Fear the Survivors (2 page)

‘uno ab …’

He stared a moment, clearly thinking, and then nodded, bending and finishing her sentence:

‘… alto’

“One over all.” It was the unofficial motto of the US Air Force. A kind of Semper Fi for pilots.

The confirmation was like an elixir to her and she relaxed, almost losing her balance and he bent and wrapped his arm under her shoulders, lifting her easily to her feet. He did not let her go once he had her standing, but bent slightly again and she felt his hands moving over her body. For a fleeting moment she thought that she was being sexually assaulted as his fingers roamed over her, feeling more surprise than alarm. But she quickly recognized the skilled hands of a field medic and helped his check of her, mumbling with deaf imprecision as he hit sore points. A few moments later his hands completed their search and he left her leaning against the ejected seat again and bent to the sand, sweeping away their previous words and replacing them with:

‘broke collar

+
2 ribs

need sling
4 arm’

She nodded when he looked up and pointed to a compartment in the back of the chair above its spent boosters, which was marked with a small, red cross. But he was already there, unclipping the compartment door and extracting the box inside.

Working with impassioned speed, Lord Mantil opened the field med box and extracted what he needed. As he did so he turned his attention to the Major. He couldn’t know how much the woman knew about what was happening, but he needed to look inside the man and find what was causing his unconsciousness. Staring with increased intensity, he scanned his limp friend with his powerful eyes. He saw it almost instantaneously, a swelling against the front portal lobe, heavy sub-cranial bruising and a hairline fracture of the parietal.

Mentally he checked his time. A list of tasks appearing and prioritizing in his mind as he assessed how much he could do before the approaching Iranian army were upon them. As he did this he speedily fashioned a sling with the expertise and secured it around Captain Jennifer Falster’s shoulder, manhandling her as he worked but carefully avoiding aggravating her wounds. He thought of the Major. Lord Mantil needed to relieve the pressure.

Turning back to the captain, he looked at her a moment and considered his next move. Deciding a course of action, he touched his finger to the sandy floor once more and began to write.

‘I now do strange thing

trust me
?’

He looked at her imploringly. She nodded. Gently, he reached his hand up to her face and touched her cheek. She instinctively went to flinch but his eyes stayed fixed to hers, and she tried to mirror their steadfastness. His index finger came to rest at the entrance to her ear. Inside the finger, he activated the tendrils that were wired into it to enable him to open locks, or worm their way into any other tight spot the Agent needed to probe.

The tiny fibers snaked out of slits in his armored skin and into the captain’s ear canal, sensors at their tips reporting back to Lord Mantil on the rip in the thin tympanic membrane of the woman’s eardrum. The cataclysmic drop in air pressure when she and Major Toranssen had ejected from the B-2 had torn through the woman’s eardrums. They would heal, to a degree, but for weeks she would hear nothing more than thrumming and mumbled thumps.

He could help the healing along by cauterizing and sealing the wound, but it would still take time for her hearing to mend and adjust, and he needed to speak to her now. The fibrous black wires surveyed her eardrum and the tiny, jointed ossicles behind it that linked it to the cochlea, her brain’s microphone. With infinitesimal care, one of the thin wires slipped through the tear in her eardrum and wrapped around one of the tiny ossicles known as the malleus or ‘hammer.’ In doing so, he literally took hold of the very mechanism of her hearing and, with his finger firmly planted against her ear, he held her head still with his other hand and started to send infinitesimal vibrations through the tiny little joint.

She felt it instantly, like a blind man opening transplanted eyes. With disjointed clarity, the voice of Lord Mantil projected itself directly into her ear without his lips ever moving an inch.

“Captain, please do not be alarmed. I must ask that you trust me when I say that this will all be explained in time.”

She stared at him dumbfo
unded. She tried to nod but his firm grip did not allow her head to move even slightly, so she mouthed her assent. He smiled at her. And while his face begged for her trust, his voice echoed in her head once more.

“We need to move … immediately. We are currently in Iran and helicopters are searching this area. When they find us, troops will no doubt be close behind. While I could easily handle them, I do not want there be anymore killing unless absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, before we can leave I have to operate on the major. He has a cranial hemorrhage that needs to be relieved before it does permanent damage to his brain. I can do the operation now, and I can do it relatively quickly, but in order to do it I am going to have to use some tools that may … alarm you.”

She looked at him, her mouth repeating his words: alarm me? He nodded. “Like I said, this will all be explained soon enough. I am going to make a quick repair to your ear. Your hearing should begin to return within the hour. But for now I am going to have to ask you to trust me.”

Silence returned as the tendril from his finger released her malleus and then gently cauterized the tear in her ear with a minuscule laser built into one of the tendrils. With her eardrum sealed once more, he gently removed his hand, allowing her to watch the fibers retract into his finger. She looked back at him amazed.

His smile was sympathetic, like he was looking at someone who is about to discover they are the butt of an elaborate but tasteless practical joke, and with one of his many ‘talents’ stowed, he engaged another. Her disbelief doubled as his left eye twisted, unlocked, and rolled aside to leave a black cavity beneath. Despite having already seen the tendrils in Shahim’s hand, this new wonder hit at her on a more primal level, and she recoiled. As she stared at the hole in Shahim’s face where his left eye had been, something in her told her that her life as she knew it was over.

Somehow the utter silence from her damaged ears made the few seconds even more surreal, but also, in a way, more digestible; and so she allowed curiosity to take over and leaned back in to look more closely into the black socket that had been revealed behind Shahim’s false left eye.

From within, a black lens extruded itself, surrounded by a host of spines and needles. Lord Mantil did his best to make his expression gentle and unthreatening but the sight was, without doubt, the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. And yet she was transfixed. She stared at it. A second more passed.

With an apologetic expression, he turned away from her. He had only a couple of minutes left, at most, before the helicopters came, and so he turned his attention to his other ward, bringing the apparatus that was his Tactical Contact Weapons Complement to bear on the sleeping major.

Gripping the unconscious man’s head with both his hands, he focused in on the center of the hemorrhage he had detected inside the man’s skull, and set his machinery to work. His scalpel was invisible. A mere flicker of bluish green in the dusty air as it lanced the major’s skull. Watching in awe, Captain Jennifer Falster saw the major’s hair singe and burn away before she saw the black spot appear on the top of his forehead. A small circle of the skin flayed away along with the thin layer of flesh beneath it and in a moment she was staring at a tiny patch of her colleague’s bleached white skull.

The hole that the laser then burrowed in the unconscious major’s skull was barely two millimeters across, but as soon as the laser broke through, the sudden release of pressure caused a spurt of blood to squirt from the gap. It sprayed across Shahim’s chest and lap, a line of red relieving the oppression of the major’s mind.

With the skull penetrated, Lord Mantil lifted his index finger and pressed it to the tiny hole. Once more, the minute fibers wormed out, this time into the major’s head, fanning out as soon as they passed through the hole in his skull into the gap between the brain and the cranial bone that cradled it. As they spread out, they found the broken capillaries and veins that were causing the hemorrhage and they began to heat up. The heat from them singed the tiny blood vessels, making them contract and seal and then the wires began to rotate in Major Jack Toranssen’s head, cauterizing the other broken blood vessels as they went.

After a moment, he withdrew his finger and focused his left eye once more, sealing and anaesthetizing the small wound even as his hands prepared a bandage from the med kit. Jennifer watched in fascination as the Agent worked, his hands moving with speed and precision, her mind working to keep up with him. In a moment it was over and he turned to her once more, his hand rising to touch her other ear this time. She let him touch her, giving in to the strangeness of it all and his voice sounded in her deaf ears once more.

“It is done. I do not know how long he will sleep, but we must move, and we must move now. Captain, can I ask you to trust me one more time?”

She paused a moment, more surprised that she was even being asked than actually debating her answer. She had just seen a man perform brain surgery with his eyes, and now that man was talking to her with wires in his fingers. What was she going to do? Run away? Ask the Iranians for help? Wait here for a cavalry that she knew would never arrive?

She mouthed yes to him, and followed it with a hesitant shrug, like a child trusting her mother before she pulls off a band-aid.

“Thank you,” his voice rang in her ear. He quickly performed the same simple but incredibly precise surgery on her right ear as he had her left, and then he removed his hand from her cheek and stood. She stood as well, a little unsteady, but her strength returning with every minute. He turned and motioned for her to climb on his back. Sparing a thought for how they were going to move the major, she shook her head, mumbling that he should carry the major, she would be fine.

But his face became insistent, the face of a father not wanting a child to argue, not this time. Just do it, his expression said, and she reacted with a trust born of a lack of options. Wrapping her good arm around his neck, she climbed meekly onto his back, wrapping her legs around his waist as she did so. He anticipated her movements and bent to meet her, lifting her easily, and then bending at the knee to scoop up the major. She felt amazement blossom afresh inside her as he stood with ease, bearing their combined weight like they were but rag dolls.

He turned his face to her and he mouthed, ‘Hold on’ and then he winked, a conspiratorial smile spreading across his face.

And with that, he leaned into the wind and leapt forward, bounding with a single momentous thrust into a headlong sprint, their negligible weight upon him like feathers on an eagle’s back as he flew across the plain.

They were fleeing the helicopters. Fleeing the innocent Iranian soldiers he longed not to fight. Heading north, they sprinted toward the large city of Mashhad, kicking up dust in their trail as his herculean legs pistoned under them, propelling them forward.

He did not know how they were going to make it to safety. He would figure that out as they went. He would have to circle the city and try to find a way to the sparsely populated border with Turkmenistan and then across it and on to the American embassy in that nation’s capital, Ashgabat. But that was a long way off; first he had to get them away from the closing Iranian troops.

Chapter 2:
Floods of Exodus

“Aw, gimme the damn
remote, ya silly bitch,” said Jason to his wife. She stared at him with indignant fury at the use of the ‘b’ word and he rolled his eyes, knowing he was about to get the bitch speech again. “Here we go …”

“
Here we go
?!” she shouted, “I’ll give ya somethin’ to roll ya fuckin’ eyes about, ya jackass. I told you thousand times, I do
not
appreciate bein’ called a bitch. Now, if ya don’t mind, I am
tryin’
to watch the pastor.”

Jason sat sullenly for a while, staring at the screen while a smiling man in an expensive suit fabricated from broken promises explained the vast benefits of his unique ministry to his viewers, “So you see, ma children, only through the voice of God can you be saved from the terrible plague sweeping our great nation. For the sinners have brought this down upon them, and are reaping the rewards of their godless ways.”

The pastor went on at some length about how the purchase of his particular version of the bible, with his particular audio CD, would help ensure salvation, hinting at but never actually promising that it would save people from the terror that was indeed sweeping the nation, killing thousands as it went. Jason watched begrudgingly, unaware that the pastor’s well-placed words were sinking into his psyche, unaware of how many of them he would be repeating when he had another argument about this at his local watering hole the next day.

It would never occur to him or his wife that the pastor was just trying to profit out of the misery of others by selling more of his trite products. Or that if the man that claimed to be a shepherd believed anything his god had ever said he would be telling his flock that they should be giving their money to the victims of the terrible disaster on the Eastern seaboard, and not to his parasitic ministry.

But this pastor had a new CD out and he needed to move the vast stocks he had paid the printers in China to ship to him. His followers were there to provide him an income, their misguided faith in him and the platitudes he preached leading them to sacrifice their menial disposable income like lambs to his ethical slaughterhouse.

After a while, Jason’s wife stood, groaning as she levered her rotund frame out of their plush La-Z-Boy couch, and headed to the trailer’s commode, farting as she went. Like a child spotting a forbidden treat, Jason took the opportunity to claim the remote control, and with a satisfied grin he changed the channel to where he knew reruns of
Cops
should be playing. But they weren’t. Instead, another special report on the events in southern Georgia was looping here as well and Jason cursed.

“Goddamn it,” he said.

A shout came through the thin wall between him and the toilet
. “Damn it, Jason, don’t take the Lord’s fuckin’ name in vain,” admonished Jason’s wife, Theresa. Unfortunately, the strain of her shout forced out a particularly loud and potent fart, and after a moment they both started laughing.

The reporter on the television was showing one of many sites outside Atlanta where tens of thousands of people were being put up in temporary housing set up by the National Guard. They represented only a fraction of the millions who were being displaced by the disaster, but the sight was sobering even for Jason, and his laughter faded as he took it in.

“Damn,” he said quietly, as the woman on the TV explained the extent of the evacuation.

“This site, which is one of fifteen outside Atlanta, is estimated to house nearly ten thousand people, a number which has been growing every day in the week since the disaster. As you saw when I spoke with the camp’s coordinator, Colonel McAvoy, the biggest problem at this point has been security, keeping the belongings people have insisted on bringing with them safe, even though it is taking away from the space left for other refugees. But this camp is up and running now, and nearly full. And as they complete others like it from Alabama to Pennsylvania, the question has become not where will these people go, but how long they will have to stay here before they can return home?”

The reporter went on with her explanation and Jason sat, enthralled by the sheer scale of the spectacle. Theresa emerged from the toilet, her
Duck Dynasty
sweatpants still down around her ankles, while she pulled up her sweatshirt so she could pull her pants up over her potbelly. But she paused with her hefty midriff and well-worn thong exposed when she noticed her husband’s intent expression. He sensed her scrutiny and said in an aside, “This shit is unreal, Terry. They’ve, like, totally evacuated the entire coast of Georgia and the Carolinas just like they said they would. I mean, this shit is really happening. I can’t believe it.”

She turned to face the screen, her panties and belly still showing as her limited attention span was absorbed by the images. The view had shifted to a CGI map of the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Overlaying it was a large grey arrow moving north from the coastal border between Georgia and Florida, up the coast all the way to southern Virginia. Its root was the King’s Bay Naval Base, where a massive explosion a week beforehand had incinerated two Ohio class nuclear submarines, laying open their radioactive cores and warheads to the North Atlantic trade winds.

In a massive evacuation, the coastal population that lived in the cloud’s path had been driven and cajoled out of their homes, assisted by school buses, military trucks, and the conversion of every highway in the area into one-way, six-lane floods of exodus. But many of them had not escaped its effects in time. Many were even now showing varying levels of radiation sickness: hair loss, lethargy, the many symptoms of overexposure to the weapons-grade plutonium dust that was irradiating everything in the cloud’s wake.

The scale of the area it now covered combined with the half-life of the material was already diminishing the cloud’s effects to some degree as it came to southern Maryland and Delaware, but unseen tumors were already blossoming in thousands of innocent bodies as they sat in traffic or settled into tents, football stadiums, and school gymnasiums, unaware of the embryonic death starting take root inside them.

Theresa eventually finished pulling up her sweatpants and sank slowly into the La-Z-Boy next to Jason, her eyes locked on the screen as the scale of the disaster hit her as well.

“You know, Sara-Beth told me they’re setting up one of those refugee camps over at the Sharp’s Farm, right here, in Slocomb,” she said, an effort to seem open-minded not disguising the air of disgust in her voice. Jason and Theresa lived in a trailer. They had always lived in a trailer. Theresa’s sister and two cousins lived in another trailer in the same park. Heading to one of the camps might actually be a move up in the world for some of their neighbors. At least they would have running hot water.

Jason picked up on her tone and reacted, “Terry, these folks have it real shitty. Surely you’re not gonna begrudge some of ’em comin’ to Slocomb?”

“Yeah, I’ll begrudge the fuckers comin’,” she replied, turning her head sharply to him, “These snooty fuckers sure-as-shit wouldn’t put
us
up if this shit happened in Alabama.”

“Hey, these aren’t all rich folk, some of ’em are good Christian folk like us.” he replied.

“Christian? They’re nothin’ but a bunch of liberal, pansy-ass, anti-American motherfuckers, and there ain’t one single real fuckin’ Christian among ’em. I don’t care if they all die out there, I don’t want them in ’bama, freeloadin’ off of us hard-workin’ real Americans.”

Their argument continued, their raised voices blending with the mixed aroma of Cheetos and methane floating out the window, along with the irony of the fact that neither of these two hard workers had held a steady job in ten years. Outside their trailer, the mix of TV chatter and inane conversation could be heard from a hundred other trailers just like Jason and Theresa’s, the clamor settling on the humid night air. But amongst the banal repetitiveness of their surroundings, Jason and Theresa’s home was, in fact, quite unique.

For, unknown to them, a dark presence lay in silence underneath it. Amongst the pipes and trash and poorly connected wiring, lay a black figure. Blacker than the shadow that enveloped her. She was perfectly still, perfectly silent. Only the whites of her eyes betrayed any movement at all. She had been present at the explosions in King’s Bay. In fact, she had been the cause of the death spreading up the coast. But the massive fireball that had ripped the two subs apart had also flayed off her synthetic skin, leaving her black battle armor exposed beneath.

Agent Lana Wilson lay in the darkness, amongst food wrappers and used tires, with a rage boiling inside her. Her systems were slowly repairing themselves after the massive damage she had suffered, but it would take time. With nothing to do while she recuperated, she had taken to putting her mind in a kind of machine hibernation, relying on a subroutine to monitor her surroundings while she ‘slept’ away the days.

Each night she awoke, reviewed her status, and briefly reviewed the bits and pieces of information her brain had stored away during the day. The system’s status was relatively unchanged. Her weapons were semi-functional again; the laser systems almost fully repaired, while the more delicate sonic punch was only a week away from operational readiness. But those were not the systems that had been most affected. To put it bluntly, she had been stripped bare of every external sensor and apparatus on her body. Everything had been wiped clean down to the black superconducting shielding that lay beneath all the Agents’ skins.

She could repair many of those lost senses. But her fake earlobes were gone, along with her hair, leaving her head smooth and featureless. She could rebuild the infinitesimal radar arrays and audio receptors that had been built into her ocular cavities, so she would be able to hear and interact with her surroundings again, but the woven, chameleon skin that had allowed her to blend in with the humans was gone forever. A gash or tear in the skin would have repaired itself with time, but the loss of the entire structure was like the loss of an entire limb, and even her extensive regenerative systems could not rebuild it.

There was a factory, unbeknownst to her, where the human conspiracy that had orchestrated the death of the satellites had built a resonance manipulator, a machine capable of rebuilding even her dermal systems. But she did not even know of its existence, let alone its location, so as far as she was concerned, nothing on Earth could replace the main tool of her disguise. So she had become as black outwardly as the dark purpose that simmered within her. And she would stay that way.

It would limit her movements, hinder her as it forced her into the shadows, but her plans now would have made blending in difficult at best anyway. For her mind was set. She was going to find them, the conspirators, the people that had launched the missiles that had destroyed her precious satellites, the people that had created the antigen that had saved humanity. She was going to find every one of them, starting with Neal Danielson and Madeline Cavanagh, and she was going to kill them all … slowly.