ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (4 page)

“So a horse walks into a bar, and the bartender says—”

“‘Why the long face?’” Pred had heard that one before. He turned to the concerned-looking woman beside him. She was still curled around her rifle, facing out into the bush, all business. But Pred could also feel the human compassion and concern coming off her.

Fuck it
, he thought. Life was very short, and not getting any longer these days. He shrugged, exhaled, and looked back out at the trees before speaking. “I guess lately I’m having trouble caring whether I make it though this or not. Like I’m only really hanging on for the mission. And for my teammates.”

Before she could figure out what to say to this, he went on.

“Juice told me something not long ago.” Kate had already worked out that Juice was Predator’s battle buddy. The body language, the way they stayed close and looked at each other before moving or speaking. “He said I just have to break through.”

“Break through what?”

“Through death – to the other side. He said life waits for me there. And that it’s very beautiful.”

“Your friend sounds like a lovely man.”

“He is. But he’d also just had a near-death experience.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”

Pred smiled sadly. “No. I guess it doesn’t. But he can’t lead me to this place he talks about – and I can’t seem to find my own way. Somehow, death never does take me, no matter the odds, or the risks I take. But I still can’t see the other side. And I can’t stop thinking about everything I’ve lost.”

Kate understood that. Everyone had lost so much. That she still had some of her team, which was also her home, was nothing short of a miracle. And it was all that really got her through. She could now see tears glistening in Pred’s eyes, and she took a guess.

“You lost your wife?”

He nodded, seeming not quite able to speak. But he mastered himself and said, “I should have been with her. Not off on my twenty-sixth deployment. I should have been home. I could have done something. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t. And I can’t stop feeling one inch tall because of it.”

Kate saw the irony, but there was nothing funny about it.

She took her hand off her rifle and put it on the big man’s shoulder. “Hey, my team captain, Brandon, as well as our senior Bravo, Kwan, and our junior engineer sergeant, Todd, all died rescuing my damsel ass from the Stronghold. And all because I wasn’t smart enough to keep from being pulled out from under a gun truck, kicking and screaming like the little girl in
Aliens
. So believe me when I tell you: you are not, by a long shot, the most pathetic or guilt-ridden person in this sangar.”

Pred turned his head and looked at her. She got it. He could see that. And it actually did help, somehow.

Looking back in time now, he remembered thinking he had put his grief aside, after his unholy rampage on the flight deck in the Battle of the
JFK
– and the miracle of him coming out alive, or of anyone coming out of that alive. But now he realized: that was all he’d done – shove the grief off to one side. He hadn’t dealt with it, never mind worked through it properly, which might be the work of years. He hadn’t even really unpacked it.

And it was not only still there waiting for him. It was growing. And maybe shoving aside whatever vulnerability, whatever humanity, whatever will to live was left inside of him. Until maybe all that would be left was his raw physical strength. And his sense of duty.

And he didn’t know if those were enough.

* * *

“There’s an issue we have to deal with first,” Handon said, looking like he wasn’t thrilled about bringing this up. Almost unconsciously, he put his hand to the bandage on his neck.

Jake’s brow furrowed, as did those of the others.

“It wasn’t a dead human,” Handon hastened to say.

Jake relaxed slightly. “Zombie critters.”

“Yeah,” Handon said.

Zack jumped in. “What kind?”

“Both Pred and I got small chunks taken out of us by bats.”

Now Zack relaxed. Jake picked up again. “We started seeing the first ones, the infected hyraxes, about four months ago. The bats we haven’t seen ourselves – but al-Shabaab have.”

“We monitor their radio traffic,” Baxter said. “They’ve had guys bitten by bats. None of them turned. So you’re probably okay.”

Handon’s eye darted to the pouch on his belt with the serum in it. He wouldn’t have to explain about that now, which saved time. More importantly, he wouldn’t have to keep giving himself and Predator injections. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t need the serum at some point. They were far from out of this.

Zack spoke up. “The baboon troops on the other hand…”

Handon’s look said they had seen them, too.

Jake picked up the topic. “Mean bastards. Vicious fighters. And they’re
all
fast ones.”

“Are they infectious, though?” Homer asked. All of Alpha had gotten way too close to an awful lot of them in Hargeisa, though no one had been bitten – yet.

“We don’t know,” Zack said. “As far as we know, everyone who’s been bitten… has also been torn into small pieces.”

Handon slightly wondered why the virus had started in on the animal kingdom. Maybe it ran out of humans. Maybe it got hungry, or greedy.

Probably it didn’t matter.

* * *

Kate took her hand off Predator’s arm and returned it to her rifle. Then she put her head down, peering through her scope.

Pred perked up. “Got something?”

She didn’t answer right away, but finally pulled her eye away. “No. I don’t think so.” She took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “This part of Somalia was always sparsely populated. So with no undead population now…”

“You’ve still got forest creatures,” Pred said. When the dead couldn’t find any other living people, they were known to feast on whatever they could get their claws on – anything that ran, slithered, or scampered.

“Yes,” Kate said.

“I bet that’s nice.”

“Nice – except for the forest noises. And never getting out of condition yellow.”

Pred snorted. “I haven’t been out of condition yellow since the nineties.”

Kate smiled. “True. True.”

But then Pred paused and looked up at the sky, his own smile melting away. “Suppose we do manage to save the world? How am I supposed to live in it? Because she won’t be there.”

Kate turned to look at him again. “I mentioned Todd.”

“Your junior Charlie,” Pred said, meaning 18C Engineer Sergeant.

“Yes. He and I were close. And he was an amazing guy – super-smart, outrageous skills, great heart.”

Pred nodded. He sounded like a lot of young guys in special operations. They were all amazing kids – too many of whom had died, in the last war, and in this one.

“When we were trying to get our gun truck running again, Baxter and I tag-teamed on the repairs. We didn’t really have the skills. So I just channeled Todd, who was an ace vehicle mechanic on top of everything else. Every time we got stuck, I just asked myself, WWTD? The answer was always the same: He’d make it work.”

Pred smiled. “So a bit of a Jesus figure.”

“More than you know. In the end, he spent his life saving ours. Without a second’s hesitation. Only after he was gone did I realize how much I’d relied on him. It was like losing a limb. I constantly wanted to give up, to chuck it in. It was all too hard without him – and any world that could chew up and swallow a person like that… well, it didn’t seem much like a world worth living in.”

“So how did you keep going?”

Kate shrugged. “I thought about what he would have done if the roles were reversed. Sure, he would have grieved for me. And he would have hated it. But he also would have found a way to pull himself back. And he would have Charlie Miked – because he still had a job to do, and had teammates depending on him to do it. And, eventually, I think, he even would have found joy again.”

Pred looked off into the forest. “It’s out there just beyond sorrow, Juice says. But I can’t see it. All I can see is the mission. It’s the one thing I’ve been hanging onto. Maybe it’s good that it never seems to end.”

Kate heaved a heavy sigh. “The fact that Todd is gone forever – that so many of our brothers are – is bullshit. And nothing’s going to change that. But we can learn to live with it. Maybe we have to.”

Pred looked over at her again. “Maybe so.”

“What was her name?”

“Cali. Her name was Cali.” Pred exhaled. “I couldn’t save her. But maybe I can still help save somebody else’s Cali.”

Kate smiled. “Absolutely – we totally can. Every Cali that’s left.” She put out her hand.

Predator took it in his – disappearing it, as usual.

If he could make a new friend, and teammate, here in the post-Apocalypse, out in the bush of Somalia… well, maybe that was something he could build on. To find a way back.

Or at least through.

Hard Rain

Camp Davis

“Okay,” Handon said crisply, already having spent more time than he cared to on anything but plans to complete their mission. “Your intel says there’s an early-stage victim in the basement of this Islamist fortress.”

Zack shook his head. “No. Not an early-stage victim. The
literal
Patient Zero. The first human victim of the plague.”

Handon eyed him across the shimmering air over the fire. “What’s the source of your intel?”

“An informer in al-Shabaab, originally. Later, I saw it firsthand.”

“Elaborate.”

“I was senior officer at the Agency safehouse in Hargeisa.”

Handon’s eyes lit with recognition. “We were in your safehouse. It kind of burned down.”

“So they tell me. I was kind of knocked unconscious when it was being rocketed, and caught fire.”

“We also read your report.”

This bit seemed to surprise Zack.

Handon looked at Juice. “Getting data off burnt-up computers is part of that man’s job.” Juice smiled and waved at Zack.

“Fair enough,” Zack said. “But I was never able to update that report, for reasons that might be imagined. Never updated it with what I learned later.”

He paused to scan faces around the circle. “It was an al-Shabaab bio-terror attack, that much you’ll have read – a chimera virus, made of smallpox and myelin toxin. But what I only found out later was they’d been testing it on baboons out in the bush. And a pack of rabid dogs attacked this outpost – tore up the baboon, and later tore up the al-Shabaab guy watching it. He was next seen in a nearby village – eating the villagers. Other al-Shabaab guys restrained him and took him home.”

Henno shook his head. “Christ. So that’s how it all started. You’re sure he was the very first?”

Zack nodded. “With ninety-nine percent certainty.”

Handon said, “How do you know it’s in this basement?”

“Again, because I saw it.” Zack nodded at Baxter. “We both lived there, barely fifty feet from the thing, for months.”

“Wait a second,” Henno said. “Why were you living with al-Shabaab?”

Zack shrugged. “Not a lot of safe havens going at the time of the fall. Strange bedfellows. We finally escaped to join Triple Nickel. Godane was going to kill us if we stayed.”

“Sheik Ali Rage Godane?” Handon asked.

“Yeah,” Zack said. His expression said to Handon that he actually knew the man – and that he was a profoundly unpleasant piece of work.

“How long ago? How recent is your intel?”

“Six months,” Zack said. “But you have to understand how Godane felt about P-Zero. He believed the Apocalypse was God clearing the Earth of unbelievers – so Godane could lead the faithful in rebuilding the Caliphate.”

Henno grunted. “More God-botherers.”

“He also believed he was God’s instrument. Rather, he knew he was responsible for the plague – but thought this outrageous fuck-up on his part was some kind of badge of honor. He also believed the first dead man was a talisman – the source of his power. It made him unkillable. And made his control of al-Shabaab unshakeable.”

Handon said, “I think murdering all his rivals had more to do with that.” Unlike Juice, he hadn’t spent years fighting al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa. But he knew the lay of the land.

Zack nodded. “You’re probably right. But it doesn’t matter what we think. Because Patient Zero was sacred to Godane. In his mind, it allowed him to keep control of his minions – so he kept tight control over it. Though it’s also worth noting that Godane’s dead now.”

Jake looked up and said, “We don’t know that.”

“What makes you think he’s dead?” Handon asked.

“Because I shot him,” Zack said. “With a minigun.” Suddenly, to the Alpha guys, Zack started looking a little less analyst and a little more operator. “But whether he’s alive or not, whoever’s still in charge in there, will be keeping P-Zero alive and well, and under tight control. Believe me.”

With a slightly sinking feeling, Handon realized he had no choice but to believe this. Because it was the only game in town. “Okay. So that brings us up to date. But the state of play now is—”

Jake picked up. “State of play is that the whole place is still heavily armed and fortified. Twenty-foot walls, guard towers, emplaced machine guns. Probably two hundred defenders left alive inside – with a shitload of ammo and explosives.”

“But also surrounded by—”

“Yeah – about thirty hectares of heaving dead. Including a lot of these new crazy-ass fast ones.”

Handon said, “And it’s been like this for the last six months – since that herd came through?”

“Affirmative.”

Henno cocked his head. “If they’re hemmed in that thick, how have two hundred of ’em survived this long?”

“Mad gardening skills.” The others turned to look at Baxter, who had been keeping his own counsel, and now still kept a poker face. “Plus significant stores of long-life food, scavenged before they got trapped. And several deep groundwater wells they dug along the way.”

“Okay, but how much longer could they possibly last?” Homer asked. “They’ve got to be running low on supplies.”

Handon waved this off. “That doesn’t help us. If they’re starved out a year from now, or a week from now, it’s still too late.”