Arisen : Nemesis (14 page)

“One… two… three…!”

She lowered her shoulder and put her back into it, and all three of them shoved for all they were worth on the door and running board of the truck. It moved up significantly. Elijah leaned beneath them, grabbed Pete under the shoulders, and tried to pull him out. The trouble was the mud or soft dirt beneath him was rising almost as much as the truck.

The whole thing shifted suddenly, the three of them lost their purchase, and the monster truck collapsed back down. Price howled in agony. It scraped Kate’s soul to hear, and she didn’t even know this guy. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like for his SF brothers. Looking down, she saw to her amazement that he was managing a pained smile. She could see him looking through their legs and past them toward the horde that was descending.

Kate knew that all the tenant commands at Lemonnier taken together had totaled over four thousand personnel. It was just too many.

“C’mon guys,” Pete said. “It’s time for you to go.”

“I said shut the fuck up,” Brendan repeated. “Ready?” he said to Kate and Todd. The pistol fire had stopped now and Kate looked up to see Jake trotting back up, his rifle still slung, and slipping his side arm back into its holster on his vest. She pulled out one of her own rifle magazines and tried to hand it to him. He ignored this – she belatedly remembered her ammo was useless to him – and instead reached around her and pulled the tire iron from its mount on the truck.

While he stopped to do this, one of the run-over bodies on the ground came back to life, crawled a few inches, and latched onto his leg with both hands. Kate saw this and opened her mouth to scream a warning, but too late – the mottled face was already biting down.

And she heard the clang of teeth on high-tech carbon-fiber composite.

She could clearly see now that the grip of the smushed Somali man underfoot had tightened the drape of his pant leg around the small circumference of the prosthetic limb underneath. She looked up, as Jake looked down, first in surprise – and then he looked back up at her, smiling this time.

He bashed in the skull of the attacking torso with the tire iron. It collapsed, finally, into disanimation.

He then kicked it free, turned back toward the front, drew his Special Forces Yarborough knife with the hand not holding the tire iron, and headed back out again, wading into the attacking mob from the camp, slashing and swinging.

It was the bravest and most badassed thing SSG Kate Dunajski had ever seen in her many years in and out of the military. It was also probably pretty fucking stupid, given public health conditions around here. If he survived that shit, Kate wasn’t sure she wanted him coming back to the team.

Then again, maybe she did.

“One… two… three!”

They all shoved again, each reaching down for their last untapped stores of physical strength. The truck lifted higher this time. Elijah reached in again, grabbing both of Pete’s arms and hauling like hell to pull him free. Price started screaming again. Kate’s eyes narrowed as she thought she saw one of the other smushed bodies under there with him start to move…

But then there was very definite movement in her peripheral vision – more stumbling figures of Somalis coming out of the treeline. Kate shouted Kwon’s name and he traversed his machine gun over to that side, just as Kate brought her own rifle up and started shooting to defend the group.

And the truck dropped down again. Price was silent this time. Maybe he was all screamed out. Everybody was shooting now. The gunfire died down slightly as they got that flank under control – only to realize a big strung-out crowd of them was now coming in from the opposite side, from the town. They were besieged from three sides, the noose closing, and Kate started to feel rising panic gripping her chest. She only remembered their trapped, wounded, heroic teammate when she heard him say over the squad net:

“Sorry guys, I’m not gonna make this one with you…”

Elijah was shouting,
“No—”
but was cut off by a single pistol shot.

And when Kate looked down, she saw Peter Price had gotten his side arm out.

And used it to shoot himself in the head.

PART TWO

“Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.”
– Exodus 21

The Post-Apocalypse

Camp Price ("Bush Camp")
[18 Months Later]

Captain Brendan Jefferson Davis, commander, Operational Detachment-Alpha (ODA) 555, U.S. Army Special Forces, sat with his elbows on his knees, on the one grassy hillock that lay within the north edge of camp. In his hands he held a steepled paperback copy of Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
– which he was not reading, but just staring over the top of.

He’d read it four times already.

Instead, he was looking up at Todd, the team’s junior Charlie (18C, engineer sergeant), who was standing up on a ladder and repairing the sign over the camp’s main gate. One side of the wooden plaque had fallen down due to rain and rot, the wood around the nails slowly pulping away. It could get pretty damp up there in the Sanaag region of northern Somalia – particularly in the remote and dense Cal Madow Forests, where the camp sat on the western slopes of hulking Mt. Shimbiris.

The mountain, Somalia’s tallest at nearly 2,500 meters, had a distinctive shape to it, with fairly gentle shoulders rising up until they reached its head – which then jutted up rocky and nearly vertical on three sides. Only a more gradual slope and path up the back side afforded access to the summit. Not that anyone ever went up there.

The end of Todd’s hammer was wrapped in a towel, and making a dull thumping sound through the morning mists.

Everything up here was muffled, one way or another.

Brendan shook his head. He couldn’t believe it had been a year and a half since they put that sign up. But it had.

As junior Charlie, and now the only one, Todd had been responsible for helping design and build the camp in the first place – and now had chief responsibility for maintaining it. Triple Nickel’s bush camp consisted of a half-dozen post-and-pier single-story plywood huts, each built three feet off the ground, with stairs to a single door, and a window in each of the other three sides. These differed very little from the ones their Special Forces forebears had built in Vietnam, living in the bush and training the Montagnards to fight the Viet Cong.

All of the huts sat within a large triangular compound, which had originally been bordered by concertina wire – but was now enclosed by a solid eight-foot-tall wood-post stockade, topped with the concertina wire. A sangar, or small guard tower, anchored each of the three corners.

As Brendan watched, he saw Kate, their CST attachment, emerge from the hooch she shared with Todd. As the sole female, she might have gotten to be the only one who bunked alone – if they’d had odd numbers. But they hadn’t, so she didn’t. Brendan wasn’t sure whether it even would have been much of a privilege. As he recalled, Kate’s first eighteen hours on the ground in the Horn of Africa had been a kinetic nightmare of violence and panic. But the subsequent eighteen months, while not totally without peril, had provided a great deal of downtime.

And a lot of time to feel alone, and occasionally abandoned.

Nearly the whole outside world had gone away – and left them here, isolated in the wilderness, and with only one another for company.

Basically, the long hours of the post-Apocalypse had lain heavily upon them.

Kate spotted Brendan and nodded a greeting, then walked up to the gate and offered to help Todd with his repair. But he was basically done. He smiled down at her and the two chatted easily. As Brendan recalled, the two of them hadn’t even gotten introduced before the fall – of Camp Lemonnier, and of everything else. But in the intervening eighteen months, they’d become close – real battle buddies.

Brendan saw Kate move off and saw Todd watching her as she left – and his gaze lingered on her just a little too long. It was subtle things like this, nearly impossible to disguise, that made it obvious at least to Brendan: Todd’s feelings for Kate went beyond mere camaraderie. And Brendan guessed this was not only because, for a while, it had seemed like she might actually be the last woman on Earth.

But it was equally obvious from how she treated him – affectionately, but like a beloved kid brother – that those feelings weren’t requited. Brendan guessed Todd wasn’t Kate’s type. Whatever type that was, or if she even had one, which itself wasn’t obvious.

Human nature hadn’t really changed, even if most of humanity had.

* * *

Brendan continued to watch as Kate did a circuit of the wire, checking on the fortifications. They had built the camp out and enhanced it a great deal – after it sunk in that it was going to be their home, not just part-time and for the length of their deployment, but full-time, and probably for the rest of their lives.

They’d already dug their own well, set up bag showers, and built a nicely appointed slit-trench latrine. There was a large diesel power generator – originally flown in by helicopter sling-load and later sound-insulated to hell and back by Todd. Power from the generator had been augmented by solar panels on the roofs of the hooches. As it stood, they didn’t have power all day, but they had it often enough to run the devices they needed most.

One of the huts was kitted out as the weight/fitness room. To universal consternation, but little surprise, their original request for airlift capacity to fly in cross-training machines and free weights had been laughed out of CJTF-HOA. So most of the weights were improvised – jerrycans full of water, spare truck axles, a bench carved out of a tree stump.

And of course, airlift of every sort had ceased entirely a year and a half ago.

Since then the gym’s most frequent habitué was their team sergeant, Jake – because he was a lifetime fitness fanatic, and had unflagging self-discipline, and because the end of the world had seemed to him like no reason to change any of that. Also, middle-age was chasing him, and he had no intention of being caught – even on one leg. Particularly on one leg.

Next most frequent in there was Kwon, because he was a killer and a protégé of Jake. Then Brendan, mainly out of his sense of responsibility to his men. If they had to run for their lives, he had to be at the front of the formation; and if somebody was badly wounded, he had to be the one to put him in a fireman’s carry and keep on running. After that Kate, probably mostly to fit in. Only Todd blew off exercise. He was naturally lean, and thought it was stupid to walk when you could ride.

The camp was located in an extremely isolated spot, previously resupplied by helicopter and their occasional movements back to Camp Lemonnier. But they had always kept significant supplies cached here, in stacks of plastic Tuffboxes in the hooches, and in dug-out underground cellars: long-life food and barrels of staples, crates of ammo in every caliber they shot, explosives, rockets, pallets of bottled water, diesel fuel for the generator and trucks, batteries for everything, spare parts for everything, and medical supplies including plasma.

These had been augmented more recently by their scavenging runs – which was the only type of mission they ran anymore.

But they ran them well. Brendan imagined that one day, if they lived long enough, this Special Forces team would have to develop some sort of an interest in farming. But, for now, the populated areas of Africa had gone down quickly and completely enough that large and diverse stores of canned goods and long-life food had gone un-raided. Between those, and the thousands of crates of MREs and HUMRATS (humanitarian rations) at military bases and NGO warehouses, the pickings looked like being good for a long time. And the team was extremely good at slipping in and out of towns and cities without waking the dead.

Or maybe their luck had just been good.

They still had their two gun trucks, stored and maintained in a garage built for the purpose – about two kilometers away, at the end of the rudimentary dirt track that led up into the mountain forest. Although the vehicles had been modified to run as quietly as possible, driving them right up to the gates would have been a bad idea. Also, that was two kilometers of road they didn’t have to clear through the forest.

Brendan looked out now at the forbiddingly dense stretches of juniper and boxwood trees, the clouds periodically grazing their tops, that surrounded them on the steep hillsides. Somewhere out there in the bush, how far he didn’t know, were Jake and Kwon – off on another of their long-range reconnaissance patrols (LRRPs, pronounced “lurps”). Brendan was pretty sure they kept running these not out of any real operational need – but just to get the hell out of camp, and get away from the others for awhile.

Those two had always been the hard-chargers, the super-soldiers, and in the post-Apocalypse it had started to get so it was only their own company they could stand anymore. The others’ deficiencies as operators and human beings had started to grate on them. SF guys were constituted to work in tight groups, and on top of one another for long stretches of time. But not this long, and not this tight.

Basically, the seams were starting to show. And to chafe.

It probably didn’t help that Jake and Kwon didn’t have anyone or anything to kill – aside from the occasional black-backed jackal that wandered up into the mountains and ended up in their stockpot. But when they ran their scavenging missions into formerly populated areas, the critical thing was always to maintain total stealth – to get in and get out without disturbing any of the former residents or having to destroy them. They also had to be alert to living survivors, assuming they would be at least as dangerous as the dead.

But they’d never encountered any living survivors. Not a single one.

Then again, their home was East Africa, where the shit had originally come down. They didn’t know any more about the virus than the outside world did. But they knew what a Petri dish this region had always been, serving up far more than its share of viral and bacterial pathogens. And they also knew about al-Shabaab’s interest in bioweapons, as well as their thwarted bio-attack against the deminers at Camp Lemonnier from a while back. So it hadn’t been too hard to work out the point of disease emergence, despite being practically on top of it when it happened.