The Flood (22 page)

This one was nearly the size of the entire power and desal plant itself – except cylindrical in shape, with huge pipes coming out of it top and bottom. It had to be where the desalinated water was stored – water storage for the whole city. If those vats of oil had been the size of water tanks, this was like the municipal water tank for Brobdingnag, land of the giants. It practically blotted out the sky. It was something like what Wesley imagined the Superdome looked like from the parking lot.

Turning back, Wesley could see a big array of eight pipes emerging from the plant side by side, each at least eight feet in diameter, and all snaking down the gentle slope toward the Red Sea. At some point, these had been slowly sucking the ocean dry. Wesley seemed to remember reading that the Red Sea was one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world. So the plant had its work cut out for it.

“Jesus,” said Jenson, never having seen a tank that big. “Is that full of water?”

“Probably,” Wesley said. “But we’re not climbing up it to find out. Our recon’s done. Time to get on with the real job.”

There was maybe only twenty feet of space between the water tank and the plant, at their closest approach, so Wesley led them on a circuit around it and out onto a street that continued west, away from the water, uphill, and flanked by office buildings on either side. This whole area was the high-technology campus, and the road led right where they were going. However, he could also dimly see a few standing figures in the middle of it farther up, so he led the team off the street, ducked behind one of the buildings, and continued west up the little grassy parks behind them.

Checking his forearm map periodically, the glow of which was starting to make him feel conspicuous in the dark, in another few minutes he had them to the pharmaceutical complex – and then, following another dual-language map on a post, found the bioinformatics/genomics facility. All without mishap, and all without any close encounters with the dead. After their quick and brutal fight in the power plant, this almost seemed to be going too well.

He decided to post Judy at the entrance while they went inside. “Guard,” he said to her, and she sat by the door, ears erect, looking alert.

The whole target building was fronted with glass, and the doors were glass themselves, but Wesley motioned Burns forward to pick the lock for them. In another few seconds they were in. There was still some ambient light inside, due to all the exterior windows. As they moved into the interior, though, it grew too dark to see without lights, and they all clicked theirs back on. As they paused to do so, a voice spoke in Wesley’s ear. It was Dr. Park.

“Okay, you’re looking for the labs – and probably a clean room facility.”

Wesley found this exceedingly strange, being addressed from hundreds of miles away like the man was looking over his shoulder – or over Sarah’s shoulder, actually. But he got over it quickly and found his radio button. “Roger that.”

He motioned Sarah up beside him, so that Park could see exactly what he saw. There were no maps on the walls, but it didn’t take much poking around in the crossing cones of their lights before they found it – the complex of labs. They moved into the first big room – and Wesley cast his weapon-mounted light on exactly three boxy pieces of lab equipment before he found it. It looked like an oversized desktop copier with a touchscreen on top, but with four tubes sticking out the front, and three bottles in a transparent enclosure on the right side.

Wesley shined his light down on it, while Sarah leaned over and pointed her shoulder at it. On the front was a logo – an
A
and a
B
with a little twisted double helix between them. The label below read:
Applied Biosystems Ion PGM
.

“Bingo,
” Park said.
“That’s EXACTLY what I need. Self-contained benchtop sequencing solution. Awesome. Well done, guys.”

Before Wesley could even instruct them to, Burns and Jenson appeared with a rolling cart, unplugged the device, lifted it up from two sides, and wrestled it onto the cart. And just like that, they were rolling it back through the corridors of the facility – right toward the front door.

As they neared the exit, Wesley had them turn their lights off, to avoid drawing the dead outside. The building faced west, straight back down the hill and toward the water and the marina – and as their eyes adjusted, the whole landscape started to resolve in the ambient moon and starlight. They were completely out of daylight now. But if everything kept going this smoothly, they’d be out of there and on their way back home in no time.

Slipping out just like church mice.

Yeah
, Wesley thought, covering the rear now, watching the team and the cart moving ahead of him and out into the slightly glowing night.

This is going almost UNBELIEVABLY well…

Exquisite Dead Guy

Jizan Economic City - Electrical Plant

Grrrgghh. Grrrgghh-grrmph.

The dead electrical plant technician made bubbly guttural noises, its blue lips pressed into the metal grille that was the floor of the overhead catwalk.

Grrrgglle-grrrgghh
.

The half-decayed corpse in its torn blue coveralls was looking straight down onto the floor of the electrical plant, from twenty-five feet above it. Spreadeagled, it lay face down on the section of catwalk directly above the door – the one in the northeast corner that all the living meat had exited from.

Starting out on the far side, this elevated dead guy, the last surviving Zulu in the room, had stumbled along the catwalk, following around the long side of the giant open area – until it was directly over where it had last seen the lovely-smelling, noise-making, fleshy meat creatures. It had then gone down on its knees, then onto its face, trying to burrow through the metal grate to get to the meat.

But at some point the meat stopped being there, so the dead plant technician had stopped burrowing. It simply rested on its face and went dormant again.

And there it lay for a good twenty minutes.

But now something was causing it to perk up again. There was a different smell – and also a sound, some kind of crackling. It didn’t sound or smell like meat, but it was something, and it might be meat making the sounds. Digging its fingertips and splintered nails into the metal grate, it dragged itself around until it faced the wall.

Both the sounds and the smells were coming from behind the wall. The dead Saudi man started clawing at the wall, but it was hard plastic molding at the base. Led by its nose, face, and gnashing mouth, it began to push itself upward, to hands and knees first, and then finally to an unsteady standing position.

And it proceeded to claw and dig at the wall, trying to get through to the crackling sound, and also to the smell, which it couldn’t recognize as the faint smoke of a smoldering electrical fire. Its clawing wasn’t really working, so it sort of randomly switched to banging – and after a couple of slams of its stiff claw-shaped hands against the drywall, it broke through.

Which caused oxygen to rush in through the gap and back behind the wall. And this caused the smoldering electrical fire to flash into a little burning one.

The dead technician continued to paw and scrabble at the hole.

* * *

With its arms sticking through the hole in the wall, oblivious to the fact that its hands were inside the fire and now cooking, the sleeves of its jumpsuit started to smolder. And with this a visible amount of smoke started to pass out into the open air of the plant, around the palsied figure, and began collecting underneath the ceiling – which was very high above the floor but low over the catwalk.

Thirty seconds after that, a different and louder noise, behind and above it, drew the dead guy’s attention. It pulled its arms free – both of them smoking and winking with little embers – then turned around unsteadily and looked up. This left it facing down one of the diagonal sections of catwalk, which led out over the room toward its center.

A few feet down the catwalk, and overhead, something was making a whizzing noise.

It was one of the sprinklers from the fire suppression system – which had been set off, but which had no water pressure to pump anything out of it. The overhead sprinkler just spun, making a whizzing noise.

The dead plant technician stumbled out until it was underneath the noise. It reached up, and due to the catwalk being quite close to the ceiling, was able to stick the fingers of one hand into the noise. A healthy hand might have survived this or just been cut. But, in this case, the tips of four rotting fingers came off – and were flung out into space over the room, arcing down to the concrete floor below, leaving little sprays of black blood in their wake.

Needless to say, the walking corpse didn’t notice this. All it knew was that it wasn’t meat making the noise here.

Its attention was now attracted by the next sprinkler down. Lowering its mangled hand, it stumbled out toward that one, its sleeves continuing to smoke and spark. As it reached this next one, and reached up toward it, one of its sleeves burst into flame. Also needless to say, it didn’t notice this either.

It simply moved onto the next noise maker. But by the time it reached the third one, out nearly over the middle of the room, its sleeve was burning bright, all the way up to the shoulder – turning the creature into an ambulatory zombie flambé. And as it pawed at the sprinkler and ceiling, the leaping flames on its arm started to scorch and singe – and finally to ignite – the ceiling panels.

As the whole section of ceiling started to burn, it held the zombie technician’s interest with the motion of leaping flames, and it continued to paw and grab – helping accelerate the process of the fire consuming and caving in the ceiling above. Within a few seconds, flaming pieces of ceiling panel, and then of insulation, started to fall on the zombie, the catwalk – and finally toward the floor of the plant, and its giant fuel oil vats, directly below.

When a particularly large section fell away, it made a loud
clap
as it hit, drawing the dead guy’s attention away from the ceiling, over the railing, and down to the floor. Looking below, it saw the motion of licking flames rising up from the burning ceiling and insulation, and reached out for it…

…and neatly flipped at the waist over the railing, tumbling into open air, finally landing on its back, on hard metal, with a crunching sound that would have horrified anyone there able to experience horror.

And, lying on its back on top of the very center fuel oil vat of the whole matrix of them, the undead Saudi electrical plant technician looked up, and regarded, and reached out for, the burning sections of ceiling and insulation that continued to rain down on it.

A section landed on its face, setting it on fire – and clogging its mouth.

Grrrgghh.

Grrrgghh-grrmph.

Cataclysm

Jizan Economic City - Outside the Pharma Complex

Pausing in the peaceful-seeming darkness, Wesley looked up the channel for the air mission net and tried to send an update to the helicopter pilots – to tell them they had their objective, were heading back to the boat, and would be offshore and ready for pickup soon. But for some reason they didn’t answer. Maybe he had the channel wrong. Maybe they were busy right that second.

He looked up and around him again. The pristine DNA sequencer still sat on its cart in the middle of the circled team, who were facing outward, covering all directions, weapons ready. All of them were smudged by the darkness, and they couldn’t see very far around them. But so far there were no undead in sight, nor any worrying noises.

Ahead of them, it was a nearly straight shot back to the waterfront, and to their stashed boat. Their only detour would be skirting slightly around the power and desal plant this time, instead of creeping through its entire length inside. This route would almost certainly be quicker – not to mention safer.

The spreading darkness was making Wesley’s skin prickle a little, creating a slightly menacing overlay on this fantasy city from the future. Another thing the carrier hadn’t been able to spare for his team was night-vision goggles. Those still on board were reserved for the QRF. Wesley figured he and his guys wouldn’t have known how to use them anyway.

And it shouldn’t matter. There was just enough light to see by from the sliver of moon and the stars, and it was surely enough to see their way back. And they’d be out of there very soon. Wesley felt almost jaunty – like they were home free.

He turned to face the team. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move out. Nice and smooth and quiet back to the boat. And look, it’s even downhill all the way back, so this will be easier.” He looked to where Judy was still faithfully guarding the entrance. “Come,” he said to her, and she happily trotted up beside him.

Wesley smiled, then turned around, facing toward the plant.

And the whole world in front of him exploded in a shattering nuclear fireball.

A second later, all five surviving members of the team were knocked flat to the ground by the force of the incoming blast wave.

And the DNA sequencer, sitting on its rolling cart, got speed-rolled straight back through the crashing glass facade behind them, and right back into the lobby of the building from which it came.

Ahead of them, the whole world was burning.

* * *

When Wesley opened his mouth and screamed for the others, he couldn’t hear himself making any sound. But when he levered his eyes open, he found it wasn’t the least bit dark anymore, with flames shooting five hundred feet into the night sky and illuminating everything for miles – and he could see his teammates variously lolling on the ground or climbing drunkenly to their feet.

Jenson, first up, seemed to be screaming back at him. Wesley lip-read:
What?

“I said: Are you okay!!??”

What!?