Arisen : Nemesis (19 page)

It occurred to Baxter that living at the sufferance of a megalomaniacal asshat was a rather poor kind of life. He tried desperately to think of something placating to say, something that would conduce to keeping Zack alive…

Godane stood. “You will walk with me.”

Having no choice, Baxter followed the Emir through the cramped and dark tunnels, passing moldy columns of timber that held up the ceiling at the junctures. These were strung at intervals with dim and flickering lights. It was, in every way, like living down in the mines – except with no gold or even coal to be brought up. Only their own flickering lives, sheltered down there from the storm of death that had blown across the earth.

They soon reached the nearest ladder and climbed up two levels, then up two more, finally emerging at the top of one of the north guard towers, where Baxter never had occasion to go. As he stepped out into the darkness, he could see almost nothing. But it was quiet and still, and what he could hear were some kind of faint and vaguely horrible sounds coming from the front. It sounded like snuffling, or quiet moaning, or maybe even sobbing…

And as he peered into the darkness and his eyes adjusted, a shape finally resolved. It was a person, a small one, upright, with his arms spread out to either side. Baxter drew in a sharp intake of breath, and turned around to face the giant courtyard of the Stronghold that spread out below them. And he realized with horror that, when the sun rose in the morning, this figure up here would be visible to the entire encampment.

As a message, he would be totally unmistakable.

Baxter turned back around slowly. Neither he nor Godane spoke.

The figure resolved into more detail as Baxter’s eyes adjusted. It was Abo. Though covered in blood, he was obviously still alive.

And he’d been nailed to a cross-beam of the guard tower.

He had been crucified.

* * *

Jesus fucking Christ…
Baxter tried to keep his head as he descended the ladders back down into the bowels of this ill-starred place.

He hadn’t even told Zack yet about the soldiers he’d found in the forests around Mount Shimbiris. He simply hadn’t a chance to get away, to climb down to the little room they shared. Maybe he should have found a way. Maybe Zack would have told him to handle this differently.

But he’d played it the best way he knew how.

What he hadn’t done, back up in that guard tower cum execution chamber, was ask Godane why he’d done this… this thing he’d done. Why Abo had ended up like that. He didn’t ask for a couple of reasons. For one, his throat had been stoppered with fear – and Godane hadn’t volunteered anything, while Baxter stood there shaking and unable to speak. Like the best villains, Godane let his work speak for itself. He finally just exited the guard tower without a word, leaving Baxter standing there soaked in horror.

And for another, Baxter pretty much knew the answer anyway. It had to be because of what Abo had done for Zack before the fall – and on behalf of Zack and Baxter’s employer. Baxter just didn’t like to think about it. Because if Godane had outed Abo, and then offed him… it meant the two of them were probably next.

Baxter had to talk to Zack.

And he had to talk to him now.

Down in a Hole

The Stronghold - Zack and Baxter’s Room

Darkness.

Or so close to darkness as made no difference.

That’s what Zack Altringham sat in now. That’s what had engulfed him. He lay unmoving on the prickly abomination that passed for a bed. On the roughly hewn table beside him lay a paperback copy of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. But he wasn’t even making the pretense of holding it, or steepling it on his lap.

There wasn’t enough light to read by anyway.

He sniffed and held the back of his hand to his forehead. He’d been nursing some mild but tenacious respiratory tract infection. The slight fever told him there was an invader in his system, a pathogen, a bug. The raised body temperature was one of his immune system’s tricks for fighting it off. Basically, it was making the environment inhospitable to the invading force, as the pathogen sought to multiply, to feed, to take over….

At least it wasn’t Hargeisa. At least it wasn’t the zombie virus.

The mild illness was also Zack’s excuse for not getting out of bed today.

But it wasn’t the reason.

Zack let his mind range back and pick over the remains of the hope he used to feel. He had once made a powerful lunge at hope, during their escape from the imploding gravity well of the town of Hargeisa, when the shit had come down. For years prior to that, Zack had been haunted with the certainty that he would die in Africa. He’d been born there, briefly escaped to college in the U.S. – and then been stupid enough to take a job with the CIA, who instantly sent him right back again. And there he had toiled, tour after tour, mission after deployment, year after decade, convinced the universe was telling him something:

That he would never get out of Africa alive.

But then, oddly, when it started to look like
no one
was going to get out of Africa alive… that’s when Zack had found his hope. As he and Baxter fled overland, he made himself a silent pledge: that he
was
going to get out of there, somehow, some day, whatever it took.

Simply, he hated East Africa too much to die there. He wasn’t going to let it win.

But that was a long time ago now.

Zack’s eyes scanned the dirt walls that were the extent of his existence now, and the rough-hewn and crooked timber supports in the corners and overhead, and he snorted, nearly amused. What amused him was that, over the eighteen months after his pledge, it had become clear that there was
nowhere to get out of Africa to
.
There
was
no place else.

This was it.

And, even if there were anyplace else, he couldn’t leave the Stronghold, for a number of reasons, each compelling on its own. One, Godane would kill him if he tried. Two, even if he escaped, the dead would devour him. And, three, even if he dodged the dead, he would simply perish in the wilderness.

His situation was about as hopeless as hopeless could be.

And his future prospects: nil.

* * *

For months, a year even, Zack had nursed hope. Kept his spirits up.

Virtually every day he thought about Maximum Bob and Dugan, and what those two unflappable and super-skilled operators had sacrificed for him and Baxter. They had given them the gift of survival, at the cost of both their lives, a gift of which he had to try to be worthy. Zack thought constantly of what he owed to their example, and how he could live up to it.

At first he focused on survival – making sure he and Baxter integrated into the daily life of al-Shabaab in the isolated fortress. Making sure they contributed – and were too valuable to get kicked out, beheaded, or just fed to the dead.

But time had passed. And survival became a chore. And resolve had faded.

For a while, Zack nursed hope for the outside world – that the rest of the world might have somehow held off the Apocalypse. Later, he thought maybe some of the countries farthest away, and most isolated, might have survived – America maybe, or Australia. New Zealand. Something.

Finally, his hopes were reduced to imagining there might at least be other pockets of survivors. Out there, somewhere.

Zack had begged, wheedled, cajoled, to try and get access to the long-range radio he knew Godane had. But of course just about the last thing that paranoid, batshit-crazy, jihadist son of a bitch was going to do was hand over a transmitting radio to the likes of a senior CIA analyst. Zack didn’t know who Godane thought he was going to call. But the Emir certainly wasn’t taking any chances.

And, as usual, the religious fundamentalists displayed a stunning lack of curiosity about the outside world. Zack and Baxter had learned enough to know the big picture – that the whole world had fallen. And they had talked to enough other al-Shabaab guys, ones less monumentally cracked than Godane, to learn the broad outlines.

The outside world was gone.

All there was now was the Stronghold. Zack knew they would never be allowed to leave. And it was unlikely in the extreme, certainly in his lifetime, that there would be anyplace else to go. It had started to look like a very mean and worthless survival he had arranged for the two of them.

And it all piled up over time. The boredom, the tedium, the endless darkness and confinement and claustrophobia. The foreignness, the human sounds – and the smells. Al-Shabaab guys hadn’t been huge on regular showers even when they had running water. Now it was a whole new level of stench. And the oppressive weight of an entire dead world, pressing in against their walls.

There was nowhere to go, and nothing to do – just wait for the end. In fairness, everyone had always had to do that – wait for the end. Long before the Apocalypse, Camus said the only important question in life was whether to kill yourself. He’d concluded no. But, then again, he’d never had to live with the dead. And he’d had Paris cafe culture and the occasional attentions of Simone de Beauvoir to distract him. For Zack, with virtually no pleasurable distractions, and with absolutely nothing to look forward to…

Well, hope had finally drained away.

* * *

The door opened quietly and Baxter stepped in.

“How you feeling, man?”

Zack dredged up a smile as Baxter sat down facing him on the opposite bed. He belatedly realized Zack had his grenade, and was tossing it from hand to hand. Not a great sign. He snatched it out of mid-air.

“My grenade, dude.” And it was. Baxter had boldly five-fingered it out of a crate left lying open in the courtyard, a few months earlier. He’d been saving it for… some special occasion, maybe. He didn’t know. He liked having something explosive. Some kind of power. Now he snatched it from Zack mid-toss and slipped it back under his own mattress.

And then, in an efficient briefing, he reported the new developments: the American soldiers living out in the bush. Godane’s awareness of same. And the horrifying fate of Abo.

Zack took all this in silently, then sat and pondered, working to get his head around all this – and to work out the ramifications. After months of deep torpor, suddenly he was having to think clearly, and perhaps act decisively. It was very possible their lives depended on it.

“There’s something else, Zack.” Baxter looked across at him, his expression pained. “I’m not sure how to put this. Godane is… not a big fan of you right now. He said he doesn’t know why he’s keeping you around. Obviously, I’m talking you up at every opportunity…” Baxter trailed off.

Zack blinked once, heavily. “I’m going to have to give him something.”

“Yeah, probably.” Baxter exhaled. “How much do you think he knows about Abo? About you and Abo?”

Zack sat up. “I don’t know, but it’s critical we find out. I’ll talk to him.”

Baxter nodded. “Okay. I gotta go. I’m on garden duty.”

Zack shook his head. “Why is that dumbass using you for manual labor?”

“Because he’s a dumbass.” This caused them both to smile.

Baxter rose and left. Zack watched him go, and tried to face the prospect of getting himself cleaned up, dressed, and out the door.

And then facing Godane.

* * *

But first he sat there for another minute, thinking. And only as he started to emerge from his torpor did he realize for the first time what it had really been about. Yeah, there was the hopelessness. But one could live without hope. All kinds of people did.

No, what it really was about was: survivor guilt.

Zack had failed to catch it – the plague. He had known al-Shabaab was buying bioweapons from the Kazakh bioscientist. He knew about the chimera virus they had bought, and he knew what they were planning to do with it. He’d even stopped their planned attack – and he thought he’d destroyed the stockpiles of the pathogen, in licks of purifying flame, along with the lab around it.

But he hadn’t. He hadn’t caught it all.

Because al-Shabaab had already infected a test animal – a single baboon, kept out at a remote site, and watched over by a single guard. But rabid dogs killed the baboon, and then mauled the guard, after the virus had mutated somehow. And that guard had gone off on a flesh-eating rampage in the nearest village.

And the rest was history – or, rather, the end of it.

Zack shook his head. It was unbelievable that, even in this instant, the original victim of the virus was locked up only a few dozen yards away, in one of the underground cells. After long months of not being able to understand why, Zack had finally had one of the al-Shabaab guys explain it to him: the dead guy, this original carrier of the virus, was a kind of talisman to Godane – the imagined source of his power.

Not only did Godane think his God had taken down the whole world, while sparing him and his minions, he also thought he actually couldn’t be killed. And couldn’t be infected. And that his little empire there could never fall. Not as long as he held onto the first undead man – the first of seven billion.

Zack didn’t understand how Godane had gotten that idea into his head. But there was a lot of weird shit in there, and Zack had no better idea how most of it had originated.

Now, at night sometimes, he imagined he could hear Godane’s talisman, this first victim, thrashing around in his subterranean cell. Of course, that was impossible – there was too much dirt between them. Maybe it was in his dreams, or just his half-waking fancy, his fever-driven imagination getting the better of him. Maybe it was the uneasiness of soul, his guilty conscience – haunted by the part he had played in the genesis of the outbreak, and the downfall of man.

If only there were something he could do, some way he could make it right. But, as things stood, Zack was a million miles from being able to do anything. He was below ground, buried, underwater, stuck at less than zero. He was impotent.

All he was… was alive.

With his survivor guilt. He had been there, at the right time and in the right place, better positioned than anyone in the world to catch the pandemic before it started. He’d had the ability, for a time, to save the entire world. But he hadn’t – the virus had gotten out anyway.