ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  Below and to their right stood the lone figure of Charlotte – siphoning fuel out of that parked Puma, to put in the Fat Cow, so she might have a better chance of extracting the other mission. The Puma was smaller and more agile than the Chinook, but like Ali she preferred the aircraft she knew – or, rather, the one she knew would fly, with all the mechanics dead and everything.

  Otherwise, Fick and Wesley were alone – now that Park and Aliyev had gone back to Bio, Jameson to his men, Miller to the JOC, and Elliot back to practicing sniping in the OP – and they stood side-by-side as the dual wind storms from the two launching aircraft whipped at them. It had barely settled when both looked up to see two more armed figures trotting up from out of the darkness. It was Wheeler and Savard, the two Charlie team guys from USOC. Fick just looked at them expectantly, plus pre-annoyed.

  Without preamble, Wheeler said, “The Colonel’s dead.”

  “What?” Wesley said. “How?”

  “Got himself infected, probably in the close action when we set that perimeter out front. Took care of it himself.”

  Wesley looked aghast. “But we’ve got the vaccine now.”

  “Too late for him.”

  “And the serum…”

  “What serum?” Savard asked.

  “Never mind,” Wesley muttered. There was no point now.

  “So guessing you guys are in charge now?” Wheeler said.

  “Guess so,” Fick replied. If he was upset to hear the Colonel was dead, he was doing a good job of hiding it. Though none of them actually thought he was hiding anything.

  Wheeler produced a Colt .45 pistol, a classic 1911 frame, and proffered it to Fick. “This was the commander’s.”

  “Nah,” Fick said. “I already got one of those.”

  Wheeler turned to Wesley instead, looking down at the M9 on his leg. He said, “Never rely on a handgun in any caliber that doesn’t start with a four.”

  “Misha might disagree,” Wesley said. The Charlie guys just looked at him blankly. “Russian bloke. Had a Desert Eagle, a giant fifty-cal.”

  Fick spat. “Misha can bob on my giant fifty-cal.”

  Wesley took the .45, mainly just to be polite.

  Savard tossed his head at the airstrip. “The noise of those aircraft won’t slow the return of the dead any.”

  Fick shrugged. “It’s the goddamned ZA. Pick your poison.”

  Wheeler said, “All the same, we’d better get back up on the walls.” As he turned to go, however, Fick snatched something from one of the loops on his vest. It was a tan cigar tube.

  “Hey,” Wheeler said. “Gimme that back.”

  “Why? I’m pretty sure you got it off the same dead man as the Colt.”

  Wheeler grimaced. Fick had him there. Still he said, “You dirty thieving leatherneck.”

  Fick smiled his scary smile. “You can always take it back.”

  For a second Wheeler looked like he was considering fighting Fick for it. But he finally just shook his head. “Your lucky day, devil dog. It’s Cuban, too.” The two USOC men trotted off into the darkness.

  Wesley said, “Who was on those two aircraft?”

  “Alpha team.”

  “And where are they going?”

  Fick just tossed his head at the walls. “Out there.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “To save us all,” Fick said. “Come on.”

  Wesley wondered what it would be like out there. But he didn’t ask. Instead he just followed Fick and let the silence return.

  They both knew it wouldn’t last.

  PART TWO

  “Today – this day – will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about. I will lay siege to the gods and shake up the world.”

  – Seneca

  Spirit of The Blitz

  London – Moorgate

  “Never thought it would come to this,” whispered Richard Chetwynd-Talbot, as he stared around the wide bank of six escalators, all of them disabled, across the grand and spacious and very dark lobby, and finally out the glass front of the building – at the chaos engulfing London beyond.

  He was hiding there with a group of nearly fifty other people, almost all of them employees in the financial sector of London – currency traders, risk advisers, portfolio managers, accountants, office support staff, IT guys, cleaners… but all of them now just terrified human beings, cowering out of the storm, hoping to survive the end of the world.

  Or even stay alive another hour.

  “Oh, I saw it coming all along.” This was said by the woman crouching beside Richard, who he knew only by her first name, Nicola. A third his age, wearing a skirt-suit that probably cost £1,000, and straw blonde hair so expensively conditioned it glowed, she was, he figured, either a bond trader or private equity. Something that required a killer instinct.

  Either way, she was a very different creature from him.

  Richard had worked as a policy analyst at the nearby Bank of England his entire career – almost sixty years. He was well past retirement age, but had so far avoided being put out to pasture. And even when he started there as a young man, he’d been a relic from another age – like a daguerreotype of a Victorian gentleman in three-piece tweed suit, with bowler hat and umbrella. He still wore some of those same suits from decades past, and they still fit. Probably unlike many Victorians, he was still a marathoner in his early eighties.

  Now the two of them seemed to be unlikely partners, somehow having gathered a large flock of lost and terrified ducklings around them. Like two strangely opposite poles, each must have given off a vibe of competence and leadership – but in two very different frequencies.

  “How did you see it coming, then?” Richard asked.

  Nicola shrugged. “It’s been a Darwinian struggle all along, the strong eating the weak. This is just the last stage.”

  Richard’s soul sagged to hear a young person speak like that. He was just old enough to remember the Blitz on London in the early days of the Second World War, as a tiny boy, and hearing the stories about it in the years after. Back when everyone had pulled together, when shared adversity made them stronger – and strengthened their bonds to one another.

  When struggle and danger had made them most human.

  And London, where he had lived his whole life, had always been a humane, civilized, and compassionate place, welcoming of struggling and striving people from everywhere. Throughout World War Two, when Europe was overrun by Hitler’s hordes, London had welcomed Poles, Danes, everyone – even the French. That last thought made Richard smile, despite everything happening now.

  Much later, after the fall, with Britain being the last bastion of humanity, once again it had taken in survivors from everywhere. After the initial lockdown and quarantine, they had welcomed those who had fought their way there, from points across the globe. They weren’t going to allow themselves to be swamped by the initial waves of the panicked and infected, with the dead right on their heels. But they also weren’t going to turn their backs on the desperate, the brave, the still living, who had somehow made it to their shores.

  London, which had always somehow seemed to contain the whole world, was now truly a microcosm of all humanity.

  But now it was also falling apart. And it was starting to look like it was every man for himself, after all. This was almost worse than the calamity befalling them, being overrun by the dead and killed. Everyone died. But you had to choose to give up your humanity, your compassionate human spirit, your connection with everyone else alive.

  “This isn’t really the spirit of the Blitz,” was all Richard finally said, regretting that he sounded like the old curmudgeon he feared he had become.

  Nicola just shrugged. “It’s different this time.”

  “Yes,” Richard said, his voice and pronunciation like a cross between a BBC announcer and an Evelyn Waugh character. “There are no bombs falling from the sky.”

  “There also wasn’t a two-million-man army of the dead pouring into L
ondon last time. Hitler’s jackboots never touched British soil. And even if they had, and had taken London, they just would have put up a bunch of Third Reich flags and imposed a government of occupation. They wouldn’t have killed everyone to the last man, woman, and child, or turned them into flesh-eating freaks to devour their own family and friends.”

  Richard did take her point. The Blitz had required courage and sacrifice to bear up against. But the imminent fall of London to the walking dead seemed to inspire a panic almost impossible to resist.

  But, no, he thought. I don’t buy it. One can always resist.

  “Come on,” Nicola said, rising out of her crouch. “If we’re going to make it to Finsbury Square, we’re going to have to get back out there. It looks clearer now than it was.”

  That much Richard agreed with. Together, the pair silently motioned the group forward and led them across the huge lobby, out onto Moorgate, and then to the north. Richard had only his umbrella to defend himself with. But then again, it was stout sugar-maple wood with a brass tip, custom-made by James Smith and Sons, a shop on New Oxford Street that really had been there since the Victorian era. And he knew the vast majority of their group had less than that, or nothing. Still, he kept a sharp eye out for the dead – particularly the runner packs that had chased them off the street in the first place. He was ready to fight, or hide again, as necessary.

  Almost as soon as they emerged, the rain started pelting them again. Richard was slightly tempted to put up his umbrella. But it was a lot more valuable rolled up as a weapon against the dead than open against the rain.

  But it wasn’t the dead that found them this time.

  Instead they heard the sound of gunfire – the loud, deep, steady roar of machine guns.

  And the sound was coming toward them fast.

  Richard scanned the shadows for a way off the street.

  * * *

  Jamie raised his rifle to his shoulder and took aim as they blasted up the road toward London Wall, the rain starting to hit hard on his face. He could just see the last of what looked like a big group of civilians scurrying into one of those five-foot-wide alleys they had in the ancient and twisting back streets of this crazy old place, where all the posh bastards got richer just by moving money around.

  But he lowered his weapon again.

  He could see the people weren’t armed. Unfortunately, Reg also saw the tail end of them, or saw something, from his position in the ring turret. He was there manning the minigun, which seemed to make him think he was a harder man than he was, or bolstered his insecure leadership of the group, or something. They had a minigun because they were riding in a Husky armored vehicle, which used to belong to the British Army – a seriously dench ride in the post-Apocalypse.

  “Oi,” Reg said. “What was that?”

  “Fuck all,” Jamie said. “Just runners.”

  “Why didn’t you shoot?”

  Jamie snorted. “You’ve never been a trooper. Ammo doesn’t grow on trees, geezer.”

  Reg scowled back at him, then looked forward again as their armored vehicle blasted by the alley, leaving it and the civvies behind. The Husky was only the first, and most impressive, of a convoy of six vehicles the group had in their possession now. Sitting in the open bed in back, Jamie watched the rear of Reg’s head for a few seconds. Their self-appointed leader clearly had no time for a former squaddie who had gotten drummed out of the Army anyway, and definitely didn’t want him telling him how things were.

  Still, Jamie was glad. The fact was, they had plenty of ammo at this point. And Reg probably would have vittled up the civilians just for target practice. Or the fun of firing the minigun, which for him was like the biggest pint glass any pub brawler ever had. The rest of them, about thirty-five in all, now had a lot more guns than any Brits on civvy street ever did. After they hit that relocation center and killed the soldiers there, they ended up with a lot of military-grade firepower. And it had only been growing since.

  Jamie shook his head. Killing those soldiers had been a river they couldn’t cross back over. But the squaddies had fired first, or some of them had. Jamie and the others were really defending themselves. But then later, at that checkpoint on Charing Cross Road, when Reg had shot that young Rupert, already badly wounded and lying on the ground, begging for his life… well, Jamie hated officers as much as any squaddie, but murdering them in cold blood was a bit much.

  Still, there was no denying that Reg was keeping them alive, mobile, and awash in supplies, weapons, and ammo. Or being part of this group was keeping Jamie alive, anyway. He didn’t fancy being cast out of it. Still, with London breached and going down, he figured looting and marauding could only get them so far. How long could they survive on their own?

  Then again, maybe no one was going to survive this.

  And they would at least hang on longer than anyone else.

  “Oi,” Reg said. “Look at that!”

  Jamie followed his finger toward the glowing darkness of the rain-swept sky – just in time to see what was clearly two parachutes coming in over the building tops on either side of Moorgate, visible as they passed through the lights of some buildings. They were gone in seconds, but they were unmistakable.

  Reg got on one of the radios they’d taken off the dead soldiers – and which Jamie’d had to teach him how to use – and ordered two of the vehicles to go that direction and find out what was going on, “if maybe it’s the Paras goin’ in.”

  “And what about us?” Jamie shouted into the turret.

  “Spitalfields Market, innit,” Reg said. “Should be good bumpf there, ’specially munch and bevvies.”

  Smashing, Jamie thought. That’s all we need is Reg pissed.

  But he had no say in it. He could stay or he could go – and he wasn’t even too sure he’d be allowed to leave. He knew he wouldn’t last long if he did. And as he grabbed on to a roll bar to keep from being thrown out, and lightning crashed overhead, their giant truck and the three smaller ones behind peeled away down a street to the right.

  Toward their next conquest.

  Into The Storm

  2,000 Feet Over the City of London

  Aside from the fact that they were flying a total of about six miles in a turboprop aircraft, Charlotte hadn’t even been kidding when she said they had only enough fuel to take off and land again. So, with Pred’s help, Juice had about four minutes to rig up the cargo chutes on his robots – and also program their initial waypoints using his forearm-mounted control unit. Particularly with only two of them, the bots were of little use if they weren’t carefully positioned to protect the two human members of the team.

  “These two toasters have call signs?” Pred asked.

  Juice pondered, then patted one. “Gordon.” Then the other. “Shughart.”

  “How the hell do we tell them apart?”

  Juice grimaced, but pulled a sharpie from a vest loop and drew a quick mustache on the sensor dome of the second one.

  “They both had ’staches,” Pred protested.

  “Randy’s was bigger,” Juice said.

  But then they were out of time – a fact brought home when the blacked-out cabin of the Dash 8 lit up with a brilliant flash through the porthole glass, and Hailey came up on their radios. “Hey, you human JDAMs in back, we’ll be over your drop zone in one – and you also need to exit the aircraft before I fly this dubious hunk of bush plane into a lightning bank.”

  Juice touched his radio. “Copy that.”

  “On the upside, we don’t have to worry about the fuel tanks exploding. Because they’re empty.”

  “JDAMs copy all.”

  Pred opened up the rear hatch – and wet wind on a cold slipstream blasted inside, followed by the flash of another aerial lightning strike. As so often on an airborne mission, it wasn’t that the weather had gone to shit so quickly. It was just that they went out and found the shittiest weather and flew straight into it – and of course their jump point was there.

 
As Pred shoved one of the bots toward the hatch, he shouted over the wind and engine noise, “It’s like mothersucking Chicago all over again.”

  “Nah,” Juice said, shoving on the other one from deeper inside. “This time, if you get wrapped around a building-top mast like a goddamned maypole, I can’t come cut you down – ’cause there’ll only be me left to progress the mission.”

  “Yeah? Screw you, then. I’ll get Gordy and Randy to do it.” He grabbed the ripcord on the cargo chute of the first bot and kicked it out with his boot, sending it tumbling into the storm.

  “Good luck with that,” Juice said, manhandling the second one into the hatch. “These things don’t have hands.”

  Doing the same ripcord-and-boot maneuver on this one, Pred said, “If that stops them, then you named ’em wrong.”

  Juice hit his radio. “Cargo away, and we’re following it out now. Good luck, Hailey, and thanks.”

  “Godspeed, guys. Only two things fall out of the sky – manna from heaven…”

  “And Airborne Rangers,” Pred finished for her.

  The lightning flashed again – and before Pred could hurl himself out the hatch, Juice grabbed him and said, “Hey, look.” Just behind them, but also practically at their feet, were two PVC body bags. And they weren’t empty. They’d been nearly invisible in the blacked-out cabin, before the lightning. Evidently no one had remembered to take them out, either to save weight – or to bury them. And neither Alpha man had to be reminded who was inside.

  It was the bodies of Special Forces Master Sergeant Jake Redding, and CIA senior analyst Zack Altringham.

  Juice touched each man on the forehead. “Okay, guys,” he said. “Let’s finish this.” And then he and Predator hurled themselves out into the storm.

  Right behind Juice’s autonomous robot army.

  * * *

  Ali and Homer had even less ground to get across, and were doing it at a much lower altitude – so for better or worse they could see exactly what they would be inserting into.