Free The Flood by Michael Stephen Fuchs Page B

health of everyone else…
    He shook his head to refocus it – no time for damned ironic reflections. The important point was that he definitely knew how to get there, he figured he could manage to get in, and he knew the layout of the building. So that was good.
    Now he checked that the Benelli was fully loaded, with a shell racked in the chamber.
    He took a last few deep breaths.
    And if I can’t make it to Biopreparat, he thought, always preferring to have a contingency plan, then I haul ass to Spassky Tower . That was actually closer, right on Red Square itself, if also scarier. Because it had been the home of the FSB, and before that its predecessor the KBG. Aliyev had taken occasional meetings there to di—
    Something slammed into the helicopter behind him, shaking the whole airframe.
    Shit! He was definitely out of time.

    At least the impact had been on the opposite side as the cargo door. Beyond that door was certain death. But also his only prayer of survival.
    No more time, not even for deep breaths.
    He got one strap of the bug-out bag over his shoulder, and the handle of the coldbox through the crook of the same arm – and gripped the Benelli’s pistol grip with the bloodless fingers of the other. With his left hand, he grasped the latch and hauled the cargo door open.
    Beyond it was living death, the night having come alive – but dead, all dead, deader than death itself – and all of it collapsing on this exact point in space and time. And in that instant Oleg Aliyev met his first runners, a pair of them, the front-runners of the whole undead Red Army, tear-assing flat out and less than twenty feet away from him as he got the door open. And as Aliyev came into view, they actually accelerated – mouths open, hands reaching out, as if they were trying to break the finish-line tape and set a new world undead land-speed record.
    And Aliyev was the gold medal in the scenario.
    He tumbled straight back into the cabin as he fired the shotgun, long white trails of sparks spilling out the barrel, his limbs tangling up with his other crap. He was trying to crab-crawl back as he discharged the Benelli, and both the coldbox and the bug-out bag fell off his left arm as he shot and flailed for dear life.
    Both of the runners went down in a pile beneath the open door.
    Behind them were dozens or hundreds more – only seconds away. And, like, single digits of seconds away.
    Still on his back, legs dangling out the open hatch, Aliyev took stock, casting around frantically. The bug-out bag was lying outside the helo, on the ground at his feet. But the coldbox… he twisted his head on his neck, and saw that he’d managed to fling it back inside, hard, and it had skittered the entire length of the helo cabin. Now it lay on its side in the far corner in the dark.
    His head snapped forward again – and he could see the entire ring of certain death closing on him, the shrinking pinhole of his escape. And, thoughts moving a million miles an hour, Aliyev somehow knew with absolute certainty that if he climbed back inside for that coldbox, he was going to be trapped in there with it – forever. He’d never get out of this crash site. He’d die right alongside his pathogen and his vaccine.
    Whereas the bug-out bag at his feet might keep him alive. The contents of the coldbox might keep humanity alive – but not if he died there buried with it.
    He hopped to the ground, grabbed the bag, hauled the door closed behind him… and he started running and shooting as fast as he knew how – and as if any prayer he had of survival depended completely on him doing both perfectly.
    Which it absolutely did.
    * * *
    I sealed up the helo , Aliyev told himself. It’ll be safe there. Eventually, his non-existent God willing, and if by some miracle he himself survived, eventually the dead would clear out – and he could go back and get the coldbox.
    And if not… well, maybe it was just never meant to be.
    As soon as he shot and shoved