Arisen : Nemesis (18 page)

Those words still rang in his ears like they’d been spoken yesterday – even though the badass Agency operator and former SEAL was long gone. He had spent his life keeping Baxter and Zack alive, and getting them out of the gravity well of ground zero of the fall of man.

They had gotten out, and they had found a sanctuary from the Apocalypse. For a while, they’d even thought they’d found a home – when the universal onslaught of the dead had made the al-Shabaab fighters and the CIA analysts feel like brothers, working together against a common threat. Godane had even given them their weapons back, after a couple of weeks of pitching in and good behavior.

But it didn’t last. The immediate peril passed – or at least become the new normal – and Godane’s natural paranoia kicked back in. After that, Zack and Baxter went from valued if odd members of the community, back down to vanquished slave labor. Maybe serfs, on a good day.

But it was definitely a seller’s market for sanctuary, so there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot either of them could do about it.

There had been many dark hours in the months since then, when it was only the memory of Dugan’s wise and super-inspiring words that had given Baxter the strength to get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other. But he had. And he had to continue to be the strong one now. For Zack – who had lost that ability.

The two of them were all they had now.

* * *

He was just getting the engine cowling bolted back down when Baxter realized he wasn’t alone. There was electric light in there, but it was feeble and flickering. And the man who had joined him was notorious for stealth – usually employed in the service of violence.

It was al-Sîf.
The Sword
.

And, as always, he was wearing his namesake weapon hanging from his belt. Huge bare arms protruded outside his tactical vest, which he wore with no shirt underneath. His taut skin was so black it was nearly purple – but, more strikingly, it sat atop pure muscle. The man had almost no subcutaneous body fat. He was the Emir’s chief lieutenant, which gave him extremely high status around the Stronghold. And he carried himself that way.

Now, he was just standing with his huge arms crossed, watching Baxter work – and how long he’d been there was unclear.

After Baxter saw him, al-Sîf actually smiled, revealing several gold teeth. “How do you know how to do this?” he asked, in accented but regal English, gesturing perhaps at the UAV in general, perhaps at the engine repair he’d just finished.

Baxter shrugged. “It’s just an internal combustion engine. I downloaded the specs and users guides before the Internet went down. I can’t really do the aeronautics or structural stuff. Then again, if this thing crashes, nobody dies – unless they have the bad luck to be standing underneath it when it comes down. But in that case, unless it’s us, they’d be dead already.”

Al-Sîf regarded him. “You are a very strange white man,” he said.

Baxter shrugged again.
Tell me something I don’t know.

Al-Sîf dug around his gum line over a gold tooth with a fingernail. “But also you must remember, if this plane crashes, it will definitely kill someone.”

“Really? Who?”

“You, my friend. You.”

Baxter’s smile faded. He knew Godane valued the Predator above all things. It was only because Zack and Baxter had come bearing it that they’d been let into the Stronghold in the first place. And he was pretty sure it was only the Predator, and Baxter’s skills flying it, that kept them alive day to day.

His smile came back a little when al-Sîf clapped him on the shoulder. He knew Godane’s enforcer had something of a soft spot for him – like Baxter was his pet Westerner. And while probably twice as deadly as the Emir, certainly in close combat – where he was rumored to have killed dozens of live men and hundreds of dead ones – al-Sîf was merely half as scary as the al-Shabaab chief. While al-Sîf was for the most part easygoing, rational, and even had a sense of humor, Godane was a nasty piece of work – mean-spirited, officious, petty, ego-driven.

And he wielded power absolutely.

“Time to close up shop now,” al-Sîf said. “The Emir will see you.”

Baxter sagged. He figured that was it – another summons. It was the most obvious explanation for al-Sîf’s presence here.

He locked up the hangar shed behind him.

And began the long walk back – to the opposite of freedom.

The Emir

The Stronghold

The large room where Godane held court, and did much of the business of running his empire, was the deepest spot in the whole underground complex. He also had – Baxter knew, though he was by no means supposed to know this – a hidden tunnel that led from the environs of his chamber, underneath the perimeter wall, and out into the bush, emerging in a hidden spot some unknown distance from the complex.

Baxter assumed this was so the Emir could escape if the Stronghold were overrun, or if he was facing some kind of palace coup inside. He was a truly paranoid bastard and it was like he had collected all the top survival and oppression tricks of all the meanest and longest-ruling despots in world history.

Well, he may be paranoid
, Baxter thought, as the gigantic front gate of the Stronghold opened to admit him and his chaperone.
But, then again, he is still alive.
And that was a lot more than could be said of Saddam, Kim Jong-un, Putin…

Baxter willed his night vision to come online as they threaded through the shadowy structures inside the sprawling courtyard. They had electric power for lights – but they never used them outdoors, and never had. Not once since Baxter and Zack had arrived, a few days after the fall – and after their flight from Djibouti and what was originally supposed to be their place of safety: Camp Lemonnier.

Instead, they had arrived there just in time to see the last living people hauling ass out of it. And by that point they’d also lost both members of their security detachment – Dugan and his large colleague Maximum Bob.

With their situation dire, and odds of survival looking longer by the minute, Zack had developed the desperate and probably insane, or maybe insanely brilliant, idea to take them here, to the al-Shabaab Stronghold. He had guessed it was the one place so hidden, so fortified, and so remote that it might still stand when all else fell.

Zack had further guessed that the Emir – more commonly known as Sheik Ali Rage Godane, leader of al-Shabaab – could be counted on to rule with an iron fist. And to be one of the few guys in charge anywhere sure to have the resolve, not to mention ruthlessness, to kill anybody who remotely looked infected, rather than let them back inside his walls.

It turned out this was exactly what Godane had done. And it worked. The Stronghold still stood. Alone, as far as Zack and Baxter knew, in all of what used to be human civilization.

Then again, it was as if the place had been designed perfectly for this in advance. They’d always practiced fascist noise and light discipline. They’d had to, to keep from being spotted – and, about five minutes later, bombed into mulch – by overflying American jets, gunships, armed drones, heavy bombers…

Originally, most of the complex had been underground, with everything above the surface heavily camouflaged. They’d now let some of that slide.

No one was looking from above anymore.

But for years they’d had to worry about infrared optics and forward-looking infrared radar (FLIR), and all-seeing ISR platforms, and long-range audio-capture devices, plus infiltrating Tier-1 operators with advanced four-barrel night-vision goggles, and not to mention all the overflying keyhole satellites.

And it was now the same skills developed to dodge all of that, which kept them from drawing the dead.

Baxter’s eyes were just starting to adjust to the darkness – though somehow he could always feel the gun barrels trained on him from up on the walls – as al-Sîf opened a heavy wooden interior door and began to walk him down.

All the way to the bottom of the well.

* * *

“So. You’ve found us some living people,
kaffir
.”

Baxter kept his expression neutral.
Kaffir
was how Godane addressed him and Zack most of the time. It meant "unbeliever" or "infidel.” Baxter sighed. Whereas most religious nutjobs had, over the course of the ZA, had the courtesy to either renounce their faith or, more often, turn into the living dead, Godane had not only clung to his jihadist salafism – which meant strict seventh-century Islam, to the point of blowing up anyone who disagreed – he’d actually taken the end of the world as an endorsement of his faith.

As Baxter had heard Godane rant many times, the zombie apocalypse was simply a case of Allah wiping out the world because it was ungodly – because there was no longer any Caliphate, no
Ummat al-Islamiyah
, or Islamic Nation. He further believed that he and his followers in al-Shabaab had been spared for the express purpose of starting over and building a new world for the devout.

The man actually thought he had a divine mandate.

And Baxter, in calmer moments, had to admit the facts were on his side: ungodly world,
check
; completely wiped out,
check
; and al-Shabaab spared…
check
.

Now he looked up at the Emir and wondered when he was next going to do something completely unhinged. He still wore that same long scraggly beard – Somalis were not known for impressively thick facial hair – and the black turban, framing wild eyes and a cruel mouth. His black robes disappeared beneath his desk. He was younger than it seemed like he ought to be, which somehow contributed to his air of menace – like he was a very mean kid who’d just been put in charge in
Lord of the Flies
.

Almost directly behind his desk was a second exit from the chamber. Not only had Baxter never been back there, he had no idea what it led to. Maybe Godane’s quarters, where he slept, or pulled the legs off insects, or whatever he did for fun in his spare time – watched infidel porn on his laptop, naughty Russian teen secretaries, probably…

It didn’t matter. What did matter right now was that Baxter had to find something to say to keep Godane from going out and either converting or killing the new survivors he had just found. It also had to be something that wouldn’t get him and Zack killed.

But he was drawing a blank.

As usual, Godane sat behind his big wooden desk on a slightly raised platform at the back of the big subterranean room. Also as usual, there were no chairs, so anyone summoned here had to stand.

It was also gloomy as shit. The Stronghold did have a crappy old generator, and decent supplies of fuel for it. But it didn’t produce enough juice for them to light most areas. And Godane tended to hoard power for the Ground Control Station (GCS) for the Predator, which was his “precious” and which he prized above all things. It was also what he believed to be one great source of his power.

That… and what he had locked up in the basement.

He also tended to use the power to run his own devices, particularly his laptop – which he now swiveled around on the desk so Baxter could see the screen.

“And not just any survivors you’ve found,
kaffir
. Americans. Soldiers… and if my eyes tell me truly,
inshallah
, these ones are
al’Shyatyn Allyl
.”

Baxter tried not to react again. He knew this Arabic phrase had been used by many jihadis to refer to the special operations units that were decimating them back in the counter-terror wars. It had gained currency when the Americans and the Brits put the band back together with Task Force Black – including elements from Delta, Seal Team Six, and SAS – to hunt ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

Which they almost always did in the dark.

Shyatyn Allyl
– it meant: Night Devils.

On the laptop screen, Baxter could see the overhead footage from the drone playing in a window, showing the isolated military encampment below. He guessed Godane had watched it a dozen times already. Baxter sighed quietly.

He had agonized about whether to tell Godane what he had seen – had stumbled upon by chance, on the long flight back from his drone mission out to track the progress of the new herd. He decided he’d damn well better keep it to himself – pretty much the instant he worked out who the guys in that camp were. His mistake had been reviewing the video several times himself, while the drone winged its way home.

And, just as happened later in the shed, he’d realized al-Sîf was looking over his shoulder, stealthy as hell as usual, watching the footage right along with him. So the jig was up. At that point, for Baxter to try to conceal what he’d found would probably come at the cost of his own neck on the chopping block.

Sorry, guys,
he silently pled to the men on the ground.
It’s you or me.

And as soon as Godane found out, he’d had Baxter refuel the Predator and put it back up – to do another more careful overflight of the encampment in the mountain forest. And to see this himself, Godane didn’t even have to go to the trouble of climbing up to the south-east guard tower, where Baxter kept the GCS and flew the Predator from – and which it amused him to privately think of as
the air traffic control tower
.

No, Godane simply had the video piped to his laptop over the wireless network.

Godane said, “I will find out what Zack knows about these men. Who they are, what they are capable of. The things that they have.”

Baxter kept his response measured. “I don’t think Zack will know anything about them. And his health—”

Godane blew up anyway, sweeping a bunch of crap onto the floor, though carefully sweeping around the laptop.

“The man is useless! For why do I keep him, feed him, protect him? Why?”

Baxter drew a breath. “Zack helps us find the things we need when we go out scavenging, especially at the American and UN facilities. He has the access, the passwo—”

“You can do those things! And all the American systems have been down for months. His access is worthless now. His knowledge, too. And you fly the drone.”