attack continued all around him. A bizarre detail David remembered was that in the midst of all the carnage, the infected men had stopped when they could to tie crude black turbans around their heads.
He saw a sliver of gold next to him, which soon grew into a broad beam of light as the Sun rose. He realized then that the attacks had stopped. But it was far from quiet. All around him, he heard the sounds of wounded men. He stepped out from his cover and found a scene straight out of Hell. Wounded American soldiers littered the base, all bleeding from bites to their bodies. One or two who had presumably tried to fight back the hardest were dead. One of the dead was the Ranger commander. The man had dwarfed any of the other men at the base, but he was now lying on the ground, his neck snapped, his body tossed away like a rag doll.
David leaned against a wall for support when he saw Dan lying on the ground, bleeding from several bites. His old friend was looking at him, pleading for help. But after what he had just seen, David knew there was nothing he could do to help him.
He entered the Comms room, and tried to radio for help. He then realized that their base was hardly the only one to be hit. Bases across Afghanistan had been attacked, and there were reports of mobs of infected people attacking thousands of victims in Kabul and other cities. Wounded men on board US Navy ships off Afghanistan had also gone on the rampage, wounding dozens. He could hear one of the voices on the radio, stammering in fear and confusion.
'Man, it was like being in a zombie movie.'
David turned off the radio, realizing that everyone was too shell-shocked and had problems enough of their own to be able to help him. He did radio in a situation report, asking for medics to come in and care for the wounded men at the base.
That was when he got the one sliver of hope he received that morning. Someone from on board the USS Kearsage, the command ship for the Special Operations forces in Afghanistan, spoke up.
'Soldier, everyone's in a world of pain, and I don't know how much we can do for you but we are sending choppers out to get folks like you to safety in Pakistan. Be there by Sunset.'
David noted down the coordinates. It was a good twenty mile hike. He could easily make it there by Sunset, but not knowing what to expect along the way, he took his time preparing. He stuffed his pack with MREs. Many new soldiers hated the Meals Ready to Eat packs, but David had learnt, if not to like them, then to accept them as inevitable. He took as many extra clips for his M4 assault rifle as he could, and then he set out for his journey to the extraction point.
At the best of times, this part of Afghanistan presented a bleak landscape, but today what made it infinitely worse was the presence of injured and bleeding people littered around the roads. Clearly the American bases had not been the only places to be attacked the previous night, and David shuddered as he wondered what was to come when the Sun set again. The Americans could at least try to quarantine the injured soldiers, but for these villagers, there was nothing to be done.
What was eerie was the total absence of the infected people who had gone on the rampage the previous night. They had seemingly disappeared though more than once David got a feeling that hidden eyes were watching him. Once, while passing an abandoned village, he took out his M4 and was about to go into a hut where he was sure someone was watching him. But then, remembering the events of the previous night, he decided discretion was the better part of valour and continued on his journey.
Even with the weight he has carrying, he reached the extraction zone by four in the evening. He radioed his position and then sat on a nearby perch, his weapon at the ready. At five, a pick-up truck rumbled into view. David's senses went into overdrive. The black turbaned men riding on the back, carrying AK-47s and RPGs could be nothing other than Taliban warriors on patrol. There must have been at least six of them, and David knew that sitting in the open, he would be a sitting duck. Even then, he was not going to go down without a fight. In less than a second, he had his gun's safety off and the M4 was tracking the cab of the truck. He was about to pull the trigger when the truck stopped less than fifty meters away, and he saw that the Taliban were making no move to attack him. One of them got down and looked at him. David put his rifle down when he realized that the Taliban were not looking to attack him. If anything, they looked terrified. The man looking at him simply pointed to the Sun and then they were on their way.
David realized that they were doing exactly what he was planning-to try and get to safety before the Sun set.
About fifteen minutes later, he heard a buzzing sound and looked up to see an OV-22 Osprey come into view. The tilt rotor craft could take off and land vertically like a helicopter, and then fly in level flight like an aircraft. The Osprey landed just a few meters away and David sprinted to it, feeling a huge wave of relief wash over him as he entered it. There was only one soldier inside the craft.
'Sargeant, didn't you get anybody else?'
The man looked at David, a haunted look in his eyes.
'None of the others were clean.'
The full extent of the catastrophe hit David as he asked why he was not being flown to the USS Kearsage. The soldier turned away before answering.
'Sir, ten infected men are on board. Last I heard the skipper was debating whether to kill them before Sunset. They have already authorized cruise missile strikes on bases where only infected men are left.'
David braced himself as the craft took off, wondering if things had indeed gotten so bad that they could be considering killing their own soldiers? The rest of the ride passed in total silence till they reached the Shamsi airbase in southern Pakistan. David had never been here before, but he knew it was the major staging ground for the US drone effort over Afghanistan. He could see soldiers milling around, as other choppers and Ospreys landed, bringing in evacuees like him. The Sun was now about to set, and he saw that many of the men and women around him looked scared. He wondered if he looked any different.
Shamsi had once been a private airbase where rich Arab sheiks used to come for their falconry. Over the last few years, it had been transformed into a state of the art facility from which hundreds of Predator strikes had been launched. Officially, the base did not exist. David was still standing near the flight line when he heard a sudden silence descend upon the base. He looked up to see what everyone else was seeing.
The Sun had just begun to set.
A soldier came up next to him, talking to nobody in particular.
'They say the base is clean, but who knows what's out there?'
Another soldier spoke up.
'We've got five Ospreys with Gatling guns and fixed base defences that could stop a battalion. I don't think we need to worry.'
Having been through what he had in the last two days, David was not so sure about that. How did you keep out attackers you could not kill?
Nothing seemed to happen for some time, but most of the soldiers were so much on edge that they refused to take their packs off. Most wandered about, carrying loaded weapons, waiting for what would be coming at them over their walls.
When the attack began, it was as unexpected as it was vicious. David, like everyone else, had expected hordes of zombie like creatures trying to come in on foot. Instead, a huge truck came rolling towards the base's main gate, being pushed by a horde behind it. The machine gun fire bounced off it, and it stopped just short of the gate when three anti-tank missiles hit it. As the truck exploded, David could hear no cheering. Everyone inside had just learnt a terrifying lesson-the infected were not just mindless hordes, they were learning, and adapting, even trying crude tactics. And it had just been two days since it had begun.
A commotion at the rear of the base had soldiers scrambling there. He heard someone screaming.
'There's got to be at least a thousand of them coming!'
David scrambled up a watch tower to get a better look, unslinging his rifle, and he saw a chilling sight. As far as the eye could see, there were infected men and women trying to enter the base. The soldiers were unloading bullets into them as fast as they could, but they would get hit, fall and then get back up. Several of them got tangled in the barbed wire fence, but the others climbed over them. David took aim, seeing a now familiar black- turbaned head, with a yellowed face below. He squeezed one round, seeing one attacker fall. To his surprise, this one did not get back up. Did head shots kill them? Did all those zombie movies actually get that one right? He shook his head sadly as a minute later, the man, if that was what the creature could be considered anymore, got up and rejoined his friends in storming the base. Head shots didn't kill, but it did put them down for some time. David
