Apache Dawn, - [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

a rumble than a chortle, slapping the short man on the back of the head.

“I know where you sleep, bitch,” said Zuka with a scowl. His face split into a grin a half second later as his comrades laughed.

Captain Alston squatted on the wooden floor of the cabin and shrugged out of his pack and gear. His rifle leaned against the wall within easy reach to the left of the door. He eased back against the wall and stretched his long legs with a sigh.

“I—have made—fire!” called out Garza from the woodstove, hands raised in self-praise. Chad saw the warm glow of the fire from inside the open door.

“Cook me up a steak and I’ll be impressed,” muttered Deuce.

“Won’t be long now, we’ll get this place nice and cozy,” Garza said as he looked around the meager cabin. “Not much here, though. We got plenty of wood for the stove, but I got nothin’ else, Cap.”

“All right then, guys, we need some chow. Think you can whip up something, Donovan?”

“Do bears shit in the woods, sir?” Deuce grumbled from the stove. The big Ranger was already laying out packets of what Chad assumed to be ingredients on the floor along with a few metal cups and pans.

“Great. I just got over the runs a few days ago,” muttered Zuka to stout laughter. “Go easy on the axle-grease this time, okay, Deuce?”

“That was chili…” muttered the big Ranger, to a fresh round of chuckles.

Chad shivered and put his own pack on the floor, then leaned against the wall and dusted the snow off his ghillie suit. He leaned his lever-action rifle against the wall like the captain had done. He noticed the snow from his gear already melting on the floor.

Captain Alston grinned. “So,” he said, bringing his knees up to rest his arms on them. “You mind telling me why the hell we were sent out here in the middle of this godforsaken storm to drag your ass out?”

Chad shook his head, brushing snow out of his beard. “I have no idea, man. I want to know the same thing.”

“That’s some bullshit, right there,” said Deuce, shaking his head and stirring a pot of steaming coffee on the stove. He tossed a package in brown wrapping to Zuka. Chad watched the short Ranger whip out a long, gleaming knife from somewhere and slice open the package with practiced ease. In a flash, the knife disappeared again.

“You honestly have no idea?” asked Captain Alston. He frowned. “I suppose you have no idea why a platoon North Korean soldiers were hunting you, either?”

Chad shook his head. “No clue. How the hell did they get in here in the first place? The National Guard is out there blocking all the roads…”

Captain Alston nodded sadly. “They probably cut their way through the Guards, no problem. I got a look at their uniforms. They weren’t just grunts—I recognized the emblems. A recon outfit with the North Korean Special Forces. They call themselves sniper brigades.” He laughed. “Got a lot of fancy names for themselves, but, at the end of the day, they’re still just NKors—a bunch of fanatics. Crazy sonsabitches buy into the ‘North Korea vs the world’ propaganda hook, line, and sinker.”

Chad sat up. “Special Forces?” He looked at the Rangers. “But you guys took them out, and there’s only, what—seven of you?”

The Rangers laughed long and loud. “That’s ‘cause we’re fucking hardcore, baby,” said Deuce, flexing his massive arms.

“Hooah!” said Garza.

Zuka sat down next to Chad and offered him some sort of food from the brown package he had been working on. Chad didn’t like the taste, but it was warm and it was food.

“Their expertise is airborne insertions and behind-the-lines kind of stuff. Very high tech,” said the captain, taking a similar food pack from Deuce. He grimaced but dug in just the same. “Our expertise is taking assholes like them to the cleaners.”

“Hooah!” called out the others in a throaty roar.

“SpecOps…” said Deuce thoughtfully after the laughter died down. “That explains the beater-scope.” He shook his head. “I hate those things.” He examined the pot of coffee. “Hey, why the hell do you have one, anyway?” he asked, pointing his canteen at Chad.

Chad put a hand on the heartbeat monitor. He unhooked from his belt and held it up. “This thing? It’s for my job.” He looked around at the blank, expectant faces. “I work for the CDC. I’m a field retrieval specialist. I gather samples.”

“Samples?” asked Garza. He smiled. “Of what, snow?”

“No…Plague.”

All smiles vanished from the Rangers. Deuce paused, a steaming cup on the way to his mouth. “Plague?”

“Bubonic plague, to be exact,” said Chad matter-of-factly. “Didn’t you guys know this whole park is under quarantine?”

“Jesu Christo!” said Garza as he crossed himself, backing away from Chad. “Ain’t that the Black Death?”

“Yes,” said Chad nonchalantly, unzipping his ghillie suit as the woodstove began to warm the small one-room cabin to a comfortable level. “My job is to track and kill animals infected with the plague, then harvest samples—”

“Samples?” asked Deuce. He took a sip from his cup and frowned. He passed it to the captain. “It don’t taste very good, but it won’t kill you.”

“Yeah,” said Chad, shrugging out of his ghillie suit. After a cursory check that his sweatshirt and undergarments weren’t too thoroughly soaked, he carefully stretched out the ghillie suit to dry on a couple of rough-hewn pegs sunk into the wall as he talked. “I take blood, bone, and tissue samples from harvested animals and check them under the microscope back at my cabin. Then I send the results back to HQ. While I’m out in the bush, I also take down as many infected animals as I can to try and limit the spread of the disease.”

“Aren’t you worried about catching it?” asked Garza. He took a cup of the coffee from Deuce with a nod of thanks.

“No,” said Chad. His expression went blank. Every single time someone asked that innocent question, he relived that cold day years ago when he buried Mom. “I don’t have to worry about that.”

“Oh, yeah, they got a vaccine, huh?” asked Zuka, warming his hands by the woodstove.

“No,” said Chad. “I’m immune.”

“Uh, say again?” asked the captain.

“Immune. As in I can’t get sick from it. Or from anything, for that matter,” Chad said. He shrugged. “Been that way most of my life. There’s something in my genes that keeps me from getting sick. No colds, no flu, no disease, no nothing. At least, nothing they’ve tested me for.”

“They?” asked the captain.

“The CDC, the government, CIA, hell even NASA, I think.”

“Well,” sighed Captain Alston after a long sip from the mug. “That explains a lot.”

“So, like you can never get sick…at all?” asked Garza.

“Not once in my entire life…at least that I can remember.”

As the Rangers mulled that thought over in silence, Chad scratched his head and ruffled his damp, thick hair. What he wouldn’t give for a nice hot soak right about now. “Would someone mind explaining why those Special Forces guys were trying to kill me, and why you were trying to get me out of here on a helicopter?” He took an empty metal mug from his pack and handed it to Deuce. “Thanks,” he said when the big Ranger returned with hot coffee.

“You really have no clue?” The captain shook his head. “What a mind job.” He took a bite from his food packet and grimaced. “Okay, listen up. Our orders were to get in here and extract you,” he said, pointing the spork in his hand at Chad. “Then get your ass back over the Rockies to Spokane, Washington. Nobody told us shit about the Black Death in these woods. My CO made no mention of any NKors, either.” He took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “Or why the hell we were supposed to get you in the first place—only that you’re on someone’s list. And that someone is pretty damn high up—if you take my meaning—for us to be re-tasked to dragging you outta here in the middle of a damn blizzard.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Chad.

“Whaddya mean?” asked Garza. “We could be doing a hundred other missions right now in all this chaos. Something big is going down and you must be a part of it…”

“What the hell are you talking about? What’s going down?”

The captain narrowed his eyes. “You got TV up here?”

“No,” said Chad, starting to get worried. “No radio either. I like the quiet.” He looked around. “What’s going on?”

“Cell phone?” asked Deuce.

Chad pulled his out and showed them the screen. “No signal,” he said. “I have a sat phone, but I’ve never needed to use it. It’s for emergencies.”

“Holy shit,” muttered Deuce. He looked at Captain Alston. “He doesn’t know.”

“Know what?” asked Chad through clenched teeth. He could feel the frustration and fear inside him begin to boil over into anger.

“How long have you been up here without contact from the outside world?” asked Captain Alston.

“Guess I’ve been up here about a month or so. What day is it?”

“Saturday the 27th.”

“Yup, I passed through the quarantine checkpoint on the 3rd.” Chad sipped from the forgotten mug in his hands and winced. It was