Shaun Harbinger - Wildfire - Destruction of the Dead

Vess’s flesh was slick with blood, making his corpse more difficult to carry. We managed to get it into the bus and lay it beneath the back seats, out of sight. Then we went into the washrooms and cleaned our hands before heading back to the girls.

By the time all four of us were heading back to the bus, some of the soldiers were returning from the northern quadrant. They looked upset and downcast. I wondered how many of their number had been lost in the hybrid attack.

Captain Price came over to us. His face was set into a hard mask of determination but there were tears in his eyes. “Some of the hybrids were the men that went missing from this camp,” he said. “It’s one thing to fight an unknown enemy but when you have to kill someone you used to know, it’s a damned terrible business.”

I nodded. We all knew the heart-wrenching consequences of having our friends become enemies.

The brigadier came marching up to us angrily. “What the bloody hell has happened here?”

“I told you what was going to happen,” I said. “I warned you. You wouldn’t listen.”

He came up to me, putting his face close to mine and pointing at me. “If you let her go, I’ll have you court-martialed!”

“Of course we didn’t let her go,” I said. “She did that all by herself. Your men are lying dead back there because of your arrogance.”

“You’re all going to jail,” he said. “What you did amounts to treason.”

I’d heard enough of his bullshit. I hit him. He stumbled backward and fell to the ground, holding his nose as it began to pour blood.

The soldiers around us looked shocked. They didn’t know what to do. Two of them helped the brigadier to his feet.

“Arrest them,” he shouted, pointing at us. “Take them into custody.”

The soldiers moved forward. Tanya and Lucy leveled the M16s at them. The soldiers halted.

“You won’t be taking us anywhere,” I said.

We moved backward to the bus, the girls keeping their guns trained on the soldiers.

As soon as we climbed aboard, Sam started the engine and reversed through the main gate, knocking it down. He kept the bus in reverse all the way to the motorway, where he maneuvered us into position to drive back along it to get to the roads that would take us to the coast.

“Are they following us?” I asked nervously as we drove along the center lane. If the convoy of armed Jeeps came after us, we stood no chance in a bus.

“No,” Sam said, checking the mirror.

“I don’t think the brigadier’s hatred of us has spread to the other soldiers,” Tanya said.

“Wait a minute,” Sam said. “There’s a Jeep following us.”

I looked through the rear window. A single Jeep was on our tail, with a driver, a passenger, and a soldier manning the mounted gun.

“It’s only one Jeep,” Tanya said.

I sighed. “That’s all they need to blow this bus to hell.”

The Jeep came up behind us fast. Tanya and Lucy prepared the M16s but I had a feeling they weren’t going to get a chance to use them. We’d seen how efficiently the mounted guns had dealt with the bandits.

The Jeep raced up alongside us. It was Captain Price in the passenger seat. He motioned to Sam to stop.

“What do I do?” Sam asked.

“You might as well stop,” I said.

He brought us to a complete stop. The Jeep stayed next to us. Price jumped out and knocked on the bus door. Sam opened it. The door opened with a hydraulic hiss.

Price came on board. He stood at the front of the aisle between the seats as if he were a tour guide about to point out the local landmarks. “The brigadier has sent me to bring you back to the camp.”

“I’ll tell you now, that isn’t going to happen,” Tanya said. She and Lucy had their guns pointed at Price.

“No, it isn’t,” he agreed. “There’s no need for the weapons. I’m not taking you anywhere. You’ll have to excuse the brigadier; he’s a military man through and through. Doesn’t believe civilians have much value, even though it’s them he’s supposed to be fighting for.

“You people don’t belong in jail. You’re doing just as much good out here as we are, maybe even more. We’re bound by rules and regulations. Sometimes they get in the way.

“So, as I said, I came after you as per the brigadier’s orders but you were already gone when I got to the motorway.”

“Thanks,” Sam said, “but why did you have to stop us just to tell us that? I mean, it’s nice that you want to say goodbye and everything, but we’d have gotten over our heartbreak if you’d just let us leave without saying a word. We wouldn’t have looked back, man.”

“I came to tell you that you may have underestimated the brigadier. He knows you killed something in Lab 3. We found the bloodstain on the floor and a trail leading to where this bus was parked. He thinks you killed your friend Jax and removed the body so the scientists can’t examine it.”

We said nothing. Price studied our faces, then nodded and gave a signal to the gunner in the Jeep. The gunner jumped down onto the road, took something from the vehicle and brought it around to the open bus door. He handed it to Price.

It was a shovel.

Price tossed it down into the aisle. The shovel clattered on the floor of the bus.

“Make sure you bury it deep,” he said.

With that, he exited the bus and went back to his Jeep. He gave us a slight nod before the Jeep turned and headed back to Camp Prometheus.

“Wow,” Sam said.

I picked up the shovel and placed it on the back seat. Even though he worked for the military, Price must have the same trepidation as us when it came to letting them study the body of a Type 1 for weaponization purposes.

“We’ll bury the body on the cliffs,” Tanya said. “Let’s go, Sam.”

He nodded and got us moving.

I hoped the short drive to the coast was going to be uneventful. We had a body to bury and I finally had a location for Joe and my parents.

I took the slip of paper out of my pocket and read it over and over, feeling as if I might be in a dream.

Tomorrow, I was going to see my family.

We parked the bus by the cafe and climbed out into the afternoon sun. The Easy and the Escape waited on a gently rolling sea. I wanted to get the burial over as soon as possible and return to the comfort of the boat.

Across the road, a small stone wall marked the edge of a field. It looked as good a place as any to dispose of Vess’s body A lone elm tree stood in the field. With shovel in hand, Sam vaulted over the wall and began digging in the shade beneath the tree.

When he had a grave deep enough, he came back and said, “All ready.” We struggled to get the body over the wall but finally managed to carry it across the field and into the grave. Price had said to bury the body deep, and Sam had dug a hole that would suffice. We rolled Vess in.

“Tell me something,” Sam said. “Are we burying the body out of respect or just to hide it?”

“Just to hide it,” I said.

We filled in the hole quickly. As we climbed over the wall and back onto the road, I looked back. No one would ever suspect that patient zero was buried beneath that tree.

Tanya grabbed the magpie from the bus and we descended the steps to the beach. The Zodiac was exactly where we had left it among the rocks.

We had driven here without incident, buried the body without being seen, and found the Zodiac with no trouble. Maybe our luck was changing for the better.

As we launched the small craft, I heard the low buzz of a drone overhead. The magpie sat by Tanya’s feet. We were safe.

WE SAILED out from the coast and turned the boats south. Our destination was Camp Achilles in Wales. We would go ashore tomorrow. For now, we wanted to get the boats near enough to Swansea Marina to assess the situation there. The last time we had been there, it had been crawling with soldiers and military vehicles. That shouldn’t be a problem now that we had the ID badges that said we worked for the MoD but we didn’t want to blunder into an area where the army had a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy.