Fear the Survivors (6 page)

They sprang to life, gathering laptops and locating information points on the fly. They all worked with rapid efficiency, quickly forming into the team they would need to be, skilled, amorphous agents slipping into roles as needed, taking and giving orders, and finding solutions as problems arose. Specialization was a luxury of regular troops. Field agents may or may not have a preferred field, but they were trained to be proficient in all: explosives, marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat, physical and electronic surveillance. They set to their task, and over the next two hours their plan formed.

Within a few hours of landing, Ayala was in the second of two deceptively dilapidated old vans, each carrying half her new team. Each was following a different route. Everyone on the team now had defined roles, along with the various weaponry, bugs, and other equipment they would need. A specialized group was also working with the liaison to ease their vans’ passages through the Gaza Strip’s strict border security.

Her team members’ respective roles were clear and she had every confidence that they would execute against them. What she could not predict was how Raz Shellet would behave. She had not been blowing smoke up the team’s proverbial ass when she said that the last time someone tried to take down one of these beasts it had caused the greatest single disaster in history.

For many years Ayala had enjoyed the quiet confidence of someone who is trained to a lethal standard, who can assume she is probably more deadly than any single person she might come up against. It was tempered by a healthy humility, but all of that confidence was banished by the thought of what she faced now. If she went up against this bitch, she knew she would be deader than Davy Crockett, and as she contemplated the recent demise of a squadron of heavily armed Iranian Commandoes, she reached for the black suit that lay in her bag and began to unwrap it.

She had thought of handing them out to the rest of the team, but unfortunately for them the risk of having one of the Agents discover the extent of their new abilities was greater than the risk of these men dying. It was a callous decision on her part, but it was not the first she had made, and it most certainly would not be the last.

Chapter 7
: Let’s Come Together

Banu
sat with a haunted expression on her soft, six-year-old face. It was late and she should be asleep, but she couldn’t, not tonight, not with that incessant coughing from her father and two of her brothers. So she had crept out of the small, three-room cabin that she lived in with her father, mother, grandfather, spinster aunt, and three brothers.

Even out here she could still hear the hacking coughs and wheezing snore of her father, but it was dulled and softened by the breathing of the wind in the valley and warm embrace of the sounds of the vivid fauna busying themselves, unseen, in their nocturnal world all around her.

She did not dare wander too far from the cabin. They lived only half a mile from their nearest neighbor, a larger house, with five separate rooms and only seven people living in it. Of course her family was sullenly jealous of them, but that family in turn was equally envious of the battered old Toyota truck that Banu’s father owned, a prized possession indeed. Banu had once been friends with the eldest son of the neighboring family, Mabatim, but he was two years older, and was no longer interested in spending time with a ‘child’. One of the many tribulations of her young life.

Now, late at night, she wanted to walk away from the cabin. To escape the incessant hacking, to lose herself in the night. But if she was missed inside and she was not near the cabin, the consequences would be extreme indeed. Fearing a beating or worse, she sat, shivering in the night air, trying to shut her ears to the sounds of her family succumbing to the virus she could not know was well on its way to killing them all.

- - -

Miles away, a damaged helicopter flew low and fast over the rugged ridges and valleys. Jennifer and Jack were bitterly cold, a powerful wind blowing over them from the damaged window Lord Mantil had been forced to kick out. But the shuddering breeze had served to awaken Jack at last. He had been disoriented at first, but it had not taken him long to ask after Martin and Jennifer’s copilot. As Jennifer told him what had happened, the grief and self-loathing in his eyes had been tangible, and had finally broken Jennifer of her hatred for him.

Huddling against the cold in the gunner’s seat of the helicopter, they had talked into each other’s ears, she updating him on Lord Mantil’s activities, he telling her the full truth behind what she had become unwittingly embroiled in. After what she had seen Lord Mantil accomplish, it had not been difficult to believe what Jack had said, and a bond of sorts had formed between them, breaking through the crustal remnant of mistrust and the pain of recently lost friends.

With fuel running low, Lord Mantil surveyed their progress. They were twenty miles from the border, but reports of fighters being deployed were coming over the radio. Fighters sent to seek the murderer of the squadron whose helicopter he had co-opted. He needed to land and get his charges away from the easily detectable chopper before the planes found them.

- - -

Banu sat in silence. She had never left the valley in her entire life. Its noises and sights were her whole world and she knew them intimately. The sounds of the seasons spoke to her and she could tell the changes in the weather like the rest of her farming family, from the humidity of the air and the thrum of the wind through the trees.

Before she could place a finger on it, something unsettled Banu. More than the ragged coughing, more than the cold wind, something new was in the air. After a moment, a faint swirling noise began to swell out of the night, and the insects and other creatures of the dark seemed to fade to silence in response, as if trying to identify the sound as well.

It was still but a whisper, but it was undeniable, echoing across the blackness like a demon. Banu sat up, straining her ears to identify it, but even as she did so it was becoming more and more pronounced by the moment. It grew and grew until it filled her ears and became a tangible breath on her face, rising to a gale, her ragged sleeping gown whipping this way and that as the shouted voice of hell thundered out of the night at her. The monstrous black shape emerged from the dark sky without lights or warning, descending upon her world like a dragon, and she shook with fear, tears streaming down her face. A sea of soil and grit pelted her and the house behind her and she shielded her face against the storm.

Her father and brothers came rushing from the house even as the whirlwind sank to the ground in front of her, settling on the sandy soil with improbable lightness. From its side, a man sprang nimbly, running up to her family with long strides. They could only stare bewildered at the apparition in front of them as the beast he had been born on whined, its roar slowly diminishing.

As the blades that spun over the beast’s head started to slow, the man shouted over the dissipating tornado he had arrived on. He spoke in the lyrical Persian dialect that was their tongue, “I am sorry but I require your truck, give it to me and you will not be harmed, attempt to stop me and I will be forced to kill you. Is that clear?”

Lord Mantil had no time for diplomacy. He needed to move. More than that he recognized the initial signs of the virus in these people, and knew that their lives were essentially already sacrificed to the first of humanity’s battles with the Mobiliei. Hoping that the dramatic nature of his arrival amongst these people would overwhelm any desire to resist him, Lord Mantil stood, bold as day, and demanded that they acquiesce.

They shook in front of him, Banu’s father trembling with equal parts fear and impotent rage, but he said nothing. After a moment, Lord Mantil nodded with finality and stepped past them to walk toward the truck that sat under a tarpaulin on the other side of the house. He started the old Toyota with ease, his capable fingers caressing the wires of the ordinarily unreliable starter motor in ways the truck’s keys had failed to do in years. As Shahim drove the old truck round to the side of the now idling helicopter, a growing anger boiled in Banu.

She could not help it. She was overwhelmed with contempt for her cowardly father. That truck was all that separated them from the nomads and lowly serfs of the plains, and her father had put up no more resistance than if the powerful-looking man had asked for an ear of corn.

Her father glanced at her and caught her look of disdain, seeing her plain-faced disgust at his cowardice. Unwilling and unable to face the man who was stealing their livelihood, he lashed out at her instead, delivering all his rage at his lack of courage into a vicious backhanded blow across his young daughter’s face. She staggered back, her vision swimming as her cheek swelled, blood filling her mouth. Her father sensed shock from his sons and turned on them with the threat of the same, but their looks of fear were not for their father as they stared at something behind their enraged patriarch. The man turned to see what they were looking at, but was greeted instead with the cold solidity of Shahim’s fist connecting with his jaw. He flew back, unconscious before he hit the ground, and Shahim turned to the stunned girl. She was sitting on the dusty soil, her lip and nose bleeding, trying to compute what was happening.

The Agent stared at her. Though the little girl did not know it yet, her whole family was about to die. There was, unfortunately, very little that Shahim could do about that. Within a week, maybe two, everyone she knew would be dead, and if Shahim left her here she would be dead too.

But worse than that, somehow, she would suffer the fury and rage of her cowardly father in those last few days, adding brutality and cruelty to an already tragic end. Shahim could not help but be overcome by a sudden desire to save this single life, one amongst thousands, a single drop of mercy in a bloody sea of atonement. He looked at her. He could do it. It was not much, but he could save her.

He held out his hand and indicated the truck idling by the helicopter.

She looked at him, then at her father slumped on the floor, then at her brothers staring back at her with shock and admonishment in their eyes. She could have no idea what she was really being offered by the stranger. She only knew that if she stayed here she faced reprisals from both her father and brothers. She could not know that she also faced an unpleasant and ignominious death, but the life she saw laid out in front of her did not seem much better than that at that moment. She looked into the black eyes of the stranger. He was massive, and his face carried a threat of violence.

But as she looked at the black eyes of the man in front of her she also saw sadness, and then something different in his proffered hand: an offer of protection. Unlimited and undying protection. And as she sensed the depth of his commitment, her hand lifted from her side as if on a string. He took it, smiling gently and with fathomless empathy, and then he started to step back toward the truck, pulling her gently along with him. She followed, like a puppy on a loose leash, gently propelled toward a new life, more by the draw of his eyes than the gentle pull of his hand.

When they arrived at the door of the truck, she saw the surprise on the eyes of the man and woman now seated on its bench seat, and for a moment she shrank from their stares. But words exchanged in a language she did not understand quickly changed their mood. She watched the woman’s expression as she shot a look of dark anger back at where Banu’s unconscious father lay, and then with outstretched arms the strange lady pulled Banu onto her lap.

A moment later they were gone. Leaving Banu’s old life behind her. A way of life that would soon be smote by the disease that was even now multiplying in her veins.

One of the many mysteries Banu would struggle to understand in the months to come was the minuscule cell that even then was floating on a whispered comfort from Jennifer’s mouth, to be drawn in by Banu’s own hesitant breath. It quickly found purchase in Banu’s lungs, found its way into her bloodstream and began to multiply. Alone it would not be enough. Not even hundreds of its kind would have been able to stem the tide of viral growth already spreading through her veins.

But supplemented with the tens of thousands of others of its kind that she would inherit from Jack and Jennifer over the next few days, the combined horde would seek out and destroy the alien virus that was dividing busily inside her. In fact, it would seek out a host of foreign bacteria and viruses that infested the blood stream of her slightly malnourished body, and cleanse her of them. It would be the first of many changes she would undergo in the coming months. Changes the most open minded and well educated of children would have trouble grasping. Maybe on some level the parochial nature of her education may save her sanity as her world expanded exponentially before her eyes. Maybe it would even be a blessing, thought Shahim, trying to rationalize what he had just done.

- - -

Lieutenant Malcolm Granger of the British Consulate’s military detachment sped along, the alert voice of his colonel back at the embassy compound shouting through a satellite phone at him. Malcolm’s two-year stint at the embassy had been sorely disappointing to him at first, because of a lack of any hint of excitement. But that was all behind him now. After reconciling himself to the humdrum nature of the job, Malcolm had actually begun to appreciate the simple beauty of the country he had been sent to.

Turkmenistan may have played a relatively small role on the world stage in recent centuries, but with its borders with Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, among others, it had been witness to some of the most important events in recent history. After a long run as a Soviet state, acting as one of the staging points for the forces that invaded Afghanistan in the first of the terrible wars that would ravage that hitherto peaceful and progressive country, Turkmenistan had made a slow return to its own tolerant roots, raising a generation marked, but not broken, by the scars of its totalitarian past.

Now an ally of the West and a burgeoning democracy, it harbored embassies from most of the major economies of the world at its economic and political heart: Ashgabat. But it was still a relatively poor nation, and the growing power of the Islamic regime ruling its burly Iranian neighbor to the south had forced it to establish strong outposts along that long border.

It was to the one of these many border outposts that Malcolm had been brusquely ordered, there to intercept and aid three American nationals that were apparently approaching the border even as they spoke. At first he had been confused by the request: why send a British soldier to meet American nationals? But his slight but growing grasp of the Turkmen dialect of Russian had not gone unnoticed by his superiors, and apparently it was a rare commodity indeed.

By his side in the embassy car was the Turkmenistan liaison to the British consulate, a man Malcolm had formed a burgeoning friendship with. Ruslan carried with him quickly processed papers for the fugitives, written under order of the Turkmen State Department who, in turn, had been implored by both the US and UK governments to make the three nationals welcome.

They actually had papers for five people, but they had been told that they should expect only three from that list to actually be at the border; which three they did not yet know. What that said of the fate of whichever two had not made it was something Malcolm did not want to ponder too closely.

- - -

The Iranian farmer’s old truck rolled up to the border gate, slowing as it approached in order to minimize suspicion. It was a minor factor, though, and unlikely to make this any less of an ordeal. They were two Caucasian adults, an Arabic-looking gentleman, and a young Iranian girl, traveling without just cause or permission. Their chances of getting across without a fight were slim, to say the least.