Dark Days (Apocalypse Z) (14 page)

I looked over at Prit.
What choice do we have
? his eyes said.

“At least we’re in this together, right?” he asked, resting a hand on my shoulder.

“Of course, Prit, don’t worry,” I replied, hiding my distress, my mind racing at top speed. Back into the fucking shit.

“Great, gentlemen!” Viena clapped his hands. He quickly signed some forms and set them in front of us to sign. “After you leave here, they’ll take you to your group’s headquarters. If you have arrangements to make at home, do it right away.” He peered over his glasses. “You head to the Peninsula tomorrow. I don’t have to tell
you
what you’ll find there.”

20

That morning was unusually cold for the Canary Islands. You could still see Venus twinkling in the sky. Our group rubbed our hands and stamped our feet on the concrete floor of the Reina Sofia Airport to fight off the bitter cold.

After our meeting with Luis Viena, we only had time to rush home, grab a few personal items and say good-bye to Lucia. The worst part was telling Lucia that we’d been “drafted” and that Prit and I had to return to the Peninsula as part of a support team. In those few hours, my darling girl went through several stages of grief: anger, indignation, tears, anger. She finally accepted the situation with resignation. But, this morning, when she said good-bye, she was distant and cold. I didn’t blame her.

She actually didn’t hold me responsible for the situation, but there was a wall between us. I didn’t understand until Prit explained to me what even a blind man could see. Lucia had experienced a terrible trauma, losing all her loved ones in a very short time. Prit, Sister Cecilia, and I were all the family she had. Now, the nun was fighting for her life and we were leaving on a very risky journey. Lucia was afraid it’d be a repeat of those terrible times in Vigo. I was so thickheaded, I thought she was mad at me. What a damn fool I was! I wanted to hold her in my arms and tell her not to worry, nothing in the world could stop me from coming home, everything would be okay, but I didn’t do that when I had the chance.

The past few hours hadn’t been easy for us, either. We joined our team at the military base at Tenerife North Airport for training on the weapons we’d use on our mission.

Fifteen minutes earlier, an officer decked out in full dress uniform drove us to an empty hangar at one end of the airport. He climbed onto the hood of a URO and announced our mission. As the words came out of his mouth, I was sure I was having a horrible flashback. It had to be a cruel joke. But it was real. And fucked up. They really were sending us back to the Peninsula. To Madrid, one of the most dangerous places in Europe.

Madrid wasn’t a quiet, abandoned corner of the world. Nearly six million people had lived in the city and its suburbs before the Apocalypse. Only about fifteen thousand of the refugees on the islands were from there, so that meant Madrid would be teeming with millions of Undead, just waiting for us.

“Our objective is Safe Haven Three, one of the city’s five refuges.” The officer shouted. “Said Safe Haven withstood the Undeads’ assaults for only four days. We believe more than three quarters of a million people lost their lives there.” He cast his eyes over the group as that chilling figure sunk in.

“But you aren’t going there to tour the battlefield! The largest building inside that Safe Haven was La Paz Hospital, which housed offices, stores, cafeterias, and dormitories. Next door to it was the largest pharmaceutical warehouse in Madrid. It supplied drugs to other Safe Havens by air.” He paused. “Unfortunately, the tide of Undead thwarted that plan.”

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 neighbor 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.