Dark Days (Apocalypse Z) (15 page)

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 hurry, 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.

The plane banked hard and the landing gear extended with a loud screech. The engines’ whine rose two octaves and the brakes groaned trying to stop the fifty-ton A-320 as it rushed down that short runway. I worried, like everyone else, that the noise was arousing the interest of all the Undead packed into that city, waking hundreds of thousands of them out of their slumber as the plane roared overhead so low it nearly clipped the roofs of buildings.

The phone on the bulkhead gave a loud ring. It connected directly with the cockpit a few feet away. Hauptmann Tank grabbed the receiver, nodded a few times, and hung up with a curt “thank you.”

“The pilot reports that we’ll be on the ground in less than a minute!” He shouted above the roar of the engines. “Our landing may be bumpy, so buckle up!”

I was scared shitless so I pulled my belt as tight as I could. Prit was muttering something in Russian, probably some comment about the pilot’s mother or Tank’s, or maybe he was pissed off he had to sit there, like the rest of us sheep, instead of being at the controls of the Airbus. You never knew with Prit.

“When the plane stops, Team One, take your positions immediately!” Tank shouted in his thick German accent, as he clutched a luggage rack and struggled to stay on his feet. “Sweep the area, check the perimeter. Shoot anything that moves! But if any of those helicopters parked on the runway gets the slightest scratch, I swear to God I’ll rip the guts out of the guy who fired the shot! Got it?”

A grunt of assent rose from twenty throats, while twenty pairs of sweaty hands cocked twenty HKs and strapped on helmets.

A sharp jolt shook us, then the landing gear gave a terrifying shriek. A dull roar rose from the engines as the pilot threw them into reverse at full speed to bring the huge Airbus to a stop in that small space.

“Too fast,” Pritchenko muttered, watching as the runway rushed past us.

Thick black smoke billowed from the wheels. The pilot had locked the wheels in a desperate attempt to slow down the plane. The cabin shook violently, as if the plane were breaking into pieces. The friction was shredding the tires. The smell of burning rubber was overpowering.
If we had a blowout at that speed, the plane would likely tip and roll out of control down the runway, becoming a fireball. My balls shrank in terror. I was convinced we were going to die.

The Airbus gradually slowed down, but it still emitted sounds that weren’t very reassuring. Something came loose from the cargo bay and crashed noisily to the floor, but that was it. Finally, with a plaintive screech, the plane came to a complete stop, but its engines still rumbled, exhausted from the strain.

On cue, the legionnaires got to their feet in sync. Two of them manned the door while a third attached a rope ladder that unfurled down to the runway. Before I could blink three times, they’d slithered down onto the cracked pavement.

A few seconds later, we heard the first shot, then a couple of long bursts of machine gunfire and an explosion broke the silence on the runway.

Let the dance begin.

23

TENERIFE

Island heat slapped Lucia in the face as she left the apartment building. Out front, a dozen people waited patiently for the bus. Not a single vehicle drove by, except for an occasional bicycle and a beat-up wagon on retreads pulled by a worn-out nag.

Although the hospital was just a few miles away, getting there took a really long time. On account of the strict fuel rationing, there were almost no motor vehicles on the road, aside from the few engaged in essential services. There were very few draft animals and even fewer bicycles. A junk heap with wheels and pedals no one would’ve looked twice at before the Apocalypse was now worth a fortune. Under martial law, bicycle theft was punishable by hard labor. Gasoline theft was worse, punishable by firing squad. Draconian measures, true, but the fragile law and order on the island had to be maintained at all costs or it could collapse.