The Flood Read online

  “Captain Martin!” he exclaimed, looking up.

  “Hiya, Wesley.” Martin smiled big. “How are you, mate?”

  Wesley had first met Martin in the very first hours of the outbreak from the Channel Tunnel in Folkestone – and they had fought together through the battle there, not to mention the later mutiny and outbreak on the JFK. They’d both originally been sent to the carrier because they had encountered a Foxtrot up close – before nearly anyone else had. And they had been fish out of water together on this vessel, finding their feet and trying to make themselves useful. Though Martin had been a lot quicker to do so. Wesley had hardly seen him since he’d become acting Chief Engineer.

  Then again, Wesley had been fairly busy himself lately. “Yeah, mate,” he said. “Just fine. What a time to run into you.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Wesley gave him the short version of what he was about to do.

  “Better you than me,” Martin said with a laugh.

  Wesley shook his head. “It’s just that so much is hanging on this.”

  Martin smiled, then started reciting. “‘Every little trifle, for some reason, does seem incalculably important today, and when you say of a thing that “nothing hangs on it” it sounds like blasphemy. There’s never any knowing which of our actions, which of our idlenesses, won’t have things hanging on it forever.’”

  Wesley cocked his head “What’s that from?”

  “E.M. Forster. Where Angels Fear to Tread.”

  Wesley just nodded and let his chin droop. That was eloquent enough – it spoke of his troubled spirit, his doubt and fear.

  “This isn’t your first shore mission,” Martin said.

  “This one is different.”

  “How so?”

  “There weren’t any zombies when we landed in Virginia.”

  “Ha,” Martin scoffed. “From the way you described that flying battle with the packs of runners, it sounds like there could hardly have been more.”

  Wesley thought upon it. His friend had a point – even if he was fighting it.

  But then he remembered that surge of optimism he had felt back in Virginia, waiting for Alpha and the Marines to fly back with the scientist. He had so wanted to be there to reel them in when they landed – to contribute in a significant way, to do his bit. To prove he deserved to be part of this great undertaking.

  But what happened in the end? He’d almost gotten everyone under his command killed. And he still hadn’t recovered Alpha, or the scientist. Instead, he decided they just had to save a bunch of random civilian survivors running for their lives. And as a result, his whole team had ended up fighting for theirs. Scott – taken down and torn apart. Derwin – nearly shot to death. They’d all nearly died there.

  What kind of leadership, what kind of judgment, was that?

  If it was the same kind he’d be bringing on this new mission, they were doomed.

  Martin knew Wesley well enough to read this on his face. “Listen. You accomplished your mission, didn’t you? As I recall, you personally found the airplane that got both Alpha and the scientist safely home. You and your team were indispensable in securing the cache of weapons and ammo that won the flight deck battle. And you even got almost your whole team out alive again – plus a bunch of survivors who all owe their continued survival to you.”

  Wesley shrugged. He was slowly coming around.

  “Look at me, Wes,” Martin said, gripping his arm. “You can do this.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “Because you’re British, that’s how. Born to rule and sacrifice. Anyway, we always muddle through. We get on with it and somehow make it work in the end. Hell, we even turn disasters like Dunkirk and the Charge of the Light Brigade into national triumphs.”

  Wesley laughed. “I’m not sure that’s the pep talk I need right now.”

  “But it’s the one you’re getting.”

  “Don’t suppose I can talk you into coming along? Would love to have you and your rifle there for this one. Wesley and Martin ride again.”

  “Love to. But I can’t – have to ride herd on our one working reactor.”

  “I thought the Washington sent a bunch of nuclear engineers?”

  “Sent, yes. But they only left two. The rest were needed for their own reactor section. Now I’ve got a skeleton crew – and just having someone in the reactor control room and awake twenty-four hours is a challenge. Only this morning I found the door propped open and nobody inside. Loo break, probably.”

  Wesley nodded. “So much for security.” Having Martin along would have been great. But just seeing him definitely raised his spirits.

  Martin shook Wesley’s hand and looked him in the eye. “Best of luck.”

  Wesley nodded and turned away. Already halfway down the companionway, he turned back and said, “Oh, yeah, speaking of Virginia… the dog I found there—”

  “Judy,” Martin said, turning back.

  “Right. Well, she’s locked in my cabin. If I don’t make it back—”

  “Don’t be daft. You’re going to make it back.”

  “Okay. But if I’m… delayed, maybe you could check in on her.”

  “Food, water, and walks. No worries.”

  “Oh yeah – she seems to have a mysterious ability to get through sealed-up hatches. So she might not be where I left her.”

  Martin nodded.

  Wesley nodded back and then moved off again.

  One less thing, he thought.

  * * *

  The complete shore team all met in the NSF locker room, Wesley and Sarah arriving at the same time. The other four – Melvin, Browning, Burns, and Jenson – were all mostly kitted up in their riot suits. Wesley started getting into his. Sarah declined.

  “While the dead are trying to gnaw through all that,” she said, “I’m gonna be able to run away.”

  “Fair enough,” Wesley admitted. He figured it was her choice.

  When they were just about done, and were checking one another’s fastenings and fittings, the hatch banged open – and a long-lost face poked inside, followed by a slightly stout body.

  “Derwin!” Melvin and Browning exclaimed in unison. It was the first time they’d seen him outside the hospital, since he’d been badly wounded by errant gunfire in Virginia Beach. Now he was back in uniform, and even had his boots on.

  “Oh, no, mate,” Wesley said, standing up, and immediately seeing what he had in mind. “You just get right back to the hospital. No chance.”

  “Look,” Derwin said, stepping inside. “I’m fine, it’s all stitched up.”

  “No,” Wesley said. “You’re not coming.”

  “Look, I’m the Master at Arms around here – and if you think I’m just going to let you take a bunch of irreplaceable weapons on shore without me there to supervise and look after ’em, you’re out of your mind. Plus, who knows when someone will go all Anderson and try to run off and leave you to die. You’re too trusting, LT. You need me to be a hard-ass for you.”

  Wesley exhaled. He had heard about the officer/NCO relationship somewhere. And he really did appreciate Derwin looking out for him. But he just wasn’t going to take a badly wounded and not-yet-recovered man out into danger of this magnitude. He had enough to worry about. He motioned Derwin aside, and the two stepped into the armory.

  “Honestly,” Wesley said, “I’d love to have you along. But I need you to look after things for me here. You’ll be in charge while I’m gone, and there could be another outbreak any time. You’ve got to be here to squash it.”

  Derwin nodded, seeming to accept this. “Okay. But…” and he went to the corner of the room, took out a key, and unlocked a large but nearly hidden weapons locker. As he removed a long boxy object, he said, “If everything goes well in Saudi, you’ll get in and out without firing a shot. But if things get messy and you need to blast your way out of there…”

  He opened the crate, and it had what looked to Wesley like four bazookas in it.
/>
  “AT-4,” Derwin said. “Single-shot 84-millimeter unguided light anti-tank weapon.” Wesley realized Derwin was reading off the top of a brochure lying inside the crate. “For use against bunkers, buildings, enemy personnel in the open, and light armor.”

  Wesley frowned. “Where’d you get these?” He seriously doubted missiles were standard issue for shore patrolmen.

  “I swiped them from the Marines,” Derwin said with a grin.

  Wesley shook his head. “I think we’re going to be heavily loaded enough already. And, frankly, if we get in trouble, I’d rather be able to run away from it.”

  “No,” Derwin persisted, “these are super lightweight. Just throw one on the back of each of your guys.”

  Wesley exhaled. “Have any of us ever used one of these?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then thanks, but no.” It simply didn’t seem prudent to Wesley to give dangerous explosive weapons to first-timers. And he had enough to worry about, without one of these things accidentally shooting off.

  Derwin wasn’t giving up. “What if you’re trapped, and need to punch a way out? Look, just take a couple, then – one for you, one for someone else. That’s my price for staying behind. Please.”

  Wesley sighed. “One.”

  “Okay,” Derwin said, leaning into the crate and smiling. “We’ve got HEDP – high-explosive dual-purpose. Or else the Bunker Buster.”

  Wesley sighed. “You choose.”

  Derwin handed him one of the long tubes and Wesley regarded it. It was surprisingly lightweight and he started to get it slung over his back – but Derwin stopped him. “Got to give you the course of instruction.”

  Wesley frowned. “Thirty seconds,” he said.

  Derwin complied, showing him how to remove the front and rear sight covers, work the system of redundant safeties, and finally how to discharge it. That he kept referencing the user’s guide packet while he did so was hardly reassuring. Wesley wouldn’t really want Derwin firing this thing, much less himself. But he had no intention of doing so. He was just taking it to make his chief happy. As he slung it on his back, he smiled and said:

  “Kind of wish we’d had one of these in the runner fight in Virginia.”

  Derwin smiled back. “I wish I’d had one of these in pretty much every scrap I’ve ever been in – including getting my ass kicked by Jimmy Knickerbocker in the seventh grade.”

  “Watch the shop for me,” Wesley said, and shook Derwin’s hand.

  Zombie-Killing Drugs Inside

  Moscow - Fifty Feet Over Red Square

  Oleg Aliyev – shitty amateur helicopter pilot, bold slayer of witless Russian farm boys, and architect of the coming genocide of all the world’s dead (he hoped) – had known all along that he would be overflying Moscow, more or less, on this insane journey of his. There was pretty much no way to get from his starting point – the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility, at the juncture of Russia, Kazakhstan, China, and Mongolia – to his final destination of London without doing so. No way other than going way the hell out of his way, which was the last damn thing he wanted to do. No, scratch that – it was the second to last thing he wanted to do.

  The very last thing he wanted to do… was happening right now.

  He was making an emergency landing, in the middle of the night, right in the middle of Red fucking Square.

  Aliyev’s vision shot forward again, up from the map display, as the Eurocopter EC175 violently impacted something – slamming his head forward and bouncing him and the aircraft and his whole tiny falling world ten feet back up into the sky. He had just clipped the edge of one of the buildings that ringed the square.

  But, by whatever miracle, he had cleared it. He was still flying.

  Sort of. Actually, with both engines shut down due to all the fuel leaking out through bullet holes – a going-away present from the last surviving Russian farm boys in that seemingly deserted field he had stupidly set down in – he was autorotating. That is, he was trying to keep the aircraft in the air by using the kinetic energy stored in the rotating blades – at least long enough to make it to the flat, clear landing ground of the darkness-shrouded square.

  Which was now coming up fast – and hard. As he hurtled toward the cobbled ground, battling the controls to keep his autorotation parlor trick working for a few seconds longer, he could see through his NVGs that the square wasn’t quite so clear as it had first appeared. There was debris, wreckage, bodies… and not a few abandoned vehicles. As he flashed over the top of it, he realized one of them was actually a main battle tank. It sat like a bellicose monument to militarism, not far from the edge of the square.

  No huge surprise there, though – the Soviets, and then the Russians, were forever parading their weapons and troops and armor, their super-phallic ballistic missiles on hundred-foot-long carriers, all of it rolling endlessly by in front of the cameras, clearly compensating for something…

  Aliyev tried to snap his mind back to reality – because, one way or another, reality was about to crash straight into him.

  Anyway, tanks or no, the square was still a hell of a lot less lethal a landing zone than the riot of buildings of the Moscow city center, so he’d damn well better make the best of it. Those uneven purple cobblestones were coming up fast in the menacing blackness, and he tried to flare out at the last second to smooth his landing. But, as little as he’d been trained on autorotation, he knew virtually nothing about setting the helo down in that state.

  He just thanked his non-existent God that he was merely suffering a crash-landing, as opposed to a full-blown crash. Touch wood.

  The sleek Eurocopter went in shark-nose-first – but at least into a clear section – and then skidded and careened and shrieked, threatening to come apart and roll over, as the landing gear collapsed underneath it and Aliyev was hurled toward the controls and cockpit glass face first.

  He blacked out while the aircraft was still moving – though it was definitely a ground vehicle now, and almost certainly would be for the duration.

  Grounded – for the rest of time.

  * * *

  When Aliyev came to, he was thrilled to find himself vertical and the helicopter more or less intact around him. The rotors had even stopped spinning. But his NVGs had been knocked off his face – and when he examined them, found they had been shattered by impact with the controls. And then… as his vision dialed up from woozy pinholes, and his natural night vision started to come back… and he peered out the cockpit glass ahead of him, he was substantially less thrilled.

  Because the night had already started to come alive all around him. Humanoid shapes, most of them in what looked like heavy military overcoats, were moving in every direction he could see. And they were all, unmistakably, horribly, ineluctably, moving in the same direction: straight toward him.

  Worse – much, much worse – was that some of them were… running. Running? Fuck! He’d never seen them run before. Maybe it was the cold of the Altai mountains, maybe it was due to when the population there went down. Maybe it was the sparse population in the region itself. But the dead in Aliyev’s world had only ever stumbled. He’d never seen runners.

  For a second, he wondered if he’d really regained consciousness at all, and this wasn’t another terrible dream. But he beat his face with his fist a couple of times, after which they were all still there. Except closer now.

  Only when it all finally came back to him did he realize his awareness of his situation had been badly muddled by the impact of the crash. And his situation was simplicity itself: He was in the middle of Red Square. And that was the undead Red Army coming for him. And in a matter of minutes, if not seconds, he was going to be a singularity of one – trapped in his Eurocopter for all eternity.

  Basically, he had to get the ever-living fuck out of there.

  He unbuckled and hurled himself into the cargo area in back, to gather his resources and make a plan. To gear up – and psych up.

  Now, he thought, n
arrating his whole hopeless situation to himself, lecturing as always, if only in his own head, of anyone else it might be said: Are you mad? Going out into the middle of Moscow alone? On foot? With no safe haven?

  As he lectured, he pulled together the three items that were going to be absolutely essential to take with him: his bug-out bag – the 5.11 Tactical backpack filled with apocalypse survival essentials – check. The medical coldbox – holding his custom-designed zombie-annihilating Meningitis Z virus, as well as the vaccine against it – check.

  And, last but first, the Benelli motherfucking Tactical shotgun. Check.

  Yes, anyone else might be thought mad for going out alone on foot into undead central Moscow. Whereas Aliyev on the other hand, perhaps uniquely among living people, actually had at least two places nearby where he knew he could seek refuge. In fact, he knew the whole government sector well – from his many visits there over the years, when he had been one of the most senior scientists with Biopreparat, the secret Soviet bioweapons program.

  This didn’t mean it was going to be easy.

  As he furiously planned in his head, he got two boxes of shotgun shells out of the bug-out bag with trembling fingers and dumped the contents into his jacket pockets, then dumped the empty boxes and sealed the bag up again. He realized he could actually hear the approaching dead now, that horrifying frenzied moaning, growing in volume every second. But he refrained from even stealing a glance out the side windows, as that would be a pointless waste of precious seconds – not to mention priceless courage.

  Now – there was the question of where exactly the hell to go, once he opened that door and started legging it.

  There was, for starters, the Moscow headquarters of Biopreparat itself. This was housed in a yellow brick mansion with a green roof that had previously been the home of a certain nineteenth-century vodka merchant named Pyotr Smirnoff. Ironic, Aliyev thought. Comrade Smirnoff’s product did more than any foreign invader to undermine the health of Russian citizens. And it was from there that we undertook to create bioweapons to destroy the health of everyone else…

  He shook his head to refocus it – no time for damned ironic reflections. The important point was that he definitely knew how to get there, he figured he could manage to get in, and he knew the layout of the building. So that was good.