Plague World (Ashley Parker Novel) (18 page)

His lieutenant N’kruma—not quite nineteen years old, but already wise enough not to contradict his leader—kept silent.

The warlord, Joshua Gideon Coli, had been preparing to raid an illegal mining encampment in the next gorge over. But then this tempting morsel had presented itself. A pair of unfortunate locals had been caught the day before. They claimed to be refugees, and told crazy stories about a horrible outbreak of blood-fever. Whole villages were fast in the grip of demons, and everyone for miles was dead.

Coli had listened to their ravings and regarded them with lizard-lidded eyes before he grew restless and ordered his soldiers to cut off their lips, and then prepare stakes to impale them.

But in their ravings he saw opportunity. From the description of their village, it sounded ripe for the picking. Their stories had been fabrications, designed to frighten him away. And now he allowed himself a grim smile of satisfaction. The huts below them were clearly still occupied, and its inhabitants were milling about without care.

Bushmeat.

He handed over the battered set of binoculars to his taciturn aide-de-camp and gave the order to move in. Coli’s soldiers rose to their feet, three hundred strong, extinguished their tasteless Chinese cigarettes, and fanned out, AK-47s at the ready.

The soldiers were overwhelmingly orphans. Ugandans, Sudanese, Rwandans, and more than a dozen other ethnic groups. Most had become orphans when they were forced to kill the other members of their own families. None were uniformed, nearly all were barefoot, and most were under the age of sixteen—many just half that age. More than a few were female, and they conducted a variety of duties in addition to soldiering.

The troops knew the drill. The youngest would lead the sweep, marching out in front to clear any land mines or booby traps, and to draw gunfire from any armed resistance. The older soldiers would follow behind, and then Coli’s army would draw the net around the target village, rounding up the locals without exception. Once the men of the village had given up the hiding places of their foodstores and valuables, they would be swiftly dispatched—along with the elderly.

The older soldiers would be given free reign over the mothers and unmarried older girls for an hour or two, depending on how generous their warlord felt.

Ultimately the smaller children would be the only survivors, and if they did what they were told they would be brought into the fold of Coli’s orphan army. Otherwise they would be used to show the proper way to cut throats, and be buried in the latrines. This is how for more than a decade Coli had managed to raise a guerilla army, ransack the hinterlands of three countries, and fight off government militias, Marxist rebels, and rival war bands.

As he watched his soldier children saunter down the hill toward their victims, something struck him as being… not right. The closer they drew to the villagers, the more the hairs on the back of Coli’s neck rose. Things were unnaturally quiet. He could hear a few sporadic pops as his troops shot a few villagers to get their attention, yet there were none of the usual screams or panicked attempts to flee.

What the hell is going on down there?
he wondered.

A whole crowd of locals assembled, but they all seemed to be drunk, or on drugs, staggering toward the ragtag army without fear. One marched right up to a young soldier and embraced him. So did two more villagers.

What the fuck is this?

And then the screaming began—but not from the villagers. Instead, it was his soldiers who were crying out in confusion, alarm, and pain. What was meant to be a methodical harvest suddenly deteriorated into a riot of confusion and terror. Frenzied shrieks and wild, uncoordinated bursts of gunfire ripped through the air. Infuriated at the break in discipline, the warlord barked harsh orders to his captains.

“Fils de putes!
Get down there and tell your squads to do their jobs, or so help me I’ll pour petrol down your throats and set your heads on fire!”

The captains immediately scrambled down the hill toward the howling fray. Coli shook his head and cursed long and spectacularly in three languages while pacing back and forth along the hilltop. What a bloody mess. His whole day would be ruined, unless…

He stepped away from the ridge, and pulled a cigar from the pocket of his fatigue jacket, along with a Zippo. He’d been saving the precious Cuban for a special occasion, and resented wasting it on this fiasco. But
c’est le guerre
. He had to do something to salve the pain.

As he flicked the lighter to life, someone called his name.

“General?” N’kruma said, softly. “Coli?” he continued, his voice rising slightly.

The warlord slowly turned in surprise. He had never seen the hardened soldier show fear before. Now, however, N’kruma stood staring down the hill in shocked silence, his arms limp at his sides, his AK-47 dangling just as uselessly. He looked every bit a scared young boy, instead of the rapist and killer that he was.

“They’re coming, Coli.”

Coli unslung his own prized weapon, a squat black French bullpup assault rifle, and strode over to gaze past his lieutenant. What he saw made no sense at all. The villagers
were
approaching—at least those who weren’t bent over screaming, flailing soldiers. And they weren’t alone.

At the forefront were many of the young people who had been his first wave, all dripping fresh blood from wounds so severe it seemed impossible that they were still walking.

“Nique ta mere
…” The warlord muttered the words around his still unlit cigar. Paralyzed, he stared into the horrible vacant eyes of his own child soldiers. He had seen horrible things in them before—fear, anguish, hate, despair, lust, and death agonies—but nothing as terrible as what he saw now, this relentless empty stare reflected in every face before him.

Survival instinct kicked in at last and he squeezed off a burst. Bodies went flying back as the bullets tossed them like bundles of torn bloody rags. N’kruma followed suit, and they continued spraying across the line of advance, mowing the enemy down until their clips were spent.

But the waves of soldiers and villagers were not spent. They continued to make their way up the hill, and those who had been gunned down simply rose up again, moving forward again, even with their bodies ripped open.

Switching out his ammo clip, Coli heard a high-pitched keening and realized it was coming from his lieutenant. The warlord retreated back a pace as N’kruma continued to shake and wail and fire his weapon in ever-frantic arcs, until his former comrades reached him at last and pulled him down into their arms.

His screams ended abruptly with a wet, tearing sound.

Coli tried to take another step back, and lost his footing. The big man crashed to the ground, his cigar and ammo clip tumbling out of reach. He swung the weapon like a club for a moment, then threw it at them in a frenzied attempt to turn and crawl away to freedom.

He screamed as the first bites landed on the backs of his legs. Coli’s army was following him again, and just as always, they would follow him to the bitter end.

The sound of voices in my headset pulled me out of my sleep, and I heard more nearby. They were muffled by the rotors, but every other word or so was discernable. I heard “Los Angeles” and “FUBAR” very clearly.

Opening my eyes, I found the rest of my teammates looking down at the landscape below, with varying degrees of horror and sorrow on their faces. Even Griff’s expression was grim, his lips compressed in a tight line. I didn’t get how bad it was, though, until I turned around and looked for myself.

San Francisco had been a mess when we’d arrived, but the outbreak had been in its beginning stages. The two days we’d spent in relative isolation at the DZN lab had been enough time for the zombie virus to well and truly take hold. The chaos we’d experienced had been horrible, but now as I looked at the patchwork quilt of burning buildings, multiple-car pileups, people running and screaming, and a staggering number of zombies… well, it made what we’d experienced in San Francisco seem like a walk in a park. A zombie-infested park, but nothing compared to the live Hieronymus Bosch painting that had replaced Santa Monica, Brentwood, and the rest of West LA.

The 405 Freeway was a river of unmoving metal. People struggled to move between and over the stalled cars, trampling one another in their desperation to get out of what had become a cement-walled death trap. The on and off ramps were clogged with panicked masses, packed like cows in a slaughterhouse chute. Many were picked up by zombies clustered around the exits.

My mother’s family was from Southern California, so we’d spent many holidays visiting various relatives scattered throughout LA and San Diego. I wasn’t particularly close with them, and had fallen out of contact as I grew older, but the thought of them down in that mess, and what Mom must be going through not knowing if they were okay…

Hell, she didn’t even know if I was okay at this point.

I swallowed hard and looked at Gentry.

“How… how long has it been this bad down here?”

“First sightings were early yesterday morning. It got bad really fast. They haven’t been able to do much in the way of evacuation.” He dragged a hand across his forehead and down his face.

“I know a lot of people in Los Angeles.” I turned to find Griff staring down at the carnage, tension clearly visible in the set of his jaw.

“Good friends?”

He shook his head.

“No. But still, I wouldn’t have wished this on any of them.” The distant look on his face made me wonder if there was more to his feelings than he was letting on. Like maybe he really cared about someone in the hell below.

I turned back to Gentry.

“Are they going to try to set up a quarantine?”

Gentry shrugged, but the gesture was anything but nonchalant. It looked as if it hurt him.

“They’re trying, but how can you quarantine every single road in and out of Los Angeles County? Santa Barbara, Oxnard, Ventura, Thousand Oaks, Santa Clarita, Riverside, San Bernardino—” He ticked them off with his fingers. “—all already infected.”

“Will they…” I swallowed again, afraid to ask the next question, but really needing to know the answer. “Are they going to use nukes?”

He didn’t answer, and my heart sank.

“You have got to be shitting me,” JT muttered.

Tony crossed his arms and snorted.

“Dude, we almost got nuked from orbit back in Redwood Grove, when they first thought this shit was gonna spread.”

“Yeah,” I added, “but that was when they thought they could contain the whole thing in one small area where collateral damage would be minimal.” It was more or less a quote from Colonel Paxton. “If they took out a big city, with a large population, it’d be a PR disaster. No way the President would okay it. Right, Gentry?”

Again with the disconcerting silence.

“Um, Gentry?” I prompted. “We could use some reassurance right about now.”

“I don’t know,” Gentry finally replied. “This thing is hemorrhaging from every point of origin we’ve discovered so far. Reports are coming in from all over the globe—from major population centers to obscure little ass-end-of-nowhere type places. There’s no telling what the powers that be might do at this point.”

So much for reassurance.

Things fell quiet again for a while as we all watched the grim scenario playing out below us. Smoke, fire, twisted wreckages of metal and flesh, and everywhere were zombies dragging down those who couldn’t flee fast enough. Some were torn to pieces, and others nibbled on just enough to insure that they’d come back to swell the ranks of the walking dead. They didn’t move quickly—didn’t scramble up walls and buildings like badly done CGI army ants. They didn’t have to. Their slow, implacable momentum began as a small trickle, then grew into an unstoppable tsunami, taking everything down in its path.

“Maybe nukes are the answer after all,” Lil said in a small voice. She stared out the window, her face pale and strained.

“No.” I shook my head. “Don’t ever say that.”

She turned toward me, expression fierce even as tears welled up in her eyes.

“Why not?” She clenched her fists. “It’s hopeless. No matter what we do, it’s just going to keep spreading.”

I stood up, nearly tripping over my blanket as it puddled around my feet. I caught my balance before I went sprawling headlong across the aisle, and knelt in front of Lil’s seat.

“We have to keep trying,” I said, taking her hands in mine. “And if we find a cure, we can still stop this.”

“But things will never be the way they were,” she said softly.

“That’s true,” I admitted, as much to myself as to Lil. “But if we can stop things from getting worse… that’s still something.”

JT leaned over and patted her on the arm.

“She’s right, kid,” he said. “You can’t think about all the things you can’t fix. You have to focus on the things you can.”

Tony snorted. “Get your inspirational bumper stickers here, dudes.”

JT shrugged, undaunted. “Shit gets put on bumper stickers for a reason. Sometimes that reason is because it’s true.”

“And sometimes it’s just shit,” Griff said softly, looking straight at me.

I glared at both Griff and Tony as Lil’s face blanched even further. I gave her hands a squeeze.

“JT’s right,” I said, with more force than necessary. “We focus on the stuff we
can
fix. And right now that means getting Gabriel and Dr. Crazy Pants back from the bad guys so we can find a cure. Got it?”

An urgent squawk sounded from the com system. I snapped my head around so suddenly I pulled a muscle in my neck. Nathan and Simone were sitting bolt upright in their seats, both looking grim but not surprised.

This was
so
not good.

“We are going down. Repeat, we are going down!”