Miasma (The Redivivus Trilogy Book 3) Page 5

  “I’ll be damned. It’s him.”

  “Puppet Master, come in,” Bayani called into the radio.

  He continued scanning the horizon as he waited for a response. It was clear that a significant battle had occurred, as every inch of open space was littered with rotting corpses and the wreckage of war. He saw the Bearcat, but the people were nowhere to be seen. In fact, he saw no movement of any kind from his vantage point. The world had gone eerily quiet since the strange music had stopped. With no competition, the crackle of the radio seemed to echo loudly across the land.

  “Bayani, what’s the situation?”

  “I followed the armored truck to the CDC. It looks like that’s their base of operations,” Bayani replied.

  “Base of operations? I thought you said they weren’t military. Are they law enforcement?” the Puppet Master asked.

  “I’m not sure who they are. Maybe they’re just a ragtag group of survivors. I’ve seen a total of six people now, two wearing military BDUs. I believe there may be others inside,” Bayani said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I think someone on the inside opened the gate for them,” Bayani said flatly. “And there’s something else: one of the people dressed in BDUs is the man who shot you in the shoulder.”

  The radio went silent, and Bayani could almost feel the rage coursing through the man on the other end. He knew of his leader’s general contempt for the U.S. military, and he knew of his specific hatred of Sergeant Hector Garza. He’d seen the identification card the Puppet Master carried in his pocket, and he’d heard him tell the story behind it on more than one occasion. Whenever his leader spoke of it, he absently rubbed the place on his shoulder where Sergeant Garza had shot him during their scuffle. After that fight, he’d found the ID card and vowed to get his revenge.

  It seemed like an eternity before a response came over the radio. When it did, the voice was laced with an anger that was nearly palpable.

  “Garza,” the voice hissed.

  Hearing the venom in the man’s voice, Bayani’s mind flashed back to his first encounter with the Puppet Master.

  6

  Bayani Lumaban was a natural warrior. The son of a poor farmer, his rural upbringing in a small Filipino village had been filled with hard work. As soon as he could walk, he tended the fields with his father. While he enjoyed the time spent with his father, he always longed for something more. He dreamt of following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Dakila.

  Dakila Lumaban was a decorated war hero and a feared Escrimador who’d lived a warrior’s life out of necessity. From a young age, he’d trained in the ancient Filipino martial art of Escrima, which he employed as a means of survival on the dangerous streets of Manila. A highly effective and lethal combination of footwork, empty hand, and weapon-based combat, Escrima had been a way of life for many Filipinos of his grandfather’s generation. When the time came, he exercised his skills defending his homeland against the Japanese invaders at the start of the Pacific theater during World War II. Just as he had from many duels with other Escrimadors, he emerged from that conflict unscathed.

  Bayani’s father didn’t hold the Filipino martial arts in the same regard as his father, and he’d chosen not to learn the ways of his ancestors. Similarly, he’d forbidden Bayani from such pursuits. As such, Bayani practiced in secrecy in much the same way as his grandfather had been forced to do during the time when the Philippines was under oppressive foreign rule. He absorbed everything Dakila could teach him, and still longed for more. When he turned eighteen, he informed his father of his decision to enlist in the Philippine Marine Corps, where he was assigned to the Force Reconnaissance Battalion. There, he received extensive training in all manner of combat, including Pekiti-Tirsia Kali for close-quarters fighting. Having learned the ways of the Escrimador from his grandfather, Bayani had such a leg up on the other soldiers that he quickly became known as the deadliest fighter in the whole battalion, if not the entire Marine Corps. He was given the position of Chief Instructor for close quarters combat training, and that role led to his being in the United States at the start of the LNV outbreak.

  Bayani had been midway through a two-week training course in advanced hand-to-hand, close quarters combat for Delta Force operators and elements of the Army Ranger battalion when the outbreak found its way to Fort Benning. As in most heavily populated areas, it didn’t take long for LNV to sweep through the large population living on the base. Like a well-orchestrated ambush, the virus took Fort Benning completely by surprise. The base fell before it ever knew it was under attack.

  Realizing that something was terribly wrong, Bayani and several of the soldiers he’d been training banded together in the hope of surviving the hellish ordeal. Despite their efforts to weather the brutal storm, many of them fell victim to the plague, often due to their reluctance to turn their weapons on their own even when their infected brothers didn’t share the same hesitation.

  When the base’s command structure fell, the soldiers secured a nearby barracks, which they set up as their own base of operations. Night after night, they defended the building against the infected swarm continually trying to overtake them. When they were able, the soldiers scoured the surrounding area for supplies and survivors. All in all, they found only fourteen additional people. Of the twenty-six soldiers that originally took up position in the barracks, more than half succumbed to the plague during the first week of their occupation. Those that joined the group generally brought far less to the table than the soldiers lost during the missions to rescue them. Hope, like their numbers, steadily dwindled.

  Late one night, while Bayani was on watch, the reality of the situation finally began to sink in. The soldiers he was with were among the most elite warriors in the United States military. If they weren’t capable of surviving the plague, Bayani didn’t know who was. The psychological toll of being surrounded by so much death and being so far away from everyone and everything with which he was familiar slowly chipped away at his sanity. Soon, he accepted that he was going die in this foreign land more than eight thousand miles away from his family.

  Bayani wondered if the infection had reached his village, but he quickly shook the thought from his mind. He had no idea if the outbreak was that widespread, and the thought of his elderly mother in the midst of such horrors was too much for him to bear. The more pragmatic part of his brain told him that if the pandemic had made it to the shores of the Philippines, she was already dead. The dark nights—filled with the incessant moans of the infected—were breeding grounds for such morose thoughts. He knew that, like the infected relentlessly banging on the barracks’s doors, it was inevitable that they would eventually find their way inside. Although he didn’t recognize it as such at the time, the first rifts in his sanity were already taking hold. Like spiderweb cracks in a glass pane, it was only a matter of time before they grew and shattered the whole thing.

  In the ensuing days, Bayani noticed similar transformations in the soldiers around him. Cut off from friends and family, low on food and supplies, and surrounded by the plague’s horrors, these strong and honorable warriors began to crumble one by one. Having seen so many of their brothers die, each felt as though he would be the next to fall victim. The combined stress of the situation made psychological casualties out of many of those not directly taken by the plague. Infighting became rampant, and the little solidarity that remained soon disintegrated. A dispute over whether they should hold their position or abandon the base proved to be the last straw.

  The argument ended when the soldier in favor of leaving executed the commanding officer right before Bayani’s eyes. Bayani knew then that the decent, honorable world he’d known was gone forever. As the blood spray from the exit wound faded away, it took with it everything he had known. All that remained was a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself mentality that Bayani found difficult to reconcile.

  A far less equitable leadership structure quickly came into existence. Corporal I
nman, the soldier who had gunned down the commanding officer, sat at the top along with a half dozen of his closest friends. That meant everyone else was at the bottom. Inman respected Bayani’s fighting skills and offered him a position at the top of his outfit. When Bayani refused, Corporal Inman was none too pleased.

  The day before the soldiers planned to abandon the base, Bayani walked in on one of the group’s upper echelon raping a female civilian they’d rescued the week before. Enraged, he pulled the soldier off her and broke the man’s nose, jaw, and arm in the ensuing fight. In response, Corporal Inman had tried to face him down, but Bayani’s eyes had remained steadfast. Inman’s eyes, on the other hand, had been filled with fear.

  “Shit. I ain’t got time to kick your ass,” he’d said in a lame attempt to back down without appearing overly weak in front of his men. To Bayani, that was all he was.

  As the soldiers prepared to leave the following morning, the infected finally breached the barracks’s front door. Bayani was keeping watch over the perimeter on the unoccupied side of the building at the time. Seeing an opportunity to escape and rid himself of Bayani at the same time, Inman barricaded the door leading to his side of the barracks. While this shunted the infected away from the others in the building, Bayani knew Inman’s intentions were far more self-serving. From across the sea of infected, Bayani locked eyes with Inman as he pulled the doors shut. The Corporal’s uncertain smile seemed incongruous with the absolute terror Bayani saw in his eyes.

  For his part, Bayani remained stoic despite being the one in real danger. The infected horde converged on him in seconds, backing him into a corner. For a moment, he considered letting them take him. He didn’t want to be a part of this new world any longer. With everything he cared about a continent away and little hope of ever getting back there, he could think of no reason to go on living…until he thought of Corporal Inman. The rage that flooded his body at the thought of the cowardly soldier infused him with the will to live at least long enough to exact revenge.

  As though a switch were flipped, Bayani morphed into a blur of motion, flowing through the infected mass like a river of death. Facilitated by his Kali training, each movement blended seamlessly with the next with remarkable grace. In Kali, every strike was meant to be a deathblow, and adapting those attacks to the infected required only the slightest adjustments. Nearly every swing of the blade resulted in another ghoul falling lifelessly to the ground. He was a one-man death show—a terrifying sight to behold. Had anyone been around to witness the spectacle, the most unnerving aspect would have been the way his eyes remained focused on the barricaded door the entire time. The infected monsters coming at him from every direction were merely obstacles standing between him and his real goal: Corporal Inman.

  Less than two minutes after being surrounded by the infected, Bayani Lumaban stood as the sole witness to the horrors that had taken place. If he’d been in possession of any part of his soul at the time, he left it in the barracks among the tangle of corpses littering the floor. When he emerged from the building, he looked no less horrific than the monsters he’d just slaughtered. Most of the infected outside had either been killed by Inman and his men or pursued them as they fled the base. Those that remained paid him little interest, likely regarding him as one on their own.

  Exhausted, Bayani stood in the warm Georgia sun, his blood-soaked ginunting hanging at his side. The thick coat of gore caked on his skin made him feel like an unwelcomed trespasser in someone else’s body. In the few places where his skin was exposed, the breeze tickled like an angel’s feathers as it washed over him. A moment later, the blade slipped from his grip and he collapsed to the ground.

  When Bayani awoke, he was surprised by how much the sun’s position had changed. He recalled its warmth as it’d shone on his face when he’d exited the building. It was much cooler now, and the sun’s rays were no longer directly upon him. Although he didn’t know how long he’d been out, he knew it had been many hours. The dried shell of blood and gore cracked when he moved, and he felt like an insect breaking out of its cocoon. Everything about the world seemed different to Bayani Lumaban when he climbed to his feet.

  Corporal Inman had left the barracks with just over a dozen people accompanying him. Whether due to a lack of skill or sheer ignorance, the group had made little attempt to cover their tracks. Their path couldn’t have been more obvious had they left a trail of breadcrumbs. Bayani’s eyes were like icy orbs as he stared in the direction the soldiers had travelled. As if on autopilot, he set out after the group. While he was uncertain of a great many things, one thing he knew without a doubt was that Corporal Inman wouldn’t live to see another sunrise.

  Bayani walked for hours, refusing to rest despite his body’s protests. The sun had long since settled below the horizon, and he moved using only the moonlight to guide his way. Even in the dark, the soldiers’ trail wasn’t difficult to follow. Like wallowing hogs, they’d left a huge mark on the land everywhere they’d stopped. He finally caught up with them just before dawn.

  A short distance ahead, Bayani saw movement in the underbrush. His first thought was that the commotion was due to actual wild hogs rooting, as the rustling sound was punctuated by porcine snorting noises. The ground appeared black and glistened in the pale moonlight, making it appear as though an oil derrick had burst. It wasn’t until a head popped up out of the undergrowth that he realized what he was seeing. He inched closer and saw a group of infected crouched over the mangled remains of something nearly unrecognizable. The combat boot poking out of the undergrowth was all that indicated the ruined mess had likely been one of Inman’s soldiers. A vile lot, the three infected barely regarded him as he approached, ginunting in hand. At the last second, the closest of the three turned its head in Bayani’s direction. The sinews dangling grotesquely from its gnashing maw made it appear as though the thing had managed to bite off Medusa’s head and was struggling to choke it down. Cold and calculating, Bayani’s eyes held far more menace than the blighted, vacant gaze of the infected staring back at him. Three vicious blows later, all was still once again.

  In a distant clearing, Bayani could just make out the outline of a large white object. The predawn world was peaceful and quiet. Even the sounds of animals going about their morning activities were suspiciously absent. When he was satisfied no one was lying in wait, he crept toward the structure. As he drew closer, he realized it was one of the many trailers scattered across the area. The smell of wood smoke hung in the air, and gray wisps wafted up from a withering campfire on the other side of the mobile home. He drew his sidearm and pied the corner around the far side of the trailer. The carnage he discovered stopped him in his tracks. Four soldiers lay dead around the smoldering fire, each with a tidy bullet hole in his head. Several others appeared to have taken up firing positions to the north of the makeshift camp. They, too, were all dead. Bayani gritted his teeth when he realized that Inman was not one of the dead soldiers. A thump from somewhere behind him interrupted his fuming.

  Slipping behind cover, Bayani turned and crouched. Once again, a dull thump came from the direction of the trailer. The window shades were drawn, preventing him from seeing inside the structure. If he couldn’t see in, then whoever was inside probably couldn’t see out. He hoped this were true as he moved to the door. With a quick jerk, he yanked the door open as he readied himself for whoever was inside. Despite his mental preparation, the rancid thing that barreled through the door took him by surprise. Although it had clearly been female, he couldn’t tell if it had been one of the civilians that had been at Fort Benning. The redolence that poured out on the heels of the infected woman made him gag.

  Transitioning to his ginunting, Bayani executed a brisk upward slash that severed the thing’s spinal cord instantly. It crumpled to the ground at his feet. The thumping sound inside the trailer continued with renewed vigor. His pulse quickened and his eyes narrowed as he stepped inside the darkened mobile home. The stench, like rancid meat, was far more in
tense within the living space, and he choked back the bile rising in his throat.

  When his eyes adjusted, Bayani advanced down the short, narrow hall. The thumping sound steadily intensified until it was nearly keeping time with his hammering heart. At the end of the hall was a closed door that rattled with each dull thud. Taking a deep breath in through his mouth, he planted a solid front kick in the center of the door. It burst inward, slamming into the thing that had been behind it. The monstrosity staggered back, colliding with the blinds and tearing them off the wall. Pale sunlight filtered in through the grimy window, as Bayani’s gaze came to rest on what he had been looking for. Before him, struggling to stand amidst the tangle of blinds, was Corporal Inman.

  The black spider web lines crisscrossing Inman’s frosted eyes left no question that he was infected, while the patch of dark blood centered over the crotch of his loosely fastened pants left no doubt that he deserved whatever had happened to him. With a look of disgust on his face, Bayani watched with morbid fascination as the infected Inman writhed and snarled like a wounded animal. When he couldn’t stomach the atrocious smell any longer, he put the Corporal down with a single thrust of his blade.

  Bayani stepped out of the noisome trailer and was greeted by the fresh Georgia morning air. Recalling that someone had ended the lives of Inman’s men with deadly precision, he didn’t revel in the breeze for long. Dropping off the trailer’s stoop, he took cover behind a thick oak tree. He assessed the situation as he surveyed the scene. Although he’d heard no shots, he knew that the soldiers hadn’t been dead for long given that their blood had just begun to clot. Maybe the shooter used a suppressor? Taking into account the positions of the bodies and the orientation of the bullet wounds, he surmised that the shooter had likely fired from an elevated position to the north. Interestingly, he also noted that no civilians were among the dead despite the fact that there had been at least five with the group that left Fort Benning. Was the shooter only targeting the military personnel? If so, why?