Praise for the Capital Falling Trilogy, Series 1
A Fantastic Read
“Loved the first book and could hardly wait for the next instalment, I was not disappointed. This book is fantastic, a real page-turner. I could hardly put it down. A must read for all Zombie genre fans. I can’t wait for the next book.”
Well, that was amazing!!
“I’ve never read zombie genre before but this has been absolutely brilliant! I never knew I would cry over zombie literature but I have with this, laughed, cried, every emotion possible, in me from start to finish of this trilogy. The only thing I can say I’m disappointed with is ......... The End! I am now going to sit & gather myself together and just enjoy what I have read. Thank u soooooo much for the incredible journey I’ve been on from your wonderful work! Keep it up and if any future books come then I will be pre-ordering them irrelevant of genre, as it’s become perfectly clear to me I need to open up my options now, well done, you’re a star!”
Excellent again
“Another great read from this up and coming author. Superbly constructed and it had me hooked from page one. In fact, I read it over 2 nights and couldn't put it down until it was finished. Excellent stuff…. bring on the next one”
Fantastic what more can I say!
“Another fantastic book, couldn’t put it down. Gripped from start to finish. Keep up the good work Lance Winkless. I look forward to a whole lot more. Please don’t put the pen down for too long..”
Lance Winkless was born in Sutton Coldfield, England, brought up in Plymouth, Devon and now lives in Staffordshirewith his partner and daughter.
For more information on Lance Winkless
and future writing see his website
www.LanceWinkless.com
By Lance Winkless
CAPITAL FALLING
CAPITAL FALLING 2 – DENIAL
CAPITAL FALLING 3 – RESURGENCE
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This book is a work of fiction, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations, places, incidents
and events are coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 Lance Winkless
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, photocopying, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without the express written permission of the copyright holder.
Published by Lance Winkless
www.LanceWinkless.com
Chapter 1
Silence throbs inside Lieutenant Winters’ head, like an empty cavern. A low buzz of static, the only faint noise his headset generates, starts to fry his brain.
He thought he had wanted the noise to stop. The gunfire and desperate voices from his team that radio waves had been sending from the mission and into his head had seemed endless. Now the silence is enveloping him, the cost of the mission cutting him as sharply as any knife would. Yet he barely knew Andy and Dan—so why is their loss affecting him so hard?
Fatigue is playing its part, for sure. Winters has been involved in plenty of critical missions to understand that adrenaline fades and the body relapses. But even so, he has lost team members before that he knew better than Andy and Dan, and he can’t remember it immediately hitting him this full-on before.
Winters' hands rush up to either side of his head, take hold of the headset and yank it off. He throws the headset across and onto the table in front of him with force. It crashes onto the surface, sliding over the polished top and hitting the computer monitor.
The sound of the storm outside replaces the static in his exposed ears, which feel chilled in the fresh air. The wind is strong, battering the closed roller shutter door, making it rattle in its runners.
Pull yourself together, he thinks to himself, wondering where his usual deeply instilled resilience has gone. He struggles to, however, and can’t seem to motivate himself to even get out of his chair; in fact, he slouches further into it.
Alone in the hangar with only the storm for company, Winters’ eyes start to flicker closed, his eyelids feeling impossibly heavy. Has he underestimated his fatigue? He has been in a constant state of stress in the last two days, hardly slept and not eaten properly. Surely, resting his eyes for a few minutes is only fair and well deserved.
An image of Andy boarding the Lynx for his fateful mission flashes across Winters’ waning mind. The image causes his stomach to burn and he forces his eyes open. How can he sit here feeling sorry for himself when others have made the ultimate sacrifice? Gradually, he feels his resilience start to return, together with his determination.
As he was starting to doze, the rest of the team would have been drawing closer, returning to base. Winters scolds himself for his lapse in concentration and reaches to retrieve the headset. Preparations need to be made for their return and time is short.
“Flight Lieutenant Alders, receiving, over.”
“Receiving, over,” Alders responds almost immediately.
“How is the team, over?”
“Quiet, over.”
“What’s your ETA, over?”
“Approximately nine minutes, over.”
“Good, have you been given your LZ point, over?
“LZ1, over.”
“Okay, follow flight instructions and I’ll meet you in the landing zone.”
“Received, over and out.”
The dejection in Alders’ voice is plain to hear, Winters thinks. He himself, embarrassingly, had nearly forgotten about the loss of Buck. How close the two pilots were, he doesn’t know—but judging by Alders’ voice, they were close enough.
Now he does force himself out of the chair, pushing himself up wearily on the arms of the chair, his energy not completely returned yet. Leaning over to the table and taking the computer mouse in his hand, he clicks onto the Windows icon on the screen and clicks ‘shut down’. Then standing upright, he stretches out his back while he watches as the computer goes through its motions of shutting off.
After gathering his belongings from the tabletop, Winters takes one last look around the dismal hangar to check he hasn’t left anything. He doesn’t look back before he flicks the switch to turn off the hangar’s lights and opens the door into the storm.
Outside, the wind is strong, but not as strong as Winters had assumed it would be. He had underestimated the ferocity of the rain though, which threatens to soak him to the bone, even on his short run over to the black Defender parked nearby. Jumping into the driver’s seat and slamming the door behind him, Winters shakes off his soaked hair whilst attempting to dry his hands on his trousers.
The Defender’s engine roars into life, but before his hand reaches the gear stick, his phone starts to vibrate in the breast pocket of his sand-coloured shirt. Pausing for a second, instinctively knowing who is causing his phone to vibrate, he debates letting the phone ring out. The Defender’s windscreen wipers swipe past his eyes three times before he gives in and reaches for his pocket.
“Report, Lieutenant,” Colonel Reed’s pompous voice demands.
How satisfying would it be to shove his phone down Reed’s throat, Winters puzzles before answering?
“I am leaving the hangar for the landing zone now Colonel; their ETA is about five minutes, Sir.”
“Good, bring the package to me directly, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, Sir.�
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With his phone back in his pocket, Winters reverses away from the hangar, in absolutely no rush to return to it.
On the short drive towards Terminal 4 where the landing zone is situated, Winters is surprised by how much standing water there is. Large puddles dance all around as more raindrops plunge into them, adding to their size. Spray rushes up from the puddles as the wheels of the Defender cuts through the water. The sight and sound of the water cascading up and away calms him somewhat and he drifts into the bigger puddles to increase the ferocity of the spray.
His little game comes to an end too quickly as he nears the cordoned-off area of the landing zone. Strange how a little fun and games affect a person, but the self-administered therapy has helped revitalise him more, and he almost feels back to himself again.
Two soldiers are manning a row of bollards that cuts off the entry into the landing zone, their SA80 rifles held across their bodies. The airport workers in their hi-vis jackets that were manning the opposite entry earlier in the day are now nowhere to be seen. The poor chap Winters had his altercation with—and threatened to run over—probably had something to say about it and so the security was beefed up.
As he approaches the bollards, the two soldiers, who must have pissed somebody off to be given this assignment in this weather, stand their ground in front of the entry. They both look like ghouls in the dark, kitted out in their dark-green military issue ponchos, the only protection they have against the shocking weather.
Winters comes to a steady stop in front of them, not wanting to give them any cause to raise their rifles. Thankfully, once he has halted, one of the soldiers leaves his position and walks around to the driver’s window. Winters really didn’t fancy having to get out of his shelter to address them, and foolishly, he’s left his overcoat in the command tent.
“Flight and mission personnel only beyond this point,” the shivering soldier tells Winters through the half-open driver’s side window.
“I am collecting a mission package that will be landing imminently, let me through, soldier.”
“Flight and mission personnel only beyond this point, turn your vehicle around.”
Winters doesn’t come close to losing his temper this time, as the young drenched soldier is only following orders.
“How long have you been out here, soldier?”
“Nearly two hours.”
“That’s two hours, Sir.”
“Yes Sir, sorry Sir.”
“I am collecting a package for Colonel Reed; move the bollards, soldier.”
As always, the name drop instils the required amount of fear into the young soldier. He immediately straightens his shivering back and then waves to his partner to move the bollards.
“Thank you, soldier, how much longer are you on duty for?”
“Who knows, I think they have probably forgotten we are here, Sir.”
“I’ll see what I can do, terrible night for it.”
“Thank you, Sir, the rain is easing off now, Sir, I think.”
“Can you point me in the direction of LZ1?”
“Over to the left, toward the terminal building, Sir,” the soldier says, turning and pointing in the direction.
“Thank you, soldier, carry on.”
As the car window goes up, the soldier salutes the Lieutenant.
Winters, as he pulls forward towards the open entry, decides that the soldier is indeed correct, and the rain is easing off. The Defender’s wipers now trigger only intermittently, to account for the sparser and smaller raindrops.
The Defender veers to the left as it enters the landing zone, taking a wide berth away from the landing points that are now on the right. Helicopters, mostly Apache Attack are constantly landing and taking off and rain or not, personnel are scattered all around. The majority are there to service the newly landed helicopters, getting them ready for take-off and onto their next mission. The rest of the personnel are either flight crew or soldiers, either disembarking from their mission or embarking ready for take-off.
The helicopter landing area has the landing point numbers painted large and bold onto the tarmac in yellow and encloses them in a large white painted circle. Each zone also has a sign next to it with its number on, making it easier for the ground staff to identify them.
Winters has entered at the end with the bigger numbers; the highest he sees is twenty-nine. Gradually, the numbers decrease as he drives. He takes it slowly, due to the number of people and equipment bustling around.
Eventually, Winters parks up a few meters away from LZ1, and he stays inside the Defender waiting for his team to land. The improving weather means that the rain is now no more than a drizzle and the wind has continued to drop, although the wind is harder to quantify with all the downdrafts taking place in the busy landing zone.
Chapter 2
A strong side-wind hits the Lynx, causing it to shudder and lose altitude before Alders reacts and compensates upfront in his pilot’s seat.
Staring out of the hold window, Alice is eager to see some sign that the flight is nearly over. She knows their return to base must be close now, but it can’t come soon enough for her or the rest of the team she has, no doubt, especially Josh. She is a reluctant passenger on any helicopter, not that she would outwardly show her anxieties—never mind her being squeezed into this overloaded one in a storm, having just seen one helicopter drop from the sky. This isn’t nursing that anxiety at all.
Struggling to try to take her mind off it, she tries to concentrate on the view out of the window, searching for any recognisable landmarks to show they are nearly back at Heathrow. She is on the wrong side of the hold, though, and all she sees is darkness and nondescript roads. She curses her luck that she doesn’t have the same view of the M4 motorway that they will have on the opposite side of the Lynx.
A wave of guilt passes over her, cursing her own luck because she isn’t happy with her view out of the window when Josh is seated next to her. Her head turns in his direction, but he is still slumped in his seat with his head down; God only knows what is going on in his head. Her guilt grows.
Alice tries to think of something to say to him, to try and pick him up, if only a little. She fails though, as she can think of nothing to say that won’t sound totally lame. She hopes that when this godawful flight is over and they land, he might improve.
Josh will have other things to think about, but then she remembers his sister is waiting for him and her father to return.
Feeling helpless, her gaze returns to the window, hoping to see the burning lights of Heathrow come into view.
“Heathrow is just ahead, ETA, three minutes!” Alder shouts from the cockpit.
Alice’s relief on hearing those words is considerable and she isn’t the only one. The low voices which are all she has heard in the noisy hold start to rise and life starts to return. Everyone starts moving to get their kit together, and it reminds her of a commercial flight after landing and the seat belt light pings off. She is relieved to see Josh’s head come up as he starts to check his kit, instinctively checking his pocket to make sure the most important piece of kit is still there, and it hasn’t miraculously vanished—his phone.
Sergeant Dixon seated next to Josh—and who has hardly said two words for the entire trip—reluctantly leans forward and fishes under his seat. Gradually, he drags out the cause of all this grief, the holdall containing the contents of Sir Malcolm’s safe. He leaves the large black, heavily laden holdall on the floor of the Lynx and with disdain, pushes it away with his boot, towards the door and away from him.
“Downey,” he says to the next man closest to him, “you’re in charge of this.”
Downey looks none too pleased with his new assignment of taking charge of the cursed holdall but reluctantly acknowledges his new task.
Finally, Alice briefly sees the large buildings of Heathrow Airport come into view and the bright lights of the surrounding area before her view is cut off again. Alders manoeuvres the helicopter
, turning south as his flight path is directed by air traffic control.
Suddenly, the hold seems to close in on the team and everyone starts to feel slightly claustrophobic as they know their journey is coming to an end. Some of them get out of their seats with nowhere to go. They all get fidgety, eager to leave the cramped space behind.
Parked up beside LZ1, Winters is also getting fidgety as he anticipates the imminent landing of his team back at base. He can see that the landing is imminent because a squad of armed soldiers has moved into position, encircling LZ1. He was expecting a welcoming party to be in place for the landing but admits to himself, he didn’t expect it to look so menacing.
Measures have to be taken to prevent the virus from spreading onto this base at all costs. A huge gamble has been taken at Heathrow. The military has invested an inordinate amount of manpower and hardware here. Should Heathrow fall, it is difficult to see how London could be saved and should London fall, surely it would take a miracle to stop the whole country from following.
Winters has played his part in formulating the plans and measures to protect Heathrow. They included these greeting parties, but times have moved on since those actions were implemented. New, nervous personnel have arrived on base. Personnel who have seen Zombies on their TVs and smartphones and have no intention of joining those ranks. The whole atmosphere on base has changed, suspicion and aggression becoming the norm and a shoot first, ask questions later attitude is coming to the fore.
There is one positive and hugely important development that Winters has seen in a briefing. As if by chance, a miraculous new easy method of testing people to see if they are infected has been discovered. An eye doctor from John Radcliffe University Hospital Oxford discovered he could establish if somebody was infected by scanning their eyes. The algorithm he used has now been adapted and written into an App—and now, any phone with a camera above 16 megapixels can be used to do the eye scan.
Capital Falling (Book 3): Resurgence Page 1