ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  ARISEN

  Hope Never Dies.

  First published 2017 by Complete & Total Asskicking Books

  London, UK

  Copyright © Michael Stephen Fuchs

  The right of Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  About the Author

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS is co-author of the first eight books of the bestselling ARISEN series; as well as solo author of Books Nine through Fourteen, and the prequels ARISEN : Genesis and ARISEN : Nemesis – which have repeatedly been Amazon #1 bestsellers in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, #1 in Dystopian Science Fiction, #1 in Military Science Fiction, #1 in War Fiction, and #1 in War & Military Action Fiction, as well as Amazon overall Top 100 bestsellers. The series as a whole has sold over a half-million copies. The audiobook editions, performed by R.C. Bray, have generated over two million dollars in revenue. He is also author of the D-BOYS series of high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include D-BOYS, COUNTER-ASSAULT, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming in 2018); as well as the existential cyberthrillers THE MANUSCRIPT and PANDORA’S SISTERS, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation). He lives in London and at www.michaelstephenfuchs.com, and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter (@michaelstephenf), or by e-mail.

  ARISEN

  BOOK FOURTEEN

  ENDGAME

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

  For humanity.

  PART ONE

  “But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is near… because these are days of vengeance, so that all things which are written will be fulfilled.”

  - Luke 21:20-22

  Fucked Again

  CentCom – Common

  The rich deep blackness of night.

  And the whole Earth submerged in darkness.

  Blackness cut only by the roiling hurricane wash of giant twin rotor-blades and the great dark body of a heavy-lift helo flaring in to land in an obsidian field. Sparse but fat drops of rain falling from a low sky, which glowed a dull orange from a light source unseen. CentCom was blacked out, or nearly so.

  But London was burning.

  This time Captain Charlotte Maidstone was first out of the aircraft – because fuck her shut-down checks. She reached the rear ramp even as it bit into the dirt, and the first survivors of the Battle for the Gap, as well as the flight from the Gherkin, began stumbling down it. She grabbed the first Royal Marine she saw, who happened to be Yap.

  “Who the fuck was it?” she said, her face inches from his, the first drops of rainwater dripping down both of them.

  “Who was what?”

  “Who fucking said everyone was already on board? When Jameson was still back there?”

  Yap, looking exhausted, just blinked slowly, rain dotting his dark eyelashes. When he finally spoke, his voice was without malice, neutral. “I don’t know who it was. It was complete chaos when we extracted that first time.”

  “WHO?”

  Yap exhaled. “The Para.”

  Charlotte waded through stumbling bodies, as they filed down the ramp into the dark of the Common like the walking dead themselves, until she finally found a beret that was maroon rather than green. She grabbed Elliot by his vest, hauled him off balance, and threw him bodily up against the outside of the airframe. Her face inches from his, she saw him just looking back at her – with eyes that briefly went wide, but then slackened again to normal. It was as if he were neither surprised, nor had any intention of fighting back.

  Good, Charlotte thought.

  She let him go, backed off two feet – then pivoted at the hips and caught him in the chin with a vicious right cross. Elliot’s head bounced off the fuselage with an audible bang. Charlotte grabbed his vest again, half holding him up, and moved her face back to within licking distance of his.

  “You ever do something like that again,” she said, her voice unsteady, “And I won’t punch you in the face. I’ll shoot you there.” When Elliot met her eye, he looked like he wished she’d do it. “And don’t ever call me for extraction again, or set foot on any aircraft flown by me. I swear to God I’ll throw you off it.”

  When she let him go, and looked away, it was pretty clear she never intended to look at that man again. Basically, he had tried to kill her family. And there was no coming back from that.

  She went to check on Jameson.

  * * *

  Ali stood at one of the blown-out windows up in the JOC as a few dim lights came on around the periphery of the helipad down below, and out on the Common. Miller stepped up beside her and answered her question before she asked it.

  “It’s not safe unloading the helo or shutting it down in the dark,” he said.

  “Ground crews not NVG-capable?"

  “They might be NVG-trained, but they don’t have actual NVGs. Almost no one here does. They all got requisitioned to Hereford, for use by USOC.”

  Ali could hardly complain about that.

  “Anyway, a few dim interior lights should be fine – the walls will mask them.” Miller paused. “Just as long as we keep the prisoner-escape spots on the walls turned off.”

  Ali smiled. “Yeah, that’d be good.”

  She turned and looked back out at the now faintly illuminated scene below and cocked her head. “Hey, who’s the mob of civilians?” She could see the surviving Tunnelers unloading along with One Troop. Not having watched a lot of local news lately, she didn’t recognize them. Then again, neither did Miller.

  “Search me. But that’s why we’ve got quarantine.”

  Ali nodded and turned away. “Do it.”

  * * *

  Jameson was just instructing Croucher – for the second time – to take the men to get properly fed, which they hadn’t been in days, when four armed RMPs in red caps marched up to them. “Sorry, sir,” said the one in the lead, a staff sergeant, overhearing him. “Canteen’s shut.”

  Croucher was opening his mouth to say he’d damn well open it for them, but was cut off by Jameson. “For how long?”

  “Until the end of time, I expect. Wouldn’t go in there.”

  Jameson shook his head. “Goddammit.” Fucked again.

  Croucher took a breath. “I’ll take the men to rearm instead.”

  “Yeah. No doubt there’s another mission cued up for us.”

  “Maybe the helo’s out of fuel.”

  “Wouldn’t count on it.”

  Jameson looked up to see the other three RMPs trying to corral and herd the Tunnelers – and their senior NCO getting into what sounded like an escalating argument with Hackworth. But Jameson couldn’t deal with that.

  “I’ll be in the JOC. Again.” Escape was an illusion.

  Croucher nodded. “Sir.”

  * * *

  “Last time the military quarantined us,” Hackworth said, a sharp edge in his voice, “they went on to fucking b
omb us – and caused the whole building to collapse around our ears.”

  “Pity, that,” the RMP staff sergeant said, not sounding like he cared how much of a pity that was or wasn’t. “Now you all have to come with us. And I mean right now.”

  “And if we refuse?”

  “The gate’s just there.” The RMP pointed off into the dark and rain. “We’ll be happy to see you out.”

  Hackworth shook his head and exchanged a very dark look with Colley. It said: Fucked again.

  Hackworth couldn’t believe it. In a highly emotional and dramatic moment, he’d convinced the Tunnelers to finally throw their lot in with everyone else left alive, to stop looking out only for themselves – to pitch in and put their shoulders to the wheel. And not only to commit their lives, but to put them at terrible risk. Hackworth had seen and heard Alderney pulled from the Wall screaming, then get half-eaten by the dead before being machine-gunned to death. They’d all worked like Pharaoh’s slaves carrying stones to the top of that doomed pyramid; then even picked up guns and fought, despite being utterly untrained and unqualified for it.

  All to help the same military that kept fucking them.

  But quarantine at least beat being back out there.

  “We’ve got injured,” Hackworth said, turning back to the RMP. And they did – several people bruised and scraped up from the truck crash.

  “We’ll get med staff to visit you in quarantine – believe me.”

  Hackworth shook his head again, still disbelieving. But here they were. And there seemed to be no choice. So they’d go.

  But then a shock of dark hair on a small body wormed her way to the front and popped out beside him. It was Amarie.

  “My daughter,” she said, her voice pleading.

  “What about her?” the RMP asked.

  “I left her here before, with an Englishwoman. She’s only a year old, her name’s Josie. Please, I’ve got to find her. I must. Please, where is she, please help me…”

  The RMP nodded his head rapidly and put his hand out, trying to calm her. “Okay, I’ll try and find out for you. But you lot have seriously got to get in quarantine now.”

  “What about these two, Staff?”

  The leader turned to see two young soldiers among the Tunnelers, one wearing the maroon beret of the Paras. “Huh. Dunno. They just said the civvies.” He guessed the Royal Marines could look after themselves – taking care of any of their own who looked the slightest bit infected. Presumably the soldiers were the same. Anyone left alive in uniform at this point was. “Okay, you two, come on – we’ll put you to work, probably on stag up on the walls…”

  The Para collapsed, dropping to the ground – out cold.

  The staff sergeant shook his head. “Right. Put that one in a guest billet, then, I guess.”

  They started moving the Tunnelers toward quarantine. Amarie couldn’t stop crying pitiably the whole way, her hysterical wailing marking their trail of tears.

  As all of them were swallowed up by the dark.

  Wesley’s Choice

  CentCom – Home Guard Command Post

  It was the scratching sounds that got to him.

  Wesley had heard enough moaning from the dead that it was basically like background noise at this point. The whole world was moaning. Unless it was moaning in your face, accompanied by bared teeth, you ignored it and got on with what you were doing. But now the dead were scratching at the base of the CentCom walls, incessantly. And somehow the sound of it transmitted through all that stone and up to his guard tower command post. And straight into his head.

  It was like fingernails on a blackboard. Or on a prison.

  Wesley sat at his desk with his face stuck in the tablet computer he’d cadged from CIC, reviewing the layout of the defenses again, trying to imagine weak spots – before they were conclusively revealed to be weak spots. He checked the power level on the tablet – still at 96%. It occurred to him the world might actually end before he needed to recharge this thing. It was amazing the progress they’d made with lithium-ion batteries in the last years before the fall.

  Much good it had done them.

  “Oh, this is doing my head in,” he finally muttered to himself, putting the tablet down and standing up. He needed to monitor the levels of dead outside anyway. That was kind of the point of having a forward CP; and it was a huge part of his job right now. At some point, his home guard of RMPs and random soldiers was going to have to resume fighting the dead. But that moment needed to be put off as long as possible.

  For now, hiding was a lot better than fighting.

  So when Wesley opened the door to the walkway and parapet that circled the guard tower on its outside, he pushed it open slowly and quietly – then crept out, and stuck just the top of his head over the railing to look down. It was nighttime, and gently raining, the sky totally socked in; and CentCom was nearly completely blacked out – the walls and guard towers definitely didn’t have a single light lit. But there was that strange orange glow that always seemed to blanket cities at night. And his eyes were also adjusted to the darkness, pupils only constricted enough to deal with the glow from the tablet.

  As he peered out, twenty feet directly below him, he could see the situation was similar to what it had been last time he checked. The dead up against the walls, shoving and stumbling stupidly into solid stone, only went three or four deep – and, much more importantly, only went one high.

  He knew all of that would change.

  But for now, with the cessation of firing, with the blackout, with everyone inside staying quiet, the dead didn’t seem to be flocking here any more quickly than they were spreading across the rest of south London.

  But even beyond that small bit of good news, and despite the fall of the ZPW in the north, Wesley found that his faith wasn’t exhausted yet. He’d heard they now had a working vaccine – what everyone had been fighting and dying and moving mountains to achieve, all this time, the objective of their great crusade. From the scuttlebutt, Dr. Park needed only to finish testing it – then fabricate millions of doses. And Wesley knew about the zombie-killing MZ pathogen that was also in production.

  Moreover, he had faith in London, and Londoners.

  Yes, the city was being overrun. But he just didn’t think it was going to go down as fast or hard as had every other major metropolis during the fall. It was not only that Londoners were tough, having survived the Blitz and all that. No – it was that they’d had warning. They knew what was coming. They knew how to hunker down, how to hide, and how to fight when necessary. Everyone knew a lot about the dead, about what they were facing. And how to survive.

  So while things were bad, very bad… Wes didn’t think this was quite the end. They had time. Not a lot – but a little.

  And they had hope. He did, anyway.

  And meanwhile he had his job to do. When he went back inside, an RMP was looking for him. “Evening, sir, sorry to trouble you. Don’t suppose you’ve seen a little girl, about one year old, wandering the base anywhere? Possibly with a woman and two boys?”

  Wesley’s expression instantly went slack. He had not only seen them, having found them cooling their heels in the SHQ lobby, but now he remembered for the first time since the invasion: he’d put them in the damned canteen – where he thought they’d be safe, safer than anywhere else. And the canteen had been the landing ground of the whole runner invasion. Oh, my God, he thought… “Who’s asking?”

  “Dunno. Some French bird. She’s fairly upset.”

  Now Wesley’s facial expression went totally inscrutable, as his mind raced. No… it’s not possible… There were a lot of French people in London – Kensington had always been overrun with them – and probably more recent arrivals who had made it here across the Channel before the fall. But, even as he considered the impossibility of it, he remembered seeing Amarie on that news broadcast they had picked up in the mess on the JFK as they crossed the Atlantic. The one that had showed the briefest glimpse of her face
as she was loaded onto a helicopter, fleeing the destruction of Canterbury. And now Wesley remembered something else.

  She’d had a small child with her.

  “Where is she?” he asked intently. “The French bird.”

  “Quarantine.”

  Wesley stepped outside again, this time onto the inner-facing stretch of the walkway. Looking out over the roofs of the prison and across the Common, he could just make out the quarantine building, practically on the other side of the complex. Then, peering down below, he could see more or less where the sealed-off canteen was, in one of the yards inside the prison walls.

  Finally, turning to either side, he looked up and down the battlements of the walls, where he could see his men positioned at intervals, standing their posts, enduring the rain and cold and the fear of what was coming – all of them faithfully doing their duty. And just below them… well, he could hear the scratching even better out here. Soon, and Wesley couldn’t have any idea when, those men above would be fighting the undead below, engaged in the last, most critical, perhaps most desperate fight of their lives. And they were going to need to be led.

  And it was Wesley’s duty to lead them.

  Now the call of that duty raged against the sudden and unexpected pull of love inside his chest. This was his first intimation that the two might not be compatible.

  And he didn’t know what to do.

  But as he stood there, frozen, he sensed something beneath even his dilemma, the two stark imperatives pulling at him from different directions. And it was fear. The fear that it really was Amarie in quarantine, that she was alive after all. Because he didn’t know how he would react if it turned out to be her. He didn’t know how he would explain why he hadn’t come to find her in Paris – why he had left her behind. He also didn’t know if he could take it if it wasn’t her, after this surge of hope. He didn’t know what any of it would do to his heart.