ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  Or possibly anyone’s.

  That was when he had ordered some RMPs into the aircraft hangar to clear it before the arrival of the relief command element from the north – and then the whole hangar had gone up in a cataclysmic explosion, which took out not only the helos with the replacement commanders in them, but pretty much their entire reserves of aviation fuel – as well as their pilots.

  So it wasn’t something Simmonds was especially delighted to be reminded of. But, then again, Jameson had punctuated the comment with a wink. So maybe he had just been taking the piss. Or so Simmonds hoped. Mainly, he hoped that by this point he’d redeemed himself for that egregious fuck-up – if not with his performance in Moscow, then by saving the French girl who Jameson seemed to be friendly with, back at the ZPW.

  Or maybe even that wasn’t enough.

  Maybe he still had something to prove. Maybe one more successful job and the hangar episode would be forgotten.

  “Keep up!” Croucher barked.

  Simmonds picked up his pace to comply. As much as he wanted to favorably impress the major, he was even more scared of pissing off the colour sergeant. But then, when they were nearly at the door that would admit them to the interior of the prison, his hopes of putting the hangar episode behind him were dashed.

  Two RMPs fell in beside them in the rain, also running.

  “Yeah, what?” Croucher said.

  “Orders to escort you to the armory.”

  “Fine,” Croucher said, pulling open the door for the others. “Don’t get in our way or slow us down.”

  The first RMP gave Croucher a nasty look, but ducked inside, weapon up. However, the second one stopped and looked Simmonds in the eye. “Oi,” he said. “Wasn’t you the one who sent Mann and McDonough into that aircraft hangar?”

  Simmonds just looked back at him, wide-eyed.

  “Those two were gods to us junior enlisted. They kept everything together. And we never even found their bodies. You’re a son of a bitch.”

  Simmonds couldn’t find any words.

  But Croucher sure could. Viciously shoving the RMP through the door, he growled, “Shut the fuck up, you red bell-end, or I swear I will fucking end you.”

  Simmonds started breathing again. Suddenly he didn’t fear the colour sergeant – instead he wanted to kiss him.

  Croucher clapped him on the shoulder.

  And then he shoved him inside, too.

  The four disappeared just ahead of the suddenly increased sounds of firing and shouting up on the walls – and the living and dead bodies tumbling off it into the yard.

  The door swung closed.

  Stick This In Your Ass

  CentCom – NW Guard Tower

  Homer hit the tower on the far right of the north walls at the same time as Ali, dripping on the previously dry floor inside. He smiled. In sync as usual. His two lab techs were a good thirty seconds behind him. Despite carrying nearly fifty pounds less crap, they couldn’t keep up.

  Ali gave the paintball rifles a baleful look as Homer put them on a desk. He then ducked out onto the front walkway, where he could see two shooters through the glass. The walkway had an overhang, so the two were still dry, and they turned out to be Kate and Baxter, who Homer gathered to be the sole survivors from Triple Nickel, and neither of whom he’d seen since the hangar back in Djibouti. He hadn’t recognized them in the dark and from behind. He saw both wore NVGs, four-barrel ones. Homer didn’t know the SF ODAs had gotten the $65k devices, but maybe they had, or maybe the scavenging was good in the Horn of Africa. God knew enough Tier-1 guys had operated there.

  These two were taking measured shots with their rifles on incoming dead out at about 100m. They were also both shooting suppressed, so it was quieter here than at the center of the north section of wall, which was good.

  To their right, Homer belatedly noticed an emplaced M240, or rather the equivalent British GPMG, with boxes of belted ammo stacked beside it. But for some reason it had no crew. That was also probably good. They were far enough out on the flank that their sector was relatively quiet. Homer wanted to keep it that way, and a medium machine gun banging away would quickly make them a center of attention.

  “Hey, guys,” he said, putting hands on Baxter’s and Kate’s shoulders. Both turned in and nodded at him. “This just became our sniper OP. And you two are on security.”

  “Check,” Baxter said, making Homer smile. He knew the young analyst had spent a lot of time with SEALs, in the CIA safehouse in Hargeisa. He looked down at a big protrusion on Baxter’s hip. “That Jake’s MP7?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Saving it for close action, huh?” The young man was shooting a modestly customized M4 rifle, with suppressor.

  “Saving the ammo, anyway.”

  “Brits don’t have any four-point-seven.”

  “Nope. Scoured the armory.”

  “Yeah, it’s a tough ticket,” Homer said. He noted Kate had a beautiful SCAR Mk 20 Mod 0, but he was out of time for banter about weapons.

  “You’ll just feel a little pinch.” The was one of the lab techs, both of whom had emerged from inside and were now stabbing Kate and Baxter in their asses with syringes.

  “Ouch,” Kate said, her mouth open. “That what I think it is?”

  Homer said, “Try not to get bitten for eight hours.” He stepped out of the way as the techs headed out down the wall, and Ali stepped out with the paintball rifles, tossed him one, then rubbed her own backside with her free hand. But even as Homer caught it, his attention was drawn by some drama to their left, from the center of the line. It wasn’t ramped-up firing, but rather shouting, screaming – and stampeding.

  It looked like a breakthrough.

  He knew they had to ignore it. They had a job to do.

  But they also had to keep the breakthrough off them. “Baxter, Kate,” he said, his voice suddenly crisp. “Pivot left.” They instantly got it, moving around to where the wall and its parapet met the guard tower. But when they got there, it wasn’t dead running at them, but fleeing living – a couple of RMPs, but mainly random British soldiers, some of whom had dropped their rifles. At the front were the two lab techs, clutching their syringe cases. They hadn’t made it far.

  Baxter looked back at Homer.

  “Security,” Homer said, “means secure this position – against all threats. Not those two.” He physically pulled Kate and Baxter apart to let the two techs back onto the tower walkway, then pressed them together again.

  Homer turned back to Ali. She flipped down her own helmet-mounted four-barrel NVGs, then raised the paintball rifle to her shoulder, looking like the world’s best spec-ops sniper had just been given a suction-cup dart gun.

  Nonetheless, she leaned out over the railing.

  And she took aim.

  * * *

  Lord, all I ask is that you don’t send me any help.

  Pred was having an even harder time battling through the spawning salmon toward the breakthrough, since he took up the whole walkway himself. He was slightly tempted to try to rally the troops, but knew it would be more time-efficient, not to mention less annoying, to just deal with the incursion himself.

  But his pincer move with Juice was being seriously slowed.

  Finally he got a look at the runners on the rampart chasing off the conscripts, and dropped the first by threading the needle with a headshot through what looked like the start of the New York marathon. He had most of the slack out of his trigger to hit the second when a soldier’s head bobbed into his sight picture. By the time it cleared, the runner had reached him, and was opening its mouth to chomp down on the arm of another soldier trapped beside it.

  Pred inserted his rifle barrel between the two and slung the runner off the wall into the prison yard like a cliff-diving champion. It flew thirty yards through the air, trailing rainwater, and disappeared into the gloom below.

  “Thanks,” the soldier said, rubbing his arm. “But are you crazy – knocking them inside the wal
ls?”

  “Hey, man, believe me, we want the meat pile on this side. Plus the QRF down there can deal with it.” Pred raised his rifle toward the point of the breakthrough, looking for other targets. He realized he’d totally forgotten about the Royal Marines in the center. These two runners must have slipped past them; but with them on one side of the breakthrough, and Juice on the other, they’d handle it.

  The soldier was still looking down into the yard. “What about the infection risk?”

  Pred lowered his rifle. “Hey, just exercise a little willpower and don’t lick the bodies, and you should be okay.”

  * * *

  “Hold up,” Homer said.

  “What?” Ali said, lowering the paintball gun again.

  “Aliyev thinks we need to try to hit Foxtrots. I think he may be right. They’ll infect more, faster, farther out.”

  “Fine.” She started to raise the rifle again.

  “One last thing. I know the paintball gun’s a joke. But what it’s loaded with isn’t.”

  “I know.” She knew. It was perhaps their best, and only truly effective, weapon for fighting the dead. It was also probably their last and only chance to stop or at least slow them, before they infected or ate the very last remnants of the living – before the vaccine could take effect.

  That was probably why she was annoyed, actually – that their last best hope had to be deployed in such a clumsy way, with a rifle used by teenaged boys, rednecks, and corporate drones on team-building weekends.

  Two British soldiers clambered up the stairs, and stuck their heads out onto the walkway.

  “What do you need, guys?” Homer asked.

  “We need to get that machine gun up. Fick said it had better be down because the stairwell here had already been torn out – and that if we didn’t get it up anyway, he’d build a new stairwell to personally throw us down.”

  Homer smiled. Yeah, that sounded like Fick. But they still needed this position to be low-profile, not a center of attention, even at the risk of hurting the defense. What they were doing was the only real defense, in the end. He looked over to where the two lab techs were cowering, waiting until it was safe to go out and vaccinate people on the walls. “Not just yet,” he said. “Why don’t you escort one of these guys down into the yard to vaccinate the QRF?” They nodded, and one of the techs, the woman, followed them down the interior stairs.

  Homer faced out again as he heard the single thwack of the paintball gun going off – followed by:

  “Goddammit.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  * * *

  Fick saw Predator’s flying runner rag-doll go into the wet ground face-first at high speed, more like a dirt-diver than a cliff-diver. It didn’t land at his feet, but it was close enough for him to double-tap it in the back of the head, before it got itself organized to get up and moving again. He finished dealing with it before any of the RMPs in his QRF even saw it.

  The thirteen of them were running around the north yard in nothing like formation, playing whack-a-mole with dead tumbling off the wall from the breakthrough in the center right. More disturbingly, they’d also had to kill two British soldiers in wrestling-and-biting matches with dead latched onto them when they both hit the ground. Their only solace was that, between the falls and the bite wounds, those guys were in pretty ragged shape by the time Fick’s men got to them.

  It made it a little easier.

  After smoke-checking this one, Fick scanned the area and started to move out, trusting his guys to follow. But one of them touched him on the shoulder. “Should we be leaving the bodies lying around? What about the infection risk?”

  Fick grunted. “Keep it in your pants and you won’t get infected.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  That sounded to Fick like a formal invitation to a better and more horrifying insult. He was very happy to oblige. “Now, I’m sure you crumpet-stuffing redcoats don’t get to fuck as many dead guys as you’d ideally like, but don’t worry – there’ll be plenty lying around before this thing is over. Also—” and he turned half away as a woman in a white coat scurried up and jabbed him in the right buttock “—stick one of those in your ass first. You’ll live longer.”

  He pulled security while his QRF got vaccinated, scanning the tops of the walls for falling bodies. At this point, it was only destroyed ones coming down, and only from one spot.

  But then that spot started exploding.

  * * *

  Having dropped two runners himself, and unfortunately having to bodycheck a handful of living out of his way – taking care to keep them from tumbling off the slick walkway into the yard – Juice met the Marines in the middle.

  Or the spot where the breakthrough was, anyway.

  He and two or three of the Marines – the walkway wasn’t wide enough for any more – were now methodically putting down dead still coming up the hanging meat ladder on the outside of the walls and pouring over the top. But the real problem was the ladder, and Juice knew somebody had to deal with it. His mind raced through a few options before realizing he was going to have to do it low-tech and old-school.

  “Hey!” he shouted across at the Marines. When he got their attention, he held up a grenade with the hand he wasn’t firing with, and said, “I’m gonna have to degrade that pile!”

  “Roger!” one of them shouted back.

  Juice presumed he wouldn’t have to tell them to cover up.

  The trick here was he was going to have to do it a chunk at a time – and he was going to have to cook the grenades off very precisely, in order to make it work. He pulled the pin, popped the spoon, and started a three count – hoping he remembered correctly the British grenades had a four-second fuze – then slam-dunked it over the parapet into the face of the first dead guy hanging there, then ducked down.

  It went up, spraying meat, thankfully outward.

  “Hey,” the same Marine shouted. “What about a satchel charge, or some rockets or something?”

  “Nah,” Juice shouted back. “Too high a risk of destabilizing the structure of the walls.” As bad as it was having a meat slope on the other side, having no walls at all would be worse. He stuck his head over for a look – solid progress, as evidenced by the fact that no more were scrambling over.

  But as he popped the spoon on the second one, he had to correct himself – a Foxtrot didn’t so much as scramble up as soar over, clearing the parapet by a good couple of feet. Juice tracked it with his rifle in an arc like a clay target, then remembered he had a live grenade in his hand.

  Screw it, Fick’ll take that one.

  He tossed the grenade over and covered up.

  * * *

  “No luck?” Homer asked. He was being whimsical, and knew Ali knew this. The one thing she never relied on, certainly when shooting, was luck.

  Ali took a breath. “It’s hard enough to make headshots on these damned things with an actual long gun.”

  Homer remembered Fick’s comment from their first briefing on the carrier that “only dead-eye dicks with ice water in their veins” could make headshots on Foxtrots. As he was thinking this, Ali shot the paintball gun again, and then a third time.

  And she cursed out loud again.

  “Is it the low muzzle-velocity?” he asked. What he meant was, however perfectly she shot, at 300 feet per second, the round took an age to get there – and by that time the Foxtrot’s face would be somewhere else.

  “Yeah, that, plus the inherent inaccuracy. It’s everything.”

  Homer got it. They both knew that in the movies, an elite soldier will go play paintball with some civilians and take out everyone on the opposing team in five minutes with perfect headshots, because he’s that damned good. But in reality, a shooter’s accuracy is strictly capped but the accuracy of the weapon. A 100-MOA (minute of angle) rifle will never be more accurate than 100 MOA, no matter who’s wielding it.

  And now they were down to five MZ paintballs.

  * * *


  “Jesus,” Juice barked over his shoulder. “That smarts.”

  He’d just let his last grenade go and popped over the parapet to check the results. Meat demolition was fiddly work, requiring precision and care. But he’d gotten it done. The hanging and piled bodies were gone.

  The breakthrough had been sealed.

  And evidently things seemed safe enough in this sector for a dude in a white coat to come out here and jab him in the ass with a surprisingly painful injection. “Sorry,” the man said. “You’re part of Alpha team, right?”

  “Yeah, man. Why?”

  “Got orders to vaccinate Alpha and the Royal Marines first. Know where I can find the others?”

  “Yeah, hang on.” He hit his radio. “Hey, Pred, brother, what’s your status in that sector?”

  “Stable-ish.”

  “Good. Got a guy here who wants to stick something in your ass.”

  “Yeah? Tell him I’ll shoot him if he comes near me. I think he looks infected.”

  “Come on,” Juice said to the tech. “I want to see this.”

  Four minutes later, they had fought their way through the bodies, dark, rain, and fighting to the other end of the line.

  “Oh,” Pred said, seeing them both and suddenly getting it.

  As the lab guy injected him and withdrew the needle, Pred took a deep breath and exhaled it, slowly. And no one else caught this – but Juice could see the tension leaking out of his body. In a single instant, his best friend’s longstanding worst nightmare – turning before he could top himself, then with his outrageous size and strength becoming a terrible danger to his teammates, the people who meant most to him in the world – was finally over.

  Or would be in a few hours, when the vaccine took effect.

  “Do me a favor and don’t get bit for eight hours,” Juice said.

  “Hey, no problem. I can do eight hours upside down with my head in a bucket of shit.”