Medora Wars (10 page)

He reached behind his back, unclasped a latch around a handle, and pulled out a long, slender blade fashioned like a streamlined machete. Holding it in front of him with one hand, he advanced down the hallway toward the sound. As he approached, he heard the sound grow louder, with intermittent gurgling. He turned a corner and saw a small group of the infected huddled around a body. They were on their hands and knees in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Nothing has changed
, he thought.
They only want one thing
.

Walking briskly into the room, he brought down the blade directly into the skull of a man whose head was buried in the open abdomen of the body. Putting his foot on the man’s back, he pulled the blade out, and kicked him down toward the carcass.

A thin woman in a polka dot dress looked up at him and swung her arm out, lost balance, and fell sideways over the man, whose brain was now bulging from his hair.

Dave quickly stepped forward over the woman and swung the blade down at her neck, slicing through the skin, and crunching through the spinal cord. She choked and struggled as he pulled the blade out, releasing a flood of blood from her neck. With one more swing, Dave completely separated her head, as another infected man had managed to get to his feet.

The infected man let out a long groan and stepped forward as Dave lunged at him, bringing the blade diagonal over his shoulder, and down through his chest. Putting his foot up on the man’s chest, he pulled the blade out, which made the man’s shoulder and half his chest completely separate from his body. His arm and parts of ribcage pulled away from the muscle of his chest wall and fell to the ground, bringing a lung down to the floor with the attached tissue. The man lost his balance and fell to the floor, slightly twitching.

The last and final infected was a woman who hadn’t noticed any of the commotion as she was still on her hands and knees, chewing on the eyebrow of a dead man, and stripping the skin away from his forehead with her teeth.

Dave simply walked over and watched her as she chewed for a moment. It was a young woman with long black hair tied together with a hair clip, to which a plastic daisy was attached. For a moment he wanted to let her be. He held his long blade over her neck, brought it high above his head, and sliced it cleanly through. Her head fell onto the body below, slowly moving its jaws.

Turning from the kitchen, he pulled out his radio once again, and turned it on to the same static sound as before. He adjusted the frequency knob when the front door to the apartment adjacent to the kitchen burst open with bodies, falling to the carpet below. Stepping back down the hallway from where he came, he dropped the radio as he fumbled with his blade. Frantically, he pointed it toward the infected crowd that was stumbling in through the door from the streets below.

Shit, shit, shit, shit,
he thought. He retreated back through the living room; toward the patio, as yet more of the horde crawled in and over those that had already burst through the door. The hallway filled with stumbling bodies.

He backed out onto the patio and closed the sliding door, thinking. He put his hand at his hip to feel for the radio, but it was gone. A surge of panic crept over him.
How the hell did I even get here?
I don’t belong here, parachuting into an infected city not having a clue what I’m doing
, he thought. He turned from the doors and looked down to the streets again, only to find that the horde below was stagnant and slow moving. Only a small eddy of movement happened directly below the patio where they were beginning to enter his building.

Turning around, he saw that the horde had made it to the sliding glass door. A small girl was being pushed up against the glass, looking up at him. A steak knife protruding from her forehead continually knocked on the glass as she kept biting at nothing, while her droopy eyelids followed Dave’s movements. Another man was behind her, pushing up against the glass as more bodies entered the room from behind.

Without hesitation, Dave hoisted himself up onto the railing of the patio. He stood on the railing and reached up to the wooden roofing, through which he had earlier fallen. He pulled his full weight up as the glass door of the patio came shattering in with bodies just a few feet from him. He managed to pull himself up to the top of the roofing, with the infected crowd directly below him, jumping up, and grabbing his jacket through the splintered wood.

“Get the fuck off me!” he yelled out, punching downward.

He crawled toward the safety of the roof of the home but felt the entire wooden scaffold sway with his weight. He stopped for a moment, waiting. The wooden framework held for a moment, and then teetered outward toward the street. As the scaffold fell, he tried getting to his knees to jump over to the roof, but couldn’t find his footing in time as the entire wooden structure collapsed sideways off the patio, and fell to the street below, bringing Dave with it.

He felt a brief moment of free air as he fell with wooden fragments onto a small van in the street. The roof of the van caved inward with his weight as he scrambled and got to his knees. Dazed, he could only see the sparkling sun through the heavy billows of smoke that surrounded the street. He unclasped his gun from his side and pointed it down where dozens of arms and heads already scrambled toward the van, biting at each other to get to the new target.

He stood atop the roof of the van and kicked down all the wooden planks that had fallen with him. The horde above had filled the patio to the brim, and the small child that had been at the window now tumbled from above, falling toward him. He sidestepped as she landed on the edge of the van roof and fell onto the heads of the infected below.

Before he could look back up, a heavy weight hit him on the top of his helmet, causing him to drop to his knees. Arching his neck up, he saw the sky dim with falling bodies.

Chapter Nine: The Pacific Ocean near Hawaii

“Tell me about him, Malik,” Atash said.

“Why?”

“It will help you to tell it all out loud. Have you ever gone over it with anyone other than yourself?”

“No.”

“You can now.”

“I’m afraid to,” Malik said quietly.

“We are the first group of people that you can be completely honest with. It is impossible for you to be judged harshly.” Atash smiled and rested his palm on Malik’s shoulder. “I want you to be fully prepared for what you are going to do. It’s important that you not have hidden tension in your spirit.”

Malik felt the sun’s heat weighing down on his clothing as he glanced past Atash to the blue ocean. In the far distance, the waves melded into an icy glass surface that extended forever. “So I do have a spirit now?” he asked, looking back at Atash.

Atash looked again at him with the same smile that Malik had seen many times, never knowing if it was sincere, or just a stalling tactic. The smile walked a fine line of being comical and endearing. Atash responded with a disappointingly predictable answer: “Maybe.”

“Shouldn’t we know by now if we have a soul or not considering what we’ve just done in Seoul?”

“Malik, quiet down,” Atash said. “Don’t let these unanswerable questions bother you. They will only cause dismay.”

Malik looked back at the blue water and sighed. “I would come into his room constantly at first. His tiny bed had become this little cockpit with wires and tubing stretching all across to different machines. One for checking all his vitals, and another to pump his lungs, half a dozen for who the hell knows. I never left his room for the first two weeks. I kept having this hope that his eyes would suddenly open, or he would yank the breathing tube out of his throat, and start crying. I had unknowingly wrapped myself up into this fantasy that he would recover and we would return back to what we were before. That’s the problem with disease. Once you have it, you keep trying to get back to what it was like before, but you can’t. You become possessed with the notion that you can return everything back to normal. You get so obsessed with turning everything back that it… changes you. I became blinded by my hope and deluded myself that I could change the course of history.

“After that first two weeks, I stopped coming in to check on him so much, because I didn’t want to care anymore. I had to will myself into not caring about my son dying, and it actually worked for a while. After months of exhaustion, practically living at the hospital, I just couldn’t care anymore. I would go on a run outside, looking out over the beach, and wouldn’t think about him the entire time while he just laid in that tiny crib and sucked away on borrowed air.

“My marriage was essentially over. My wife became a bigger coward than I was. I’d go a couple of days without even seeing her. I think she may have stayed at her mother’s a few times a week. I just stopped asking. We grew to hate each other. I still hate her, and I know she still hates me… I still hate me.”

“Malik, you can’t hate yourself for the things that you cannot control. None of those things were your fault and were an illusion,” Atash said, sitting down beside him.

“Please, brother, let me talk.” Malik suddenly felt a pang of love for Atash as he looked over at his cool eyes. He remembered again why he trusted the man.

“Of course.” Atash smiled.

“She didn’t want to deal with any of it. She just walked away from the lives that we had built.” He looked around at the group of men that silently listened. “I hate her so much,” Malik said. He paused as he thought about his words, wondering if they true.

Malik continued. “After she finally left us for what I thought was for good, I could hear his ventilator pumping away every night. I couldn’t sleep. All I heard was a single click with a push of air repeated by another click. The clicking sound started getting into my dreams, and one night I dreamed about a gigantic furnace the size of, of one of those big dump trucks they have in America. It was like a dump truck, driving around the streets, but the back opened up to a huge pit of fire that just went on forever. I dreamed that it drove around from house to house and collected little kids and dumped them in. I had that dream more than once. I still do.

“Nothing ever got better, and it’s still not better, but I think now I’ve realized that it doesn’t matter. I tried a lot of anti-depressants, which didn’t do anything but make me suicidal. It took me a long time to realize what I needed to do. Every day I would keep going into his room and watch his chest go up and down from the ventilator. It didn’t matter that his heart was still pumping because he was already dead. The cycle of grieving for his death, but then having hope that he still wasn’t quite dead, was killing me. I was dying with him, and I knew if he were a grown adult, he wouldn’t want me to be there by his side, dying along with him. I woke up every day like this, with a kaleidoscope of emotions flowing through me: anger at every person involved, indescribable sadness mixed with complacency, and also a deep sickness inside of me.

“For a while I was just going to kill myself and everything would be fine. But then I realized that if he did somehow survive, my son wouldn’t have a dad. It was that terrible hope that he would pull through, that was destroying my life. Every solution that I could come up with was just… thwarted by that bullshit hope. This ridiculous, irrational idea that somehow it might turn out better when, why in the fuck should it? Why would things work out better for me and my family when it hasn’t for a million other people dumb enough to also have hope? Hope is the worst thing to ever happen to me.”

Malik looked over again at Atash who was leaning forward with his hands propped below his chin, eyes closed, rocking slightly back and forth in his seat. “Atash?”

“Yes, Malik?” he said.

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, of course. I’m waiting for the part where you killed your infant son,” Atash said.

The group of men seated around the deck of the boat looked over at Malik.

He swallowed and felt an urge to stand up and flip Atash over the railing of the boat into the ocean. Breathing calmly, Malik asked, “How did you... know?”

“It was the merciful thing to do. It is what we did in Seoul, and it’s what we’re going to do in America in just a few short weeks. It is what our brothers and sisters are doing in many cities all across the world at this very moment. Our world has clung to that false hope for far too long.”

“I killed my son,” Malik responded.

“Malik, because we are the messengers to the world. Death is our message and fear is the tool we use to shock and persuade their souls to ignite!” Atash yelled out, standing to his feet. He walked over to the side of the large boat, and stood in front of the group of men. “My brothers, we must emulate the courage that our brother Malik has shown us. As we move along this great ocean, we must prepare ourselves to confront the great illusion of the world. I want you to reflect on the small groups of the faithful all around the world, just like us that are changing the world in just the last few days. This is only the beginning, but I believe most of us will live to see the day of realization.

“It has come time my brothers to tell them who we are.” Atash walked up to the railing of the boat and looked out over the ocean. “We are the brotherhood of the Sirr, the brotherhood of the man who you will all know soon. He is a man whose flesh has been rent from the illusions of this world. He is a man who has communed with the nothingness of the universe and returned to bring us, his warriors, together for the last battle. It is through the Sirr that we have been able to bring the scourge of mankind once more to the face of the Earth. It is the Sirr who has laid a trap for United States and with them, the rest of our sick world will follow and finally become free.” Bringing his arms down, he looked at the men, and smiled. “You don’t know how special you are, but the Sirr does, and he has chosen you. He knows every event that is occurring on the planet. We are his seed, to wait on this boat and sail toward the end while the scourge festers in Mexico. It will burst at the borders and unleash a tide of destruction.” He turned and smiled at the group.

“Malik,” Atash said, motioning to his chest. “We need to speak.”

Malik stood and walked over to the railing of the boat. He leaned over and looked down the hull as its surface sunk deep into the water. The waves lapped up the hard steel in a rhythmic motion; licking up at the dried surface, and then sinking back down to the darkness of the ocean.

Atash put his hand on Malik’s back. “We need to go down below. It’s time for you to make the call.”

Malik stood. “Let’s go.”

Atash led Malik down the narrow side deck of the boat, past large cargo containers, and several emergency rafts suspended from metal scaffolds. Malik looked up at the captain’s deck that was positioned in a cabin, a level up from the main deck. Several men laughed and smoked within the windows of the cabin. Atash disappeared down a dark tunnel that led to the underbelly of the ship.

Malik followed with wary footsteps, uncertain of how far apart each metal step was. He only saw the faint figure of Atash in front of him as he gripped the railing. At the bottom, an electric lantern lit up the small room below.

Atash sat down at a wooden table set with a rectangular panel to which numerous cords connected. A set of headphones was lined up in a row along metal hooks along the wall. “Do you need to go over anything before we begin?” Atash asked.

Malik paused for a moment, approaching the table. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Are you certain, Malik? This is very important. Our entire plan rests on this being executed with perfection.”

“I’ve been over it a million times in my head. If I keep going over it now, it’s just going to give me more anxiety. I am ready.”

“I trust in you, Malik. The Sirr trusts in you. He knows all about you. Do you trust in him?”

“Yes, I do.” His mind was ready, but his heart was still up on the upper deck, wanting to explain the reasons for everything he had done. Breathing in and out slowly, he sat down at the table and put on a pair of headphones, while Atash did the same.

“Go ahead,” Atash commanded.

Malik turned on the circuit board and dialed a few numbers into a keypad. After waiting several moments, he dialed several more sets of numbers in timed intervals, concentrating on typing in the precise sequence. After another moment, a ringing tone flickered in his headset, and he held his breath.

The ringing stopped, followed by a slight pause, and then a voice picked up. “This is Mayberry.”

“It’s me,” Malik said.

“Holy shit, are you kidding me? Where are you?”

“Still in Japan.”

“Why haven’t I heard from you in over a week?”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t been able to contact you. It has been extremely dangerous for me.”

“Hey, I’ve got a question for you.”

“Oh, okay…” Malik was startled by Mayberry’s casual tone.

“Did you know anything about two planes full of infected dead bodies that were shot down over D.C.?”

“No. What’re you talking about?”

“Yeah, we just happened to thwart a major attack on the capital. Or how about the outbreak in Jerusalem? Know anything about this?”

“No.”

“Am I now
your
agent in the field?” Mayberry taunted.

“You have to understand these people.”

“I want to and you’re not helping!” Mayberry yelled.

Malik looked over at Atash, who shot him back a stern look. Malik continued. “They keep saying they’re finally going to use me for an attack, but right up to the very moment, they put me on a truck and fly me away.”

“Fuck me.” Mayberry exhaled loudly into the phone.

“Just shut your mouth, you son of a bitch!” Malik grabbed the sides of his chair and yelled back.

Atash shot a cold stare at Malik.

“Oh, suddenly you’re growing a pair?” Mayberry asked.

“You’ve no fucking clue what I’ve been dealing with over here, you ungrateful bastard. I’ve given up two years of my life to get where I am. I am threatened daily with death. They place a gun at the side of my head and interrogate me about the CIA. They still don’t trust me, and I don’t know if it’s just because it’s a scare tactic or part of their training. And then when I finally do get the chance to slip away and call you, you tell me I’m not helping?” He breathed heavily and looked over at Atash, who waved his hand at him, cautioning him to slow down.

After a pause, Mayberry responded. “Okay, all right. I apologize. I can’t possibly imagine what you’ve been going through.”

“Just this conversation right now could get me killed.”

“I understand.”

“And if you could just stop yelling at me for one second, I can finally tell you something useful.”

“All right, agent.”

“I don’t have a lot of time, so I’m going to be brief, and then I’m going to need to hang up. They flew me down to Japan because from here I’m going to be taking another plane out to South America. I’m going to Venezuela. Something huge is happening down there, and I don’t think it only involves Venezuela.”