The Flood (7 page)

The Sikh was still smiling and affable.

But he no longer took his eye off his prisoner, even for a second.

With a little luck and God’s grace
, he thought,
the team will be back in an hour, and we’ll be back on our way – mission complete.

He hadn’t been around long enough to know nothing ever went that well.

* * *

“Sun’s out, guns out, motherfuckers.”

Reyes looked across at Brady, who was justly and famously proud of his Greek-god-like physique. “Dude, you’re not going to strip your shirt off, are you?” Admittedly, the sun was still beating down, even as it was heading for the horizon. The day was bleeding away, but was still hotter than hell.

“Nah.” Keeping his right hand on the pistol grip of his replacement M4, with his left Brady pulled out his replacement M9 pistol, then stuck his head in the open door of a squat one-story building, pistol leading, and did a quick one-man clearing operation. He emerged shaking his head:
Nothing
.

Fick was tempted to shake his own head in turn. But they still had a job to do. That didn’t change because it wasn’t easy or quick. “Keep moving,” he said.

They were inside the town proper now, such as it was, but staying out near the outskirts. While Alpha penetrated toward the city center, and the hospital, they were keeping a safer distance, traversing the perimeter. But it was much the same at the edges as elsewhere – another dusty, underdeveloped, low-rising town, like Berbera, but ten times as big. It had a lot of squat two- and three-story structures, tan or cream in color, many with flaking red tiles on the roofs. The dirt-paved streets were wide, but didn’t seem that way, due to being choked with cars, mostly eaten bodies, random crap and debris, and thousands of shell casings – almost all 7.62, the AK having been wildly popular here as everywhere else in the developing world.

Another post-Apocalyptic shithole
, Fick thought.
And almost certainly a world-class shithole even before the Apocalypse…

The Marines stepped over and around all the crap in the road, mostly keeping their distance from the buildings on either side to avoid getting jumped. It was an odd tension – two years of zombie-fighting had trained them to dodge the dead when they could, and kill them instantly when they couldn’t.

This time – the zombie
was
the mission.

Fick turned to their six just to check on Graybeard, who as usual was pulling rear security – and then froze as he saw a dark flash of movement in the trees, between two of the buildings behind them.

Just a dark blur, and then it was gone.

And Fick instantly flashed back to the terrible dream he’d had in that rattling bomber, flying back from the overrun airfield on Beaver Island. He had dreamt the bomber had crashed in a forest – one that was filled with flying Foxtrots, and Zulus that
carried you off
. And that whole nightmare dreamscape had been infested with non-stop blurs and dark flashes between the trees. He could still see them as vivid as life.

And now here he was seeing one that actually
was
in life.

Or so he assumed. Fick shook his head once, just to be sure he wasn’t still asleep. Maybe everything since Beaver Island had been one long, bad, epic dream. If so, it was a damned vivid one. He could see the dust puffing up under their boots, feel the sweat beading and trickling down his neck, and smell the rotted wood and flesh and ruin of the abandoned city.

Which meant the blur he just saw had to have been real. Didn’t it?

And at the speed it had moved, it could have been a runner – but the impression it left on Fick was that it was too small. Another fucking zombie animal? Or just an animal?

Fick jumped an inch as a hand landed on his shoulder.

It was Reyes. “You see something, skipper?”

Fick blinked and shook his head again. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t like it.”

Reyes nodded. “That makes you and me and everyone we know, brother.”

The two of them turned and set off again. Fick spared a last look over his shoulder at Graybeard, still bringing up the rear. There at least was one Marine he didn’t have to worry about.

The unkillable grand old man of MARSOC.

Three Dark Nights

JKF - Hospital Lab

After Wesley’s briefing, in which she had sat silent and just listened, Sarah Cameron climbed back up to 01 Deck and her own cabin, to gear up for the mission. She had been issued NSF uniform. But on this one, when she was going to be operational – and when it really counted – she preferred to rely on the clothing and gear she knew and trusted, and that had gotten her through two years of ZA alive.

Stepping into the dim and silent cabin she shared with Handon, she methodically found her synthetic technical top and hiking pants, changed out her hiking socks, and finally strapped her gun belt back on. She pulled the handgun from its drop-leg holster, checked the chamber, then dropped the mag and checked that. She reseated both the mag and the weapon.

Then she let herself drop down onto the bed, just to rest for a minute – and quickly found herself thinking about what she’d been determined not to. She remembered her last moments in there with Handon.

And how badly they had left things.

She wasn’t sure why she’d done what she did – flirting with Henno right in front of him, then getting caught alone with him in his cabin. And her intimacy with Homer, from their time together fighting through North America, probably fell into that category, too. Was she willfully pissing away all of her miraculous good fortune – in landing here, in surviving, and most of all in finding Handon? Much worse, she had clearly been angering him – and, a whole hell of a lot worse than that,
distracting
him, only hours before his mission was to step off.

It was unforgivable, really.

She had gone into all this swearing not to become the Yoko Ono of Alpha Team. And now it seemed that’s exactly what she was doing – fanning the flames of drama everywhere she went. And she honestly wasn’t sure why. She only knew that at some point she was going to have to try to make it right – to earn Handon’s forgiveness, and to forgive herself. To atone.

She looked over at her old Mini-14 rifle propped in the corner. She did know the importance of using weapons and gear you’re familiar with. But she also thought maybe that weapon’s day had come and gone.

More firepower was going to be required on this one.

Exiting the stateroom, she headed off toward the NSF ops room and its armory. But on the way, she had a better idea, and veered off.

Toward the MARSOC team room.

* * *

Having snuck away from CIC for a few moments of work on other stuff, Dr. Simon Park was back in his lab. And lately it seemed he was trying to do everything, and keep it together, all at once. Right up until the minute that NSF briefing started he’d been trying to find decent pictures of what a DNA sequencer looked like –
Damn you, no Google Image Search
– ultimately coming up with one crappy photo, one crappy sketch from memory, and a list of brand names and model numbers.

That was behind him now, but little else was. In addition to the unspeakable pressure of having to complete his world-saving vaccine, he also had to worry about supporting not only the shore mission to retrieve Patient Zero – but also this new shore mission to get him the DNA sequencer he also needed.

Which was a lot of damned shore missions.

He looked up from his laptop to blankly regard Professor Close – the Oxford biosciences guru who had been flown over from Britain and survived the assassination attempt on the flight deck – and who had once again come over to give Park shit about abandoning the vaccine work for other tasks, and leaving him to do it on his own. Park just nodded, while listening to a phone ring and ring in the background. Finally one of the hospital orderlies came in, answered it, and interrupted Close’s harangue.

“CIC for you, Doc.” He put the phone on the counter and left.

Park made a
hang on
gesture to Close, then picked up the handset. He dully listened as an ops officer demanded to know how soon he was going to get his ass back up to CIC to be on station and available to consult with Team Cadaver on what was, and what was not, an early-stage victim.

By the time Park hung up, Close had disappeared somewhere, blessedly leaving him alone again. He looked back over to his lab stool… but then just slumped down to the floor where he was, his back up against the wall. He touched the side of his waist where the half-dozen holes, made by those shotgun pellets in their close call belowdecks, had been bothering him all day. And, staring at his boots, he exhaled heavily, and tried to just breathe for a minute.

Shit was coming at him fast and thick.

And it wasn’t just the vaccine work now – that was the least acute source of pressure and stress. Because he was painfully aware that he had talked almost everyone around him into undertaking two extremely perilous shore missions, and all of it on his behalf. And there were a lot of very real fleshy people who were, or soon would be, hanging their asses out in the wind. And who might not be coming back – ever. All because he had insisted it was vital that they do so.

So, in the end, whatever befell those people… was all on him.

In a way, this was worse than being responsible for the salvation of fifty million. That was too abstract. But these were real individuals, many of them friends – and all men and women he had looked in the face. And some of whom had already saved his life, in some cases more than once.

Then again, he truly believed this couldn’t be done any differently. The vaccine simply couldn’t be finalized without the sample from Patient Zero. And it was Park himself who had fucked up by not telling the Brits to put a DNA sequencer on the plane they were already flying down to them – and which fuck-up might result in a two-to-four-day delay in producing that vaccine.

Imagine if those two days cost us everything
, Park thought.
Everything that’s left in this whole denuded crapsack world…

Now, riding herd on all of this was proving cognitively taxing – worse even than his hardest days in the lab. He knew he could make a huge difference, on multiple fronts. He just didn’t know if he was strong or capable enough to get it all done.

But just as he started to feel sorry for himself, overwhelmed and overloaded… he thought of the operators of Alpha and MARSOC out there in darkest Africa, out on the ground alone – probably fighting for their lives, and for their mission, and for the lives of everyone, all while surrounded by millions of dead.

And he knew without even having to think about it that those men and one woman would do whatever was required to complete their taskings and get the job done. Which kind of put into perspective the fact that all he had to do was organize a few damned things in the safety and comfort of his lab.

I fucked up
, he thought, taking a deep breath.
And now I have to make it right.

He knew the operators sometimes fucked up, too. But what distinguished them was that they assessed the fuck-up, learned from it, and corrected it for next time. It was about learning, every time out, and correcting course. And it was usually about digging down – just one more damned time.

With renewed energy of body and spirit, Park climbed to his feet.

And he got back to work.

* * *

Andrew Wesley nervously checked his wristwatch for the fifth time in five minutes. His other hand held a burning cigarette and was visibly shaking. He had a few minutes on his own, and had gone out to the deserted fantail deck to indulge in an unaccustomed cigarette. Now he stood there smoking, leaning against the railing, monitoring the ocean, and periodically flicking ashes out into it.

He was trying, with very little success, to steady his nerves.

He shook his head and took a deep drag. Since the start of this whole adventure, he seemed to have quit smoking without quite realizing it.
It’s funny what you don’t miss when you’re running for your life
, he thought. But then a few dozen cartons of Stuyvesants had appeared with the other supplies from South Africa. And a pack had made its way into his hands.

He seemed to have friends in a variety of places for some reason these days.

After the endless run across the Virginia naval base, it had occurred to him that he ought to quit – officially. Especially if he was going to be out on the ground, tear-arseing away from packs of runners, and not to mention being responsible for other people’s lives. But it was too late now. This new mission had come up so quickly.

And one cigarette more or less wasn’t going to matter.

He had one time seen one of the Marines, Lance Corporal Burris, smoking out here. Overcoming his English reticence about asking personal questions of strangers, he had said to the young warrior: “I’ve never understood how someone in the military, in the infantry, could smoke. I mean, if your life might actually depend on your cardio, wouldn’t you be more careful about it?”

Burris had squinted while taking a deep drag, then flicked the butt over the side. “Let me tell you something. If you get in a situation where your life depends on your cardio, you
will
run. I don’t care if you’re on four packs a day.”

Wesley laughed to remember that now.

What I’d really kill for
, he thought, dully regarding the burning ember, and the endless ocean stretching out behind it,
is a pint of beer
. Technically, the carrier was dry. But the ZA was a damned tough thing to get through sober, and he’d heard plenty of rumors of stashes of booze, though never seen any. No, that blessed pint he so fancied would probably have to wait until his return to England.

If
he returned – and whatever the chances were of him making it that far.