Arisen, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  And if they were really lucky, the damned thing might even work.

  But, in any case, they had at least fully mapped the terrain. There was no doubt that challenges, obstacles, and unpleasant surprises would come up along the way. But they both felt like they had a good sense of what lay between them… and salvation for humanity.

  And they were close. Extremely close.

  As the two of them finished a last review of the document, each sitting at his own laptop, Park smiled out loud – at the thought of those unexpected obstacles they might yet face.

  He knew now that adversity was inevitable, a universal of human experience. But the contest would be decided, always, by how he reacted to it. Much of life, he realized now, consisted of how we respond to adversity.

  And he felt now like he had really internalized the appropriate, irresistible, and eternally powerful response to obstacles and unpleasant surprises:

  Adapt and overcome.

  With those three words, you almost couldn’t lose at life. And Park had no illusions about who had taught him this. The operators had not only saved his life, repeatedly.

  They had changed his life.

  Park’s vision only came back to the room when the hatch opened, and Sarah Cameron strode back in, riding as always on a wave of confidence and capability.

  “Can you feel that?” she asked.

  Both Park and Close gave her blank looks.

  Sarah put her palms on a countertop. “That’s the ship turning. We’re reversing course, heading directly for the Gulf of Aden – with one stop only, to load supplies. Handon, Fick, and their guys are going to get you your Patient Zero. So be ready.”

  Park straightened up and nodded. But when he looked across at Close, he saw the Oxford don’s expression was more troubled. “What’s wrong?”

  “I was just thinking how… we’ve neglected something.”

  “What’s that?”

  Close seemed to gather his thoughts. “Bit of an elephant in the room, really.”

  “What is it?” Sarah said, seeming not real charmed by this Hugh Grant-esque rambling.

  “Well, even presuming we’re able to successfully inoculate the fifty million living people who remain… How the devil do we get rid of the seven billion dead ones?”

  Park exhaled and sagged slightly on his lab stool. “Yes. That’s occurred to me, as well. And it won’t be an easy problem to solve either, will it?”

  “No. No, it will not.” Close seemed to hesitate slightly. “Back at Oxford, we did give it a little thought… tossed a few ideas around – no real research, mind you…”

  Out with it, Sarah wanted to say, but let the man get to it in his own time.

  “But we did wonder whether the dead might be susceptible to some other pathogen. Or some new one. It was the rampaging spread of the virus that got us into this pickle in the first place.” He paused and looked at the other two. “What if we produced, or stumbled upon, some bacteria or virus that was—”

  Park cocked his head. “Fatal to the dead?”

  “Yes, it does sound a bit far-fetched when you put it like that. But if you put the pathology problems aside, and just consider the epidemiology – how the vectors of a massive outbreak amongst them, with the dead clustering up in big groups as they do now… well, it might take them out a damn sight more efficiently than we could ourselves, one by one.”

  Park nodded. “And there would certainly be an elegance to it. If not actual irony.”

  “Yes. It would do a job on them like the one they did on us. Unfortunately, transgenics and bioengineering are not really my fields.”

  A few beats of silence passed, before Close noticed that Park’s gaze had gone long again.

  “What is it?”

  He refocused on the room. “Sorry. I was actually just remembering a man I used to know whose fields those very definitely were. He was a colleague of mine, back in Dusseldorf. Bioscientist on a fellowship from Russia. Very big into bioengineering, genetic design of microbes, custom bacteria and viruses, that sort of thing. I was never totally sure what he planned on doing with those skills.”

  “Oh?”

  Park tapped his fingers on the lab bench. “It was a little creepy, honestly. For a while, I was half convinced he was a Soviet spy.”

  Close arched his eyebrow. “Whatever happened to him?”

  “No idea.”

  “Any chance he’s still alive?”

  Park exhaled. “No. Of course not. None.”

  Close deflated. “No. I didn’t suppose there would be.”

  The Mongol Horde

  The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains

  Holy motherfucking shit.

  The silhouetted figure standing hunched in the doorway of Oleg Aliyev’s Dacha was, it immediately became clear, a dead Mongol. And he had simply let himself in – walked right through the doorway that Aliyev had moronically left open for his next trip ferrying out supplies. Now, standing less than twenty feet away, it finally looked up at him and locked on.

  Aliyev looked balefully over toward the living room, where the raucous stylings of Tool were still playing at absurdly high volume.

  That wasn’t very clever, either, he thought.

  And then he dropped the syringe of MZ vaccine from suddenly frozen fingers. The glass cylinder hit the top of the lab bench, then rolled rapidly toward the edge. Coming slightly back to life, Aliyev darted his hand out and caught it just as it rolled off into open air. It definitely would have shattered on that tile floor.

  When he looked up again, the Mongol had raised its arms, and was coming straight for him.

  Holy fucking fuck!

  Instead of going for his gun, he’d gone for the plummeting syringe. His instincts were all wrong. How he’d survived this long was a complete fucking mystery, even to him.

  By the time he shifted the syringe to his left hand and drew his pistol, the half-frozen dead guy was on top of him. Aliyev had nowhere to go, so he hopped up on the lab bench behind him, lifted his boots up between him and it – and, with a solid two-legged shove, sent it stumbling backward.

  Now he got the pistol clear and started triggering off. The sharp reports tore through the progressive metal blasting out of the living room, his rounds hitting all over the place, sending up shards and splinters of building structure, lab equipment, and piled-up supplies. Then again, there were a hell of a lot of bullets in the gun, and one must have finally found the Mongol’s brainstem. As the creature disanimated and fell down, Aliyev could now see that there were others coming in behind it – at least two or three.

  HOLY FUCKING FUCK ME.

  It’s the Mongol horde, all over again…

  He emptied the rest of his thirty rounds messily into the crowd in the doorway. Bodies lunged and tumbled. One of them fell across the piled cases of bottled water, and carried on across the stacked MREs, knocking the kerosene lamp off the top. Glass smashed on the tile floor, and a sharp-smelling clear liquid splashed out, a large pool of it forming and racing toward Aliyev’s feet.

  His first thought was to get his boots clear.

  Wrong impulse again.

  But something else, some other related matter, began tickling faintly at the back of his mind…

  He spun around – and saw that the Bunsen burner was gone from where he’d left it sitting on the lab bench. He’d obviously knocked it off when he jumped up there. But had he also put the flame out when he knocked it over?

  No. No he hadn’t.

  The floor erupted in racing, leaping flames, roaring up all around him, as he spun again to face the door. There were more dead Mongols coming through it, heedlessly lurching through the licking inferno.

  Aliyev raised the gun again, but saw that the slide was locked back.

  Empty.

  * * *

  And now his boots were on fire.

  He didn’t even know what to freak out about first.

  But his body did react and dictate that he had to avoid burn
ing to death before all else – so he nearly autonomously leapt out of the lake of fire, scurried toward the rear of the lab, and got several of the benches between himself and everything going horribly wrong at the front of the room.

  When he looked down, the kerosene on his boots had flash-burned off – and his clothes never caught – Thank you, REI! – leaving him only with an uncomfortable hotfoot. (And, as he would find later, half-melted and deformed soles.) He was also left with several long-dead villagers, who were now either actually on fire, or else just smoking suggestively, all of them pushing their way in and trying to thread through, or just stumble over, the lab benches between them and the scientist.

  Aliyev stared at this scene, his face a rictus of barely comprehending horror. He still didn’t know what he should freak out about next.

  FUCK!

  But then the question resolved itself when he looked up to the front wall of the lab, and over to the left. The pool of burning kerosene was continuing to spread down that side of the room, right in front of the piles of staged supplies.

  Clearly this floor wasn’t level.

  Motherfucking Chinese contractors, he thought, with their lowball bids. I should have flown in Germans or Swiss—

  But that thought was amputated mid-stream when he saw the burning pool of kerosene reach… the other crate of motherfucking grenades, which sat on the floor at the far left end of the row of survivalist crap. In another second, the soft wood of it had ignited, burning in a bright and lively fashion.

  “What kind of asshat!” Aliyev actually screamed aloud, “Makes a grenade crate! That’s fucking! Flammable!” But immediately he was assailed by an alternative, and rather more pressing, question:

  What kind of asshat leaves a crate of grenades… sitting right next to a FRIDGE OF DEATH?

  The flames on the softwood crate now licked higher, reflected in the glass door of – well, the door of what comprised the most completely horrifying and deadly collection of pathogens that had ever existed in one place before, in the entirety of human history.

  And so the matter of what to freak about next clarified perfectly for Oleg Aliyev. Screw the zombies. Screw the fire.

  He had to get the ever-living fuck out of there.

  And he had to get really, really far away.

  Really fucking fast.

  * * *

  And, in this state of play, he realized he only needed to take two things with him.

  The coldbox with his MZ pathogen and vaccine.

  And the motherfucking shotgun.

  Everything else could fuck right the fuck off.

  He looked down and saw he was still holding the empty pistol in his right hand, and the syringe of vaccine in his left. He jammed the gun in its holster, and the syringe between his teeth. (God I hope THAT works…)

  But now the first two smoking dead Mongols were on him – reaching and lunging over the top of the rear-most lab bench. Not giving the dumb sons of bitches time to work out the complex issue of going the fuck around it, Aliyev instead juked left, drawing them to that side, then dashed right.

  In another two seconds he was flying up the right wall of the lab toward the door, and a second after that had snatched up the fully loaded shotgun – his spec-ops/mafia friend had once dryly asked him, “What good, my friend, is an unloaded gun?” – and he started triggering exuberantly off.

  The tattoo of rapid-fire twelve-gauge blasts thundered in the enclosed space, for a second drowning out even the mighty Tool, and making the pistol sound like the toy popgun it was. Aliyev wasn’t even really aiming, and he didn’t really have to. The buckshot storm ripped arms from shoulders and legs from groins and sent half-decomposed but still animated bodies tumbling to the previously white tile floor in great angular heaps of dead flesh and black gunk.

  And thus did the Kazakh simply shoot his way through the dead Mongol conga line still coming in his front door, and then he powered forward – straight toward the coldbox sitting by the Fridge. And also right beside the motherfucking flaming crate of grenades.

  In two seconds he had snatched up the coldbox, turned again, rested the shotgun barrel on top of the box – and started shooting his way.

  The fuck.

  Out of there.

  Empire of the Dead

  The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains

  And now Aliyev had cause to say another quick prayer of thanks to his spec-ops/mafia buddy, for talking him out of buying a pump-action shotgun. (“Leave that shit to the purists. Buy an autoloader – faster is always better.”) Now it meant he could operate the weapon one-handed.

  As he rapid-fired, long strings of evil sparks falling out of the blasting barrel, the room filling with smoke either from the fire, or the gunfire, or probably both, he now had to pick a direction, which also turned out to be an easy one.

  Going out the front door was a non-starter, because he had absolutely no way of knowing how many dead assholes were queued up out beyond it – for all he knew, they stretched halfway down the mountain, drawn by his idiotic blasting of that music. (But you know what? It was totally worth it.)

  In fact, he didn’t even want to know how many dead assholes were out there.

  So he headed instead for the living area, shooting his way straight back through the surviving dead pressing in through the doorway, the music growing even more thunderous in volume as he got clear of the lab, and the kerosene behind him having burned itself out – but not before igniting, well, more than enough flammable crap in there to keep burning out of control, and to, no doubt very soon, turn the whole Dacha into a black, smoldering, useless memory of its formerly luxurious and grand and self-reliant self.

  Wait! – Aliyev didn’t quite pause to think. Why the fuck isn’t the halon fire-suppression system coming on!? Granted, he had never tested it. Those Chinese fuckers again. All this time, he had been working in a bioengineering lab with any number of horrifyingly dangerous pathogens – and without a working fucking fire-suppression system.

  Oh, well. Fuck it.

  He ran on, syringe still in his teeth, but now with his left arm hooked through the handle of the coldbox, so he could reload the Benelli from the shells in the side saddle. He didn’t have the faintest fucking idea what he was going to find out back on the helipad, but he knew one goddamned thing: he’d be better off with a fully loaded shotgun than a nearly empty one.

  He exited the living room, dashed through the kitchen, and turned the locks on the back door with trembling and adrenaline-flooded fingers. Then he was out in the cold air, whumping his deformed and half-melted boots through the snow, skidding right around the storage building, and finally skating onto the helipad.

  It was all clear. Aliyev exhaled dramatically.

  But he quickly realized it wasn’t going to stay that way for long. He could hear but not see more moaning, wheezing dead sons of bitches coming up the trail toward the front door. And as soon as he started the helo’s engines, they were going to hear him, too – and no doubt change course, and simply go around the side of the Dacha to the helipad.

  He slammed shut the cargo door – which he’d left open on his first, and very terminal, trip ferrying supplies out to it – then swung open the cockpit door, tossed the Benelli across to the co-pilot’s seat, then heaved himself in and hauled the door closed behind him.

  When he paused to look out beyond the glass of the side door… he could see the first of the Mongols was already coming out the back door.

  Hmm. Missed a trick there. He should have shut that.

  Never mind!

  He reached over into the passenger seat and snatched up the stapled sheaf of papers that was his preflight checklist. He had never flown enough to commit it all to memory, and there was little point in remembering shit you could just look up anyway. He flipped to the first page.

  External checks: Remove the blade socks. Engine air intake – clear. Main rotor he—

  A blackened hand, terribly burnt and bloodied, slapped viole
ntly against the glass of the door inches to his left, snapping Aliyev’s head around, where he watched the hand drag down, leaving black bits of itself.

  “Okay,” he said aloud. “External checks are out…”

  He flipped pages with trembling fingers to the internal checks, the much more critical ones, and started narrating aloud as his palsied finger traced down the page.

  “Fuel shut-off valve in forward position – check… Collective, pitch, and yaw pedals moving freely – check. Ditto rotor-brake control… Battery voltage – okay, hydraulic pressure – okay…”

  More hands, and faces, were now slapping at the outside of the cockpit glass, and Aliyev realized he was hyperventilating – and having serious trouble focusing. The whole aircraft was starting to shake from the assault of overwrought dead guys outside. Aliyev shook his head and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

  “Emergency rotary throttle control – fuck it, got bigger problems right now… Gyroscopic instruments on… warning and caution lights off…” He closed his eyes and whimpered as nightmare Mongoloid faces mushed horrifically against the glass barely inches from his own. As much as he tried to block them out, they invaded his peripheral vision, squished against his naked soul.

  And he knew perfectly well that if too many of these dead bastards swarmed the helo, he either wouldn’t be able to take off – or they’d jam the air intakes, and the engines would shut down or flame out. When he looked over again, out past the glass-deformed faces, he could see thick black smoke rising from the the far side of the Dacha.

  And he belatedly remembered the grenades, and their location, cheek-to-jowl with the Fridge of Death.

  And it did not slow his breathing or calm his nerves one goddamned bit to remember that, in probably a very short time, maybe only seconds, this bit of Eurasian mountainside was going to become THE SINGLE DEADLIEST SPOT THAT HAD EVER EXISTED ON THE ENTIRE FUCKING PLANET. No collection of pathogens so utterly hostile to all known forms of life had ever before been collected in one place, and never would be again, and as soon as they wen—