“Here you go.” Jimmy and Dillon quickly swapped out weapons and each function checked the new one just to be sure. Magazines were pulled and inspected as well.
“Okay, I’ll be back in a few, boss. I’ll see if I can find another MP-5 or two while I’m out there.”
Dillon knew it was a good idea to do so, but also knew that there would only be MP-5s out there if Donnie, Hannah, or Talbot had dropped theirs, or died with it in their hands. Dillon was glad that he wouldn’t be out there picking through the corpses on the runway to find out.
“Dad, why don’t you call Mom?”
“Shit, Mikey. You’re right!” Dillon waited until Jimmy opened the hangar door and stepped into the door frame to get better reception for the satellite phone. He dialed the only number he knew, the Admiral’s, and it picked up after a few rings.
“Admiral Covington’s office.”
“This is Special Agent Dillon Shay, U.S. Embassy Cairo. May I speak to the Admiral?”
“The Admiral is not available at the moment. Would you like to leave a message.”
“Ask him to call me.”
“Yes sir.”
“Thanks.”
After that, Dillon went shut the door. “Mikey, we’re going to have to wait until the Admiral calls back. Then we can check on Mom, okay?”
“Yeah.” Mikey sounded pretty glum. His hopes had just been dashed.
“I know it’s tough, Mikey, but you’re doing really well. I’m proud of you, buddy.”
“Super proud?”
“Yeah. I’m super proud. Now, let’s get all of the stuff together. Did you find any pipe?”
“I found some different pipes over there. And I found the welding stuff.”
Dillon laughed. “One thing at a time, buddy. One thing at a time. Show me where you found the pipes.”
Mikey walked over to a cubby hole near the closest wall. “It’s all over here.”
Dillon walked with him, the interior of the cubby hole finally coming into view. “Ah, okay. There they are. Okay, here’s a hacksaw. Find me something to cap the larger pieces of pipe, something about three inches round.”
They had most of the items collected by the time Jimmy returned. Dillon jumped at the Hangar door opening, immediately leveling his M-4 in that direction until he realized there was not a threat. Jimmy came back with an MP-5, and mentioned that it hadn’t been strapped to anyone. That was a relief to Dillon. After that, work began in earnest. Mikey was fairly mechanically inclined, and Jimmy seemed to have a lot of experience in a shop. Dillon lagged behind in that particular skill set, but he kept guard as they worked. A few times, they dropped something that made enough noise to force Dillon to check the perimeter. Each time, everything was clear.
Six hours later, they had built three suppressors and two swords. Dillon was calling them choppers, as they resembled long meat cleavers more than they resembled swords. They were thicker and heavier than machetes, about 28 inches long from end to end, and lacked anything resembling a point. They had, in fact, been ground down from leaf springs. Dillon had no doubt, however, that they would do the trick. Mikey came up with an idea for heating sheets of kydex plastic to make molded sheaths for them, and used a drill and pop rivets to finish them. The suppressors were an improvement on the home made plastic models. They utilized metal washers, rubber washers, and were threaded. Dillon and Jimmy both quickly used them to replace the old ones.
Jimmy seemed to like Mikey, and surprised him with a shield made from the curved side of a plastic barrel. It had a hand and forearm strap made from lengths of seatbelt attached with rivets, and a sling to allow him to carry it on his back. It reached from his knee to his shoulder, and weighed a little more than five pounds.
“You can stop carrying that anytime you want, Mikey.” offered Dillon.
“I think the kid has a handle on it, Dillon.” Jimmy said.
Dillon double checked Mikey’s shield one more time before they headed out to find a vehicle.
“Okay, you’re all set, buddy. Now listen, you need to stay with a little bit behind us, and always between us. If you get in front of us we can’t shoot, okay?”
“I got it dad. I won’t let you down. Hey, if I do well at this, will you think about giving me a gun?”
“Mikey, I promise I will. Stay safe, and stay close.”
“Okay!”
All of the vehicles on their side of the airbase were not promising. They were riddled with holes. The smell was getting bad very quickly. They circled around the piles of dead that were at each obstacle or narrow area that had served to channel the infected into kill zones. On two occasions, there were still infected moving in the piles, apparently wounded or simply pinned under the dead. They decided to exit the airfield through a gap in the eastern fence and skirt around it looking for perimeter vehicles. The idea proved fortuitous when a small group of infected spotted them and rushed the perimeter fence line. They couldn’t get through it, and there weren’t enough of them to topple it. They followed Dillon, Jimmy and Mikey as they made their way along the outside of the double fence. After a quarter of a mile, there were sixteen of them.
“We have to deal with these guys before we get another break in the fence, Dillon.”
Dillon knew that. He had been avoiding it because he didn’t want to shoot these people in front of Mikey. He also knew that these weren’t really people anymore, and Mikey had to learn to protect himself.
“Mikey, these people are infected. There is no cure. If they get us, they will rip us apart. If we get them, we can end the suffering for them. Do you understand?”
“Yeah.”
“Mikey, do you want to try it?”
“Um…do I have to?”
“If you want to carry a weapon, you have to be willing to use it. If we don’t kill them right now, when it’s easy, we’re going to have to fight them when they can get to us. Then, they will be a real danger, and I don’t know if we will be able to get them all in time.”
“Then we should kill them so we’re safe.”
“Do you want to try?”
“Um…I’ll try.”
“You’ll have to put down your shield.”
“No I won’t, dad. Look what Jimmy did. See this notch in the upper rim of the shield? I just put the shield down in the sand, like this, and then I can brace an MP-5 on it.”
“Jimmy, you’re a genius.”
“It’ll work as long as the kid doesn’t try to fire bursts.”
Dillon handed the MP-5 to Mikey, stepping up beside him like he had down a hundred times while training young men on ranges all over the world.
“Okay, buddy. We’ve done this before. When you’re ready, switch the selector to fire. Keep your finger off of the trigger until you’re ready to shoot.” Dillon noticed that Mikey was shaking a bit. “Take a few deep breaths. This isn’t supposed to be easy. Okay?”
“Okay…” Mikey took a few deep breaths then put the stock into the pocket of his shoulder and braced the weapon on the shield.
“Okay, Mikey, pick one out, aim for the center of his chest….not his belly, not his head – his chest. Then, squeeze the trigger nice and gentle.”
The first round was on target, it was hard for it not to be. The inner and outer perimeter fences were only twenty feet apart, and the targets were staring at them and pushing at the fence. The first target dropped. Dillon was impressed with how well the suppressor worked. He saw Jimmy to the right take out four infected in fairly rapid succession. It was good to know that Jimmy was a good shot. Mikey fired again, killing another, then stopped, tears rolling down his cheeks.
“Daddy, I don’t want to do this anymore.”
Dillon took the weapon off of him and let Mikey step behind him as he finished the job with Dillon. In ten seconds the last of them was dead. Then, after checking all around them to make sure that the noise hadn’t attracted more, Dillon reached over and pulled Mikey to him, squeezing him hard.
“C’mon dad, you’re embarrassing me.” was all Mikey said, wiping his eyes on Dillon’s jacket before stepping back.
“You ready, critter?”
“Yeah. And….daddy?”
Dillon stopped and took a look at Mikey. “What?”
“Thanks.” Mikey said, throwing his arms around Dillon.
“Any time, critter. Any time.”
The sun was going down as they circled Wadi Degla, looking for a gently sloped entrance. Dillon knew there were a few, but finding them in the dark was proving less than simple.
They had been driving for six hours. During most of that time, they had been in the desert. They had found the Egyptian made ZIL jeep, originally a Russian design, a mile south of the airbase. It had been mired in sand, and the tracks of a lone soldier marching into the sand showed it had been abandoned. Dillon and Jimmy had let most of the air out of the times and spent a half hour rocking it out of the sand before it was unstuck. Best yet, there were two five-liter cans of gas in the back.
“We’re not going to find it tonight.” offered Jimmy. Jimmy had been walking in front of the ZIL for the past hour, guiding Dillon to make sure they didn’t drive over a cliff.
“You’re right. Let’s park it right here. We can move into the Wadi a bit for the night. If we can find some higher ground, we can climb up there and sleep safely.”
“It’s going to be chilly.”
“That’s why Mikey’s going to be the Oreo filling.”
“Gross, Dad.”
It took some time to even find a good place to climb down into the wadi. The lights of Cairo burning in the distance did little to illuminate their search, but the smoke from it managed to obscure much of the moonlight. In the end, the settled on a small spur that required a couple of five foot climbs to reach. Near the top was a rock overhang that had been used as a camping site in the past by someone. There wasn’t any firewood left, and Dillon guessed the original campers had brought their wood, so they settled in for a night of restless sleep. As expected, Dillon woke up shivering a number of times, and the sleep was fitful. Dillon knew, however, that the only thing worse than bad sleep was no sleep at all.
In the morning, he shared an MRE with Mikey as Jimmy picked through his own. In the light of dawn, as dim as it was because of thick clouds of black smoke, their campsite looked better than Dillon had originally estimated. Further, Dillon could make out a dirt road less than a quarter mile away that would get them, if they took it slowly, to the bottom of the wadi.
After watching Mikey scramble down the spur and then up to the ZIL, Dillon scanned the area. He nudged Jimmy and motioned towards a small group of infected, six to ten, moving about a half mile northwest.
“They aren’t giving us any trouble.” Jimmy said.
“Right, why wait around for them just to waste our ammo.”
“Exactly. Do you need me to guide us down into the wadi?”
“No. It looks easy enough with the sun up. We can try to make it to the east side of Maadi by mid-day.”
“What’s over there?”
“The old USAID compound and the British school are in that area. At that point, we’ll be leaving the desert and we’ll have to navigate around villas, apartment buildings, and a few high rises.”
“Great. That’s just great. Are you sure we’re going the right way? There are less zombies that way.” Jimmy said, motioning behind him with his thumb.
“We wouldn’t last long out there. If the Egyptian Army or Bedouins didn’t get us, we’d die of thirst or hunger. The Bedouins and Egyptian Army don’t like us, and they have all of the resources out there locked up tight. No, our best chance is getting back to the compound. Rick is there, and his plan to get a boat headed downriver to Alexandria is as good as any.”
“Well, I’ve never been much of a leader, Dillon, so I’ll take your word for it. Let’s get going. If we keep chatting about our plans those zombies over there are going to get a lot closer.”
The infected started moving faster after the vehicle started up, but Dillon, Mikey and Jimmy were into the wadi and a mile down the dirt path two minutes later. The wadi had always been one of Hannah’s favorite places to run, but it had always reminded Dillon of that scene from Star Wars where the Jawas stalked R2-D2.
Dillon tensely kept an eye out as Jimmy drove. Occasionally, they spied locals hiding out in the wadi, and Dillon would tell Mikey to get down in the back seat as he kept his weapon ready and pointed in the general direction of the strangers. Dillon noted, not entirely surprised, how quickly the world had divided into “us” and “them.” The only people who seemed to want any contact with them were a couple of desperate teenage kids looking for food and water, and their eyes grew hostile when Dillon told them, in Arabic, that he had nothing to spare. One reached to pick up a rock, and Dillon sited in on him, convincing the kid that throwing rocks was not the way to proceed. The kids shouted some obscenities, and Jimmy hit the pedal to get some distance.
The wadi was approximately eleven miles long and a quarter of a mile wide. A few miles down the road Jimmy crested a hill and stopped abruptly before backing up and out of sight of the half dozen men who had pulled a car into their path.
“I don’t know if they were armed.”