Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

Coulson ran up to both of them, looking slightly wild-eyed. Handon put his head close to the Marine’s. “We’re getting flanked!” he shouted. “On both sides! And it’s only going to get worse!”

  “Roger that!” Coulson said. “The end is nigh!” With this, he pointed out to the starboard edge of the deck. “But it ain’t here yet!” And as if on cue, two MH-60R Seahawk helos crested up above the level of the deck, the wind from their rotors pushing little waves of water and gore across the deck, and ruffling the defenders. Handon figured they must have been skimming the sea surface on their way in from the destroyer.

  The first bird leveled off there, just below the deck, while its door gunner brought his GAU-16/A minigun to bear on the mountain of dead now climbing up the side of the ship – the ones coming toward the vulnerable hole in the hull. The gun spun up, making that fabulous buzz-saw noise that always made Handon smile – there was no fire support quite like 6,000 rounds per minute of 7.62mm. And, of course, only the good guys had these things, so the noise always augured good tidings.

  From where the defenders stood, unless standing right at the edge, they couldn’t see what was happening down below. But this high-firepower development couldn’t be good for the dead trying to climb up and enter the Kennedy through the hole.

  Henno clapped Handon on the shoulder. “Result!” he shouted, even as the second Seahawk blasted over their heads, flared, and touched down on the deck. But the truly amazing thing was where the pilot – clearly a fearless and badass flier of the first rank – chose to set down.

  Not behind the lines – but out in front of them.

  The rotors were a bit too high to do anything like decapitate the dead. But the helo’s door gunner, on the side facing away toward the bow, certainly was capable of it. His minigun spun up and he started doing damage the individual militia with their rifles could only dream of. The rotor wash wasn’t hurting either – many Zulus were going down from the artificial hurricane, or actually being knocked over the edge of the deck and into the drink. The defenders took advantage of this badassery, stepping up their shooting, to get the foredeck clearer than it had been in a while.

  Handon thought to himself that better was good; but this was still half-measures. The ones they killed would only get replaced by ones behind. There would never be an end to them.

  Handon noticed that the bird was also canted at an odd angle – because it had settled down on a thick and uneven carpet of bodies. Some of those had been put down but not destroyed – many of them Predator’s handiwork, no doubt – and they wriggled and struggled around the three fat tires of the helo. But they weren’t going anywhere.

  This was all just far enough from the line for something like safety for the militia – though it still seemed to Handon like damned tight quarters to be dropping in 53 feet of spinning rotary death. But it was all happening. In another second, the crew chief began shoving boxes of small-arms ammo out the door facing the line. It was clearly a lot more than they’d keep on board, so Handon figured they must have picked it up from the Murphy.

  He trotted forward to help gather it up, and with that and no other preamble, the Seahawk lifted again. Through its cockpit glass, Handon could see the pilot talking into his chin mic. They were clearly leaving on the hurry-up, presumably in response to some new tasking. As they rose, a thin scattering of body parts fell away from the landing gear, dropping back down into the general meat pile.

  Handon thought he might have preferred it if they’d hung around a little longer. But as it was, for the moment, the situation was manageable. Working together, the defenders got the resupply boxes moved back behind the lines, before the dead started resurging and really charging them again. But Handon genuinely didn’t know how long they could keep this up.

  Hell, he wasn’t sure how long he could keep it up. He found he was too tired – plus too task-saturated, just staying alive and helping to keep the wheels from coming off their circle of wagons – even to calculate how long he’d been going now. But it was a hell of a lot of hours, during most of which he had been pushed to his limits either physically or cognitively or, most often, both. Everyone had a breaking point. It happened to be the defining characteristic of Tier-1 operators that they could carry on past theirs – often far past.

  But no one could keep slugging forever.

  As Handon levered the top off one of the ammo boxes, filled his pouches, and then cleared out to make way for others, suddenly something hit him like an anvil. Only his utter physical and mental exhaustion, and the peril he had parachuted into the middle of, could account for him not having considered this before. And it only occurred to him now when he heard one of the sailors shout at one of the Marines, sounding exhausted and half-panicked: “How much longer?!” The Marine snapped a look at his watch and shouted back, “Any minute! Just hold on a little longer!” as he ran off again.

  Handon found Coulson, stuck his head into the Marine’s face. “What’s the endgame?” Coulson didn’t immediately get it. Handon tried again: “What are we holding here for?” He wanted to tell Coulson that, a long age ago, in the bomber and over the radio, he’d heard something about getting the JFK’s engines started. But, frankly, he was out of breath. Basically, he wanted to know why they didn’t all just lie down now, since there were effectively infinite Zulus, and – barring some plan for getting the ship out of there – being overrun was inevitable and only a matter of time.

  And, given all that, lying down was starting to sound like a really attractive option.

  Coulson nodded in understanding. “A flight of nuclear engineers inbound from UK! Due any minute! They’re going to pull-start our damned reactor, and we’re going to steam our asses out of here!”

  Handon sagged a little with relief. “That sounds good,” he said.

  Then he squared up, reloaded, and poured himself wearily back into the fight. Henno, Juice, and Predator – all of whom had sustained variously painful and debilitating injuries on this never-ending mission – were already there, throwing all of their skills, energy, resolve, and viciousness into the defense, without limit or reservation or thought for their personal safety.

  Handon could do no less.

  Dead Can Dance

  Ocean Surface

  Right now, Ali knew two things. One, the water here, at least a half mile offshore, was too deep to stand in – probably too deep even for five to stand in, all atop one another. And, two, she knew that Zulus can’t swim. Not even those God-blighted Foxtrots – they had leapt out of the water at her like giant evil spawning salmon back on Lake Michigan. But when they hit the surface, they dropped back under it again.

  However, what Ali hadn’t counted on was… Zulus in fucking life vests.

  Sure enough, sailors on board one of the vessels, almost certainly the carrier, had been attacked, infected, and then been knocked or fallen overboard – all while wearing their standard-issue Navy inflatable life preservers. Now there was a whole new menace. Like some kind of perverse surface fleet, or maybe just water polo team, of the dead.

  And it was these that Ali found Emily frantically trying to paddle herself away from – and that had prompted her screams of terror. When she got away from one, another would loom out of the rain and mist ahead. She was on the brink of total, abject terror.

  Coming out of her crawl stroke, Ali grabbed Emily, turned her around, gripped her across the chest, and started stroking backward with her legs and free arm – standard swim-rescue tactics, to avoid being pulled under by a panicking drowning victim. Emily wasn’t going to drown, as she had her life vest on. But she was definitely panicking. And she was only a few feet away from pallid hands and dead faces, which waved and splashed and grabbed at her, as water and air hissed out from their blue lips.

  Once Ali had her a semi-safe distance away – going back the way she’d come seemed a good bet – she let her go, paddled around between the girl and the floating dead bastards, of which she counted three, though visibility wasn’t great,
and plotted her next move. While treading water, she considered just paddling them both out of there, back to Park, and waiting for that blessed helo extraction. But she couldn’t know for sure how long they were going to be on the water; and she also wasn’t sure how well these things could locomote. They mainly just seemed to thrash around, and the dead definitely weren’t learning creatures. But it was at least conceivable that their random flailing and grabbing might actually get them somewhere.

  That would be just like Ali’s luck, anyway.

  She couldn’t count on her handgun without draining it first, so she drew her knife, breast-stroked around to the outside of the one on the left, darted in, grabbed it by the life vest, and put her knife through its head. The others locked on, perked up, and wheezed and gesticulated at her. But they didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so Ali used the first one as a flotation device, flutter-kicked her way over, and finished the other two. If there were any more, she couldn’t see them from there.

  When she made her way back to Emily, the girl had stopped screaming, but was still whimpering quietly. It had been a rough few minutes. Ali pushed her undead life buoy away and said, “It’s okay. You’re okay, I got you.”

  Emily seemed to steel herself, nodded, and managed: “Where were you?”

  “Just a little delayed. I’m here now. Can you paddle behind me?”

  “Y—yes.”

  “Okay, then.” And Ali started a slow side-stroke back in the direction she’d originally come from, Emily paddling behind. In another minute, they were reunited with Park, Ali had strapped herself back into her life jacket, and the three of them floated in a cozy circle, facing inward.

  Like they were waiting for the sharks to come.

  * * *

  Seemingly less prone to panic than Emily – though they’d see how he did when the floating dead got there – Simon Park was nonetheless enormously relieved at Ali’s return. He was glad, too, to see Emily, and glad that she had made it. If nothing else, she was the only other civilian on this military rocket-ship ride he’d been on lately. And while Ali often seemed to be the only thing keeping him strapped in, it was nice to have company.

  And then again… as they floated wordlessly, the rain still pattering down and kicking up the surface of the ocean into fractal splashes and mist, the three of them spinning very slowly from some current Park couldn’t otherwise perceive…

  Well, maybe it was the splashing and the mist and near darkness – but Ali started to appear inexplicably ghostly to Park’s eye. Ghostly – and oddly silent. It was true that, in the short time he’d known her, she had always seemed to glide around pretty effortlessly, or sometimes even invisibly. The other members of Alpha could have told him that was more or less her defining characteristic – coming and going like a ghost, usually having shot someone very far away in between. And she never wasted words.

  But, now… she seemed positively spectral.

  Suddenly, Park was seized with a crazy idea: had Ali actually died on that plane?

  Because she had only just managed to get him out of there before it went over on its side. And he definitely hadn’t seen her come out behind him.

  Could this be the ghost of Ali, now watching over them? Or was he somehow hallucinating? He shook his head, trying to clear it. But everything continued to look hallucinatory. Including their guardian, floating low in the water, her face expressionless through the rain and mist.

  Finally, he couldn’t resist any longer. “How— how did you get out of that plane?”

  Her face showed no visible reaction to this. When she answered, it was deadpan. “I didn’t,” she said. Park’s breath caught in his throat. But then she looked around them, her expression still placid, undid the clips on her life vest, and shrugged out of it again.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, then took a big breath – and dove.

  When she went under she already had her LED tactical light in her left hand, while keeping the right one free, and not too far from her knife – but she didn’t turn the light on immediately. Only when she realized she could see virtually nothing did she click it on, mainly because she didn’t want to swim face first into—

  Ohh, shit… She frantically back-paddled, rising a few feet up toward the surface, but then steadied her position. For a second, she’d been nose-to-nose with them.

  And she didn’t know if they were standing five levels deep, or ten, or only two… but there were a hell of a lot of wriggling dead bodies down there underneath them. And they were not far enough down for comfort. Ali guessed that with the uncountable multitudes of dead spilling off the edge of the continent, many hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands, were simply being shoved out along the ocean floor. It was like some massive volcanic super-eruption of the dead. Ali laughed to herself at this – how many natural-disaster metaphors were they going to bring to bear on this damned thing?

  Anyway, they were never going to fill up the ocean.

  Then again, they didn’t have to. All they had to do was pile up off the seabed a little higher – and the legs of the three of them floating there would come within grasping range.

  Ali figured it to be only maybe another twenty or thirty feet.

  And then their little idyll of floating out on the water was going to come to an ugly end.

  * * *

  When she breached the surface again, she didn’t make any mention to Simon or Emily that they were actually floating above an aquatic army of the dead. That fact wouldn’t have helped anyone, not least Ali, who needed to keep her civilian charges calm and compliant.

  But Park wasn’t stupid. “Um,” he began. “What’s down there?”

  Emily, for her part, just looked at Ali with those enormous eyes. Ali merely nodded at them both and got on her radio again, trying to get an updated ETA on their extraction.

  But no response came back. Nothing at all.

  Ali blinked the water out of her eyes and eyelashes. As usual, instead of cursing fate, much less freaking out, she just mordantly shrugged at this latest round of adverse circumstances. And she began trying to work out a Plan B.

  Unfortunately, the only one springing to mind was that of swimming to the destroyer. Oh, well, she thought. That’s not so bad. There’d be some hazards – friendly fire, red-hot 30-mil brass falling in the water, ship’s propellers, that kind of thing. But those could be managed. No, what she was really worried about was that, one, they’d be swimming toward shore, which meant shallower water and higher pile-ups of dead; and, two, it was going to take these two no little time to cover the distance.

  And getting to safety sooner would definitely beat the hell out of later.

  They needed to get out of this water.

  But at least Ali knew the direction and the rough distance to the Murphy – both of which she’d clocked during her short float down to the ocean surface.

  “Okay, guys,” she said. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  But even as the other two paddled in tighter and listened with avid attention, Ali cocked her head and stopped speaking. Then she smiled.

  “Never mind,” she said. “We’re all getting out of here – the easy way.”

  And then Park and Emily could hear it, too – the roar of an aircraft engine, and the whir of rotor blades. With the muffling of the rain and the mist, and the distant roar of the battle, the sounds were followed by sight of the actual helicopter only seconds later. It came out of the mist, blew the rain around in great lashing gouts, and pushed the water on the surface away from them in concentric circles of thick swells.

  Ali squinted through the thick and now extremely harsh spray that lashed at them in addition to the rain. She could make out the pilot through the rain-streaked left-side cockpit glass. He had a night-vision monocle clipped to his helmet, and Ali figured he’d homed in on the IR strobe attached to Park’s vest – probably after following a heading based on their transponder signal.

  Gotta love technology, she thoug
ht to herself.

  She was feeling positively jolly at the prospect of finally being recovered, at the ass-end of a mission that had begun so many hours and lifetimes ago. And, with a little luck, recovery would be followed by some dry clothes, hot food, and a warm rack on a nice Navy warship.

  Yeah… that’ll do nicely.

  But they weren’t out of the water yet.

  The port-side door on the Seahawk slid open, while the aircraft held a hover approximately twenty feet above the sea surface, and a fully geared-up Navy rescue swimmer – wetsuit, flippers, snorkel – slid to a sitting position on the lip. Then, with no hesitation, he slid off and dropped through the air, flippers extended, hands crossed over his groin. He hit the churning surface and slid straight under, popping up again a second later. With a few controlled and powerful strokes, he reached Ali, Park, and Emily.

  The latter two squinted and shielded their eyes from the rotor-driven horizontal rain.

  As Ali knew he would, the diver first established comms. “Can you understand me?” he shouted over the roar of the hovering helo.

  “Affirmative!” Ali answered, giving him a thumbs-up.

  “Anyone injured?”

  “Negative!”

  The swimmer then looked back up at the helo and raised his arm. On this signal, the crew chief tossed out a rescue strop. This was a long, buoyant, flexible, orange, single-strap harness, with D-rings at either end, and a long stretch of rope attached, which trailed back up to the bird. In seconds, the swimmer had recovered it. He then cast his eye over the three of them and swam up to Emily, grabbing her left wrist and turning her around in the water.

  Before he could proceed, though, Ali grabbed his upper arm. “Him first!” she shouted, pointing at Park. She felt slightly bad putting Emily at additional risk; but of course Park had the fate of fifty million riding with him, so he was coming out first. And Emily would be just fine in the number-two position. The swimmer nodded, turned, and took hold of Park, wrapping the strop around his upper body and under both arms.