Arisen : Genesis (20 page)

But none of that would comfort Dugan now – and nor did Zack imagine he could convince Dugan that it had just been bad luck. In any case, he didn’t even try. Every time he opened his mouth to say something, his throat dried up. Some sorrows were not open to outside intervention or comfort. Just as some brotherhoods were beyond the reckoning of people outside of them.

Some tragedies couldn’t be made okay, not by words, and not by anything else either.

Like everything else, it was, emphatically, what it was.

* * *

Zack shifted his legs around, seeking comfort. His right thigh brushed against something on the door. Examining it, he found it was a machete, in a sheath, secured to the inside of the door. He announced it to the others.

“So much for peacekeeping,” Baxter said.

“Yeah,” Zack said. “Gandhi wouldn’t walk around here unarmed. And ours didn’t make it out of the Tahoe.” He immediately regretted saying this. Like it was some kind of criticism of Bob’s last act on this earth, his last bequest of their critical supplies. Dugan didn’t visibly react.

Not for a few minutes, anyway. That was when they came across the bus, which sat jackknifed across the road.

And even from a half-mile out, they could see that it was surrounded by figures. Milling. Shuffling. And perking up when the Land Cruiser started to get within hearing of it.

Dugan slowed and stopped 100 meters out.

“What are we doing?” Zack asked.

“Making a stop.”

“We can go right around that, Dugan.”

“Yeah. I know. But we need fuel.”

Zack paused a beat. “There are trucks that run on diesel abandoned everywhere. And that don’t have a whole bus full of infected people guarding them. This is too dangerous.”

“The bus has got a really big tank to siphon. I’m gonna borrow this.” He reached across Zack’s lap and took the machete. “Stay in the vehicle.” He took off his NVGs and laid them on the dash, then opened the door and climbed out. He seemed to have murder, or maybe fallen brothers, burning behind his eyes.

“The hell I’m staying in the vehicle,” Baxter said, exiting the back a second later. Zack swiveled and saw Baxter had his M4 cradled in his arms.

Dugan paused fractionally. “Okay. But no shooting unless you have to.” Baxter nodded and Dugan stalked off. Zack seated his own NVGs and swung out onto the sandy surface of the road, in the featureless middle of the desert, in the black middle of the night. And he had a perfect view of Dugan striding forward and just murdering the shit out of over twenty of the already dead.

They had started moving forward even as the vehicle stopped, then picked up their pace when they locked on to Dugan. The ones at the front moved in a frenzy. And Dugan took them on like a kendo or aikido master. He sidestepped, pivoted, swung one direction and then the other, whirling and flashing. He cleaved skulls. He severed, or mostly severed, heads. And he carried on walking forward, leaving a 50-meter trail of bodies in his wake. It occurred to Zack that, however the adage had it, the road to hell was almost certainly paved with these things…

Dugan disappeared around behind the bus. Baxter and Zack could just make out more wet thwacking sounds, as well as Dugan audibly grunting. He appeared on board the bus, through its windows, and moved the length of it, then walked back and climbed down.

He cupped his hands and called out to them across the dry desert night air: “Bring it in.”

Zack walked around the front and got in the driver’s seat, while Baxter climbed in back, and drove up to the bus. Buses are the only transport option for most Somalis, and their quality tends to reflect that. This one had replacement panels spot-welded on, mismatching tires, more primer than paint, and religious charms dangling from the rear-view. In a word, it looked like crap even before it suffered an outbreak and bloody melee on board.

Suddenly it hit Zack. “Wait. I don’t think the siphon hose made it out of the Tahoe.” Dugan walked up, his breathing almost back to normal. The machete dripped with gore. Zack looked him up and down, but he couldn’t see any blood on the SEAL.

Dugan quietly said, “Check the ISU.”

Zack had no desire to second-guess this, so he wordlessly went around the back of the Land Cruiser and opened the rear door. He pulled the crate toward him, flipped open the top, and rooted through it, around the grenade gun, under all the magazines… yep, there it was. The rubber siphon hose. Zack hadn’t seen it his first time in there. Bob’s last gift to them. Or his latest one, anyway. There were also some kind of sachets underneath that, floating in the very bottom. Zack pulled one out and examined it. Iodine tablets. For water purification.

Apparently there was no end to the number of times Bob would save their lives. It just went on and on.

Zack coiled up the hose, brought it to Dugan, and in eight minutes they had topped up the tanks from the bus and were back on the road. Once again they drove wordlessly. Zack spotted a road sign: they were now less than 100 miles from the border with Djibouti. And Camp Lemonnier was only about five miles beyond that.

Zack was too tired to start entertaining thoughts about whether they might just make it after all. He didn’t want to get his hopes up. Not because they might be dashed by reality. But because he was sure they would be cratered by his own fatalism – his longstanding and constantly growing sense that he would never get out of the Horn of Africa alive.

The sand hissed under their tires, the placid ocean spread out silently to their right – and the night held them in its embrace.

Or its death grip.

Zion Burns

It wasn’t sunlight in the east. Or even sunrise.

It was merely a very subtle blanching of the great black body of the sea and sky, at the point where they pressed together, like the border between this world and the next, like a gateway from being to nothingness. Zack felt the lightening before he really saw it. But within a few minutes, there were faint little dancing glints way out on the surface of the ocean.

Jesus
, Zack thought.
We’ve been running for our lives the entire night…

But then he looked again, suddenly transfixed by the dance of pre-dawn light. Beauty – even now, still in this world. As Zack stared wordlessly out the window, he felt a fleeting but regnant sense of affection for this place, this lonely blue planet. And that feeling made him want to know if the world was going to make it.

He fired up his phone, burning precious battery power.

The New York Times
site pulsed for nearly a full minute without loading. He was just moving his thumb to give up on it, when the front page came in partially. “Hargeisa – Latest News and Public Health Advisories.” Zack screwed up his face in confusion. Why were they talking about Hargeisa? And then it hit him. Just as the sweet little German town of Marburg, and the gentle Ebola River in Zaire, had their names tainted for all time, now it was Hargeisa’s turn.

New diseases were often named for the place where they were first identified.

“We’re twenty mikes out of Lemonnier,” Dugan said, pulling Zack from his dark reverie. “Can you get eyes on with the Pred?”

“Sorry, eyes on with what?” Zack asked.

Oh – the Predator
.

He powered off his phone, realizing that somehow he had completely forgotten about the drone again. That thing really did fly itself. And the open desert coast road had meant they could drive safely without the aerial surveillance. But that was never going to last. Zack clambered over the armrest into the back seat, nudged Baxter aside, and pulled the GCS over the partition from the back. He got it opened up and arranged.

“Where is it, actually?” Baxter asked.

“Still on an autopilot holding pattern, I presume, halfway back up the Hargeisa–Berbera Road.”

Zack woke up the laptop – and quickly discovered the main electronics were dead and cold. A quick survey revealed there was no power to be had in the Land Cruiser, no power inverter. Another facet of the enormous loss of the Tahoe.

“Oh, well,” Baxter said.

“So much for persistent eye in the sky,” Zack said.

“It’s still got like sixteen hours of linger time, though, right? We should be able to land it from Lemonnier.”

“Yeah. Or maybe it will just spiral down and out, fall out of the sky. Have its final rest deep in Somaliland.”

Baxter didn’t respond to this. Zack didn’t go on to suggest that this was any kind of metaphor for Maximum Bob – or for the rest of them, for that matter.

Dugan didn’t say anything.

He just drove on.

* * *

They saw the smoke first.

It wasn’t a good sign at all, though no one seemed inclined to point that out. Dugan slowed the vehicle incrementally as they got closer. They rolled up to a big Humvee, turned over on its side in the culvert. As they passed it, Zack could see splashes of now-dried blood on the windows. And he was seized with a massive sense of
déjà vu
. He’d seen this scene, lived through this moment, somewhere before…

Now the great plume of smoke rising from up ahead was unmistakable – and it resolved into multiple pillars, floating up side by side and joining hundreds of meters up in the now dark-gray-and-pink sky. The sand still hissed under their wheels, somehow more loudly at their reduced speed. Metal scraped on metal – Zack looked back, and saw it was Baxter dropping the mag out of his M4 and checking it. He slid it back into place with a confident click.

Zack didn’t know whether to roll the windows down, to try to hear something; or keep them up, for safety. But by the time they were in sight of the main gate of the camp, about 300 meters out, now rolling at only a few miles an hour, they heard noises loud enough to penetrate the Land Rover cabin, from ahead and to their left. First it was thin small-arms fire, rapidly crescendoing – which then culminated in a rattling crash. Dugan braked them to a stop, Zack craned his head and peered, and Baxter slid out the back passenger-side door and placed his rifle across the roof of the vehicle.

None of the vehicles had headlights on, so it took a few seconds for them to resolve. But it was a convoy of four Humvees, bumpers inches apart, moving something like 60 or 70 miles per hour. The crash had been the lead vehicle blasting through one of the smaller gates in the fence that ringed the camp. As the tail-end vehicle ramped out of the base, two figures squatting in the back fired assault rifles into the complex behind them. In fact, there was firing, in what seemed like all directions, from all the vehicles, which were evidently loaded for bear. The three Agency men instinctively ducked, but within seconds the firing had tailed off – as all four Humvees disappeared up the road that led west, further along the coast. They were very clearly not stopping for hell, high water, or abandoned babies.

They were only in view for a few seconds, but all three passengers of the Land Rover got a mental image of the convoy.

Baxter saw keffiyahs on some of the men shooting.

Zack clocked flashes of body parts in the grilles and wheels and undercarriages of one or more of the Humvees.

And Dugan spotted their distinctive unit insignia, stenciled on the side of each of the vehicles.

“It’s ODA triple nickel,” he said. “Or what’s left of it.”

“And making a run for it,” Baxter added.

Zack fought to get his breathing under control. The manifestly obvious was belatedly impressing itself upon him: their salvation was a mirage.

Camp Lemonnier, the invincible beating heart of U.S. military might in Africa, had somehow fallen.

It was now no more than Hargeisa with an armory.

Dugan started them moving forward again. Within a few seconds it was obvious he wasn’t turning around.

“Dugan,” Baxter said. “Lemonnier’s gone. It’s gone, dude.” Zack felt, for the second time, like he was back in one of the
Alien
films. When the dropship crashed on LV246. When Ripley blew an axle on the APC. When Private Hudson stalked up and down chanting, “Well that’s just fucking
great
, man. What the fuck are we supposed to do now, man?”

Dugan didn’t visibly react to Baxter pointing out the obvious. He spoke calmly in response. “I’m just going to get us a bit of a closer look. I’ve got friends in there – we all do. And maybe we can find some survivors. Or just find out what happened.”

As they approached the outer security station, the main thing about it immediately became obvious: it had been blown up. Wood splinters, burnt plastic and metal, and other debris were scattered in a 20-meter circle around the jagged outline of the little shack. Dugan stopped the truck and got out. As he stalked around, rifle aimed low, he quickly homed in on one spot and stopped there. It was just behind the only substantial remaining section of the structure.

Zack and Baxter cautiously got out and followed him.

And soon they saw. Slumped up against what was left to slump against was an American soldier – an MP, and a staff sergeant, from his uniform and insignia. He was conscious, lids half-lowered, breathing labored. He was also shy a leg – it had been taken off just above the knee, the wound seemingly cauterized by the blast that did the damage. Finally, his complexion wasn’t good at all – red bumps presented on the skin of his face, two or three having turned to sores. A thin black spiderweb pattern could also be seen just underneath the skin. When he clocked the newcomers and levered his eyes open, they were an inhumanly milky color, cloudy and opaque.

“Military, government, or contractor IDs,” he said, weakly but audibly. “And state your business on the base today.” Dugan squatted down before the MP, and Zack could see they were both smiling. God love the stoicism and unbreakable good humor of grunts. Zack also noted that Dugan didn’t get too close.

“What happened here, Sergeant?”

The man’s head sagged, or nodded, and he worked to get his breath. “Some snake eaters fragged my security station. AT-4 rocket, I think. Don’t blame ’em. Me and my team were sick. I’m the last one.” He coughed weakly. “You should go,” he said.