ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  “Damned Russian creased me. In an ambush in the open.”

  “Really. Small world.”

  “I suppose it is.” Jameson looked at the bandaged ring finger again. “No wedding band, I see.”

  “Nah. Never gonna happen now.”

  “One never knows. The world’s not over yet.”

  Fick exhaled. “You not married either?”

  “No.” He raised his cup. “Here’s to marrying the military.”

  Fick raised his. “Here’s to marrying our men.”

  Jameson drank, but his vision went long. “And to the ones who aren’t here.”

  “Yeah. To absent Marines.” Fick swallowed, the smoky Scotch warming all the way down. “I guess we may as well toast them now. Like you said…”

  “Yes,” Jameson said. He’d never actually said it, and neither of them had to: now was a safer bet than later. He raised his cup again. “To Briars and Lewis. Sergeant Elson, Rottes, and Johnson. Webb, Snipes, Thomas, and Nicks. Sergeant Travis. Akers. Younis.”

  Fick poured out a few drops on the wooden floor, then drank. He cleared his throat. “To Gunny Gilbert. Staff Sergeant Cartwright. Corpsman Milam. Day, Gifford, Master Sergeant Saunders. Blaylock, Flynn, Kemp, and Jeschke. And to the LT.” He paused to drink again, and Jameson followed suit.

  But Fick wasn’t done. “To Gunny Blane, and Sergeant Coulson. To Jenkins, Lawton, Corporal Raible. Patrick, Meyer. Swett, Dunham. Graves and Commiskey, Witek. Vorster. To Graybeard. To Sergeant Lovell. And to Brady and Reyes.”

  “Looks like you’ve got me beat,” Jameson said.

  “Looks like it,” Fick said. He looked into the deeply shadowed eyes of the other man. “You’ve got guys left.”

  Jameson sighed, more of a low moan, and put his hand on his forehead. “I just need to finish this thing. Bring it home.”

  “Yeah. Me, too.” It was obvious both men were exhausted. And also that neither had any choice but to carry on.

  “Well,” Jameson sighed, physically straightening up. “Expect it will be over in a day or two. One way or another.”

  “If not by morning.” Fick straightened also. “And, hell, I can do two days upside down with my head in a bucket of shit.”

  Jameson laughed. “You have a lot of colorful expressions.”

  “Actually picked that one up hanging out with Alpha team. I think it’s a Delta thing.”

  Jameson smiled. “I’ve heard they have an interesting sense of humor. Though I’m not sure the upside-down shit-bucket strategy doesn’t make things harder than necessary.”

  Fick grunted. “Yeah, well. Nobody ever said saving the goddamned world would be easy.”

  “No. Nor being a Marine.”

  “Yeah. I definitely never heard anybody say that.”

  “Semper fi,” Jameson said.

  “Per mare, per terram,” Fick answered. It was the motto of the Corps of Royal Marines: By sea, by land.

  Jameson rested his cup on his thigh. “Did you know the very first American Marines were recruited from the colonies to serve in the British Navy?”

  “I did know that,” Fick said. “Did you know they were actually called colonial marines?”

  “Seriously?” Both of them looked up at the sound of this voice, to see a newcomer’s head sticking in. It was blonde and female and belonged to SSG Kate Dunajski.

  “What do you want?” Fick asked.

  “Have either of you seen Baxter?”

  Fick grunted. “Have either of you heard of fucking radios?”

  Kate grinned. “Say again – all after ‘incinerators’.”

  Fick grimaced. “Get the fuck out of my CP.”

  She did.

  * * *

  Sarah Cameron walked alone through the dark of the dripping Common. And she had never felt so alone. Getting dismissed from Dr. Park’s security detail had been one of the heaviest blows she’d ever endured. Then again, she knew she had earned it. She had fucked up badly.

  And not nearly for the first time.

  When she had left Park and Aliyev, not to mention the vaccine and the MZ, in that Bio warehouse, she had believed it to be secure – and everyone there safe, the cavalry set to arrive in minutes. She had been proven wrong about all of that.

  And the world almost paid a terrible price.

  She didn’t know if it made it better or worse that she’d done it for love. Handon, the man she adored, and on whom she had finally focused her loyalties, had been in danger, and totally helpless. And she had saved him, when no one else could. But she knew it didn’t matter.

  And worse, she knew that’s exactly what he would tell her.

  She just couldn’t seem to get it right – this balance between love and duty. She thought she’d sacrificed her husband and, much worse, her son, in the cause of Alpha’s mission – getting Park and the vaccine out of North America, and saving the world. But no sooner had she done so than she began to wonder if it had really been necessary. If she could have done more to save them. And, worst of all, if her motives had really been as pure as she made out.

  She’d fallen in love with Handon – and vowed to be a source of support and strength for him, to always put his job, his team, and his mission first. But no sooner had they shacked up than she was getting friendly with other warriors on the JFK – including other men in Handon’s command. Creating drama, and distracting the Alpha team leader, unforgivably. For all she knew, it had been this distraction that had led to him being so grievously wounded in Somalia.

  For all she knew, it had also led to Henno’s death.

  It had been her desire to atone for her sins that forged her resolve to help Wesley’s shore mission in Jizan succeed, even if it cost her life. Maybe she had been hoping it would cost her life. And, after that, when she’d survived after all, the same desire to atone and make good inspired her to stay behind and hold that cargo deck while Sergeant Lovell and Simon escaped. But, after they were safely away…

  It had been her thoughts of Handon that had kept her going. He had made her want to live through all this. To do more, to be better, to be her best self. She put her hand to her stomach now, thinking of what was growing inside her.

  It was her love for Handon that had kept her alive.

  Now she genuinely had no idea whether love was the whole point of life. Or whether love was the enemy, maybe the devil itself, some trick of Satan’s, a ruthless exploitation of human weakness, designed to bring the whole world down.

  To engineer the final fall of man.

  She only knew that she had once again abandoned her post, her new downgraded and disgraced one, which was to stand watch on the walls. But she had to get back to Simon. She knew he had a new protection detail. But she couldn’t bear it, not being there to watch over him. However much she had screwed up, she still felt he was her responsibility, her job. And she was going to try to do it, to keep protecting him – even if it had to be from fifty feet away.

  She went to Bio first, but they said he was in a warehouse out on the far side of the Common. Going back out into the dark, she reached into her pocket for the night-vision monocular she had swiped from Handon’s belt at his bedside and scanned to the southeast. Seeing what was probably it, she put the monocular away, headed that direction, and soon saw it coming up ahead in the dark. When she pushed through the door, she immediately heard four words spoken in Oleg Aliyev’s heavy Slavic accent.

  “Absolutely nothing. We’re fucked.”

  That didn’t sound good…

  Carrier

  CentCom – Warehouse

  “That’s a full hour?” Park asked, yawning. The work lights in there didn’t change the fact that it was the middle of the night.

  “Yes,” Aliyev said, letting his hand and the watch on it drop, despair coloring both his voice and body language. An hour was how long he and Park had been sitting vigil, observing their Foxtrot test subject – waiting for the MZ to take effect. And that was also supposed to be the maximum time from exp
osure to final death – of both the victim, and the virus.

  Aliyev stepped up to the cut-out porthole in the closet door for another peek. “No disablement, not a trace of Kernig’s sign.” That was the telltale indicator of meningitis, when both the hip and knee flexed at 90-degree angles, and which Aliyev had observed many times in testing in his mountaintop lab. “Not even tremors or erratic behavior – well, no more erratic than usua— ahh!” He leapt away as the Foxtrot hurled its body against the door, and tried to squeeze its whole face through the small hole.

  “Fuck you, clown!” Aliyev said, giving it the bird.

  But it wasn’t the attack that was pissing him off. It was that he had failed. After all this. Now there would be no salvation for him – never mind for humanity. This had been his only chance at redeeming his immortal soul for what he’d done – namely killing the world. Though, putting it like that, it was obvious even to Aliyev that he probably didn’t deserve salvation. But he still would have liked to save the world.

  “After all this,” he muttered. “The shit doesn’t even work.”

  Park stepped up beside him. “Not necessarily. It might just mean the incubation period is longer on Foxtrots. It might have the same effect on them in the long run.”

  “Yes, well you know what John Maynard Keynes said.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “In the long run, we’re all dead. Only in this case, it’s not even the long run. It’s any fucking minute.”

  “There’s another possibility,” Park said.

  “What?”

  “That Foxtrots could be carriers.”

  Aliyev’s eyes went wide, and his mood immediately lifted. If that were true, if Foxtrots were carriers of the MZ infection – which meant they could infect others, without succumbing to it themselves – then that was even better!

  That would be fucking awesome.

  In the same way that a carrier of a disease was most dangerous to the living, going around infecting all and sundry, but never succumbing himself, not even giving any sign of being sick, so no one knew to stay away, an undead carrier of MZ would be a lethal menace to the dead.

  Aliyev turned and grabbed Park by the shoulders. “You said the whole point of Foxtrots is just running around infecting people, right? It’s perfect! This rules! We’ll build a Typhoid Mary battalion! A battalion of infected dead spies to infiltrate and kill the army of the dead!”

  Park frowned. “Don’t get your hopes up too soon. It’s just a theory. But it’s a hypothesis worth testing.”

  “Yes, we must,” Aliyev said, looking around wild-eyed. “We just need to chuck a bog-standard zombie in there, stir them around with a stick, and see if the new one gets infected! I’ve got a good feeling about this! Now – where do we get one?”

  “I’ll make it happen.”

  Both Aliyev and Park turned to see Sarah Cameron standing in the shadows.

  “I’ll come with you,” Park said.

  “Not a chance,” Sarah said. “Stay put. I’ll be back.”

  * * *

  Twenty-five minutes later, she was back – along with Fick, Jameson, two RMPs, and a writhing body in a PVC body bag. Sarah, Park, and Aliyev stood back and out of the way while the four others conducted the equally difficult and dangerous job of trying to get a Zulu into a closet with an enraged Foxtrot.

  Over the moaning, shrieking, banging, cursing, and shouts of warning, Park asked Sarah, “Did someone have to go outside the walls to get it?”

  “No,” Sarah said. “That was the beauty of it. Fick had one of the engineers rig a rope and pulley from one of the guard towers, and we just lassoed one on the ground. He even did a sandbag counterweight, so we didn’t have to haul it back up ourselves.”

  Aliyev said, “I thought they weren’t at the walls anymore.”

  “They’re not, really. But a handful are still wandering in our direction now and then. We just had to get the snipers to let one through.” She didn’t touch on the fact that one of those snipers had been less than thrilled to see her.

  The closet door finally slammed shut, Fick pressing his thick body against it, breathing hard from exertion and annoyance. “Now what?” he grunted, addressing the question to Park.

  “Now, as before, we watch and wait.”

  “Yeah?” Fick straightened up, also straightening his uniform blouse. “Well you two geniuses better wait fast.” With that, he marched out again.

  Sarah, Park, and Aliyev all looked at one another.

  They all knew Fick wasn’t wrong.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes after that, they had another visitor in their out-of-the-way warehouse. It was a tall and lean American officer, with two aides-de-camp in tow – the Colonel himself. He loped up fast and fearlessly, and looked from Park to Aliyev.

  “You two the pointy heads?”

  Park and Aliyev exchanged a look, and Park nodded.

  The Colonel didn’t introduce himself. He just said, “Heard you’ve got some kind of Foxtrot RAID in here. Came to see for myself. In there?” He nodded at the hole in the closet door.

  “Yes,” Park said.

  Aliyev hastened to add, “I wouldn’t get too clo—”

  “Mary mother of God on a Sybian saddle!” the Colonel shouted, recoiling from the door, as now two faces tried to squeeze out the small porthole, mouths gnashing, one moaning, the other shrieking at high volume.

  He looked again at Park and Aliyev. “Does the shit work?”

  The two exchanged another look. Park answered for them. “It works on Zulus. We’re testing now to see if Foxtrots are carriers, and can spread the pathogen faster.”

  The Colonel squinted and nodded. “Faster would sure be better. And you shouldn’t lack for Foxtrots.”

  “Is it bad out there?” Aliyev asked. He’d been told USOC had been out in the overrun countryside before arriving here.

  “It’s a goddamned Foxtrot rodeo,” the Colonel said in his twang. “More than I’ve ever seen – a lot more. And they’re multiplying fast. Running around like goddamned rabid dogs, going wild, biting and infecting everyone. It’s like the ZA’s in frenzy, can’t wait to finish this thing, doubling down. And if that many FNs reach our walls in force, frankly we’re all doomed. So I strongly suggest you complete your testing and get this shit weaponized.”

  Park said, “Roger that, Colonel.” He could read rank now.

  “Doomed,” the Colonel repeated, more quietly this time. “Okay. I gotta go.” But as he turned to leave, Park realized he didn’t look too great. But he guessed nobody looked great at this point, everyone exhausted to the point of tears.

  As the Colonel and his entourage exited, Park got a thoughtful look on his face, then snorted once in laughter.

  “What?” Aliyev asked. “What’s funny?”

  “Your chimera virus – smallpox plus myelin toxin.”

  Aliyev’s eyes went wide. “How in God’s name do you know that?”

  “A dying CIA analyst in Africa told me. His last act on Earth.”

  Aliyev didn’t know how to react to that.

  “But here’s the funny thing,” Park said. “He also told me your chimera virus didn’t become Hargeisa until it mutated – in the presence of rabies.”

  “Oh, really.” Aliyev squinted in thought. “That kind of makes sense. I guess. Whatever.” He had long noted the similarities between rabies and Hargeisa symptoms, specifically the confusion and aggression. At the same time, this wasn’t the sort of conversation he was real anxious to be having.

  Park nodded at the door. “The Colonel reminded me of that. When he said the Foxtrots were like rabid dogs.”

  Aliyev gritted his teeth. Evidently Simon wasn’t going to let it go. Fuck it. “Back in my lab, I wasted six months trying to develop a vaccine for Hargeisa, not that I was doing anything else.” He paused. “Well done to you, by the way.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I was such a dipshit back then I even thought a cure might be poss
ible. I tried all kinds of fucked-up things. Of course, I didn’t know rabies was literally implicated in the evolution of the virus. But I guess it was the aggressive behavior, the biting, all the spittle… something. So at one point I tried injecting some zombie test subjects with HRIG.”

  “HRIG?” Sarah asked. She was still there. Just hovering in the shadows.

  Park looked over at her and answered. “Human rabies immunoglobulin. It’s the shot that’s given after exposure to rabies. It inactivates and controls the virus until the vaccine can begin to work.”

  “The one that saves your life,” Sarah said.

  “Yes,” Aliyev said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “What was the result?” Park asked.

  “What was what?”

  “The result of the HRIG exposure.”

  “Oh. Right. Spectacular failure. Not only was there no therapeutic effect. In fact it made them more agitated and aggressive.”

  Park cocked his head. “More aggressive how?”

  “The dead actually started attacking one another.”

  Park and Sarah turned in and looked at each other – then back out at Aliyev. He opened his mouth. Nothing came out. Then he said, “But it was mostly just shoving and clawing – not enough to do any real damage.”

  Then Sarah said, “But you also said you’d never seen Foxtrots before. The incredibly violent and aggressive ones.”

  Aliyev opened and closed his mouth again. Then he said, “Yeah. No. Only the stupid slow ones.”

  Park looked at Aliyev. “You don’t think…?”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Come on.”

  “Where are you going?” Sarah asked, running to follow.

  “Med wing,” Park and Aliyev answered, in unison.

  * * *

  That same good-looking and well-spoken doctor, still wearing scrubs and his Royal Army Medical Corps surgical cap, turned around from the med wing’s tiny dispensary and held out a single glass vial between thumb and forefinger.

  “That’s it?” Aliyev said.

  “Well, that’s the treatment – one dose of HRIG followed by four doses of rabies vaccine. And this stuff is expensive – more than a thousand pounds a dose. Didn’t imagine it would come up at all in here. Also, St. Thomas’s is twenty minutes away by ambulance.”