The Flood Read online

  Now he checked that the Benelli was fully loaded, with a shell racked in the chamber.

  He took a last few deep breaths.

  And if I can’t make it to Biopreparat, he thought, always preferring to have a contingency plan, then I haul ass to Spassky Tower. That was actually closer, right on Red Square itself, if also scarier. Because it had been the home of the FSB, and before that its predecessor the KBG. Aliyev had taken occasional meetings there to di—

  Something slammed into the helicopter behind him, shaking the whole airframe.

  Shit! He was definitely out of time.

  At least the impact had been on the opposite side as the cargo door. Beyond that door was certain death. But also his only prayer of survival.

  No more time, not even for deep breaths.

  He got one strap of the bug-out bag over his shoulder, and the handle of the coldbox through the crook of the same arm – and gripped the Benelli’s pistol grip with the bloodless fingers of the other. With his left hand, he grasped the latch and hauled the cargo door open.

  Beyond it was living death, the night having come alive – but dead, all dead, deader than death itself – and all of it collapsing on this exact point in space and time. And in that instant Oleg Aliyev met his first runners, a pair of them, the front-runners of the whole undead Red Army, tear-assing flat out and less than twenty feet away from him as he got the door open. And as Aliyev came into view, they actually accelerated – mouths open, hands reaching out, as if they were trying to break the finish-line tape and set a new world undead land-speed record.

  And Aliyev was the gold medal in the scenario.

  He tumbled straight back into the cabin as he fired the shotgun, long white trails of sparks spilling out the barrel, his limbs tangling up with his other crap. He was trying to crab-crawl back as he discharged the Benelli, and both the coldbox and the bug-out bag fell off his left arm as he shot and flailed for dear life.

  Both of the runners went down in a pile beneath the open door.

  Behind them were dozens or hundreds more – only seconds away. And, like, single digits of seconds away.

  Still on his back, legs dangling out the open hatch, Aliyev took stock, casting around frantically. The bug-out bag was lying outside the helo, on the ground at his feet. But the coldbox… he twisted his head on his neck, and saw that he’d managed to fling it back inside, hard, and it had skittered the entire length of the helo cabin. Now it lay on its side in the far corner in the dark.

  His head snapped forward again – and he could see the entire ring of certain death closing on him, the shrinking pinhole of his escape. And, thoughts moving a million miles an hour, Aliyev somehow knew with absolute certainty that if he climbed back inside for that coldbox, he was going to be trapped in there with it – forever. He’d never get out of this crash site. He’d die right alongside his pathogen and his vaccine.

  Whereas the bug-out bag at his feet might keep him alive. The contents of the coldbox might keep humanity alive – but not if he died there buried with it.

  He hopped to the ground, grabbed the bag, hauled the door closed behind him… and he started running and shooting as fast as he knew how – and as if any prayer he had of survival depended completely on him doing both perfectly.

  Which it absolutely did.

  * * *

  I sealed up the helo, Aliyev told himself. It’ll be safe there. Eventually, his non-existent God willing, and if by some miracle he himself survived, eventually the dead would clear out – and he could go back and get the coldbox.

  And if not… well, maybe it was just never meant to be.

  As soon as he shot and shoved his way past the first rank of swarming and collapsing dead, he found he had a little breathing room. It was because Red Square was so incomprehensibly large – even an entire dead Red Army couldn’t fill it. But it was only enough breathing room to try to catch up with his own breathing, and fumblingly shove some shells from his pockets into the loading port on the bottom of the Benelli. Not breathing room for anything else, certainly not for slowing down his madcap run, never mind stopping.

  Aside from the size of the square, he was pretty sure the only other reason he was still on his feet was that most of the dead were still intently interested in his crashed helicopter. It had made a big boom when it went down – and Aliyev’s little booms, not to mention his fleshy, breathy, living self, were of lesser and mainly local interest.

  But he’d done the right thing, taking the bug-out bag and leaving the coldbox – he must have. He had to keep himself alive. It was going to take both him and his designer pathogen to fix things. If Aliyev died, the anti-plague died with him.

  I mean, maybe, it’s conceivable if I don’t make it… maybe someone could find it.

  He slightly wished he’d had time to put a little handwritten sign in the window: “Zombie-killing/humanity-saving drugs inside.” But he hadn’t.

  So now his interests and those of humanity were perfectly aligned. If they were going to survive, he had to survive. And now all he had to do was run and fight like a Kazakh possessed – long enough to get himself indoors and to some kind of safety. He had the bug-out bag reasonably securely on his back now – using both straps this time. He held his weapon with both hands. And he still had a pocketful of shells.

  He stood a chance.

  Tanks…

  Moscow - Red Square

  And then the soles of his shoes started to come off.

  They had recently been melted and deformed by a huge flaming puddle of kerosene in the shit-show that had been the Mongol invasion of his lab, back in his dacha in the Central Asian mountains. He hadn’t thought too much about it at the time – he’d been too busy trying to live through the next minute and make it to the helicopter alive – but he might have guessed this would come back to bite him in the ass.

  Oh well, he’d just run until they came off, and deal with that then.

  Right now, soles flapping, he was angling at high speed toward the short northwest edge of Red Square, which wasn’t actually square at all, but really a long rectangle – typically Orwellian of the Soviets, declaring that 2+2=5. Anyway, he needed to get onto Tverskaya Street, that grand boulevard, fifteen lanes wide, formerly the route of all those phallic parades, and which met the square up at its top end. This would lead him straight to the Biopreparat Building – or “the Main Directorate of the Council of Soviet Ministers,” as it had officially been known, due to the bioweapons program naturally not existing and all.

  If he could just get out of the damned square, he felt like he had a shot. And the crowds of surging dead – and, yeah, every one he got a look at was a damned former Red Army soldier – were thinning out markedly the farther he got from the crash site. Hell, he was almost minimizing his firing now, only shooting those coming right at him – because he felt like he was attracting more with the noise than he was putting down. It was an absolutely gigantic square, and it was nighttime, and he was a compact man of average height and could almost kind of disappear into it…

  And now his exit strategy from the square was coming up on him, the narrower plaza beside that big red monstrosity of Russian Revival architecture, the State Historical Mus—

  And, oh fuck me – here comes the blocking force.

  Seemingly timed by a staging director of exacting precision and explosive talent, a whole new company-sized formation of Red Army dead guys appeared, even that second barreling down the plaza straight toward Aliyev and into the square proper. Evidently they still thought they were in one of those parades.

  Not daring to slow down, Aliyev instead executed a severe banking maneuver. And he cut a wide arc as he pulled a complete 180 and reversed direction, still running at full speed, centrifugal force pulling at his body.

  And now he was running at high speed back into the square.

  Which is pretty much me fucked, then.

  * * *

  Spassky Tower.

  It was his next, and p
robably last, hope. The trouble was it sat at the absolute opposite end of Red Square – which really did have a damned severe aspect ratio, a hell of a lot longer than it was wide, and of course it was the long side Aliyev had to run across to get there. But, whatever else, he had to get the hell indoors. To stay out in this was worse than madness – it was death on a stick.

  He angled to the right now, intending to stick to the long southwest edge, thinking and hoping and praying and imagining that maybe this would keep him somewhat out of sight. It was also going to take him right by Lenin’s motherfucking mausoleum, which he’d have to jig around, but Lenin was dead like everyone else and would just have to forgive him if he didn’t stop to pay his respects.

  Since he was now, insanely, running back toward his crashed helicopter and the mass of dead milling around it, he had to start blasting again. Luckily the Benelli was topped up, and remained an outstanding weapon, and the loss of the priceless drugs in the coldbox at least meant he could wield the shotgun with two hands, so he brought the fixed stock up to his shoulder, tightly clutched the pistol grip…

  And he started learning how to make headshots while running flat out.

  And like the skydiver with the faulty chute, he had the entire rest of his life to figure this out and get good at it. Luckily it was a lot harder to miss with a twelve-gauge. Plus the effect it had on half-rotted heads – namely exploding them – was so gratifying as to provide excellent positive feedback as he worked on his aim.

  He also started to work out that as long as he kept moving – at his very top speed – he was kind of okay-ish, or at least rated his chances as better than nil. The regular old stumbling zombies he knew and loved to hate definitely couldn’t catch him. And he seemed to just have a slight speed advantage over the terrifying new running ones. He couldn’t slow for a second, but at his top speed they couldn’t catch him. Which didn’t mean they couldn’t corner him. But while their numbers were growing, they were still too few to fill up this Brobdingnagian behemoth of Soviet spectacle that was Red Square – God bless them for their small-penis issues and insistence on compensating at every turn…

  Speaking of turns, here came Aliyev’s – the three-story ziggurat that was the final resting place of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who had taken his alias from the River Lena in Siberia, where he had spent three years in exile. But all of Lenin’s problems were over. And Aliyev’s were just beginning, he realized, as he rounded the front of the building and tried to angle back to the right and toward the clock face and ridiculous spire-topping five-pointed star of Spassky Tower…

  Because now he could see that corner of the square was heaving with dead.

  Moreover, his crash site near the center of the square, to his left, was evidently losing its fascination, particularly as his roaming shotgun circus continued to circle around it. Now he had pursuers behind, ahead to the right – and angling in from behind and to his left. That pretty much left ahead and left as the only viable option in his fast-shrinking collection of options.

  That left St. Basil’s Cathedral.

  He had no idea if he could get inside. And he had no idea if the inside wasn’t already filled with the dead. He only knew he was just about out of alternatives.

  And when he was within sight of the ridiculous onion domes that represented the eight freaking churches built around the central one, he realized he was now totally out of them. Because he could also see there were more dead Russian soldiers in front of it than he had shotgun shells, even counting every last one in the dwindling stash in his pockets.

  Still not slowing, because he couldn’t, he turned his head on a swivel, frantically scanning in all directions. It was increasingly looking like a one-man busker show today in Red Square – and all the crowds were being drawn by him. He was becoming the sole center of attention.

  He was nearly surrounded. And he wasn’t going to make it.

  Think, think, think! he exhorted himself. There had to be something. He couldn’t go down like this. Not after all this. And definitely not here! Here of all places. And then something teased the flapping corner edge of his memory… something he had seen, something at the edge of the square, on the way into his crash-landing from the air maybe…

  Yes! That was it!

  Just as he felt despair and defeat and resignation tightening their grip around his throat, choking off the air that he was already battling for… he took off at a forty-five-degree angle to his current path, toward those buildings ringing the square that he had clipped on his approach, and which had nearly done him in… and with no preamble, a big, dark, boxy shape loomed at him out of the darkness ahead.

  It was that Soviet tank.

  Yes! yes! Aliyev thought. And to that he added, not for the first time:

  And thank God for the Walking Dead!

  * * *

  Slightly suggesting that there might in fact actually be a God, one of the top hatches of the tank was already open.

  Which was good because he would have had absolutely no idea how to get it open, and he didn’t have a single second to try to do so. This hatch wasn’t on top of the turret, but just in front of it on the main body. Aliyev leapt onto the front of the giant steel vehicle like a spawning salmon, then crawled head first down inside.

  Okay, there is definitely a God after all.

  Because the inside was empty. If there’d been any dead in there, he would have run into them face first. As it was, he hit the hard steel deck, limbs and backpack and shotgun banging and smarting on hard, angular, vaguely complex surfaces, and he flipped around like an Olympic swimmer, reached up, and hauled the hatch closed. Closed he could do.

  Though he didn’t know how to lock it.

  Then again, it didn’t matter. Those swarming dead assholes outside were even more clueless, and wouldn’t know to pull on it. They’d just walk and flop on it and beat their arms, and he could hear them doing so even now, and their own stupid dead weight would keep it closed for him.

  Plus now he had time to work out the finer points of tank operation.

  In fact… he had all eternity.

  Well, at least I’m alive, he thought with a sigh and a mental shrug.

  Albeit buried alive.

  * * *

  Bang bang bang. Moan moan moan. Bang bang bang.

  It was like being in a tin shack during a meat downpour.

  The noise never went away. It was constant, rhythmic, eventually becoming just background noise. After that, it became almost soothing. Like being back in the womb. If the womb were solid steel. And your mother was a mass of hundreds of undead Russian soldiers.

  Aliyev even had a little space in there – it was a surprisingly spacious interior for a tank – and he regarded it, casting around in the spectral dim green light. The first thing he’d done after closing the hatch and entombing himself in total darkness was dig around in his bug-out bag until he found the chem-light sticks, and then cracked one, setting it on a nearby surface.

  Thinking back to those few seconds he had seen it from the outside, with a snort Aliyev realized he might even know what kind of tank this was. But there was a reason for that – and it was right back to good old Russian hubris. This thing looked, if only from the sheer size of it, to be the new one, the T-14, called the Armata, which President-for-life Vladamir Putin had launched to enormous fanfare. It was supposed to be superior to all western tanks, because of its remotely controlled cannon and the protection it offered its crew.

  Anyway, Aliyev vividly remembered the military parade broadcast on television, from right here in Red Square, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany. The new tank was the star of that dick-waggling festival – memorably, because one of them had stalled and held up the whole parade. Even the attempt to tow it off the street failed. Hilarious! While that circus went on, the presenter commenting over the PA system had claimed it was all planned and part of the training “to evacuate weaponry.”

  That was so typical
– lies, lies, and more lies. The truth was the first casualty of communism, and it was the next after the fall of communism. Nothing changed.

  Dick-wagglers.

  And now here Aliyev was, trapped in this giant steel phallus that was also a womb, while surrounded by the heaving massive dead body of Mother Russia. He snorted again, thinking how he now had the rest of his life to come up with amusing mixed metaphors for his situation. He sure wasn’t going to have a former pizza delivery guy in riot gear call on the radio and bail him out…

  Wait. Radio. There will be a radio in this thing.

  But there’s no way there’d be power – is there?

  It didn’t take him long to locate it. There were a shitload of baffling controls all around, both manual and electronic, arrayed all over the many stations and control surfaces – but only one of them had a phone handset attached. Even the power button on the thing was pretty conspicuous. He hesitated with his finger poised over it. He didn’t dare to hope. Hope was stupid. Hope was for other people, in some other less fucked time, and in some less monumentally fucked situation.

  He flipped the plastic rocker switch.

  The whole face of the radio lit up.

  Holy shit.

  He flipped it back off instantly. Whatever power this thing still had was virtually guaranteed not to last long. Now he had to formulate the perfect plan. And he had to execute it flawlessly. Now he had hope again.

  And that was a terrifying thing.

  …For the Memories

  Red Square - Inside the T-14 Armata

  First question: Who the hell to call?

  The question was kind of self-answering, due to there being so very few people left alive on the planet, never mind ones with UHF-band radios. Basically, it had to be Britain. It had to be CentCom. They were the only ones – anywhere – who might have the wherewithal to come rescue him. They still had a military. They had planes and pilots and soldiers. And they certainly had the incentive to help him. Because it wasn’t just Aliyev trapped here.