The Flood Read online

  Which meant the blur he just saw had to have been real. Didn’t it?

  And at the speed it had moved, it could have been a runner – but the impression it left on Fick was that it was too small. Another fucking zombie animal? Or just an animal?

  Fick jumped an inch as a hand landed on his shoulder.

  It was Reyes. “You see something, skipper?”

  Fick blinked and shook his head again. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t like it.”

  Reyes nodded. “That makes you and me and everyone we know, brother.”

  The two of them turned and set off again. Fick spared a last look over his shoulder at Graybeard, still bringing up the rear. There at least was one Marine he didn’t have to worry about.

  The unkillable grand old man of MARSOC.

  Three Dark Nights

  JKF - Hospital Lab

  After Wesley’s briefing, in which she had sat silent and just listened, Sarah Cameron climbed back up to 01 Deck and her own cabin, to gear up for the mission. She had been issued NSF uniform. But on this one, when she was going to be operational – and when it really counted – she preferred to rely on the clothing and gear she knew and trusted, and that had gotten her through two years of ZA alive.

  Stepping into the dim and silent cabin she shared with Handon, she methodically found her synthetic technical top and hiking pants, changed out her hiking socks, and finally strapped her gun belt back on. She pulled the handgun from its drop-leg holster, checked the chamber, then dropped the mag and checked that. She reseated both the mag and the weapon.

  Then she let herself drop down onto the bed, just to rest for a minute – and quickly found herself thinking about what she’d been determined not to. She remembered her last moments in there with Handon.

  And how badly they had left things.

  She wasn’t sure why she’d done what she did – flirting with Henno right in front of him, then getting caught alone with him in his cabin. And her intimacy with Homer, from their time together fighting through North America, probably fell into that category, too. Was she willfully pissing away all of her miraculous good fortune – in landing here, in surviving, and most of all in finding Handon? Much worse, she had clearly been angering him – and, a whole hell of a lot worse than that, distracting him, only hours before his mission was to step off.

  It was unforgivable, really.

  She had gone into all this swearing not to become the Yoko Ono of Alpha Team. And now it seemed that’s exactly what she was doing – fanning the flames of drama everywhere she went. And she honestly wasn’t sure why. She only knew that at some point she was going to have to try to make it right – to earn Handon’s forgiveness, and to forgive herself. To atone.

  She looked over at her old Mini-14 rifle propped in the corner. She did know the importance of using weapons and gear you’re familiar with. But she also thought maybe that weapon’s day had come and gone.

  More firepower was going to be required on this one.

  Exiting the stateroom, she headed off toward the NSF ops room and its armory. But on the way, she had a better idea, and veered off.

  Toward the MARSOC team room.

  * * *

  Having snuck away from CIC for a few moments of work on other stuff, Dr. Simon Park was back in his lab. And lately it seemed he was trying to do everything, and keep it together, all at once. Right up until the minute that NSF briefing started he’d been trying to find decent pictures of what a DNA sequencer looked like – Damn you, no Google Image Search – ultimately coming up with one crappy photo, one crappy sketch from memory, and a list of brand names and model numbers.

  That was behind him now, but little else was. In addition to the unspeakable pressure of having to complete his world-saving vaccine, he also had to worry about supporting not only the shore mission to retrieve Patient Zero – but also this new shore mission to get him the DNA sequencer he also needed.

  Which was a lot of damned shore missions.

  He looked up from his laptop to blankly regard Professor Close – the Oxford biosciences guru who had been flown over from Britain and survived the assassination attempt on the flight deck – and who had once again come over to give Park shit about abandoning the vaccine work for other tasks, and leaving him to do it on his own. Park just nodded, while listening to a phone ring and ring in the background. Finally one of the hospital orderlies came in, answered it, and interrupted Close’s harangue.

  “CIC for you, Doc.” He put the phone on the counter and left.

  Park made a hang on gesture to Close, then picked up the handset. He dully listened as an ops officer demanded to know how soon he was going to get his ass back up to CIC to be on station and available to consult with Team Cadaver on what was, and what was not, an early-stage victim.

  By the time Park hung up, Close had disappeared somewhere, blessedly leaving him alone again. He looked back over to his lab stool… but then just slumped down to the floor where he was, his back up against the wall. He touched the side of his waist where the half-dozen holes, made by those shotgun pellets in their close call belowdecks, had been bothering him all day. And, staring at his boots, he exhaled heavily, and tried to just breathe for a minute.

  Shit was coming at him fast and thick.

  And it wasn’t just the vaccine work now – that was the least acute source of pressure and stress. Because he was painfully aware that he had talked almost everyone around him into undertaking two extremely perilous shore missions, and all of it on his behalf. And there were a lot of very real fleshy people who were, or soon would be, hanging their asses out in the wind. And who might not be coming back – ever. All because he had insisted it was vital that they do so.

  So, in the end, whatever befell those people… was all on him.

  In a way, this was worse than being responsible for the salvation of fifty million. That was too abstract. But these were real individuals, many of them friends – and all men and women he had looked in the face. And some of whom had already saved his life, in some cases more than once.

  Then again, he truly believed this couldn’t be done any differently. The vaccine simply couldn’t be finalized without the sample from Patient Zero. And it was Park himself who had fucked up by not telling the Brits to put a DNA sequencer on the plane they were already flying down to them – and which fuck-up might result in a two-to-four-day delay in producing that vaccine.

  Imagine if those two days cost us everything, Park thought. Everything that’s left in this whole denuded crapsack world…

  Now, riding herd on all of this was proving cognitively taxing – worse even than his hardest days in the lab. He knew he could make a huge difference, on multiple fronts. He just didn’t know if he was strong or capable enough to get it all done.

  But just as he started to feel sorry for himself, overwhelmed and overloaded… he thought of the operators of Alpha and MARSOC out there in darkest Africa, out on the ground alone – probably fighting for their lives, and for their mission, and for the lives of everyone, all while surrounded by millions of dead.

  And he knew without even having to think about it that those men and one woman would do whatever was required to complete their taskings and get the job done. Which kind of put into perspective the fact that all he had to do was organize a few damned things in the safety and comfort of his lab.

  I fucked up, he thought, taking a deep breath. And now I have to make it right.

  He knew the operators sometimes fucked up, too. But what distinguished them was that they assessed the fuck-up, learned from it, and corrected it for next time. It was about learning, every time out, and correcting course. And it was usually about digging down – just one more damned time.

  With renewed energy of body and spirit, Park climbed to his feet.

  And he got back to work.

  * * *

  Andrew Wesley nervously checked his wristwatch for
the fifth time in five minutes. His other hand held a burning cigarette and was visibly shaking. He had a few minutes on his own, and had gone out to the deserted fantail deck to indulge in an unaccustomed cigarette. Now he stood there smoking, leaning against the railing, monitoring the ocean, and periodically flicking ashes out into it.

  He was trying, with very little success, to steady his nerves.

  He shook his head and took a deep drag. Since the start of this whole adventure, he seemed to have quit smoking without quite realizing it. It’s funny what you don’t miss when you’re running for your life, he thought. But then a few dozen cartons of Stuyvesants had appeared with the other supplies from South Africa. And a pack had made its way into his hands.

  He seemed to have friends in a variety of places for some reason these days.

  After the endless run across the Virginia naval base, it had occurred to him that he ought to quit – officially. Especially if he was going to be out on the ground, tear-arseing away from packs of runners, and not to mention being responsible for other people’s lives. But it was too late now. This new mission had come up so quickly.

  And one cigarette more or less wasn’t going to matter.

  He had one time seen one of the Marines, Lance Corporal Burris, smoking out here. Overcoming his English reticence about asking personal questions of strangers, he had said to the young warrior: “I’ve never understood how someone in the military, in the infantry, could smoke. I mean, if your life might actually depend on your cardio, wouldn’t you be more careful about it?”

  Burris had squinted while taking a deep drag, then flicked the butt over the side. “Let me tell you something. If you get in a situation where your life depends on your cardio, you will run. I don’t care if you’re on four packs a day.”

  Wesley laughed to remember that now.

  What I’d really kill for, he thought, dully regarding the burning ember, and the endless ocean stretching out behind it, is a pint of beer. Technically, the carrier was dry. But the ZA was a damned tough thing to get through sober, and he’d heard plenty of rumors of stashes of booze, though never seen any. No, that blessed pint he so fancied would probably have to wait until his return to England.

  If he returned – and whatever the chances were of him making it that far.

  Wesley thought of his local pub in Peckham, The Flying Pig, with great and unexpected longing. He was starting to feel like Bilbo Baggins – wandering Middle Earth, always getting farther from home, and wondering if he would ever see Bag End again. But everyone knew Hobbiton was a thinly veiled metaphor for England; the hobbits for the English; and Mordor for Nazi Germany. But if there were ever any better metaphor for the walking dead than Orcs, Wesley had never heard it.

  Maybe the best stories were always about real life in the end.

  Flicking the last of the cigarette into the ocean, Wesley remembered how the shore mission that recovered those cigarettes had been led by one of the Alpha commandos, at the head of a bunch of hardbitten Marines. Whereas today it would be Wesley leading a team that he had overheard one Alpha bloke – the implausibly gigantic one – refer to as “glorified mall security guards.”

  Maybe he was right. Maybe this whole project was complete madness.

  It was Alpha and the Marines out there now, fighting to find Patient Zero. And it had been Alpha who had gone into Chicago to get Dr. Park out.

  So what the hell was Andrew Wesley doing leading a bunch of shore patrolmen on a mission like those ones? He was so far from being anywhere in the same league as any of those commandos, he couldn’t imagine why the hell he was in charge of this thing. Hell, he wasn’t even a soldier – never mind an operator, much less an elite one…

  Sure, he’d muddled through at NAS Oceana, and on those below-decks sweeps. He’d fought a few zombies along the way. And he seemed to perhaps have some small natural ability for leading and looking out for his men.

  He’d come a long way, definitely.

  But now he would be willfully dropping himself and five others right into the middle of a city heaving with hundreds of thousands of dead. And he would be responsible for that entire group of people out there. And finally, worst of all, the survival of the whole world might actually hang on their success or failure.

  This was just a totally different league. This was the Premier League.

  And Wesley was not Premier League material.

  Somewhere along the line, he had to think, someone had made a terrible mistake putting him in charge. And, probably very soon, he was not only going to be found out – but the mistake, and his imposture and inability, were going to have terrible consequences.

  But it seemed to him too late to do anything about it. If nothing else, he was simply too timid to say anything, to risk making a scene, to upset all these plans that were already in motion, and now had a terrible momentum to them. He simply couldn’t think of any way of getting out of it – not one that wouldn’t be as bad as just going through with it.

  And then, for some reason, Wesley remembered the inscription on Nelson’s Column, in Trafalgar Square in London. The great, one-eyed, one-armed, indomitable, victorious naval captain stood 170 feet above the square, while the bronze relief on the base read:

  England expects every man will do his duty.

  Wesley exhaled one last breath of fresh sea air. Maybe that would be enough. That he try to do his duty.

  He started to toss the cigarette pack into the ocean – but he couldn’t do it, as it seemed such a criminal waste in the post-Apocalypse. So instead he just wedged it between the railing and a strut. Maybe someone who needed them – and who wouldn’t be doing any running – would find them.

  May they smoke them in good health, he thought.

  And then Wesley turned and went back inside.

  Born to Rule and Sacrifice

  JFK - MARSOC Team Room

  “Absolutely,” Sergeant Lovell said to Sarah. “Follow me.”

  He grabbed a security key card from the desk, then led her out of the team room, down one level, and then through the companionway to their stores and weapons compartment. He badged in, held the hatch open, then followed her in. As she looked around, her eyes went wide. It was like a toy store for spec-ops pipe-hitters in there. Weapons, ammo, explosives, and combat gear galore.

  Wasting no time, Lovell pulled a big tan assault rifle off a rack and handed it to her. She picked it up and felt the weight. It was a beautiful weapon.

  “SCAR-L,” Lovell said, while digging around in a drawer. “You’ve used an M4?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said.

  “Then you can use this. Same caliber, same magazine, similar action.” He dug out what he was looking for and turned around. “Suppressor.” He started screwing it into the end of her barrel. “None of those NSF M4s have them.” He finished tightening it, then sat down on a crate. “I don’t have enough of these Gucci rifles to hand out, and no more suppressors to spare. But if any shooting needs to be done, make sure you’re on point and doing it first. You’ll all live longer. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Sarah looked into Lovell’s eyes. Dressed in MARPAT fatigues, he was solid, of medium height, with curly dark-sand-colored hair, an easy grin, strong jaw, and confident manner. He was a damned attractive man, not least because of his unshakable aura of confidence and capability. There were just so damned many manly men on this boat, who were basically the exact opposite of what she had been married to, and obligated to protect, for so many years…

  But then she rapidly shook her head to get that thought out of it. This was how she’d gotten in trouble already – screwing things up with Handon by responding to Henno’s masculine charms, and Homer’s before that. She simply couldn’t afford to indulge every emotional or sexual impulse that ran through her body. She had shit to do. They all did.

  “Got it,” she repeated. “But why me? Why not Wesley, or the other NSF guys?”

  Lovell returned her look – and for a second sh
e imagined he was going to say that he saw something in her. Capability, or resolve, maybe. But instead he just said, “My mother was a cop. I grew up around cops. I trust cops.”

  Sarah smiled and nodded. “I worked with a lot of ex-military guys in the police.”

  Digging around now for body armor, a tactical vest, and some magazines for her, Lovell said, “Yeah, if the world hadn’t ended, my plan was to finish my twenty – then go back and be a small-town cop. In the same small town I grew up in.”

  As he handed over the loaded rifle mags, Sara tapped the underslung grenade launcher. “How about rounds for this?”

  “If you need rounds for that, it won’t be enough anyway.”

  Sarah grinned. “You started this. Show me everything.”

  Lovell laughed out loud. “I get that reference, believe me.” Still he hesitated.

  Sarah cocked her head. “You wouldn’t have given me one with a grenade launcher by accident.”

  He sighed. “No. I don’t guess I would have.” He produced a fat 40mm round. “Obviously, there’s no silencer for these. They’re pretty quiet when they pop off – but they make a big bang when they land again. Make sure you’re no closer than a hundred meters away when one does.”

  Sarah reached for the round, but he pulled out of reach. “Emergencies only.”

  “Got it.”

  Lovell flipped out the side-opening breach of the sleek Enhanced Grenade Launcher Module (EGLM) under the rifle, slid the round in, then popped it closed. “Safety,” he said, pointing with his thumb. “Trigger.”

  “Got it.”

  He popped the round out and handed it to her, then six others like it.

  * * *

  On his way back to the ops room, and its attached locker and armory, to start kitting up for the mission, Wesley unexpectedly ran into an old friend belowdecks.