The Flood (4 page)

“We’ve had increasing cases of IBS and IBD,” Walker said. “It’s a problem.”

“Oh, good. Another one.”

Doc Walker had squinted up at him. “You are a very big smartass, aren’t you? Like a bratty eight-year-old blown up to the size of Sasquatch.”

“Sorry,” Pred said, lightening up. “It just gets me down when I can’t do my job.”

Walker nodded. She got that. “Okay, look – I’m going to give you some cortical steroids. These should tighten up your gut enough to let you operate. They’re not good for you, and definitely not a long-term fix. But it’ll keep you on your feet – and off the shitter.”

Now, as Predator recalled all of this, he started to get himself out of sight of the others, partially behind a tree. There were plenty of combat situations where crapping in sight of your teammates was necessary. But this probably wasn’t one of them. Then again, Pred was a lot wider than all the trees around here. He hoped no one saw anything traumatizing.

As he took care of business, he heard something rustling in the underbrush nearby.

The hand he wasn’t wiping with went to the knife on his chest rig.

* * *

Reyes was posted to the south side of the bridge, the far one from the parked MRAP. He tried to ignore the noise of cars and trucks being rolled off the bridge, accelerating down into the gully, and crashing into trees – not to mention the steady suppressed firing back toward the town. He simply faced away and covered his sector, his mind on his job. This was important not least since coverage was thin – him to the south, Brady to the north, and Ali up in overwatch.

Everyone else had to get out and push.

He stole a quick look over his shoulder as he heard the MRAP’s winch spinning up – and saw the overturned truck being slowly but powerfully dragged off the bridge. They were close to getting it clear – and thus close to getting out of there.

Scanning to the south, he could see there were a few vehicles on the road – and a fair number of what looked like they used to be bodies, strewn on the blacktop and the shoulders. There wasn’t much left of them now. Mainly clothing, bones, hair, and the tang of regret. Options foreclosed. Things over forever.

Reyes’s vision snapped to the foreground again and he brought his rifle to his shoulder, as he heard rustling in the underbrush nearby – just past the shoulder of the road. He advanced a few paces to investigate. The brush was low, and the trees were small and sparse, so he didn’t think there could be anything human-sized hiding back there. Wildlife, maybe.

Sure enough, a dark nose on a tan snout stuck itself out from a low bush. As it emerged further, it looked like some kind of mole or beaver – tan fur on its belly, shades of brown on top. Whiskers and cute little ears. Then again, its fur was pretty patchy, showing mottled gray skin underneath – and the eyes, which were black underneath, had an unhealthy-looking milky coating. But things were probably tough all over the whole ecosystem. Reyes could relate.

Instinctively, he stopped moving, to avoid spooking it and to get a better look. But, pretty quickly, the creature demonstrated it had no fear of man. It scuttled forward out of the bushes, front paws first.

Reyes knelt down. “Hello there,
chula
. What a cutie pie.” He startled slightly as it began to make some strange chirruping or singing call – like a little velociraptor maybe. Within seconds, four or five more snouts poked through the bush. And now the first one issued a tiny bark.

Reyes hesitated. He was a little weirded out by this, but not worried. Yet.

But then he felt a strong hand on his shoulder, grabbing him and yanking him up out of there – and simultaneously heard Graybeard hissing, “Get the fuck back, dumbass” – right as he saw the blur of one of the little creatures launching up and forward. It smacked into his plate carrier, teeth and paws extended – basically right where his face had been before Graybeard relocated it.

He and Reyes staggered back – as the small creatures leapt after them.

They were being chased by moles.

* * *

“Dude – what the fuck!?”

Brady had just watched Handon cut one of the furry creatures in half with his sword. Suddenly, in seconds, these things were coming out of the woodwork, scurrying over the ground at the foot of the bridge, toward the MRAP and the operators – and attacking, flying at them viciously.

It was both scary and completely comical, like getting ambushed by an army of otters – or like the killer rabbit in Monty Python. On the other hand, they also moved fast as hell and were tough to hit. And they seemed to be going for the operators’ faces and necks. Most everyone was using melee weapons to defend.

Graybeard and Reyes backed toward the truck, side by side. Reyes echoed Brady: “Seriously – what the fuck is this?”

Graybeard seemed unperturbed. “Did you see their eyes?” Belatedly Reyes remembered that their eyes were weirdly opaque – as if covered with cataracts. “No fucking way,” he said. “Can’t be.”

They were all collapsing on the MRAP, as the overturned truck was still being dragged across the near end of the bridge. The human dead were still coming over the hill behind them, much closer now. Nonetheless, Ali abandoned her perch and appeared magically on the ground, sword out and swinging.

“They’re rock hyraxes,” she said, backing away, pivoting, and dodging all at once. “Local to Somalia. Just little herbivorous mammals… I remember them as cute and harmless.”

“Scratch the herbivorous part,” Pred said, swinging his bat powerfully – and missing completely. One of them landed on his chest, its sticky paws grabbing on – and its burrowing face going for his neck. “Mother
fucker
,” he barked, pulling it off and throwing it all the way into the ravine.

“Do
not
get bitten!” Ali shouted.

“This is bullshit,” Reyes said. “Animals don’t get infected!”

Handon came on the squad net to reach everyone. “Collapse by sectors to the vehicle. We’re Oscar Mike.”
On the move.

Backs to the center, they all swatted and stabbed and retreated back to the MRAP. Some covered while others mounted up. It was still all completely surreal and borderline hilarious. Then again, the threat of infection kind of killed the humor. And these things were still moving damned quickly…

There were now at least a dozen of them visible on the ground – ones that had been whacked, stabbed, or shot by the operators – but some were still crawling, barking, or just wriggling. A few with crushed heads lay still.

Luckily, within seconds, both teams were all mounted up, buttoned up – and driving the hell out of there. Amazingly, the hyraxes were still attacking the MRAP – hurling themselves at the windows, tires, and cast-iron body.

Have fun with that
, Pred thought, looking out one of the louvered side windows in disbelief. Up front, Handon had his fingers dug deeply into the armrest again, as they rolled out onto the first few feet of bridge.

Because they still had to get across the damned thing without it collapsing.

It looked like it was still just one-damned-thing-after-another day. Handon reminded himself to deal with one thing at a time.

They cleared the bridge and accelerated south.

Bombast

JKF - NSF Ops Room

Wesley took a long, slow, nervous look at the faces all staring wide-eyed at him around the ops room. All of the surviving and healthy Naval Security Forces were crammed in – including Melvin and Browning, men Wesley had worked and fought with since taking command, all the way back to Virginia Beach. Three of that original crew no longer present were Scott (killed by runners in VA), Anderson (abandoned the others to die, infected in the flight deck battle, now being kept alive with the serum), and Derwin (shot in the runner fight, nearly bled out, now recuperating in the hospital).

They were all packed in there for the briefing –
his
briefing.

And it would be Wesley, now Lieutenant (junior grade) Wesley, who would be leading this group out on a new shore mission – one into the remains of an artificial city in Saudi Arabia, to try to retrieve a DNA sequencer. This would allow Dr. Park to complete the critical last step after getting his early-stage virus sample – namely sequencing its entire genome – and thus speed completion of his vaccine, all before they got back to Britain.

If there even was any Britain left, by the time they made it back there.

And it was Wesley’s NSF team who were being asked to execute this mission – after Commander Abrams finally approved it – because, simply, there was no one else left. And it was Wesley who was in charge of NSF because… well, actually, he didn’t have the faintest idea how or why he’d been put in charge.

But here he was.

In addition to the old hands, also in the room were NSF’s numerous replacements – those from the survivors they had pulled out of Virginia, including their tattooed hardman leader, Burns. Also several who had been shanghaied from Stores crew, including the tall and strong Jenson, with whom Wesley had fought in the flight deck battle, and who had further demonstrated his steadiness in the sweep for lone Zulus in the lower decks.

Also attending, but not so much participating, were Dr. Park – whose big idea this whole mission was in the first place – and Sarah Cameron, who would be going along as Park’s eyes and ears, essentially the technical consultant, to identify the sequencer they needed. And, finally, there was Marine Sergeant Lovell, who had basically planned the whole mission while Wesley and Sarah tried to keep up.

All in all, it was about twenty people there in total, and they were all sitting in chairs that had been pulled around for the purpose, or else stood around the periphery of the room.

The NSF ops room had recently become Wesley’s second home. It was of a similar size to Alpha’s and the Marines’ team rooms, but with fewer weapons and a lot less testosterone in the air, and more paperwork and office crap. Whereas the team rooms of the spec-ops pipe-hitters had the feel of a Forward Operating Base in al-Anbar Province or the Helmand river valley, the NSF ops room felt more like a police station-house in a small and generally crime-free American city.

A rack of radios sat charging on a table, near a bank of CCTV monitors. Chairs and desks filled some of the space – rather than crates of man-portable missiles serving as improvised tables – though an armory and locker room did let off the main room. A big flat-panel display hung from the front wall, driven by a laptop Wesley had open on a table, displaying a region map that included the Horn of Africa, the Gulf of Aden – and the Arabian Peninsula.

Wesley fiddled with the zoom level of the map and looked over to Sergeant Lovell, who sat beside him. He had originally asked Lovell to run this briefing, which he was enormously more qualified to do.

“No,” the serious and professional warrior had told him. “It’s important that the men you’ll be leading into harm’s way see you as the leader from the outset. Their lives will be in your hands, so you need to sound like you’ve
got
things in hand – right from the start.” He had paused then. “Have you got any previous team leadership experience?”

Wesley pondered. “I was rugby team captain for a half a season in sixth-form college.”

“Why only half a season?”

“I wasn’t very good. They voted me out.”

At the time, Lovell had looked like he was trying to think of something reassuring to say. But nothing came. Now, with the briefing actually imminent, he just nodded up at Wesley. The message was clear:
Get on with it.
Wesley straightened up, swallowed – and got on with it.

“This is our target,” he said, pointing a ruler at the map onscreen. “Jizan Economic City, or JEC, down at the southern tip of Saudi Arabia.” The others could see from the region map that it was almost at the bottom of the whole Arabian Peninsula, with only a bit of Yemen below it.

And below that the Gulf of Aden – and them.

Wesley flipped to an aerial color view of the city itself. This had been taken by a drone flyover an hour earlier, made necessary by the sad demise of Google Earth. It showed a huge matrix of orderly rectangular buildings backing onto an elaborate port and waterfront area – which looked like it had taken some serious shore and waterway construction to get into the intricate shape it was in.

“It’s a bit of a theme-park city,” Wesley said. “Constructed with Saudi oil money, as an attempt to diversify the country’s economy away from oil. Sits on a strip of land twelve kilometers long and eight wide and includes a port, industrial zone, high-technology campus, power and desalination plant, and a residential area. The port is here. Behind the port is the colony of waterfront villas.”

Wesley withdrew his ruler and scanned the faces before him.

“Villas are for people, so obviously we’re keen to steer clear of those.” He raised his improvised pointer again. “Our target is here: the high-technology campus. Inside that is a pharmaceuticals industry compound – and somewhere inside
that
is a bioinformatics and genomics facility. That’s where we will find a device that looks roughly like this.”

He reached down again and flipped the display to a low-resolution photo, originally taken with Simon Park’s camera phone, of a vaguely boxy-looking piece of high-tech equipment with some kind of bottles sticking off it. He flipped again, to a hand-sketched drawing of a similar one, but longer and more rectangular.

There were a few groans from the audience. “Can we get a hand-drawn map, too?” one of the former Stores guys, Dooley, asked.

“Yeah,” another added, “maybe with hand-drawn zombies on all sides?”

Wesley had been intent on maintaining a facade of knowing what the hell he was doing, in order to inspire confidence.

It wasn’t going well so far.

* * *

In fact he’d barely gotten started when he was interrupted, and his faltering control of the meeting wrested from him entirely. Lieutenant Campbell from CIC banged open the hatch and walked in without knocking, riding a big wave of
I-don’t-really-care-what-else-you’re-doing-right-now-so-don’t-fuck-with-me
.