Adam Baker - Impact

‘Hurts to lift my arms right now.’

‘If I shot you up with painkillers, could you move?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. What about you? What about your leg?’

‘I’ll cope.’

‘And what about Hancock?’

‘Comes with us. Doesn’t have a choice in the matter.’

‘What’s the deal? Why’s he tied up?’

‘The guy wants to complete the mission. Load the physics package on a sled, drag it to the target site and detonate the thing. Happy to let him do it, except that he wouldn’t get a quarter of a mile before his legs gave out. Then he’d probably fire the nuke there and then, take us all to hell.’

‘Why was he staked in the sun?’

‘Payback. He did the same to me.’

‘If I told you a week ago you’d be torturing some poor bastard to the brink of death, you wouldn’t have believed me.’

‘I didn’t instigate this shit.’

‘But you can put an end to it. The guy’s tapped out. Let him inside.’

Frost went outside.

She crouched and examined the trip flare. It should have fired the previous night when Pinback entered the plane. He must have stepped over it.

Cunning motherfucker.

She sat in the shade.

Hancock lay on his back beside her, staring into the reddening sky with half-closed eyes.

The fuselage creaked and ticked. Metal contracting in the cool evening air.

‘Kill me,’ he whispered. ‘Cut me loose or kill me.’

‘You brought us to this. Remember that. Waving your gun around.’

‘You don’t have the guts to pull the trigger. Sooner or later you’ll set me free.’

‘I don’t want to shoot you. I don’t want to shoot anyone. Convinced yourself this is some kind of zero-sum face-off. Fighting me because I’m human, a quantifiable enemy, unlike those infected fucks out there in the sand.’

‘You’re a fucking coward.’

Frost took a tube of toothpaste from her pocket. She squeezed a nub onto her finger and rubbed it round her teeth.

‘I’m getting out of here, and I’m going to take you with me. Sit you on the sled and drag your ass, if that’s what it takes.’

‘The Great Trek. You’ve been talking about it for days. Haven’t taken a single step.’

‘We leave tonight. Pinback, Guthrie, the rest. They’ll show when darkness comes. We’ll force a confrontation, put them down for good.’

He gave a derisive snort.

‘You need a major reality check,’ said Frost. ‘You’re dying of septicaemia. Forget the mission. You won’t be striding off across the desert to a hero’s death. Your skin is necrotising, rotting from your skull. Smells bad. Real bad. You need antibiotics. If we make it to a town, we might be able to find a pharmacy that hasn’t been looted bare. Grab what we can. Then we’ll find some kind of army unit, some place with a surgeon, some place that can perform a graft. Either that, or you can sit here and let the flesh peel from your bones like a leper.’

Frost held her canteen to Hancock’s mouth. He struggled to lift his head and drink.

‘This is a chance to become someone new,’ said Frost. ‘Ever think of that? This anarchy. A chance to erase your past. Pick up a dead guy’s wallet and take a new name.’

Hancock drank some more.

‘I don’t need a new name. I know exactly who I am.’

Frost unsheathed her knife.

‘Am I going to regret this? If I cut you loose, going to give me any trouble?’

‘Think I’m going to beg? Go fuck yourself.’

Frost cut him free. He groaned and stretched, massaged stiff, welted arms.

‘We ought to get inside,’ said Frost.

‘Sit in the plane and wait to die? That’s your big fucking plan?’

‘Like I said. We get our shit together then walk out of here.’

‘Never make it. Look what the journey did to Noble.’

‘He reached the foot of the Panamints. Could have gone a lot further, if he hadn’t turned back.’

‘He would have died in those mountains. Barren as the desert. Nothing living up there but vultures. He would have been carrion.’

‘He had a shot.’

She held out a hand. Hancock hesitated, then let her pull him to his feet.

He swung his arms, tried to restore circulation. He bent and stretched.

She waited to see if he were about to throw a punch. Too strung out. He sagged, exhausted, against the fuselage.

‘You better get inside,’ said Frost. ‘It’ll be dark soon.’

Hancock climbed through the rip in the fuselage. He stood a while, holding the wall for support, letting his eyes adjust to darkness.

He blinked to clear sunspots from his vision. He saw Noble lying on the deck, head propped by a parachute.

‘You look fucking awful,’ croaked Noble, looking up at him.

Hancock slid down the nav console and sat on the floor.

‘Take a look in the mirror. You’re no prom date.’

‘Your head. Looks bad. Smells bad.’

‘Not a whole lot I can do about it. And you smell pretty ripe yourself, by the way.’

Hancock spat dust. He sat, head in hands.

‘They’ll be coming for us, soon as night falls,’ said Noble.

Hancock pointed to Noble’s side arm, the vacancy in the butt.

‘She took your magazines.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Worried I would take your gun?’

‘That’s right.’

Hancock smiled and shook his head.

‘You need to sort your shit out, you and her,’ said Noble.

‘Going to help me suppress a mutiny?’

‘I’m not picking sides in this fight.’

‘I’m still AC, no matter what. And we got orders.’

‘Do I have to spell it out? That satellite link you’ve been fooling with? There’s no one at the other end. Those flash EAMs? Figment of your imagination. Just you, at the keyboard, typing little messages to yourself. There is no chain of command. We are utterly alone.’

‘Tell yourself whatever you like. The orders were real. They stand. We got a mission to execute, so are you going to do your job, or pussy out like her?’

‘I went out there, Captain. I saw the target site. Apache. Some kind of multi-agency installation. A FEMA/CDC slaughterhouse. You know full well this mission has no purpose. An attempt to whitewash the reputations of guys that probably died weeks ago. Pure bullshit. But you’re in a headlong rush to die for it anyway.’

‘Some folks choose to live by a code. No point trying to explain.’

‘Never understood guys like you. Itching to jump on a grenade.’

They each retreated into silence.

Noble supported himself on an elbow and sipped from a canteen. He offered it to Hancock as a conciliatory gesture.

Hancock hesitated, then took the steel flask.

‘I saw the damndest thing while I was at Apache,’ said Noble.

‘What?’

‘There was an office. Paper scattered everywhere. Some of it Japanese. Dense pages of kanji.’

‘Yeah?’

‘And there were pictures. Look.’

He dug in his backpack. He handed Hancock monochrome sheets. Poor quality. Copies of old woodblock prints, kind of thing held in a Tokyo museum. Stylised, grotesque.

Hancock examined the pages. One showed a city on a hill. Townsfolk leaning from their windows, watching some kind of shooting star fall to earth. Another showed a samurai warrior, sword drawn, confronting an army of deformed skeletal things.

He studied the samurai. Black armour. A white, half-face skull painted on the snarling helmet mask.

‘Japan.’

‘Maybe this isn’t the first time humans have faced off against the virus. Maybe it’s been here before.’

Frost paced the dunes. She took a last look around before sunset.

She sat on the half-buried undercarriage. She disassembled her Beretta and held the components in her lap. She blew them free of sand.