice coffee,
tovarisch
?”

Aliyev noted that he was holding the pot with his left hand.

While his right had moved to rest on the butt of the cheap-ass revolver he wore tucked into his cheap-ass leather belt.

Aliyev held out his cup and tried to smile.

And as the coffee waterfalled down into his cup, he wondered whether he was going to die rooted to this spot, too afraid, or – much worse and even more pathetic – too embarrassed to make a move.

His cup was nearly full.

Lapse

Camp Lemonnier - Northwest Quadrant

Well, this is fucking awkward
, Ali thought.

She withdrew her katana from the head of a walking corpse wearing traditional Arab garb, then seamlessly wiped the blade on its dishdasha as it fell. She’d come up on it so quickly and quietly that it never woke up. It just made a tiny wheezing sound as it died for the second time, then crumpled to the floor.

She saw a stairwell farther down the corridor, then turned back to where Homer was watching her from behind. She could feel his eyes on her as unmistakably as if they’d been laser beams. Speaking quietly and emotionlessly, she said, “I’ll head upstairs. You clear the ground floor.”

He hesitated, obviously not thrilled about splitting up.

Ali read his look and thought:
Get used to it.

And then Homer got it, too. Splitting up was the whole point for her.

She turned and headed up without a word, flipping her sword into an overhand grip to carry more comfortably by her side. She hadn’t even brought her rifle – the Mk12 designated marksman rifle (DMR) was half as big as she was, not to mention that she neither wanted to take along the big optic nor remove it. She did have her HK USP Tactical .45, with a big Brügger & Thomet suppressor screwed into the threaded barrel, sticking out the bottom of an open drop-leg holster.

But she didn’t plan on taking it out.

At the top of the stairs, she edged her nose out into the hallway, just a small and silent shadow among memories of shadows. Nothing moved, or even didn’t move, in either direction down the hallway. But through the doorway nearly straight ahead, she could see a figure sitting in a chair, facing the window.

And it was wearing tan Army ACUs.

Outstanding
, Ali thought. She opened the pouch on her belt that contained her improvised ZPW (Zombie Prisoner of War) kit – hood, flex cuffs, and tightly rolled-up PVC body bag. Then she paused. This might be tricky. She couldn’t recall when she’d ever had to take one alive –
erm, “alive.”

She shook her head.
Whatever.

But as she silently rounded on the sitting figure, and it failed to perk up, she realized she still wasn’t going to have to. This one had an M9 pistol in its lifeless hand, which lay across its lap. And there was quite a lot of the contents of its cranium on the floor – dried up now across the years, and little more than fuzz and stains.

Ali mentally amended that:
HIS cranium
. Judging from the only faint spiderwebbing around his eyes, he’d still been a man when he took his own life.

And he had died like a man.

She exhaled mournfully and stepped up to the window, looking out at what must have been his last sight before he died. It was an open stretch of parade ground. But it must have been bedlam down there when he’d punched his own ticket. She wondered what his regrets were in his last moment on this Earth.

She wondered what her own were going to be.

And, unsurprisingly, but against her better judgment, she mentally flashed back to that Seahawk helo flight back from Homer’s crazy-ass mission to singlehandedly sink a 28,000-ton Russian battlecruiser. And not only had that stunt worked, but Homer had looked serenely confident that it would all along – including when he came up front and took the co-pilot’s seat, to keep her company on the flight back.

She had shaken her head then, but did have to give him credit. So she reached up and offered him a high-five, which he returned. Not long after that, as they’d sat with their legs hanging off the stern of the
JFK
, listening to the cheers as the
Admiral Nakhimov
exploded and headed for the bottom, she’d turned and kissed him on the shoulder.

She’d pretty much immediately regretted that.

Because he then looked across at her hopefully. Had she changed her mind?

And now she remembered back to a couple of days before that, when Homer had already brought his kids back, but before Ali broke things off between the two of them. When Homer had introduced them all.

“No,” Homer said, kneeling down, “Mommy didn’t know Ali. But I know they would have been friends if she had. She’s my friend – and she’s going to be your friend, too.”

Isabel had reached up and taken Ali’s hand. “It’s okay,” she said, looking nearly straight up. “We’ll be nice to her.”

“Good girl,” Homer said. “Mommy’s watching you right now from heaven, and she’s so happy and proud of you.”

Ali had done her best to smile – thinking how much easier that line must be to pull off when you actually believed it.

But, no, she hadn’t changed her mind.

Her relationship with Homer had to end. For all kinds of reasons.

The high-five, and the kiss, had just been two moments of weakness – all of which had started, really, when that same helo had earlier been in a flat spin, with Ali down on the deck, firmly believing she was seconds away from death. But, no – nothing had changed, and she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t continue her love affair with Homer. Maybe one day, after all this, if they both lived, if the world made it.

But not now. It was too distracting, too dangerous.

But flipping her face shield up and focusing on her own reflection in the window glass, she continued to remember, and could never forget, that when she was in that uncontrolled, spinning, diving aircraft, having what she was sure would be her last thoughts on this Earth… they had been of Homer.

Something moved in the reflection behind her.

She whirled around, bringing her sword up – too late.

* * *

When Homer burst into the room, what he saw was a 6’5” 260-pound dead infantry grunt, some kind of corn-fed Nebraska linebacker type, pinning Ali to the ground. He could hardly even see her under its big bulk.

Her sword was pressed flat across her chest by the thing’s massive weight, and she was trying to draw her handgun, but a tree-trunk-sized thigh was pressing into the weapon and holster, making that all but impossible. She was not only giving up 120 pounds and superior upper-body strength to this guy, but none of Ali’s usual tactics for dealing with bigger opponents – nerve strikes, pressure points, pain application, leverage, timing and superior speed – were of any use now.

The house-sized dead guy had simply pinned her with his weight, and now his big gelatinous mouth was mushed up against her face shield, gnawing. Homer couldn’t even imagine what she was feeling in that moment. And he didn’t have time to. He lined up his boarding axe and swung it flat, taking off the back of the Zulu’s head, and then he put his boot into its hip and rolled it off her.

She bounced to her feet, ripped her helmet and face shield off – getting the shield flipped down at the last second was all she’d had time for, and the only thing that had saved her – and she squared up to Homer and said:

“Idiot!”

He straightened up, lowered his boarding axe to his side, and opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

“Which part of ‘dead Americans in uniform are early-stage victims’ did you fail to comprehend? Or were you playing fucking Angry Birds during the briefing?”

Homer closed his mouth. He got it now – he had screwed up, perhaps badly, by destroying this potentially valuable Zulu. In his urgency to save Ali, he’d forgotten the mission. But, moreover, he also understood that losing mission focus wasn’t really why Ali was so pissed at him.

It was because she’d had to be rescued. And – much worse –
by him
.

This was actually the first time Homer had seen Ali lose her cool –
ever
.

She picked up her sword and stalked out.

Over her shoulder, she said, “Find your own goddamned building to clear.”

* * *

Yeah, Homer got it – but Ali knew he didn’t get all of it.

As she exited the building and headed back to their staging area to get washed down, ideally with chlorine bleach solution, she cursed herself inside her head. For an operator known for her complete unflappability, losing her shit the way she just had was like an alcoholic with a twenty-five-year sobriety token downing a shot of whiskey. She couldn’t take it back.

And now it defined her.

But she was damn well going to take something from it.

A little reminder
, she thought.
You take your head out of this game for one second, and you’re done. FUCK.

Surviving over two years of ZA, on the most hazardous missions imaginable, would mean nothing, would all come down to nothing, if she went out now. All it took was one bite, one scratch, one splash of gunk… and she’d end up exactly the same as these seven billion other dead dumbasses who’d spent their precious days of life sitting on the couch watching reality television and eating cheesy poofs. All her accomplishments, all her trials bested, all that honing of herself into a perfect and exalted instrument of war – it would all be gone in a second, turned to nothing more than moaning and slouching and, finally, a bullet in the head.

And she knew exactly what had caused this near-fatal lapse on her part.

Thinking about fucking Homer.

And what had caused him to screw up royally by destroying that Zulu? His emotions for her.
Jesus Christ.

And, come to remember it, the reason she had been down on the floor of that crashing helo in the first place was because she had just lost an aerial duel with that Spetsnaz sniper. Another first for her, and not a good one.

Not cool.
Not
cool.

Had she been thinking about Homer during that fight? She couldn’t even remember now. She only knew that losing was an experience equally unfamiliar and unpleasant, and one she had zero intention of letting happen again.

But what had happened just now was
not
a promising sign.

At least Handon hadn’t witnessed it – either the lapse, or the squabbling between them, with her storming off. If he had, he would have had serious questions about what was going on with the combat effectiveness of his team.