Arisen, Book Three - Three Parts Dead

by Glynn James

  “Please state the condition of the patrol,” said Elise, at the same time as she flicked an alert switch on the board in front of her – the one that said Urgent Alert.

  “They came in about ten minutes ago,” said the voice. “Four of them are hurt really bad. Two died before they got here. They’ve been— oh, God, what’s going on back there?”

  Elise heard a scream echoing in the background across the radio.

  “Oh, God, they’re up.”

  Elise jumped to her feet and waved both arms at her supervisor, who was already on his way over. He started hurrying.

  “I think Chaucer Hospital have a possible outbreak in progress.”

  The man’s eyes widened. “What?”

  The hospitals had been where it all began. Oh, God, not again…

  Elise pulled the headphone cable out of the switchboard and pushed the volume to the top.

  The voice on the radio spoke once more before the line went dead.

  “We have an outbreak at Chaucer Hospital. Please, we need help.” Just before the radio went silent the entire CentCom Exchange room heard the final scream.

  The supervisor turned to the operator next to Elise, his expression grave.

  “Alert Folkestone barracks, North Canterbury barracks and Faversham barracks. Tell them that we need full mobilization and a lockdown on the entire grid square around Chaucer Hospital, and we need it now.”

  Storm of the Dead

  Commander Drake had just taken the stairs down to the Combat Information Center (or CIC, but sometimes still called the Ops Room) a half a flight at a time. He’d also given a couple of shoves to the hapless ensign assigned to bring him down there, in order to maintain his sense of urgency. Now he looked down on the radar console, one hand on its operator’s shoulder. The officer of the watch, Lieutenant Campbell, stood at his left shoulder, along with another pair of CIC techs.

  “What am I looking at?” Drake asked Campbell.

  “That was pretty much my question, sir,” Campbell said. She held Drake’s eye levelly.

  “C’mon, LT,” Drake said. “Do I look like a man with time on my hands? It’s a storm system, right?”

  Campbell nodded. “Looks to be, at first glance. Like a classic hurricane or heavy storm pattern, with a big mass circling around a relatively still center, and arms spiraling out from there… But it’s also unlike any storm I’ve ever seen.”

  “How so?”

  “Much lower to the ground. Thinner. Basically weirder.”

  “Are you saying the ZA is producing new weather patterns? Why don’t we send out a UAV? Get a close-up view and figure out what we’re dealing with.”

  “Already done, sir.” She paused before continuing. “But not a drone. A Prowler.”

  The Boeing EA-6B Prowler was an electronic warfare aircraft, this one originally part of Electronic Attack Squadron 130, which had been fleet-deployed to the Kennedy at the time of the fall. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of electronic warfare to be done lately. There weren’t a hell of a lot of working electronics, for that matter, and the Zulus didn’t have them. But the Prowler also made an excellent surveillance/reconnaissance platform, so two of them had been spared from getting dumped in the ocean, when the carrier’s hangar deck got repurposed as an organic farm.

  Drake turned to face his CIC chief, his demeanor now even less friendly than it had been when he entered. “A manned sortie? Without my authorization?”

  Campbell cleared her throat quietly. “The Captain authorized it, sir.”

  Drake didn’t even know how to respond to this. The Captain had not been involved in the day-to-day running of the ship, commanding either tactically or strategically, in over a year. Hell, he’d hardly been spotted out of his quarters in months.

  “Where do you think the JP-8 for this is going to come from?” Drake meant the military-grade aviation fuel that their jets gulped like marathoners did Gatorade. They had little enough in stores, and generally reserved it for critical missions.

  Campbell kept a straight face as she answered. “Should be plenty in the tanks at AB Oceana. Sir.” She was practically standing at attention at this point.

  “Je-sus Christ…” Drake said, shaking his head. The very fact of their scavenging op was supposed to be need-to-know. And they certainly weren’t going in there for the purpose of siphoning jet fuel. They were trying to find an aircraft to extract Alpha, and thus maybe recover a vaccine to save the whole human race. Drake pinned Campbell with his unamused eye. She straightened up further, if that were possible. “Be advised, Lieutenant. No more fucking mission planning based on scuttlebutt. You read me?”

  “Aye aye, sir. Lima Charlie.”

  “Good. Now where’s your bird?”

  “Feet dry over the homeland, and reaching the edge of… the anomaly… any second.”

  “Video?”

  Campbell snapped her fingers at a tech, who powered up a large overhead video display.

  “Wait,” Drake said. “Where the hell is this thing, actually? Zoom the map out.”

  Campbell showed him on the console screen. “North Carolina,” she said. “The center’s about a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Raleigh.”

  “The center? How big is this thing? Shit, that is big. It’s moving this way?”

  “Aye, sir. Since we started tracking it.”

  Drake looked up now to the streaming video on the overhead screen. Thick Carolina pine forest zipped by beneath the Prowler’s underwing-mounted targeting pod, which housed the camera. The plane was cruising at low altitude, maybe a couple of hundred feet. Suddenly, the great stretches of forest gave way to farmland – those distinct, multicolored rectangles of cultivated crop plots.

  And then, almost as quickly, that gave way to something else.

  First, Drake thought he saw figures moving on the ground, in ones and twos, zipping by too quickly to track. But then suddenly the camera was skimming across…

  “What the hell…” Drake muttered.

  LT Campbell stood erect, in a wide stance, arms crossed, but also leaning closer to the screen. No one in the room spoke for a few seconds.

  “Is that…?”

  Campbell picked up a desk mic from the station beside her. “Prodigy Five-Four, this is Alpha Whiskey Actual. Interrogative: what are we looking at here, over?” She flicked a switch that put the channel on room speaker.

  “Alpha Whiskey, Prodigy. I am visual on what looks to be… a whole shit-ton of Zulus. All the way out to the horizon. Over.”

  The LT touched the transmit bar. “Prodigy, Alpha Whiskey, that’s received… with thanks.”

  “It’s a fucking herd,” Drake said, his voice devoid of affect or emotion. And it was a herd – but numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Or millions.

  Campbell and Drake looked at each other for a moment, then back to the screen. The depth of the image was starting to resolve. It wasn’t just a staggeringly large crowd of bodies. It had a third dimension to it. They were somehow… roiling. It was more than one layer of bodies thick, a great heaving ocean, with depths to it. The individual bodies were heaving and leaping upon one another, limbs and heads and torsos thrashing and legs going ass over teakettle, and somehow…

  “Alpha Whiskey, Prodigy, I’m descending for a better look, over.”

  The LT looked concerned. “Copy that, Prodigy. Let’s not put it right on the deck.”

  “Roger that. Hang on… they seem to be reacting to my engine noise. Coming around…”

  The video view in the CIC had already descended more than half the total distance to the ground, and now it banked and swerved as the jet came around at high speed…

  “Holy shit…” Lt. Campbell said, involuntarily.

  Coming back around on its original path, and a lot lower as well, the plane now faced a much more roiling ocean of bodies. Thousands of them scrambled up on the backs of others, and one, now ten, now a hundred were leaping into the ai—

  Something blacked out mo
st of the camera view, and the remaining sliver of light twisted and dove…

  “Alpha Whi—!”

  And that was it. The screen was black, the channel dead.

  “Prodigy Five-Four, Alpha Whiskey Actual, sitrep. Acknowledge.” The LT spoke the words into the microphone. But she spoke them mechanically. The pilot had been way too low. There’d been zero time for him to react.

  And it had taken less than a second for his aircraft, smashing into dozens of leaping bags of dead meat, to drop out of the sky and plow nose-first into… whatever it was.

  * * *

  Commander Drake now sat again in his little conference room up on the flag bridge, with Lieutenant Campbell and a handful of other officers. He damn well wished Gunnery Sergeant Fick were there. But Fick was out on the ground – along with virtually everyone who represented the carrier strike group’s accumulated ground-combat experience.

  We’re spread too damned thin, Drake thought. Especially after the fucking mutiny and outbreak. The ship was coming apart at the seams. He did have the ship’s Senior Medical Officer (SMO) in there, a surgeon and lieutenant commander named Roberts.

  Drake looked to him now. “I thought we understood these things to shut down and go dormant when there was no living prey around?”

  LCDR Roberts, serious and senior with his decades of service and salt-and-pepper hair, spoke evenly. “We did understand that. But then this wouldn’t be the first time they’ve evolved a new behavior pattern.”

  “I don’t think I like this one,” Drake said. He struggled to maintain his calm and professionalism. He spoke again now, but almost to himself. “It looked like not all of them were Foxtrots, with the speed and the leaping… but some of them sure as hell were.” He looked back to the doctor. “Can this be related to the ghost town the shore party found at the air station? The total lack of Zulus there?”

  The surgeon shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe they’re clumping or clustering in some way we haven’t seen yet. Perhaps all the undeveloped open space in the U.S. allows them range more freely, or more of them to clump together in the same spot. I don’t know.”

  “Something like this idea of the zombie singularity?” Drake said. “When they all follow the same prey, and the ones further out follow the moaning of the closer ones?”

  Roberts had nothing else to add, so he didn’t.

  Drake looked to LT Campbell again. “How long? Until it’s here?”

  “Twelve to fourteen hours, at current heading and speed.”

  Drake shook his head. “But why would the accursed things be heading right toward us? Of all the possible goddamned directions? With all of North America to rampage through?”

  “Dunno, sir,” Campbell said. She paused fractionally. “But we did just ram a hundred and ten thousand tons of aircraft carrier into the edge of the continent.”

  Drake inclined his head slightly down, squinted, and sat there with his lips parted for a full ten seconds.

  “Fuck me,” he said, finally.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Road

  Ali walked behind the rest of the team, in the lightening dimness, serving as Tailgunner Charlie. She was generally the only one Handon trusted with this duty, other than himself. From the back, she noted Handon’s failure to ask the woman where they were going. And another thing he’d chosen to leave for now was the matter of trying again to radio Homer.

  It was conspicuous by its absence.

  And Ali also knew intuitively why he was doing it. For this mystery woman, Sarah, it was going to be unsettling enough to have six strange armed men turn up turn up right in her patch like this. If they also started radioing friends and reporting their location, it might be too much for her. She might well ditch them.

  And she might be smart to, Ali considered.

  And, anyway, by this point Ali had worked with Handon long enough – they’d all worked together long enough – to generally know what the others were doing, and why, almost before they did it. Explanation was rarely necessary. And Handon’s cautious and deferential air with the woman made it obvious to Ali what his objectives were.

  Basically, not freaking her out.

  So she followed his lead, and refrained from trying to radio Homer herself.

  Though, as she mechanically placed her assault boots over and around the ruts in the scarred dirt road, and as she set periodic mini-ambushes behind them to make sure they weren’t being shadowed… well, she damned well couldn’t stop herself thinking about Homer.

  He was in her thoughts a lot these days, so her specific feelings at this moment took some teasing out. But self-reflection, and self-analysis, were long-established habits for her. And pretty quickly she worked out it was the fact that she had left Homer out on that lake alone – less than a day after he had so gallantly not left her on the streets of Chicago. He had followed her straight down in that botched parachute drop. He hadn’t hesitated.

  But she had let him just swim out to meet his fate.

  The asymmetry was stark, or appeared so.

  But Ali also knew the tactical realities of the two cases were totally different. There had been little or nothing she could do to support him while they were both swimming. And she knew, and he knew perfectly well that she knew, that he’d be totally fine out there on his own. Probably better off, given their relative swimming ability.

  So why did she still feel so heavy?

  She turned, stepped ten meters off the road into the bush, and concealed herself. A full ten minutes of ambush would reassure her about whether they’d really gotten away cleanly. And maybe it would be time enough to push her feelings of guilt, of forlornness, deep down where they wouldn’t distract her. After that, she’d double-time it until she caught the group up.

  Wherever the hell they were headed.

  * * *

  By Handon’s calculations, they were four miles into their road march before the woman spoke again. At that point the sun was up, but still below the tops of the trees. The air was crisp and clean. If vehicles ever used this road, they didn’t do it often. They were in a truly wild place – original-growth forest pressed in on them from both sides, and healthy ground-level vegetation nibbled at the road. Not far off, to the south, Handon could hear a good-sized stream, rushing down to the lake behind and below them.

  “You seem a bit incurious,” the woman finally said, “about where I’m taking you.”

  “Figured you’d get to it in your own time,” Handon said.

  The two of them walked side by side. A few paces behind, Henno kept an eye on the scientist, with Juice and Pred behind them, and Ali alone in the rear.

  “So I’m guessing you’re from Britain,” she said.

  “Yes,” Handon said. He didn’t ask how she knew, but guessed she’d picked up one of the radio beacons. And from that, Handon guessed that wherever they were going there would be a decent radio receiver. Perhaps even a long-range transmitter.

  “And what military did you say you’d served with?” Sarah asked.

  Handon hadn’t said. But he simply answered. “Originally the U.S. Army, in my case. Same with Predator there, as well as Ali in the back. That strange bearded thing, Juice, worked in the U.S. intelligence services. Henno there was British Army. And Dr. Park is a microbiologist, civilian.”

  Sarah seemed to like these answers well enough. She certainly noticed that all of them presented with a definite military bearing, with the exception of the last one – the smaller, much more timid, and unarmed Park – who definitely didn’t.

  “And did you serve?” Handon asked.

  “No, not in the military,” she said. “Metropolitan Toronto Police.”

  Handon nodded, impressed. “First responder. All respect. But Toronto’s some distance from Lake Michigan…”

  “That’s by design,” she said. She stopped walking, turned to face the group, and raised her voice enough to be heard. Simple efficiency, Handon figured – like she’d given more than one briefing, and didn�
�t believe in giving them twice.

  “Okay. Where I’m taking you is to my cabin. My husband and son are there now. It’s a safe location – as much as any place is safe anymore. You’re welcome to consolidate there, hole up for a bit, try to contact your chain of command, or whoever you need to contact. We’ve got a good radio set, and power to run it. We can even get you fed, for a meal or two.” She paused, pinning each of the operators with her eye. “But then you’re off. Got it?”

  Handon nodded, and the others let him answer for them. “As agreed,” he said.

  “Good,” she said. “And maybe along the way you can tell me what you know. From out there. About what’s going on.”

  Before starting off again, she looked into Handon’s eyes to try and take his measure.

  And she suddenly found herself slightly flustered – though it didn’t show up on her in any way. She simply realized she had perhaps never locked eyes with anyone so solid and unflappable. This guy was like an ivory statue – one that extended four stories below the earth. Not cold. But utterly solid, and at ease with himself and the world – and she guessed unyielding and unmovable, when he wanted to be. And unbreakable – there was an obsidian-like hardness to him. But something more than that, underneath. She didn’t know what.

  Wresting her eyes away, she also guessed that, solid as he was, he could also move damned fast when he needed to. She turned and resumed walking, trusting the others to follow.

  “The cabin was our weekend getaway spot,” she said, in part to cover up her reaction. “Until there stopped being a world to get away from. Now it’s – what did the taxmen used to say? – our primary domicile.”

  Handon considered the cabin’s “by design” location, far from civilization. He refrained from asking whether it had intentionally been stocked to withstand a major disaster – or perhaps the end of the world. He had a feeling it had been. Something told him this was a woman who thought ahead.

  “So what’s that, about four hundred miles? To Toronto?”

  Sarah eyed him sidelong. “Four-thirty-four, if you take the highways. Longer if you avoid them. Why? You have plans to visit? I don’t suppose we’re ever going back now.”