I sat there in silence for a few seconds. The way he put it made sense. They had Prit by the balls; he had to accept. Just the thought of turning my back on my only friend made my stomach clench. Plus, if I didn’t accept the assignment, I had no idea how the hell I was going to survive. I’d asked around and they sure didn’t need any more lawyers.
I looked over at Prit. What choice do we have? his eyes said.
“At least we’re in this together, right?” he asked, resting a hand on my shoulder.
“Of course, Prit, don’t worry,” I replied, hiding my distress, my mind racing at top speed. Back into the fucking shit.
“Great, gentlemen!” Viena clapped his hands. He quickly signed some forms and set them in front of us to sign. “After you leave here, they’ll take you to your group’s headquarters. If you have arrangements to make at home, do it right away.” He peered over his glasses. “You head to the Peninsula tomorrow. I don’t have to tell you what you’ll find there.”
20
That morning was unusually cold for the Canary Islands. You could still see Venus twinkling in the sky. Our group rubbed our hands and stamped our feet on the concrete floor of the Reina Sofia Airport to fight off the bitter cold.
After our meeting with Luis Viena, we only had time to rush home, grab a few personal items and say good-bye to Lucia. The worst part was telling Lucia that we’d been “drafted” and that Prit and I had to return to the Peninsula as part of a support team. In those few hours, my darling girl went through several stages of grief: anger, indignation, tears, anger. She finally accepted the situation with resignation. But, this morning, when she said good-bye, she was distant and cold. I didn’t blame her.
She actually didn’t hold me responsible for the situation, but there was a wall between us. I didn’t understand until Prit explained to me what even a blind man could see. Lucia had experienced a terrible trauma, losing all her loved ones in a very short time. Prit, Sister Cecilia, and I were all the family she had. Now, the nun was fighting for her life and we were leaving on a very risky journey. Lucia was afraid it’d be a repeat of those terrible times in Vigo. I was so thickheaded, I thought she was mad at me. What a damn fool I was! I wanted to hold her in my arms and tell her not to worry, nothing in the world could stop me from coming home, everything would be okay, but I didn’t do that when I had the chance.
The past few hours hadn’t been easy for us, either. We joined our team at the military base at Tenerife North Airport for training on the weapons we’d use on our mission.
Fifteen minutes earlier, an officer decked out in full dress uniform drove us to an empty hangar at one end of the airport. He climbed onto the hood of a URO and announced our mission. As the words came out of his mouth, I was sure I was having a horrible flashback. It had to be a cruel joke. But it was real. And fucked up. They really were sending us back to the Peninsula. To Madrid, one of the most dangerous places in Europe.
Madrid wasn’t a quiet, abandoned corner of the world. Nearly six million people had lived in the city and its suburbs before the Apocalypse. Only about fifteen thousand of the refugees on the islands were from there, so that meant Madrid would be teeming with millions of Undead, just waiting for us.
“Our objective is Safe Haven Three, one of the city’s five refuges.” The officer shouted. “Said Safe Haven withstood the Undeads’ assaults for only four days. We believe more than three quarters of a million people lost their lives there.” He cast his eyes over the group as that chilling figure sunk in.
“But you aren’t going there to tour the battlefield! The largest building inside that Safe Haven was La Paz Hospital, which housed offices, stores, cafeterias, and dormitories. Next door to it was the largest pharmaceutical warehouse in Madrid. It supplied drugs to other Safe Havens by air.” He paused. “Unfortunately, the tide of Undead thwarted that plan.”
I looked at Prit, who was as absorbed as I was in the officer’s explanations. If the reports were true, tons of drugs had been seized from the warehouses of Bayer, Pfizer, and other manufacturers nearby during the last chaotic days and must still be there. Those drugs were as important as fuel or weapons. Maybe more important. Our health care system was already shaky due to a lack of medical staff. Without those drugs, it would revert back to the eighteenth century. The situation in Tenerife’s hospitals was grim. They needed antibiotics, insulin, serums, opiates, painkillers, sedatives—the list went on and on. Supplies were running low and production wasn’t keeping up with demand. On top of that, some medicines were impossible to produce, due to the lack of materials and know-how. We had no choice. We had to go there.
The hospitals on the other islands were either infested with Undead or had already been looted by teams like ours. To make matters worse, casualties on those trips had been very high. So they’d decided to try for the jackpot—Madrid.
Before the communication systems failed, Spain and France had shared a spy satellite, Helios II. Its central control was in France, but there was a substation on the Peninsula.
After several attempts, the few surviving computer programmers finally created a replica of that substation in Tenerife. The Helios II’s cameras were now our eyes on southern Europe. The fact that they hadn’t had any problems taking control of the satellite convinced me that either France wasn’t interested or there was no one left at the helm.
Aerial images of Madrid showed that the city was intact for the most part, except for some neighborhoods that had burned to the ground. The warehouse seemed to still be standing, but who knew what we’d find when we got there?
In the half dark before the sun was completely up, we took off in an Airbus A-320 headed for the Peninsula. Nearly every seat had been removed, transforming that bird into a gigantic cargo ship. Our destination was Cuatro Vientos Airport, the former military airfield, about ten miles from the capital. Months before, someone had noticed via satellite that the fence around the airfield was intact; additionally, there seemed to be no movement on the site. After weeks of observation, they concluded that the facilities were empty and probably safe. That word probably bothered me the most.
The only way to access the complex was through the main building. The last radio communication, received as the Safe Haven was falling, reported that the airfield was locked up tight. If that report was reliable, the complex was safe and empty.
Our first objective was to secure the airport. To accomplish that, we were accompanied by a platoon that comprised a few surviving Spanish legionnaires, battle-hardened commandos who’d be armed to the teeth. Once the area was secured, they would station themselves around the perimeter and seal off the area. Then it would be our turn. That’s when things would get really rough.
21
“Fuck!” Lucia grabbed the pan of milk off the stove so it wouldn’t boil over, spilling half the contents on the burner in her rush. The acrid smell of scorched milk instantly filled the room.
Tears welled up in her eyes. She felt like such a fool! She’d only looked away for a moment. She knew perfectly well how strictly milk was rationed—one liter per person every two weeks. But she got distracted and spilled almost half a liter. How could she have been so stupid? Where the hell was she going to get more?