The Flood (26 page)

And nobody living had been in there for two years.

* * *

Another ten meters of corridor bought them to double doors, also with the cafeteria sign on them. Before Handon could reach the doors to open them, Joe Shit the Somali Ragman beat him to it. Handon shook his head – this guy was still here?

Now the man used his body to block the entrance, standing between the team and it. How he could see to do so was anybody’s guess. But there was probably now a little moon- and star-light leaking in some of that wire-reinforced glass. Also about to leak through was the Arab Legion. From the fury of their pounding, they wanted in. Handon could also see globular shadows leaping by.

The simian dead were rampaging around and above the human dead.

It was a pure shit-show out there, and Handon wasn’t in the mood for any insane survivor theatrics in here. He reached out to haul the wiry little man out of his way – but then hesitated, something tickling at his brain.
Local knowledge is king
– an idea he’d recently been flogging.

And always listen to the man on the ground
.

But before he could act on this, Henno stepped to the front, grabbed the little man and hurled him back down the hallway. And before Handon could protest, he yanked open the door on the right – which came off its hinges and fell to the floor.

Henno moved inside, rifle up.

Handon moved to support him – but was instantly assaulted by an absolutely crushing stench. Even in a dead world, this was something special – a rancid ammonia smell, billowing out at them in waves that threatened to knock them over. Swallowing his rising bile, and out of long habit moving to confront any threats and clear the room, Handon went left as Henno went right. Nothing was standing or moving, though the floor was inexplicably two or more feet higher inside, and rose and fell in lumps and swells.

Squinting in slowly growing comprehension, Handon pointed his rifle and IR illuminator at the high ceiling, following it with his NVG gaze.

And the ceiling was moving – every inch of it. It twitched and rippled, little triangular protrusions flicking in a thousand places.

And then, with no other warning or preamble, it fell on them.

The whole dark mass blasted down and toward them and out the double doors in a whirling, flapping, shrieking nightmare of leathery wings and sharp little flashing teeth and mottled fell fur and dead black eyes – all of it green and black and even more terrifying for it.

Handon ducked and covered his head and turned back to the team – who’d had a fraction of a second more to react and now were somehow defending themselves with melee weapons. Handon saw Pred swinging his bat wildly, which looked only a little more effective than trying to bash away a cloud of mosquitoes. Then he stopped swinging and grabbed at his neck, where one or maybe two of them had landed and latched on.

“
Son of a BITCH!”
he bellowed at a volume that tore through even the chaos swirling around them.

But as Handon watched, he felt a hot pain on his own neck – and his NVG vision started strobing as wings flapped at high speed in front of his face. He dropped his rifle on its sling and started tearing at the horrible leathery bodies that had landed on his neck and shoulder and were now piling up.

He was being swarmed. And enough of these things would bring him down.

Enough might bring them all down.

They had to get the hell out of there.

* * *

Ali heard none of this from her OP on the roof, three floors above. A small open-air pavilion topped the three-story building, and Ali was up on the very top of that.

It was way too far to hear the chaos on the first floor, and the others hadn’t troubled her with a radio report, so she was instead monitoring the growing singularity around the building. Where the hell this many dead had come from, and how they’d been missed in aerial surveillance, was anybody’s guess. But in a long career of scavenging dead zones, it was hardly the first time they’d had this problem. Half the time the dead came out of nowhere.

Ali was also trying to keep her profile down – not least because she was pretty sure baboons, even dead ones, could climb right up the outside of the building if they saw her up there. Other than that, she was just staring half-numb out over post-Apocalyptic Hargeisa, looking upon the ruins of her childhood.

Oh well, my childhood sucked anyway
, she thought.

But that was really just a distraction. What she was really trying not to think about, albeit without a ton of success, was the chimera virus mentioned in that CIA report Juice had recovered. It had specifically cited that exact bioweapon – the stocks of which, as well as their rogue Kazakh designer and dealer, Ali had personally watched go up in great licks of purifying flame two and a half years ago.

Or so she had thought at the time.

But if it really turned out to be true that the Hargeisa virus was some kind of mutation of that chimera virus… and if the bioweapon she had been tasked with stopping hadn’t been stopped at all, but instead had gotten out, mutated, and then taken down the whole world… well, then Ali’s perfect service record, and her generally untroubled conscience, were about to become things of the past.

And she might have more to answer for than she could bear.

* * *

The last thing Handon saw, looking back toward the horrorscape of the cafeteria, was their Somali survivor, writhing on the ground and beating his arms against his face, with dozens of the swarming, flapping, remorselessly biting creatures carpeting his body, more of them piling up every second, and all relentlessly gorging on his flesh. And with no bite-proof assault suit, just about every part of his body was fair game. They seemed to be going for all of them at once.

He had been taken down – and was being eaten alive. And the answer to the mystery of his presence, strapped down to that gurney, would die with him.

More importantly, his death made the parameters of the engagement clear: more than a few of those things landed on you at the same time and you were done.

But instantly Handon faced forward again and got fighting – because he also knew the assault suits wouldn’t be enough to save them. Their hands, faces, and necks were all exposed to the biting aerial swarm. They’d all had to ditch their face shields when NVGs became necessary. The two didn’t work together. They’d never made them work together, because they almost never went out at night in the ZA – it made zombie-fighting harder, unlike terrorist-and-insurgent fighting.

Now they might be paying the price.

Alpha’s dust-up with the gigantic, thick swarm of bats quickly became a running, fighting, screaming, suffocating retreat back down the corridor, battling as they went. Pred was still swinging his baseball bat, and Henno his cricket bat – which with its wider and flatter edge worked a little better. Handon had got his sword out and was slicing the air in front of him, bifurcating tiny nightmare hairy flying bodies, which fell at his feet in black-gunk-spewing chunks. Juice and Homer were pretty much just running, their melee weapons of virtually no use.

Luckily it was a short running battle – only back to that storeroom Handon had found up the hall, on their left now. Everyone piled in, Handon yanked the door shut – and then they danced around like crazy people, killing the dozen or so that had flown in there with them before they got the room sealed.

Juice picked one up off the floor and held it up where everyone could see it. Its body was only three or four inches long, and mostly covered in mottled fur. It had tall dog-like papery ears with holes torn in them, rodent-like teeth, and leathery wings with a single claw at the joint. Creepiest of all was a long slit running down the center of its face between the eyes.

“I’ve seen these before,” Juice said. “Nasty piece of work. I think it’s called the
Hairy Slit-Faced Bat
, believe it or not.”

“Why’d they call it that?” Pred asked, wide-eyed.

“Becau— oh.”
Smart-ass.

“Yeah,” Pred said. “My real question is: are these ones dead?”

“Who gives a shit,” answered Henno. “They’re fucking bats, there are thousands of them, and they’re trying to eat us.”

Handon pulled out two chem-lights, broke and shook them, and put them on opposite ends of a nearby shelf, then flipped up his NVGs. The others did the same. Then he started trying to assess and dress the wound on his neck, but he couldn’t really see it or get to it. Pred pulled his hands away and said, “Lemme deal with that.”

“Who’s going to deal with yours?” Handon countered. He could now see blood dripping down the front of the big man’s plate carrier.

“I’ve got it,” Juice said, gently pulling Pred away from Handon, while Homer angled in and started on Handon’s wound.

And for the next minute they sat still and did combat medicine. And nobody said out loud what everyone was thinking – until Handon looked over and saw that Pred’s right hand was resting on the butt of his pistol in his chest rig.

“
Oh
, no,” Handon said, “just put that hand somewhere else, right now.”

Pred gave him a look – not reacting to Juice’s careful and astringent cleaning of his ugly wound.

Handon spoke intently. “Listen, that bite is not going to turn you. Any strain of the virus in another species is unlikely to be infectious to humans. Park told me this – in no uncertain terms.”

“Yeah, sure,” Pred said. “No doubt getting bit by a zombie bat is perfectly safe.”

Handon’s neck stung like hell from Homer’s work on it. But he was grateful. Zombie virus or no, those bite wounds were ragged and scary-looking, and already looked like going septic. Hargeisa was probably not the only virus or bacteria coating the foul surfaces of Hargeisa. Never mind in a bat cave with two feet of piled-up guano.

And on top of all that, now Handon had to worry about Pred checking himself out – terrified as he was of turning, and then turning on his teammates.

As Homer finished taping down the bandage, Handon dug out his serum pouch and got a syringe and two vials out. “Look,” he said. “I’m going to give us both the serum now. Even if, against the odds, we’re infected, this will keep us from turning.” Implicit in this, though Handon didn’t say it, was that it might keep them alive long enough to complete the mission.

Pred just grunted, sounding distinctly unconvinced.

Filling the syringe, Handon’s voice grew serious as he looked Pred in the eye. “Bottom line: you do
not
do a goddamned thing – at the very least until we see some symptoms. You got it?”

As Juice finished up on him, and Handon jabbed him in the ass, Pred just petulantly muttered, as if to himself: “Damned hairy slit-nosed bat took a chunk out of my neck. This some
bull
shit.”

Nobody there disagreed. Also, nobody had any good ideas for getting them the hell out of there. They were well and truly trapped.

With every possible clock still ticking.

Sinner

Jizan - Genomics Building

The NSF team, cowed by the raging inferno and menaced by the swarming dead, and finally driven back inside, now took cover behind lobby furniture and the front desk and got busy waiting – either for instructions on how to get the hell out of there, or for things to get a lot worse.

Sarah took up a position closest to the blown-out glass windows of the front wall, so she could cover it and silently dispatch any Zulus who took an interest or tried to wander in. But none did. They were too obsessed with the world-on-fire inferno of the plant out in front of them. For the living, there was only the blaze, the unnerving darkness surrounding it, the relentless march of the dead, and the black cocoon of the building around them – with its relative silence and peace inside. It was almost dreamy and soothing in there.

Surely it was an illusion. But it was real while it lasted.

Scanning tirelessly over her scope, but with nothing active to do just then, Sarah Cameron found herself getting into her own head. And not for the first time on this mission.

For some reason, the whole time she had been shooting those runners back in the power plant, singlehandedly defending the team, all she could think about was her behavior back on the
Kennedy
. Flirting with Henno as she’d done, her intimacy with Homer before that, when they had been alone on the road – and which Handon seemed to suspect had crossed over from intimacy to indiscretion…

Basically, she had risked everything – not just her relationship with Handon, which was precious enough, but also Handon’s ability to command his team, and thus complete his mission. It was unforgivable, really. But, suddenly, at least the causes of her inexplicable behavior were starting to become clear to her.

It wasn’t just the giddy freedom of having escaped that prison-like cabin in the woods, and escaped the life of thankless and dull labor keeping her husband and son alive. Sure, she had resented all the sacrifices she had made for them – and, later, resented having to feel guilty about their deaths. And, yes, she had also been intoxicated by being around all these super-capable, confident, self-reliant military men – and by the fact that she had a role among them, that she was accepted as something like an equal. And she’d become jealous of her newfound and unexpected freedom.

So she had done whatever the hell she wanted to do. Cutting loose. Flirting – and verging on sleeping around – and basically being reckless and irresponsible. Being cruel to the one who really loved her. And, mainly, being deeply selfish. In the self-regarding hall of mirrors of her ego, she thought she deserved it.

But it was deeper than that, and worse.

And she only realized it now: she had been turning into her father – her gambling, womanizing, reckless father. Maybe also turning into her crooked cop boyfriend, who had also put himself above everything and everyone else.

Just like those two, she had been irresponsible, and reckless, and gambled with the lives of those around her – and the lives of everyone on the planet. She had risked hurting not just Handon, but all of humanity. Maybe it was hard-wired deep within her, by her birth and upbringing. But none of that mattered.