Arisen, Book Three - Three Parts Dead

by Glynn James

  But now it was looking increasingly hopeless, and unlikely that they would succeed in their mission. Best guess was that everything that could fly had been flown out of here right before the fall. Where to was a whole other vexing question…

  But Fick’s Marines had found something else in the shut-up hangars which they had hoped would contain flyable aircraft.

  Not planes, but guns. Thousands and thousands of square feet packed and racked with weapons and ammunition.

  The Stash

  Fick and Wesley stood in the entrance to the warehouse, each looking as dumbfounded as the other.

  “Shit, this is some serious hardware,” said Fick, walking over to the nearest pallet, which at a glance appeared to be packed up with unblemished assault rifles, still in sawdust. Fick lifted one of the boxes and turned it over.

  “Rifles?” asked Wesley.

  “Not just. XM29 Prototype. Dual 20mm smart grenade-launcher, with underslung 5.56 assault carbine. Plus a computer-assisted sighting system with integrated laser rangefinder, thermal vision, and night-vision capabilities. Basically, a whole armload of complete whoop-ass. Still in development when everything went to shit. Must be twenty crates on this pallet. And how many more in this place?”

  “Enough to equip an entire regiment, I’d say,” said a voice from behind them. It was Coles, the JFK’s Store Master. He’d arrived with a handful of his crewmen while Wesley had been busy clearing buildings on the periphery.

  Wesley turned to Coles.

  “You can tell that just by looking at it?”

  “Of course; that’s what I’m trained to do.”

  Fick glanced at the pair of them, and then back down the first aisle, where he could see one of his four-man fire teams finishing a security sweep.

  Coles said, “I also noticed a pair of helos out on the tarmac further up the field. Sea Knights. Medium-lift.”

  “Will they fly?” asked Fick.

  “No idea. I’m no wrench monkey, but they aren’t packed down, so that suggests they were ready to go a couple of years ago. Then again, if they were ready to go, why haven’t they went?”

  Wesley took a deep breath. “Sea Knights. Can they fly long-distance?”

  “No,” said Gillan. “But they’d make good donkeys to move all this stuff back to the JFK. If they’ll fly.”

  “Or a way to bring people back and forth,” suggested Wesley.

  “Wesley. Be useful now. What did you find?”

  Wesley nodded. “Nothing but empty buildings. This place seems like a ghost town, though there’s a lot left to check.”

  “No shit. I want your team assisting my Marines in the hangar searches now. This time you’re starting five hundred meters from the center here and working your way out. We’ve come up totally empty on our primary search targets. Unless there’s something hidden away in one of the outlying hangars, we are basically eating a huge horse-cock sandwich here, as regards finding our goddamned plane.”

  Wesley nodded. “Roger that. One question. If we come up empty, should we move out and look at the other airfields, maybe even a nearby airport?”

  Fick nodded. “You mean a civilian jet, something like that?”

  “Yes,” replied Wesley. “Back in the UK we had countless smaller airfields with civilian aircraft and helicopters. Do we have to be picky? It’s all very well looking for a military plane, but anything that can land and pick them up on… what’s the place called?”

  “Beaver Island, “ said Fick.

  “Yes, Beaver Island. Well, if all we can find is some dinky private jet, but it can make the distance, then we’re go aren’t we?”

  “True enough. Maybe you’re not as useless as you sound.”

  “Something else,” said Wesley. “If we make contact with Alpha and they are on Beaver Island, maybe they can check the airstrip there to see if there’s any fuel. That way we can go for a plane that can just make the distance there. Should expand our options a lot.”

  Fick squinted at Wesley. “Huh. A shiny horse-cock sandwich for the Brit. Good thinking. Okay, everybody listen up. We expected a battle when we got here, so we didn’t plan on staying, but now we know the area is clear, we’re gonna put a temporary base down here. Secure the area, and get this set up as a jumping-off point to expand our search. Let’s get those helos checked to see if they’ll fly… Coles, get your people to start shipping this stuff back to flat-top… weapons, munitions, fuel, everything. We’ve still got a job to do, but I for one am not leaving all this beautiful shit here.”

  “Roger that,” Coles said, turning away.

  As Wesley also turned to leave, he heard Fick mutter, “Though if our aircraft search keeps coming up empty and we’re stuck here long enough, eventually we’re gonna need the guns and ammo ourselves…’

  Scuttled

  On the deck of the suddenly rocking sailboat, near the prow on the port side, was where Ali had racked out – how long ago, she couldn’t immediately say. Now she came to quickly but smoothly, and in perfect silence. It was how she always woke, whether due to the alarm clock, a firefight, or breakfast in bed.

  She also paused before reacting, instead simply taking stock and tuning in to the darkness. She didn’t even sit up. Not yet knowing what needed doing, there was no point in moving in what might turn out to be the exact wrong direction. Also, with the boat bucking underneath her like at a funfair, it seemed to her that being flat on the deck had some tactical advantages.

  She listened, swiveled her neck to look around, and drew a steadying breath.

  And a hand flopped wetly over the gunwale in the near dark – ten inches from her face.

  Now Ali stood up – like an electric cat on a glowing stove.

  The hand had only been in front of her for a fraction of a second. But the image of it lingered – massively swollen, mottled with gangrene, a rainbow of nightmare colors, covered with floppy sores… and smelling of bottom-feeding fish left to rot for a hundred years in some underwater hell.

  Her wakizashi, or samurai short sword, appeared in a bright flash as starlight reflected in its sleek blade, and whatever the hand was trying to pull up over the gunwale fell back into the water. Ali kicked the hand after it. It splashed dully.

  “Multiple contacts, submerged!” Homer reported crisply.

  Yeah, I could have told you that, Ali thought to herself, looking peeved as she pivoted around her sword in the dark.

  In her peripheral, she also clocked motion as somebody shoved the scientist through the cabin hatch; he crashed down inside with a yelp. The others now fanned out to the black edges of the boat, their backs all to the center. No one fired. And no one else spoke. Silence reigned again. Silence and darkness.

  The boat merely continued to rumble and bounce, because of something underneath, in the perfect midnight of the lake’s invisible depths.

  Ali thought balefully of the many feet of gunwale that surrounded them in the dark – and of how very many hands might at that moment be coming over it in other places.

  She edged out toward the water again, covering her sector, which was afore on the port side. Leaning out and craning her neck, she peered down into the much blacker blackness of the lake. The water rippled and rolled, reflected stars riding the little swells. Something was definitely moving down there. She smoothly drew her Surefire tactical light from her belt with her left hand. This was the side on which she’d taken a wooden spike through her bicep, after parachuting through a windstorm onto the Chicago elevated train platform. But the damaged arm managed the flashlight well enough.

  Pausing one beat, swallowing dryly, she steeled herself and clicked it on with her thumb.

  As one, a hundred rotten heads all swiveled to look up at her, their rheumy, gelatinous, or rotted-out eyes locking in on the beam of light. They all stood perhaps a foot below the surface of the water, some a bit more or less, based on height or missing feet. And now, as one, they began to wade, paddle, scrabble, grope – and climb one upon the other tr
ying to reach the surface and the edge of the deck.

  Within seconds, a watery hill of dead was self-organizing in front of her.

  She clicked her light off, and scrabbled for her NVGs.

  She knew the others around her would be doing the same.

  * * *

  Henno got his on with no drama. As the world turned bright green around him, and all the detail resolved from gloom, he saw only two hands, in just two spots, grabbing at the edge of the boat. Thank fuck for that, he thought, mentally exhaling.

  But with that, and no other preamble, Sleestak-like melting appendages flopped over the gunwale in a dozen other places, interspersed with one or two waterlogged chins and faces and missing noses. Henno took a step back, and held his fire, as he heard the first couple of suppressed shots chuffing out around him. For his part, he simply stepped over to the edge and kicked all the Zulu hands and heads back in the water.

  Job jobbed, he thought, contentedly. For now, anyway.

  One eye still on the water, he looked over his shoulder and spotted Handon.

  “Oi, boss,” he said. Handon seated his own NVGs, then pointed them back at Henno, expectant. “Hate to point this out, but we’ve got no options here. We’re gonna have to swim for it – and the sooner the better.”

  “Negative,” Handon said. “Too dangerous for the civilian, too far from shore. And this might be an isolated concentration, from a sunk boat or something.” He raised his voice slightly. “Fire discipline!”

  “Bollocks,” Henno muttered, as he shook his head and roughly drew his cricket bat from his ruck, which lay near his feet. He rarely got to use this; but he never went anywhere without it. As he stepped to the wicket and started batting heads, he thought, We’re gonna have a Zulu singularity right in our laps – and nowhere to retreat, advance, or escape to…

  Gritting his teeth, he teed off on a few more rotten faces. They gurgled as they broke the surface, expelling fetid lake water and bits of mouths and tongues as they tried to moan in frenzy. As Henno swung, their heads collapsed and exploded like long-rotten melons. The trick was to make sure they sprayed seaward – it was too much infectious organic matter to have splashing around the deck. Henno paused swinging to take stock around him.

  Fire discipline was still being maintained. But, he thought, sooner or later the shooting is like to start – and it’ll avail us nought, because the minging dead will just keep on coming.

  And not long after that, he knew, they’d be out of ammo and overrun.

  * * *

  On the opposite side of the cockpit, Juice looked down to Predator and said, “Well, at least the Kennedy didn’t run aground on the dead.”

  Predator snorted and then rocked himself upright on his drumstick. Juice offered him a hand up, but he ignored it. The whole point of the new cast was that he could get around on his own now, albeit still in great pain. Once upright, he hauled up his tactical vest, shrugged into it, put on his helmet, shouldered his backpack, drew his sword, and stood back to back with Juice. Juice clocked all the gear and gave him a look.

  “Gotta be ready to move, man,” Pred grunted.

  “Move? Where to?” Juice said, making a wide gesture with his arm. They were adrift on a small boat and completely surrounded by a lake full of the dead.

  Predator spat over the side. “One problem at a time, man. One problem at a time…”

  * * *

  Ali and Homer worked in tandem at the front of the boat, keeping its edges clear of hissing would-be boarders. They also had their vests back on, and their rifles slung, also ready to move to nowhere. They had their NVGs but not helmets on. Ali still had her sword out, and Homer wielded his unique, and now uniquely suitable, melee weapon – a boarding axe. He jabbed its top-mounted spike through rotten skull after skull.

  The destroyed ones fell back, but also contributed to the mound the others could try to climb. The moaning and hissing on all sides of them had reached a frenzy such that civilians or lesser fighters might have fallen to their knees and covered up their ears. From all the movement underneath, and the grabbing hands, the prow was now swinging out toward the middle of the lake and away from shore. But the deck was still clear.

  “This could be going worse,” Ali said over her shoulder.

  Homer paused and gave her a quick grin in response.

  A flying body, trailing moonlit water, streaked through the air between them, screaming.

  Homer dropped to a crouch to get under it, and Ali pivoted, bringing her sword around, as Homer’s smile melted away. A shout of warning formed in her throat: Foxtrots!…

  But before she could vocalize, and before either of them could react, two more rocketed out of the water and landed between them, both fixed on Homer. He brought his axe up, but he didn’t have leverage. It lodged in the groin of one of them; he gave it a tug, but it stayed stuck – and all three of the dead were collapsing on top of him now.

  As Ali swung desperately and decapitated one of the three, but otherwise looked on helpless, Homer clenched his leg muscles, pivoted away, and instantly dove – low, horizontal, long, and strong – straight off the boat and into the teeming lake.

  It was the only direction he could go.

  * * *

  Handon, trying to monitor all sides of the battle, had just been thinking it was going okay himself. "Look,” he said sidelong to Henno. “They’re maxing out. The pile’s not getting any bi—" but then went wide-eyed as he suddenly realized the front of the boat was being overrun by flying corpses. He jabbed his sword in the deck and brought his assault rifle up from its sling. He had to shoot around Ali, but in two seconds he had the mess cleared up.

  Just beside and behind him, Henno muttered, “Fuck the cricket,” dropped his bat, and pulled an HE grenade from his rig. “Frag up!” he shouted, pulling the pin, and cocking his arm toward the edge of the boat. THIS’ll wake these dead bastards up in the morning…

  But something launched out of the water right at his face, crashing into his body and knocking him onto his back. The grenade floated up into the air like a mis-juggled egg – and only Predator saw its arc. He took the long step needed to get under it, snatched it out of the air, cocked his arm to baseball-throw it toward the horizon – at which point the tussling Zulu and Yorkshireman rolled into his bad leg, which collapsed, folding under him. Predator went down like the ton of bricks he was, and the live grenade skittered across the deck, zipping straight through the open hatch, and down into the cabin below.

  My bad, Predator thought, laid out flat, electric pain firing up his leg.

  Handon pivoted where he was, dropped to a squat, and put four point-blank 5.56 rounds lengthwise through the head of the one wrestling on top of Henno. Opening a Zulu brainpan over his team member’s face wasn’t good news, but Handon had a hundred other problems. Luckily, one of them auto-resolved when the little scientist hauled ass out of the cabin like the Road Runner ahead of exploding dynamite, legs almost windmilling on the deck. Handon tackled him and kicked the cabin door shut with one boot as the explosion inside rocked the boat.

  One door closes, Handon thought, prone and draped over Park. And another opens…

  * * *

  But at the same time, he realized he was also staring straight into the dead eyes of several attackers coming over the stern, not ten feet away.

  “Good to go,” Henno said, rising to a crouch, when Handon gave him a look. There was a lot of liquid on the Brit, but it seemed like lake water to him. Anyway, he knew it didn’t matter what he said – Handon would be watching him like a hawk for a day at least, for any sign of the turning. Henno shrugged it off and forgot it. Either he’d be fine, or he wouldn’t.

  Either way, he’d just get on with it.

  Shooting, swinging, splatting, and minor acrobatics were going on in almost all quarters of the small and shrinking surface of the deck around them. The sound of rapid firing approached as Ali backed across the deck toward the cockpit, her Mk 12 Special Purpose Rifle to
her shoulder, barking incessantly, spitting a hail of close-in precision lead toward the prow. She was retreating to tighten up their formation. She was also abandoning Homer, alone down in the lake, as she couldn’t forget for a second. But still she figured, or tried to tell herself, she knew what she was doing.

  And, mainly, that he knew what he was doing…

  In her last sight of him, he’d been doing a smooth and strong combat sidestroke, straight out into the middle of the lake and toward deep water – too deep for anything to grab him from the bottom. Or so Ali hoped. He had also been struggling against the weight of his gear. But staying above water with forty pounds of kit on was one of the first tricks they taught Navy SEALs.

  Or, again, so Ali hoped.

  In the middle of the cockpit, closest to the cabin, Handon heard a noise underneath the firing, shouting, and moaning. He pulled open the hatch and took a step down and inside. Sure enough – rushing water. The grenade blast had, naturally enough, opened a gaping hole in the hull, on the starboard side and just below the waterline.

  Emerging again, he saw Henno had already seen it.

  “Sodding told you so,” he didn’t resist saying. Now they’d have to fucking swim for it.

  Handon assessed. Since they now knew to expect flying bodies leaping out of the water like some kind of spawning zombie salmon, they could at least react. There were also plenty of slow-moving attackers still just trying to haul themselves up over the gunwale. Rifles chugged, melee weapons whistled and thunked, and body after body hit the water again.

  But it was hardly even like water now. It was turning into a corpse pit, or open grave. And still they came.

  While he did a quick mag change, Handon looked down to see that water was now ankle-deep in the cockpit. They’d all be swimming in another minute, whether they stayed or went.

  “On me,” he barked. “We use grenades to clear a path to shore.”

  The others, in their shrinking circle, assimilated that while they fought.