The Flood Read online

  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.

  Wesley stopped talking and watched her stride in. With her serious, competent air, and big side arm on her hip, she somehow seemed like more of a warrior than anyone on his NSF team. And they were the descendants of shore patrolmen, whose main job had been to restrain drunken fighting sailors and get them back to the ship’s brig.

  She took a look around, saw the map projection Wesley had on the wall, and stalked up to it. “This Jizan Economic City of yours,” she said.

  “Yes,” Wesley said. He seemed to have yielded the floor.

  “The pharmaceuticals complex is here, right?” She pointed to a spot on the map.

  “Yes again.”

  “Well, this place also has a huge oil-fired electrical plant, with fuel-oil storage facilities, and a desalination plant. They’re both in this big structure here.”

  Wesley squinted. “Why would they put an electrical plant and a desalination plant together?”

  “Beats the hell out of me. I think desalination requires a lot of power. Or maybe so if the fuel oil blows up, the desalinated water will put it out. Who knows.” She turned to face Wesley, ignoring everyone else in the room, who were watching and listening raptly. Wesley was afraid it was because she had the natural and absolutely compelling air of command that he totally lacked.

  “The important thing,” she said, “is that if those oil tanks are full, they could be of major use to this vessel. We’ve got plenty of nuke power, but everything that runs on fossil fuels is constantly down to fumes. We could run all kinds of stuff on the stores of oil they’re likely to have.”

  Wesley nodded.

  “And that desalination plant, from its size, could probably produce something on the order of a half-million cubic meters per day of potable water. That’s a hell of a lot more than the desal plant on this vessel – and could be a major resource to a world rebuilding and coming back from the brink.”

  She turned to scan faces in the room, then turned back to the map and pointed. “Electrical and desal plant.” She moved her finger inland. “Pharmaceuticals.” It was obvious they’d have to go right by the former to get to the latter, at least coming from the docks on the waterfront.

  Finally she turned to stare at Wesley. “I want you to check these out on your infil. Get inside and tell me if those fuel tanks are full, and whether that desal plant looks to be intact and functional. That’s my price for approving your mission.”

  Before Wesley could respond, she turned and headed toward the door. As she did, she pointed over the tops of heads and said, “Oh, yeah – Dr. Park is urgently needed in CIC. On me – now.” Park rose awkwardly and followed her out.

  Wesley looked back to the room.

  This kept getting harder.

  He tried to master himself and his voice, mustering firmness of tone and speaking over the titters. “Okay, listen up – and listen carefully. What we’re going in there for is a DNA sequencer, which is desperately needed to bring forward the date when Dr. Park can complete his vaccine. So that it might be completed before England’s green and pleasant land goes the way of all the world’s less pleasant lands.”

  “Aye,” said Melvin, the Scot. “And Scotland can just go spit, then, eh?”

  Wesley ground his jaw. This was actually starting to piss him off. He said, “If we don’t get this done, Scotland will end up like the entire rest of the world – dead.” His voice grew deeper and more resonant now. “The honor has been given to us of
going out and getting this thing – and playing a critical role in the salvation of the world. In curing the plague. It’s our turn to step up and do our bit. Just us. And with everything on the line now.”

  Wesley had no idea he had such bombast in him. But, reaching down, he’d found it somewhere. And the group seemed to get it.

  The air in the room had changed.

  Zombie Armor

  JKF - NSF Ops Room

  Someone in the briefing raised a hand. “Are we all going?”

  “No. Team assignments will be made after the briefing.” In truth, Wesley hadn’t yet decided who to take. He also didn’t want to tell them that Abrams had strictly limited the number of NSF personnel he could take off the ship. The last thing the shore team needed was to feel like an undermanned force of sacrificial lambs.

  Wesley nodded down and to his side. “Sergeant Lovell is going to brief on the insertion plan.”

  Lovell stood up, nodded once at Wesley, and dove in – utterly relaxed. Like he’d given this briefing a hundred times, and to even bigger screw-ups than NSF.

  “Ship’s launch is out with the Somalia mission. So this team is going to take one of our CRRCs – combat rubber raiding craft. Rubber hull, compartmented air cells, seats ten max – six or eight more comfortably.” Sitting down now, Wesley flipped the display to a picture of one. “It’s got an outboard engine, removable roll-up slatted decking, paddles, a bow line for securing it to a dock, and a ‘righting’ line which is used to flip the boat in event of capsizing.”

  The audience, which had started to realize the seriousness of all this, now realized it even more. Someone raised a hand, and Lovell nodded.

  “It’s hundreds of miles from here to Saudi,” Browning said. “Surely we’re not taking a zodiac the whole way?”

  Lovell frowned. “It’s not a zodiac. It’s better. But in any case, it’s roughly five hundred miles from here to Jizan – and, no, you won’t be taking the boat the whole way. We’re going to sling-load it under a Seahawk helo, go by air until you’re five miles out, insert onto the water, motor in until you’re a mile out – then paddle in the final stretch for silence, just as slick as shit.”

  Wesley flipped back to the map, then stood up again.

  “As Sergeant Lovell says, doing it this way will keep from waking the deaders. We insert here” – and he pointed to a spot at the edge of the port – “move ashore, do a quick recon of this large building here,” (he pointed to the building Campbell had indicated, modifying the plan on the fly), “then move quickly and quietly toward our target here. We find the device, get it back to the dock, get back on the boat, paddle out – and the helo will return and pick us up again.”

  He refrained from concluding with, “Easy, right?” Because the way he had put it, it actually did sound easy. Which almost certainly meant he was doing it wrong, or missing something important – perhaps a great deal that was important.

  “Waterfront villas, huh?” Burns said. “What was the population of this place?”

  Wesley swallowed. “Three hundred thousand.”

  “And what happens when the shooting starts – and they wake up?”

  Wesley nodded. “That’s what we’re going to avoid. If there’s any fighting to be done, we’ll use melee weapons.”

  Browning hesitated, but then said, quietly, “NSF doesn’t have melee weapons.”

  Wesley sighed. “I’m working on that. For now, I believe you all have knives.”

  He could immediately see from the expressions around the room how little these men relished the prospect of fighting zombies with knives. They might have made it look on easy on The Walking Dead, but those guys also lived in some weird universe where getting splashed head to toe with the blood of the infected somehow carried no infection risk. Even that aside, nobody really enjoyed getting within arm’s reach of a large creature furiously trying to kill and eat you.

  In fact, that was pretty much what guns had been invented for.

  Wesley felt like he was forgetting something – or maybe a hundred things. But then it hit him.

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve been informed our call sign for this mission is… Mutant.”

  * * *

  After the briefing broke up, turning into small groups of unsettled and worried people, Wesley quietly pulled aside the men he had, almost unconsciously, decided he wanted on the team.

  First, Melvin and Browning, the two most senior NSF personnel, and the two Wesley most trusted – they’d all been through hell and back together, which counted for everything. Also, Browning was by far the best shot on the team – and if there had to be any shooting, Wesley wanted it to be “one and done.”

  Next was Burns, the former leader of the group of American survivors. Wesley knew maybe he should have taken someone with more military experience. But Burns had been around the block, surviving two years out on the ground in the ZA – and probably had as much hands-on zombie fighting experience as anyone on board the JFK right now.

  More importantly, he had experience dodging zombies.

  Then Jenson, for his physical size and strength – and for his stalwartness, proven both in the flight-deck battle and the below-decks sweeps. Basically, Wesley was discovering what all combat veterans knew: there was no replacement for men you had fought and bled beside.

  And that left a single spot, reserved for Sarah Cameron.

  When he had his hand-picked team corralled in the corner, Wesley said, “Listen – if we’re going to have to get up close and personal with the deaders, I’d like us to have a little more protection than last time.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Browning.

  “Well, I’ve always had this idea for a sort of zombie armor, to keep from being bitten or scratched. We just need a lot of rolls of electrical tape, and then something tough but flexible, like thick leather, or maybe even rolled-up magazines or some sor—”

  Browning cut him off. “Come with me.”

  The other five followed Browning into the locker room and armory that let off the ops room. He took them all the way to the back and opened another hatch, which revealed a large storage closet. Hanging inside were a dozen suits of black and very menacing riot gear.

  “What the hell?” Wesley exclaimed.

  Browning smiled. “Damascus FX1 FlexForce modular hard-shell crowd control system.” He started picking up or pointing at pieces of it. “Hard helmets, chest-and-back panels, forearm protectors, thigh and groin protectors, and knee and shin guards. All of that laid over a tough foam and nylon shell. It’s even fire-retardant.”

  “No, seriously,” Wesley persisted. “What the hell? Why have these just been sitting in a closet?”

  Browning shrugged. “Last time they were out was during the fall, when we were doing riot control at ports. Since then, NSF has never done any real zombie fighting. We never left the ship. MARSOC did, of course, but we assumed they had their own gear and were too cool for our stuff. Also, only the NSF commander has the authority to break these out. And he’s dead.”

  “No, he’s not,” Wesley said. “He’s just me now.” He was obviously still gobsmacked at this horrific oversight. “Why the hell didn’t we use these when we were clearing the lower decks of the ship?”

  “Dunno. We were only looking for the odd one or two. And all we found in the end was pools of black gunk.”

  “And fucking Anderson,” Melvin added.

  “And a hand,” said Burns.

  Wesley sighed and nodded. “And a hand.” Having got over the stupidity of keeping this priceless gear locked in a closet, he managed to be pleased about it.

  Now they had their zombie armor.

  Zoonosis

  The MRAP - Racing South Through Somalia

  “Can you pull a still from Juice’s shoulder-cam feed?”

  Handon was talking on the radio to Dr. Park, from the front of the MRAP, and sounding rather urgent. He wanted a consultation before the team walked into another swarm of Pythonesque killer bunnies. If
something completely stupid killed you, you were still dead. You just got to feel stupid in your last seconds alive.

  “No problem, pulling the still now.” Park had been summoned up to the Combat Information Center on the JFK, where Juice’s real-time video was being streamed, as it had been on the shore mission in South Africa.

  Right now on this mission, the terrain of central Somalia was blasting by on both sides and ahead out the windshield, as Brady drove it like he stole it – which basically they had – heading south on one of Somalia’s few hardball roads. Periodically the MRAP swerved terrifyingly around abandoned vehicles, its gigantic profile and high center of gravity threatening to pull them over into a long sliding last leg of their road trip.

  “Ali’s right,” Park said after a short delay. “They look like hyraxes. Order Hyracoidea, I think. Usually mistaken for rodents – but their closest relatives are actually elephants. They’ve got little tusk-like incisors. They’re good communicators, with complex syntax, like primates and whales.”

  “Not interesting,” Handon said. “More interesting: were they fucking undead?”

  Park hesitated, audibly exhaled, then stared offscreen at the still image of one he’d pulled from their video stream. “It would be remarkable. But this is a remarkably opportunistic virus – damnably so. And the disease was zoonotic in the first place – meaning it crossed over species borders to get to us.”

  “So you’re saying the virus could have crossed back?”

  Another pause. “I guess, thinking about it, it wouldn’t be totally surprising. Aside from Africa having always been one giant Petri dish and microbe-breeding ground… this bug in particular was already the most vicious, virulent, and communicable virus we’d ever seen. It took down all seven continents in weeks. And, like I said, it’s already crossed species barriers at least once.”