Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  And that was it.

  Maybe they had actually over-adapted. The usual military failure was in fighting the last war. But, in this case, perhaps they had forgotten, too soon, how to fight the last war.

  Hell, Handon thought, Sarah probably had it right. Compared to humans, zombies were damned predictable – and a lot easier to deal with. You never saw them getting all shifty-eyed and trying to out-clever you. And they certainly never tried to sucker you in with a double-cross. You knew where you stood with a zombie.

  Handon thought about his post-Sarah crisis of duty, and how it had manifested itself in the shootout on the lake and its aftermath. There were so many terrible decisions he’d had to make along the way. He remembered his choice, and before that Juice’s, to spare the pirate boy – William had been his name. Though it was a damned rough sort of mercy, dumping him on the lake with no arms or provisions. Handon wondered if the kid was still alive, even at that moment.

  And then suddenly he wondered: in sparing him, had they been trying to pay the bill for the Cameron boy, Sarah’s son, whom they had failed to save?

  He didn’t know. It had all been spooling by too fast in real time.

  And now, on top of everything else, did he also have to worry about Henno – that he was going to be questioning his decisions constantly, after he led them onto that damned ship? And he thought: Here’s that bad dynamic between me and Ainsley, playing out all over again – except with Henno playing the part of me this time, second-guessing the commander…

  He also remembered his choice to spare the older girl, Emily’s sister, not long after that. How he had seemed to find some moral line there that he couldn’t justify crossing – no matter how important the end it served, no matter what the cost. And with that thought, he wondered if he had perhaps resolved this inner conflict after all – if he had found a middle way. Namely, that he would be compassionate when he could. And ruthless when it was necessary.

  And maybe that was the best he could do.

  Maybe, in the end, he was muddling through like everyone else. Handon shook his head. In the end, they’d just have to work it out as they went along. Improvisation and flexibility, too, were key components of the spec-ops mindset.

  He couldn’t afford to start second-guessing himself. Not even if he had changed – maybe especially then. Back beside that stream where he and Sarah had last sat alone, he knew she had inspired feelings in him he never expected to have again. They had come on incredibly quickly. But there was no denying them.

  You knew it when you felt it.

  Handon breathed in a sharp lungful of the crisp air, and exhaled it slowly.

  God, when it had looked for a minute there like he might actually have gained something, in the midst of all this loss… and then to have it taken away from him again so quickly, almost in the same hour… Life, he had been learning, was too hard to fight through alone. And that had been true before the fall, never mind now.

  Then again, whatever their losses, whatever Handon’s doubts, whatever horrific trials still lay ahead… still, they had done it. They had succeeded in the impossible mission. Dr. Park was safe down below, working on his data, even at that moment. They had a partial, workable vaccine. And because of what so many remarkable people had done, and sacrificed, the world still had a shot.

  But Handon also knew that his time for savoring this victory was already drawing to a close. This thing wasn’t over. They were going to have another mission to plan and execute – almost certainly to the interior of Africa. And it would be to a part of the dark continent that had been one of the most dangerous places in the world even before the zombie apocalypse happened. Once again, the odds against them were about to get stacked to the sky. And if it all tumbled over on them, there would be no mercy, no second chance, and no happy ending.

  Not for them. And not for the world.

  Handon knew he needed to be back in character, and back on form, for them to have any chance of making it happen.

  In his last moments of staring backward, at all that was behind them, he thought again of Sarah, and he remembered something Ali had said to him back in the bomber, shortly after they took off from that overrun airfield. He had been looking behind them then, too – looking out for someone who never appeared.

  “Don’t worry, top,” Ali said. “Sarah’s got our radio frequencies. We can pick her up later.”

  But, as he watched the Atlantic recede behind them, he thought:

  Later is passing us by.

  * * *

  Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick turned a bend in the passageway, and physically crashed into Emily, the rescued civilian girl who had turned up with Alpha. This pair who were perhaps more unalike than any two people on the entire carrier still seemed to have some inexplicable connection. After rebounding off each other, they each looked ahead and behind, finding that they were alone. Neither moved to leave.

  They stood for a few seconds in awkward silence.

  Fick had no idea why he was rooted to this spot. But he couldn’t stop looking at this girl. There was something about her – so small, and thin, and fair, and particularly frail. Like she was a flower, or the ghost of a flower. Then again, he also sensed underneath that a core that was very strong – maybe as strong as his own.

  Or, who knew, maybe he was just full of shit. When was the last time he talked to a civilian, never mind a teenage girl? Finally, just to make the silence go away, he said something. “So – you like it here?” This sounded ridiculous to him even as the words passed his lips, but she didn’t immediately erupt in laughter.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “A lot bigger than the old double-wide.”

  Fick inclined his head. “You grew up in a trailer?”

  “Some of the time. It’s definitely better here. More places to hide.”

  Fick paused, then went on despite his better judgment. “What did you need to hide from?”

  She hesitated a second herself before answering. “My mother’s boyfriends, mainly. Including my father.”

  Fick thought of his own old man, who was also a Marine, and who had been one scary dude. “Well, at least your father was around.”

  “He wasn’t, not really. Not most of the time.”

  Fick puffed down a little now, feeling slightly more at ease. He pressed the sheaf of papers he held up against his barrel chest and regarded the girl in the dim light. “Yeah. Mine, neither. He was almost always off on deployment. And that was after dragging us to some new garrison town, maybe fifteen in as many years.”

  Emily hugged her own elbows. “At least you moved. I was stuck in one shitty small town my whole life.”

  Fick dared half a smile. “Join the Navy. See the world.”

  Emily smiled, as well. “So we both had shitty childhoods.”

  Fick paused. Neither of them, in honesty, had any idea why the two of them, basically total strangers, were having such an intimate, personal conversation, standing alone in the bowels of the world’s last nuclear supercarrier. But many things just had to be taken as they came in the ZA. Finally, Fick thought, The hell with it – and nodded and agreed. “Yeah, well. My dad was an abusive asshole, anyway.”

  “Mine, too.” She looked at the ground, then raised her eyes up to Fick’s. “But they’re both gone. And we’re still here. The whole world ended, and we both made it somehow.”

  Fick regarded her. “Well, with us both being alive and all, maybe I’ll see you around.”

  “You can call me Em, if you want.”

  “Yeah? Well, you can call me Gunny, if you want.”

  VERY strange girl, he thought, sidling around her and scuttling off…

  * * *

  Ali was now sitting on Pope’s bunk – and finally going methodically through his sparse belongings. He’d always been very Spartan. And, true to form, aside from weapons and gear, he hadn’t brought much on this mission. There wasn’t much that was personal.

  On her walk back to Alpha’s area, she had p
assed by one of the Marines, whom she vaguely remembered from their briefing. He’d taken his hat off as he passed and said, “I’m sorry about the loss of your officer, Ainsley. And that black dude, with the knives. I’m sorry I forgot his name.” Ali had nodded and tried to smile. Now she thought about how quickly a person got devalued, how blurred into anonymity, across even two degrees of separation. To Ali, he had been a cherished friend and comrade. To this Marine, honestly trying to convey his sympathies, he was just “that black dude.”

  Ali had already pulled out all the knives from Pope’s footlocker. She figured she’d give the team dibs on them, and hang on to anything left herself. Part of her thought she should keep the collection together. But having them actually used by the team was probably the best way to honor him.

  Down beneath those, she found a letter – from a girl whose name Pope had never even mentioned. At least not to her. Nearby to that was a small picture – also of a girl she had never seen. Pope had always made himself completely available to Ali, and to everyone. But he had also been totally self-contained, self-enclosed. And, as she saw now, he had secrets that he never told. Not even to her.

  Beneath the knives, covered by some clothes, she found a little dog-eared paperback. It was Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. Ali had seen Pope flipping through it once or twice. But she didn’t know he took it down-range with him. She had never read it. From the back cover, she now learned that Frankl had been a survivor of Auschwitz during the Holocaust – and out of that had come his philosophy, and psychological practice, of finding meaning even in life’s worst circumstances.

  Ali could immediately see the relevance here. And so she read the little book in one sitting, alone there on Pope’s bunk.

  She found a lot of underlining around the section that said, essentially, sometimes all we could control was how we reacted to misfortune and suffering. And it was how we bore up to it that could still give our lives meaning. She wondered if maybe this was where Pope got his seemingly inexhaustible wellspring of professionalism and forbearance. He never seemed to have to work at it. It had always seemed easy for him – as had his amazing level of achievement, his skill and discipline and steadiness.

  But Ali had been around exceptional, self-made people for enough years to know that a lot of what passed for natural ability was in fact hard-earned and carefully honed. Particularly in the spec-ops world, what looked like effortless mastery was usually earned by years or decades of painstaking effort and commitment. That was the only way you got so far above the average.

  But then Ali remembered the thing about outlying statistics was that they usually regressed back to the mean. Ultimately, she thought, we all regress to the mean: silence, oblivion, eternity.

  As for finding meaning by bearing up to suffering, Ali felt like she had long sensed this, certainly since the fall. So, on one level, she felt validated. On another, though, it just made her sad. To think that was all that was left for them – choosing how to bear up to their suffering, loss, and terrible misfortune.

  And then again, she also had some familiarity with how humans reacted to disasters and extreme or catastrophic events – and how and why they survived them, or didn’t. These had been matters of some interest back at Delta. Research into it showed that survivors tended to have a few particular traits in common: dedication to an ideal or values… belief in their ability to meet challenges… the determination to exert every bit of control they possibly could over events… and the ability to perceive meaning in random chance – or, more often, to create their own meaning.

  Basically, survivors had a sense of purpose to their lives. And the belief that they could achieve that purpose.

  And it was perhaps because of these traits that humans, it seemed, could survive almost anything. Homo invictus – man unconquerable.

  And Ali now felt an unexpected wind of hope rise within her, bearing her up, and refusing to let her fall any further into despair. It almost seemed to speak in Homer’s calming voice. And it told her: maybe, if they held on and did their jobs for a little longer, there were miracles only a little out of sight, out ahead of them and just over the horizon.

  Maybe, just maybe, they could still fix all this. Maybe there was still time.

  Ali resolved to go out on deck again – but out to the prow this time.

  She wanted to see what lay ahead.

  * * *

  Wesley heard the scratching noise even before he stepped into the compartment. He opened the hatch, slowly, his hand instinctively on his handgun even though it was holstered. His nerves were still screaming from everything that had happened in the last few days, and more specifically the last few hours of that insane interval. A shower. That was what he needed above all things, but he didn’t know if he could handle standing still for even five minutes.

  As he opened the door, a pair of dark eyes stared back at him. Not those of the dead, thankfully. Everybody on board had been warned to be on the lookout for any wandering Zulus still left aboard, and there had been a number of full sweeps of the ship. Drake wasn’t trusting anyone.

  The dog sniffed the air and shuffled on its haunches, but just sat there, looking at him. It hadn’t been in the storeroom where he’d originally shut it in on their rush to the main hangar after boarding. Somehow the hatch had ended up open again, which confounded Wesley. It had a handle, and a latch, and there was no way a dog was going to get out, but somehow it had, and the room had been empty when he finally remembered his new furry friend. He tried to think back, wondering if he hadn’t shut it properly. It was possible, considering how much of a panic they had been in.

  That, of course, didn’t explain how the dog had ended up three frames down and behind another closed hatch, but as Wesley stepped into the room and let the door go, there it was.

  “So this is where you ended up,” he said, looking the dog in the eye. He was rewarded with a brief, quiet whine in reply, and the pretty black-and-tan German Shepherd stood up, ears pointed straight up, licking its mouth.

  “Oh. I guess you must be hungry?”

  The dog whined again, and scratched the floor with its front paws.

  “Come on, then. Let’s go to the mess hall and see if they’ll feed you.”

  The passageway was quiet as the two made their way around the corner and up the ladder to the next deck, but the mess itself was bustling with activity. Fifty or more people huddled around tables, cramming down food and drinking from plastic cups as they watched a news program on a television overhead, others queuing up at the far end, and taking their turns shoveling soup and bread onto their trays.

  Wesley was briefly confounded as to what could possibly be on TV, out in the middle of the Atlantic, and two years after the end of the world. But he quickly recognized it as one of the few remaining news programs from the UK. Somebody around here had somehow found the distant signal and tuned in to it. The picture and sound were staticky, but intelligible.

  A few puzzled glances followed Wesley as he walked the dog through the room, but then he heard a familiar Scottish voice calling to him, and Melvin pushed his way through the bustle.

  “You found the mutt, then?” he said, grinning. The man’s face was covered with bruises down one side, and Wesley was about to ask him how he’d got them when his attention snapped again to the TV.

  He couldn’t hear much over the din of the room, but he could see a reporter sitting in a helicopter, looking down upon some area of what was almost certainly the English countryside. There were crowds of people on the ground, running through open fields, and when the camera panned out he saw a lot of other helicopters in the sky – big military transports, Chinooks, he guessed – and others on the ground. Soldiers were pouring out of the helos and racing past the fleeing civilians. The camera swept across the field, showing flashes of gunfire.

  “Where is this?” Wesley asked, transfixed.

  “Somewhere in the south, I think. Outskirts of Canterbury,” said Melvin, turnin
g to watch the screen. “They got some deep shit going down there, all right. And from what I can tell, they’re struggling to contain it. Them’s the Paras going in, and that’s one big fist they’re smacking that place with.”

  As Wesley watched, hundreds of airborne troopers from the storied Parachute Regiment formed up into firing lines and started sweeping forward toward a distant crowd. He couldn’t make out if the crowd were rioting people, or zombies, but he presumed the latter. What he could make out, dotted infrequently along the line of helmeted soldiers, were distinct, maroon-coloured berets on some of the officers.

  Then the helicopter with the camera crew in it was also moving, distorting the view of the battle as it swept across a hundred feet of open field before swooping down again. The camera swung right, and focused in on another group of soldiers that appeared to be escorting a group of civilians across the field, and these guys were dressed differently, and looked far more beaten up. Underneath the live video feed, the caption changed from Airborne Troops Deployed to Counter Outbreak to Tunnelers Identified And Alive.

  “Tunnelers? Who the hell are they?” asked Wesley.

  Melvin shrugged. “I’m still trying to figure that one out. Apparently some sort of escape was made from the Channel Tunnel. People from France, but I thought the tunnel was collapsed.”

  “It was,” said Wesley, who was in a position to know. And as he watched, confused, the group of soldiers ushered the civilians onto one of the waiting Chinooks. The camera zoomed in, focusing on several different figures as they climbed into the helicopter. A tall, black man carrying an axe, a smaller, chubby guy, a young man with a head-wound, and finally a young woman, carrying a child.

  Wesley frowned. There was something familiar about the woman. She was covered in dirt, and her hair was tied back, but he still recognized her – something about her that he couldn’t place. That was, until she turned for the briefest of moments, and looked directly into the camera.