The Flood (11 page)

Wait. Radio. There will be a radio in this thing.

But there’s no way there’d be power – is there?

It didn’t take him long to locate it. There were a shitload of baffling controls all around, both manual and electronic, arrayed all over the many stations and control surfaces – but only one of them had a phone handset attached. Even the power button on the thing was pretty conspicuous. He hesitated with his finger poised over it. He didn’t dare to hope. Hope was stupid. Hope was for other people, in some other less fucked time, and in some less monumentally fucked situation.

He flipped the plastic rocker switch.

The whole face of the radio lit up.

Holy shit
.

He flipped it back off instantly. Whatever power this thing still had was virtually guaranteed not to last long. Now he had to formulate the perfect plan. And he had to execute it flawlessly. Now he had hope again.

And that was a terrifying thing.

…For the Memories

Red Square - Inside the T-14 Armata

First question: Who the hell to call?

The question was kind of self-answering, due to there being so very few people left alive on the planet, never mind ones with UHF-band radios. Basically, it had to be Britain. It had to be CentCom. They were the only ones –
anywhere
– who might have the wherewithal to come rescue him. They still had a military. They had planes and pilots and soldiers. And they certainly had the incentive to help him. Because it wasn’t just Aliyev trapped here.

It was the secret weapon for killing all the dead.

But that was only if Aliyev could convince them of… well, of anything. His whole story was so batshit crazy, he didn’t believe it himself half the time.

But, anyway, that was too much to agonize about right now. One impossible task at a time. Next was… which frequency to use. Luckily, he had spent so much time futzing with his radio at home, eavesdropping on their forlorn military broadcasts, that he knew their frequencies by heart – including the long-range ones they used for units deployed overseas.

And then, with a crash of despair, he remembered what kind of channel those were again: military ones. Which meant they were encrypted. Now, he had long ago cracked CentCom’s encryption key, using nothing more than off-the-shelf cracking tools. And they had stopped updating their encryption protocols entirely about six months into the shit coming down. So Aliyev already had their encryption key. The only trouble was…

He didn’t fucking have their encryption key!

His damned radio, back in his dacha, had the encryption key.

His dacha – the one that was gone, burned to the ground, nothing but smoldering embers, plus coated with a hundred über-deadly pathogens, the former contents of his Fridge of Death, and now trod upon by an army of dead Mongols.

He’d even had it scribbled on a scrap of paper, which he’d taped to the front of his radio set the day he entered it – and never bothered to take down again.

Why, oh why, the fuck didn’t I think to grab that scrap of paper on my way out?
But, agonizing and tantalizing as it was, this was another question with an easy answer: because he had been running for his life, and had only barely escaped, with less than seconds to spare. Hell, there’d been any number of things he desperately regretted not being able to grab on his way out. (At the top of that list: forty boxes of shotgun shells.)

And, hell, if he was honest with himself, there was no way it would have occurred to him at the time, even if he’d had a few more seconds to think about it.

And so, just like that, there he was – totally fucked again.

But one thing about Aliyev was that his mind was restless – even when there was no point to its activity.
Especially then
, he thought with a mental slap to the back of his own head. Nonetheless, his mind ranged on.

Could I even have used the code if I had it?

He started digging in and around the radio. Sure enough, there it was, in a tiny drawer underneath the radio set: a keyloader – or, in Motorola-speak, a “KVL” for “Key Variable Loader”. He had one almost like it at home. It was a simple handset, like a point-of-sale terminal a waiter might bring you, with an LCD screen and a ten-digit keypad. It had a special cable that attached to an interface port on the radio. Once it was plugged in, it allowed the user to enter encryption keys into the radio, typing them in by hand.

Aliyev slumped down in the radio operator’s seat. He looked ruefully up at the hatch above him, upon which the dead soldiers – hell, for all he knew, they were the original owners and operators of this vehicle – continued to energetically bang and slap, without evident boredom or fatigue.

Now, squinting up into the green glow reflected off the dull steel of the hatch, his restless brain had another thought – one perhaps not so idle as it seemed.

That encryption key… it was only twenty two-digit numbers…
And it had been taped to that radio for many months – including many long afternoons he had spent staring at it while listening to the ridiculous survivor broadcasts from London. His mind often wandering, he had idly read it over and over, probably hundreds of times. Now, he almost felt he could call it up in his mind’s eye.

Was it… possible he could
remember the whole thing?
Maybe it was actually burned into his visual cortex, on some deep level. And, once again, he had the rest of his life for the project. And if there were any other remote chance of him getting out of this tank alive, it wasn’t occurring to him at the moment.

He got out a small pad of paper and a pen from his bag.

And he started transcribing from memory.

* * *

Two hours later he had his answer:
No – no, there isn’t any way I can remember twenty fucking two-digit numbers just from having stared at them a lot
.

Even if he had any high degree of confidence in any of the dozens of versions he tried to scribble down, there was no way he could test them. If he entered one in the radio, and tried to broadcast, it would go out on the air. But if it was incorrect, anyone listening on the other end – this was assuming that by some miracle the signal even carried that far – would hear only an awful shrieking noise. And, even if for some unimaginable reason they responded, all Aliyev would hear would be shrieking in response.

And with the likely amount of charge left in that radio battery, he’d probably get about two chances at this before it died.

And, not long after that, he would die right along with it.

Basically, he’d blown it. He was done for. It turned out there was one absolutely critical thing he needed from the Temple of the Lone Apocalypse Survivor he had built in the mountains at the very ass-end of the Earth. And he had failed to bring it with him. He’d just had absolutely no way to predict that he’d soon be stranded in the middle of Red Square, holed up in a lemon of a tank and surrounded by the Dead Army, his only hope of survival being to make a radio call to the only people who might, theoretically, be able to come and rescue him.

It was more evidence, if any were needed, that it only took one oversight, one tiny misjudgment, to take you out of this game entirely. And that was him now. He was out. He’d almost made it. But he was done for. And this was going to be how he ended.

He let his hands fall into his lap.

Where he felt the familiar shape of his phone in his front pocket. Even now, two years later, he still felt, very slightly, the urge to pull it out – to check for messages, check for a signal. Ha. What a ludicrous impulse to still have. He no longer knew a single person in the world who might send him a message. And there were no signals anymore – at least not when he got out of range of Wi-Fi at the dacha.

God, he never should have left there.

Goddamnit – this was the single stupidest idea I’ve ever had… and I’ve had a few.
Fly to London? He’d have had as much success trying to fly to the sun. And the result would have been much the same.

And thinking about his dacha now just made his heart ache all the more: his beautifully appointed, safe, secure, comfy villa – luxurious, even, the place that had been his home. It was lonely, the neighborhood was a shithole – but it had been his refuge for two years, and it had kept him alive. And he would give anything to be back there right now. Even just to see it one more time…

His hand still resting on the phone, he remembered he’d have pictures of the dacha on it. Mainly photos of his dead test subjects, but there’d be a few other random ones from around the property. He pulled it out, to look upon all he had lost, just one more time, to simultaneously lacerate and comfort himself, in what were sure to be his last hours on this Earth…

He thumbed the power button, which brought up the home screen – screen lock went out the window when there were no more muggers, identity thieves, or living people of any sort – and tapped to open his photos. And the very first one that came up was one he had taken only yesterday – of that crazy-ass snowstorm that had been chucking it down outside, a nearly complete whiteout.

He’d taken the shot through his living room window.

He peered down at the photo, his eye moving from the external snowscape… down to the ledge of the bay windows… upon which perched his radio set. And in the top right corner of the radio set was a blurry little white square.

Not even daring to hope, having no idea what the camera resolution was set at, Aliyev tremblingly two-finger zoomed in on that corner. It swelled and resolved… and there it was – the little paper scrap with the encryption key handwritten on it.

And it was just barely legible.

Well – fuck me.

“Yeah!” Oleg Aliyev shouted aloud, pumping his fist in the green darkness. “Yeah! Ha, bizzles – I’m not going to die here!

“
YEAH!
”

* * *

Okay, maybe he was going to die here. Actually, he probably still was. He figured a tank radio was intended for pretty long range, and he guessed it had a big-ass antenna on top, though he hadn’t actually seen it. And London wasn’t
that
far from Moscow. Still, realistically, he knew he was still probably going to die here.

Though now he at least had some kind of a chance, the comfort of a dwarfy hope.

But it was nearly immediately punctured.

His heart surged in his chest when he got, very quickly, a response to his hail. It was staticky, and the volume went up and down, but it was comprehensible. It said:

“CentCom HQ. State your call sign – or branch, unit, and rank.”

“Listen. Hello. I haven’t got any of those. But it’s vitally important that you connect me with someone – a senior milit—”

“Please state your call sign – or branch, unit, and rank.”

The person on the other end sounded frazzled, busier than hell – and distinctly displeased to hear from Aliyev.

He tried to control both his breathing and his tone of voice. “As I say, I haven’t got a call sign. But I’ve got something you need, something absolutely critica—”

“This is a secure military channel. How did you get the encryption protocols for this channel?”

“Not important. Listen, I don’t have much time. The battery on this thing is going to die. So you
have
to li—”

“Stay off of this channel and military comms. Or there will be consequences.”

“Please, no, just listen to me for one minute! Hello? Hello!”

They’d hung up on him. He didn’t even bother powering down the radio again. There was no point.

He was done for. Absolutely hosed.

But then, pondering the matter in glum silence, Aliyev realized there actually was one other person on Earth whom he knew – and could, just maybe, try to call. It was completely crazy, but there was one guy. Aliyev had heard him mentioned by name, along with his purported vaccine, when eavesdropping on CentCom’s long-range frequencies – and it was the mention of him that had started him on this whole insane misadventure in the first place.

And Aliyev knew the man personally.

How Green Was My Ferret

JFK - Bridge

“No, no, no,” the ensign at the radio station a few feet in front of Commander Abrams said. “You can
not
just talk to Dr. Park. You need to clear this channel. CVN-79 out.”

Commander Abrams watched him put down the handset, then mutter to the man at the station next to him, “Fucking survivors, man.”

“If he was a survivor, how’d he get on an encrypted military channel?”

“…That’s actually a pretty good question. He also knew our hull number.”

“Ensign Jones,” Abrams said crisply.

“Sir,” the ensign replied, twisting at the waist.

“What I’d really like to know is…
how did he know Dr. Park’s name
?”

“Yes, sir. That’s not a bad question, either.”

Abrams picked up his own phone handset. And dialed the hospital lab.

* * *

“Who did this guy say he was?” Dr. Park asked, rushing onto the bridge, even before reaching the captain’s station.

Abrams gestured down at the ensign on the radios, who looked up and answered, “He claimed to be a bioscientist, from Uzbekistan or somewhere – and he was babbling something about having some designer disease. Said it would kill all the dead. He just sounded like a crazy person.”

Park’s mouth went for his shoes, and just hung there for a good two seconds. When it closed again, his face was a mask of determination. “You’ve got to get him back on the line –
right now
.”

The ensign looked up at Abrams, who nodded his assent. So he picked up the handset, tapped his touchscreen, checked the frequency, then put the phone on speaker. Finally, he spoke crisply into the open air: “Unknown station, this is CVN-79, are you still receiving on this channel, over?”

“Yes, yes! For God’s sake, I’m here. But I don’t have much time.”