Dark Days az-2 Page 23

  “What’s happening?” I asked as I looked out the window.

  No one answered. Everyone was too engrossed in the scene below. The airport looked like an anthill some naughty little boy had kicked over. A long convoy of military trucks filed out of the base; packed like sardines into each truck were dozens of grim-faced soldiers rushing here and there, armed to the teeth.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Prit whispered to me. He looked worried as he watched out the window.

  “Maybe it’s a drill or maneuvers,” I said, trying to be nonchalant.

  “I don’t think that’s it,” said the Ukrainian. “Look at all those trucks. Given the fuel shortage, moving that many vehicles is a drain on supplies. No, this must be something big. Really big.”

  We didn’t have to wonder for long. A set of stairs were rolled up to the Airbus and then the doors flew opened. Before we could deplane, a group of heavily armed soldiers covered in hazmat suits entered the cabin.

  My first though was, Dammit, not again! But then I calmed down. The soldiers seemed friendly, not hostile. After carefully checking out everyone onboard to make sure we weren’t a bunch of slobbering Undead, they lowered their weapons and took off their helmets. Everyone relaxed.

  “Welcome back, boys,” the commanding officer said, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “You picked a fine time to come back. It’s hot as hell and we’re on high alert.”

  “What the hell’s going on?” asked Prit.

  “We have reports that Froilists have attacked Tenerife Hospital. The situation seems to be under control, but apparently there’re dozens of dead.”

  “Prit!” I grabbed his arm. “The hospital! Lucia and Sister Cecilia!”

  “What happened exactly?” asked the Ukrainian, as he motioned for me to calm down. “How many casualties?”

  “Nobody’s sure,” said the officer, taken aback by Prit’s military-style interrogation. “Some think their target was the hospital’s lab, but I think they wanted to rob the pharmacy. Drugs are worth a fortune these days.”

  He cast a greedy glance at the bulging backpacks lying in the aisle.

  “What happened? You brought back just those two backpacks? Where’s that old SOB, Tank?”

  Nobody said a word. The officer’s expression changed to disbelief.

  “Tank? Dead?” He stammered, shaking his head. “What about the rest of the team? So it’s just you guys? Fuck! What the hell happened out there?”

  “Froilists,” Prit said quietly. “Same as here.”

  “Shit!” The officer pounded his fist on the plane’s bulkhead. “This fucking civil war’s going to finish off the few of us those Undead didn’t get. Hell! We don’t need an infection to exterminate the human race—we’ll do it ourselves!”

  I leaned in close, as his men escorted the rest of Tank’s team off the plane. “Sir, we’ve got to get home as soon as possible. My girlfriend works at the hospital and we have a friend being treated there. We need to know…”

  “There’s a procedure we’ve got to follow,” said the officer, bluntly. “Seven day quarantine for the entire team. You were informed of that before you left.”

  I tried to contain my impatience. I couldn’t wait seven days. Or even an hour. Something was terribly wrong. I could feel it. I needed to find Lucia and Sister Cecilia right away.

  “Listen, officer,” I said, pulling him aside, “I just need an hour to make sure she’s okay. One lousy hour. I’ll be back before anyone misses me. Swear to God.”

  “You know I can’t do that. We’d both get in big trouble if anyone found out.”

  “No one’ll find out, I swear,” I said as I searched my pockets.

  I finally found what I was looking for—a half-dozen boxes of antibiotics I’d stuffed in my pocket back at the supply room. That little stash was worth a fortune in Tenerife. The officer’s eyes grew wide when he saw what I was offering him. I’d planned to sell it on the black market, but getting out of there was an emergency.

  “One hour, not a minute more,” the officer muttered, as he slipped the boxes in his pockets. “If you’re not back in an hour, I’ll report that you two escaped. Then the problem will be on your shoulders. They’ll shoot to kill, you know.”

  “I’ll take that chance.” I grabbed a Glock and stuck it in my belt.

  “We’ll both take that chance,” Prit said, grabbing one of the HKs.

  “Thanks, Prit, but you don’t have to come. This is my concern. I’ve got a bad feeling Lucia needs me now, not in a week. I hope I’m wrong because if they pick us up out there, we’ll be in deep shit. God knows you’ve got enough problems of your own.”

  “Cut the crap! I’m going with you and that’s that. So, let’s move. We’ve only got an hour to get there and back.”

  I gave the Ukrainian a grateful look and resisted the urge to hug him. What a friend!

  We rushed out of the plane as the officer trotted toward the quarantine area in the terminal. I had no idea how he’d justify our absence, but I was sure he had the situation under control, at least for that hour. People like him always manage somehow.

  After five minutes of furious negotiation (and trading two more boxes of antibiotics, which quickly disappeared into the right pockets), Prit and I were perched on a pile of scrap metal in the back of an asthmatic truck headed for Tenerife, its driver terribly pleased with his unexpected fortune.

  The trip took forever. The closer we got to town, the stronger my hunch got. We passed through all the extra checkpoints without a hitch. At one, the officer in charge told us they were tracking a woman, a Froilist spy who’d taken part in the assault on the hospital, but gave no details.

  “Whadda you think, Prit?”

  My friend suddenly looked tired. “I don’t like this one bit. I hope we find Lucia soon. In case you hadn’t noticed, those people are paranoid and armed to the teeth. Out of the blue, some nut job could lose it and start shooting. Then we’d be in big trouble.”

  “You’re right. I hope Lucia’s someplace safe.”

  Five minutes later the truck came to a more heavily manned checkpoint. Soldiers and the police had parked a couple of tanks sideways and set up a machine gun nest.

  The truck driver talked briefly with the officer in charge. “Here’s where you get out. The entire area within a thousand feet of the hospital has been evacuated and no one can go through.”

  “Why? What the hell happened?” I asked as we climbed out of the truck.

  “Not sure,” said the driver, looking really scared. “Apparently the Froilists attacked a medical lab. They might’ve released some kind of germ. Didn’t those people learn anything from what TSJ did? Only an idiot would rob a lab, for God’s sake.”

  Muttering under his breath, the driver lit a cigarette, his hands shaking. On the seat of his truck, he set a poster that the officer at the checkpoint had given him. With a terrible sense of dread, I reached over and picked it up.

  It was a blurry photocopy of an ID. Below the picture, in bold letters, was the word WANTED. It warned anyone who saw the woman in the picture not to go near her and to contact the military.

  I handed the poster to Prit, without saying a word. A cold sweat ran down my back as a sense of doom came over me.

  The woman in the poster was Lucia.

  50

  I have no idea how we got through that checkpoint. My mind had shut down, so it was all a blur.

  Lucia, a Froilist spy. That was impossible, for God’s sake! My girlfriend couldn’t have cared less about politics. Hell, she didn’t even know all the details of the problem. If she’d gotten involved, wouldn’t she have told me? All those ideas whirled through my mind.

  “Hey! Wake up!” Prit snapped his fingers in front of my eyes. “I get it—you’re overwhelmed, but if you really want to help Lucia and Sister Cecilia, you’d better get it together. Those two need us to be at the top of our game. Agreed?”

  I took a deep breath. “Of course, dammit! What’r
e we gonna do?”

  “First, find Lucia. Then clear things up, if we can.”

  “How do you suggest we find her in all this chaos?” I said, pointing to the riot troops that just drove up. “Half the island’s looking for her and the other half thinks the fucking Froilists are invading.”

  “Let’s start at the most logical place—our home.”

  We didn’t have much choice, so I agreed. At first the truck driver flatly refused to take us to our home in the hotel. After a brief talk with Prit away from prying eyes, he became more cooperative. I’d guess the nick on his neck from Prit’s knife had something to do with his sudden change of attitude.

  I was not surprised to find a URO parked outside our building. A couple of soldiers lounged against the hood, while another soldier was sitting in the driver’s seat, reading a well-thumbed, girly magazine.

  “They’re on the lookout for her,” I whispered to the Ukrainian. “Lucia wouldn’t come here with those guys hanging around.”

  “Well, they’re sure not going to find her sitting on the couch reading Tolstoy, idiot,” Prit said, as he got out of the truck. “Maybe we can find something in there to clear things up.”

  The soldiers barely glanced at us as we entered the building. They were looking for a seventeen-year-old brunette, not a tall, skinny guy with a pained look on his face or a short guy with a blond mustache.

  As we walked through the doorway, the door flew open and someone stuck her head outside. Just in time, I grabbed Pritchenko’s shirt and dragged him behind a dusty flowerpot with a plant big enough to hide behind. The open door cast a rectangle of light along with the smell of cooked cabbage.

  I recognized the block leader, an old gossip I’d always distrusted. The woman squinted as she scanned the dark lobby. Most of the light bulbs had burned out months ago and no one had replaced them.

  “Who’s there?” she chirped.

  Prit and I held our breath. If that snitch saw us, she’d raise the alarm and we’d have to explain ourselves to the guards stationed in front.

  After a tense moment, that old biddy turned, muttered something under her breath, and went back into her lair.

  We made it through the lobby and to the stairs without crossing paths with our neighbors. The soldiers at the front door must’ve scared everyone off, as we didn’t see a soul on the stairs that were usually crowded.

  When we reached our floor, I wasn’t surprised to find the front door broken down. They’d given our home a thorough going-over. It looked like a tornado had hit it. Nothing was spared. They’d even ripped up the mattresses and cushions, searching for God-knows-what. My heart sank. If Lucia had left us a clue, they’d have found it.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something rush through the door. Instinctively, I drew my pistol, but then I heard a pitiful meow coming from an orange blur.

  “Lucullus!” I shouted as my cat bounded over to me. When I picked him up, I could tell he’d put on some weight. I scratched his belly and he purred ecstatically.

  Lucullus shot me an angry look when I stopped petting him. I looked closely at his collar. All his life, he’d worn a black flea collar. Now strapped around his neck was a strip of red leather I knew well. It wasn’t a collar; it was a bracelet I’d given Lucia.

  My hands shook as I unfastened the bracelet and turned it over, with Pritchenko peering over my shoulder. Just one word was written on the back in Lucia’s handwriting, a word only Prit and I would understand: Corinth.

  51

  It took us nearly two hours to reach the port of Tenerife. We had to do some tricky maneuvers to get out of the building without anyone seeing us, and to give the checkpoints a wide berth.

  “It’s just a matter of time till someone links us to Lucia and starts circulating our photos, too,” Prit said.

  I agreed. Plus, the hour the officer at the airport had granted us had long since expired. Prit and I were now deserters and fugitives. It wasn’t the triumphant welcome I’d pictured, but at least we were alive—and free.

  By the time we reached the docks, we’d come up with a plan. We guessed that Lucia had hidden out in one of the boats anchored there. Only we knew about the Corinth, the boat I’d sailed to Vigo where I met Prit. Lucia’s cryptic message had to mean she was hiding on a sailboat… but which one? Surely she’d left us another clue, one that wasn’t too obvious.

  When we reached the docks, our spirits fell. There were hundreds of sailboats anchored among dozens of rusting freighters and warships. Thousands of refugees had trickled in on those boats. When fuel became scarce, the government organized a fishing fleet that went out every morning to feed the hungry masses packed on Tenerife.

  For a boat lover like me, it was painful to see those thoroughbreds of the wind buried in nets, fishing gear, and traps. But people had to eat. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t spot a boat like the Corinth under all that gear.

  “What now? Which one’s she in?” Prit nervously asked. From our hiding spot between containers stacked on the pier, we watched dock workers head to work.

  “If I knew, we wouldn’t be standing around wasting time,” I snapped. I struggled to hold on to Lucullus, who kept trying to launch himself out of my arms. My mind raced as my eyes searched for a sign. None of those boats reminded me of the Corinth.

  I was about to give up when I spotted a small sailboat anchored at the end of the pier. I blinked several times to make sure my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me. Then I smiled. Flying from the top of her mast like a flag was a faded, old wetsuit.

  52

  The Crocodile II was an old twenty-four-foot sailboat. Once upon a time, she must have been a real gem, but when Prit and I rowed up in a dinghy, it was clear that she was pretty run down. You could tell from her teak decking and elegant steel fittings that her original owner had really lavished her with love, but all those months used as a fishing boat in less careful hands had taken its toll.

  The rigging was a mess and damp lines were strewn around the deck. The bow was almost buried under a thick layer of nets—all shapes and sizes—that smelled of rotting fish. If Lucia had taken refuge there, it was an excellent choice. No one would’ve boarded that floating trash heap.

  We rowed alongside the Crocodile II and climbed aboard. The deck was in complete disrepair. The front half of the cabin had been transformed into a hold for their catch. Peering in the cabin door, all I could see were white plastic crates stacked every which way and a filthy mattress tossed on the deck.

  “No one’s here,” Prit said despondently. “I don’t think…”

  Before he could finish, Lucullus jumped aboard the Crocodile II and took off like a shot between the crates. There was a muffled yelp of surprise and suddenly, a hand I knew so well pushed aside a stack of crates.

  Standing before us, petting a contented Lucullus, looking at us through tears of relief was Lucia.

  I grabbed her hands. Not saying a word, she squeezed mine as tight as she could. We stood there, speechless, until Prit coughed to get our attention.

  “Sorry to interrupt this reunion, but we’ve got a lot to do. They’re looking for us and we don’t know how Sister Cecilia is. Maybe we should—”

  “Oh, Prit,” Lucia dropped my hands and hugged the Ukrainian. Her pained voice broke and she started to cry. “Prit, I’m so sorry. They killed her right in front of me. It was horrible.”

  “Calm down. Calm down,” Pritchenko managed to say, as he gave her a clumsy pat on the back. The Ukrainian was as pale as a ghost, his eyes like two black marbles. I knew my friend, and whoever killed the nun had earned a mortal enemy.

  Lucia pulled away from Prit and leaned on me, sobbing, as she described the nightmare she’d lived through over the past two days, from the time she entered the hospital until she took refuge in that boat.

  “How’d you know no one would find you on this boat? What about her crew?” I asked as I held her tight.

  “They were admitted to the hospital for botulism
. They ate some rancid canned food,” Lucia managed to say between sobs. “They were patients on my wing. I knew no one would come around for at least fifteen days.”

  “What if we hadn’t found you? What would you’ve done?”

  Lucia stopped crying. A sad smile lit up her face and she gave me a long kiss. “I was sure you’d come,” she said, calmly looking me in my eye. “I never doubted you for a minute. Nothing in the world—not human or Undead—can stop you.”

  I hugged her tight. I’d never let any harm come to her.

  I turned to Prit, who was sitting on the cabin stairs, crestfallen, his arms folded. Not only had he lost his best friend, he’d been robbed of the chance to get revenge. I knelt beside him. “Prit, don’t fall apart now. We need you, old friend. We’re comrades-in-arms, remember?”

  The Ukrainian raised his glassy eyes. I saw a spark of life in the back of his eyes. “Fatalism,” he said, with a bitter smile.

  “Fatalism,” I answered, returning his smile. “But I promise we’ll make sure that changes very soon.”

  53

  Five hours later, as the sun was coming up, the Tenerife fishing fleet set sail for the traps they’d set a few nautical miles away. From the shore, the sight of hundreds of sailboats spreading their sails on a dimly lit sea was unforgettable.

  A veteran sailor might’ve noticed that the rigging of one of the boats was pulled tight on the leeward side, as if she were in a race. Her crew was scurrying around on deck, tying down loose ends.

  Two hours later, when the boats reached the fishing ground, the same sailboat didn’t cast her nets like all the rest. Instead, the crew let out the spinnaker in the morning breeze and set sail for Gran Canaria. No one in the fleet noticed as the boat pulled away.