Land of the Dead (Book 1): Infected (12 page)

Marsa Matrouh was a poor little resort town eighty miles east of Cairo, nestled on the Red Sea. It was named after a hot spring that had long since stopped spitting out water. It was the home of several failed hotels since the first and second revolutions had assured that western tourists would stay clear of all but the best known sites in Cairo and Luxor. Though traveling there would mean avoiding Cairo, the chances of finding any way out of there was slim.

“No. There never was much there. Besides, the Bedouins probably like strangers even less these days than they did before the virus. I think we need to follow SERE protocols. We hide out here for a day or so. We have food and water, and we are safe from discovery. Besides, with all the racket that the Ospreys made, and with all of the gunfire, I’m guessing this place is going to have at least a hundred thousand infected swarming it soon by dawn.”

“That many?” said Mikey, obviously afraid.

“There could be ten thousand and there could be ten million. It doesn’t really matter. Either way, the Egyptian Army will be swarmed and will either retreat or die. I’m betting they will retreat across the desert, and not in an orderly fashion. If we wait for it to happen, safe and sound in this bunker, we will be safe.”

“So.” Jimmy said, “we should let the Egyptian Army lure them away and then what? SERE protocol says we link up with the nearest friendly unit.”

“Right. We still have a walled American compound in Maadi. They have an exit plan. If I can use some of that radio equipment in the next room we should be able to contact them.”

“That equipment hasn’t worked in decades.”

“I only need the antenna to work. I need something to help boost my signal enough that this hand radio can be heard eleven miles away. I think it will work.”

“And what’s their plan?”

“They’re going to grab a river boat and take it down the Nile. Once they reach the outskirts of Alexandria, they are going to try to contact the fleet for an evacuation flight from Alexandria Airport.”

“That’s crazy.”

“I know. But we have a chance of making it work if hordes of the infected are leaving the city to chase retreating army units. If they won’t pick us up from Alexandria Airport, we hit the harbor and try to find a ship, or ships, that will allow us to stick to the coast and make our way to somewhere, anywhere, that is safe and will take us in. Maybe Israel fared better than Egypt – they certainly have a shot if they were willing to shoot the infected on sight early on. If not, there are Islands off of Turkey. Cyprus was a possible evacuation point, along with Crete and Malta. There are a thousand or so islands in the Aegean and Ionian seas….”

“Well, there certainly are more islands in the Med than there are in the Red Sea and along the coast of Africa. Besides, I have no urge to ever see Somalia again.”

“The feeling is mutual.”

“Okay, for now, though, we stay hydrated, piss and shit in this bucket over here, and wait.” said Jimmy, standing up and stretching his back. “We have some cots over here against the wall. Oh, kid, if you forget to cover the bucket, I’ll make you drink it.”

“Gross.”

“He’s serious, Mikey.” Dillon said, mussing Mikey’s hair.

The hardest part of the next 36 hours was keeping Mikey from climbing the walls, literally and figuratively. Twelve year olds were simply not made for sitting around in a bunker for that long. To pass the time, they slept a lot. Dillon and Jimmy swapped army stories, and Dillon let Mikey help him connect the walkie-talkie to the bunker antenna. Though it would have worked better with a something to boost the power of the signal, there weren’t a lot of competing signals. At nearly double the estimated effective range, the hand radio managed to reach Rick with enough signal strength to communicate.

“Rick, this is Dillon. Boy am I glad to hear from you.”

“What the hell is going on, Dillon? You’re supposed to be long gone by now.”

“Everything went sideways. The Navy only sent two birds. They got into a firefight with the Egyptian Army. I’ve been holed-up overnight with Mikey and my new friend Jimmy in an old bunker under one of the hangars. It sounds like the Egyptians executed every American that didn’t make it onto the Ospreys.”

“Those son of a bitches! How many? Who?”

“We don’t really know yet. In a few hours we’re expecting the entire infected population to swarm this base, and then we are planning on letting the retreating Egyptians lure the infected away, most likely easterly. Then, we’ll grab whatever vehicle we can get that still runs and head southwest back to your location.”

“Well, right now Maadi has been pretty clear. We’ve even seen a few groups of scavengers roaming the streets.”

“I don’t know if the military drew the infected out of the city on purpose, but the final result is going to be the same. I think we have a narrow window and I mean to exploit it. I’ll get to you within 48 hours. Once we are closer, we will have more frequent radio contact. Then, I think we’re all going for a boat ride.”

“That sounds great to me. Everybody complained about you when you were here, but they seemed to freeze up entirely as soon as you left. It’s been hell just trying to get these people to pull guard duty at night.”

“Well, you need to fix that. Those scavengers are going to quickly form larger bands and they WILL come for what you have in that compound.”

“I hear you. We’ll do our best. Get here as soon as you can.”

Around dawn they heard gunfire begin to pick up across the airbase. Apparently, payback had finally arrived. At first, it was sporadic. Then, an hour or so later, it became heated for a half hour before settling down.

Dillon and Jimmy talked through what they thought would happen next to pass the time and show Mikey that there was nothing to worry about. Dillon thought that the attack would most likely come in waves while Jimmy thought the next one would be the big one. Jimmy’s reasoning was sound. The first short wave had been the infected hanging around Cairo International Airport. At a rough estimate, there might have been a couple of thousand there. But behind them by about two hours was a mass of infected from Cairo.

The fire steadily increased, and occasionally there were explosions that probably came from Egyptian tanks. Then, the fire began to shift as the left half of the airbase was rapidly abandoned. To Dillon, it was obvious that the left flank had been overrun. Soon, the gunfire increased in intensity again, reaching a crescendo of violence before fading again to become isolated pockets of desperation.

“In four hours we can check out the hangar. I think it will be pretty clear. Then, we can poke around outside and try to find a vehicle or two.” offered Jimmy.

“Well, we can always head back towards the barricade. We left our FAVs there.”

“It’s a possibility. I’m thinking something lighter, like a jeep, might be just the trick to off-roading it back to Maadi.”

“That could work. We could move south to Wadi Degla and then take the Wadi west into Maadi without encountering too many residential areas.”

“Alright. I think we have ourselves a plan. I might want to use some of the tools upstairs to make us a few REAL suppressors, though.”

“I’m guessing you know how, then?”

“Let’s just say I took metal shop in high school.”

“How long would you need?”

“I could get two cranked out in…..three hours or so?”

“As long as you let Mikey help out, we have a deal.” Dillon said, winking.

“Well then, it looks like I have a helper.”

“Daddy, can I?”

“Can you work with a bench grinder, a welder, drills, and pipe cutters? Sure, what could happen?”

“Daddy, please?”

“Of course you can. It’s time for you to take on some more responsibility. It is the apocalypse, after all. Am I right?”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Dillon tried to nap for the next few hours, but Mikey was too excited to let anyone sleep. Instead, he drew up a few designs that he wanted to make for Jimmy. One of them involved putting an axe on the stock of an M-4. Another one involved a pistol with a bayonet. Dillon looked at each one patiently, then gently burst Mikey’s bubble by pointing out the impracticality of the invention. Finally, it was time for them to pop the hatch and check outside.

“What about a couple of swords and shields?”

“What?” said Dillon, rapidly becoming impatient.

“If you had a shield you could keep them from biting you.”

“And if I had a shield I couldn’t use my MP-5. And if I had a shield I couldn’t move as quickly and I would bang it around in close quarters and alert everyone….”

Dillon was almost to the top of the ladder. He couldn’t wait to get out of this hole and get some fresh air. He paused a second to close his eyes and pray that there wouldn’t be any infected waiting for him as he squirmed out of the hole.

“What about a sword, then? With a sword you could kill them quietly. Or, with a sword at the end of a pole, like those Japanese weapons, you could kill them quietly from a distance and save ammo.”

“I think a couple of machetes might make sense. Nothing too heavy, but something heavy enough to be a one shot kill to the neck or head. It would have to be longer than a knife, but not a full broadsword.” Jimmy offered, obviously agreeing.

Dillon popped the hatch. Though he would have preferred a pistol for climbing out he had his MP-5 and the bulky, plastic silencer instead. He knew he needed to keep the noise down.

“You too, Jimmy?” he said, incredulous.

“The kid has a lot of crazy ideas, but this one isn’t one of them. A couple of machetes…..that might help us. I mean, not primary weapons, or even secondary ones, but they might do the trick. The infected don’t really think too much. They don’t use tools or tactics. If the group was small enough, a couple of swords could work.”

Dillon had hopped up and scanned the hangar as Jimmy talked. Jimmy was now next to him, though he would only fire his weapon as a last resort. Firing an M-4 would be loud enough to attract a lot of attention. Dillon heard Mikey scrambling up the ladder and taking position behind him. He looked back quickly, just in case it was one on the infected coming from under a table or something. It never hurt to be cautious. To his relief, it was just Mikey, and the Hangar was totally clear. There were bullet holes in the hangar, and the place looked like it had been looted of food, water, fuel, and smaller hand tools.

“Okay, as long as we can figure out a way to do it quickly and quietly you can go ahead and make those swords.”

“Boss, quietly doing ANYTHING with power tools is not gonna happen.”

“How much noise are we talking about, Jimmy?”

“Plenty, but we could muffle the worst of it by using as many unpowered tools as possible. Then, at the end, we could take the grinder downstairs in the bunker and plug it in with an extension cord.”

“That would definitely cut down on noise. How about you get the tools and materials together with Mikey while I check things out outside?”

“I wouldn’t recommend going out there.”

“I’m not. I’m going to peak through the bullet holes wherever possible. I want to avoid any future surprises.”

“Roger that, boss.”

The carnage outside was severe. The Egyptian Army had spent thousands of rounds on this fight, and it showed. To the west, Dillon couldn’t even count the number of bodies. It boggled the mind to count how many people had been killed. Towards the end, the infected had obviously been tightly packed, and high-velocity rounds had been able to penetrate several bodies before slowing down enough to lodge in someone.

The airfields themselves were killing fields as well. Dillon couldn’t even see the Americans who had been executed the night before. The eastern fences were down, and Dillon was certain that the remaining elements of the Egyptian Army had retreated in that direction, firing as they drove. Dillon had no doubt that the Egyptian Army had killed around a hundred thousand infected between Cairo International and here. Dillon also had no doubt that the Egyptian Army had ceased to be a coherent, combat effective unit.

Vehicles had been swarmed, and retreating soldiers had been gunned down along with the infected. Perhaps, Dillon thought, they HAD been infected. There were plenty of weapons lying around, and it would not be difficult to find a vehicle. Driving over the dead might present some difficulty, though, and finding a vehicle that hadn’t been shot up was going to be a challenge. All in all, though, the area looked fairly empty of the infected. There were perhaps a dozen in view within a couple hundred yards. The rest, it seemed, had followed the last vestiges of the army into the eastern desert.

“We’re clear enough. I’m going to pop out and clear the few infected that are out there.”

“Boss, I think I should do that.”

“What gives you that idea, Jimmy?”

“Well, you have a son to take care of, and I need a bunch of pipes cut. You can cut the pipes and stay in here with your son while I go out there, WITH your MP-5, and mop up.”

“Alright Jimmy, I have no issue with that. Just leave your M-4 here.”