Arisen, Book One - Fortress Britain

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  A world fallen – under a plague of 7 billion walking dead

  A tiny island nation – the last refuge of the living

  One team – of the world’s most elite special operators

  The dead, these heroes, humanity’s last hope, all have…

  First published 2012 by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs

  London, UK

  Copyright © Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs

  The right of Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them 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 authorr‘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 unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  About the Authors

  GLYNN JAMES is an Amazon-bestselling author of dark fantasy novels, born in Wellingborough, England in 1972. He has an obsession with anything to do with zombies, Cthulhu mythos, post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and films, all of which began when he started reading HP Lovecraft and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend back when he was eight years old. He is the author of the bestselling DIARY OF THE DISPLACED series (DIARY OF THE DISPLACED, CHASING SPIRITS, THE BROKEN LANDS, AT LAST GOODBYE, WHISPERS OF THE DISPLACED, and THE LAST TO FALL).

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS is the author of the D-BOYS series of high-concept, high-tech special-operations military adventure novels: D-BOYS, COUNTER-ASSAULT, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming in 2013). He’s also author of the acclaimed existential cyberthrillers THE MANUSCRIPT and PANDORA’S SISTERS, both published worldwide by Macmillan, in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats. He is represented by Robert Gottlieb, Chairman of Trident Media Group in New York. He lives in London and at www.michaelstephenfuchs.com, and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge.

  Notes from the Authors

  Glynn

  When I had the original idea for the ARISEN series (a name Michael came up with), I was planning on writing something involving much less combat and military, and not special forces, but then it occurred to me that all of the zombie fiction that I’d read lacked something – really fast-paced fight scenes. So the idea developed, and I was getting more and more enthusiastic about it, but I also became convinced that I would need expert help. This was too big for me. Fortunately I had a good friend and an excellent writer to turn to. It was a huge and crazy experiment. Neither of us had tried co-writing before and the two genres we write in are very far apart in terms of style, so it was unexpected when we found ourselves half-way through the second book and unable to stop. I’m so glad we tried it and I want to thank Michael for both taking the leap and for making a good idea become an awesome reality. One that I couldn’t have achieved alone. We had no idea that this was going to turn into something we were both very proud of and I certainly am.

  The coolest thing is that I get to introduce my readers to one of my favourite authors! To everyone who has read one of my books and liked it, I hope this new project will entertain you as much if not more.

  Michael

  First and foremostly, thanks to my writing partner Glynn for suggesting this project, for coming up with such a great concept, for making it happen, and for being so fabulous to work with. Very, very many thanks also to Mark George Pitely, Alex Heublein, SNaFu, Michael & Jayne Barnard, and Jacqui Lewis – Lady Editrice(.co.uk) non pareil.

  To those readers of this book who may have very kindly read one or more of my D-Boys books (D-BOYS, COUNTER-ASSAULT, and whatever I’m calling the third one ;^), you might have noticed in ARISEN a very slightly more cavalier attitude toward details of tactics, tech, weapons, and other SOF minutiae. Basically, I figured since we were writing a series of Zombie Apocalypse novels, I could probably rely on a bit more suspension of disbelief as well as push things further. But you may trust that the high standards of military realism to which you have been accustomed in the D-BOYS books will be right where we left them. Thanks so much for reading (both series).

  ARISEN

  BOOK ONE

  FORTRESS BRITAIN

  GLYNN JAMES &

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

  “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

  – George Santayana

  “And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from Heaven on the Earth in the sight of men.”

  – Revelation 13:13

  NO EXITS

  Its face appeared through the mist, the mouth torn and the left side of its skull shattered. Ragged and bloodstained shreds of clothing, hanging from the gaunt frame, grew visible as it advanced. Congealed black fluid leaked out of sores that burned red with infection, and its bones cracked in defiance with every movement as it staggered into sight.

  And there was no hiding from it. Poor visibility meant nothing to the wretched creature that now lumbered forward, slowly closing the gap between them. Handon raised his rifle and sighted in, quietly waiting and hoping that he wouldn’t have to take the shot. The noise of gunfire was all that was needed to bring the whole neighborhood down on them.

  “Contact, my twelve,” he whispered into the chin mic curling around from his lightweight tactical helmet. Even as he spoke he could see more dark shadows stirring behind the first. There was no mistaking their direction – straight toward his team – but they were yet to latch on, to spot them en masse, and the wave of moaning had yet to begin. But Handon knew that it would soon. And then every poor dead bastard within a mile would be shambling mindlessly in their direction. And that was if they were lucky, and it was only shamblers out there, and not the fast ones. Come on, he thought. Just a little more time was all they needed.

  It didn’t matter how many of these creatures Handon had seen, each one still made his heart lurch. And every time he fired and one of them fell, he wondered who that person had once been. Unlike the men and women on his team, he had not developed the ability to switch off, to put the dead and the living in firewalled mental boxes. He had yet to accept that the creatures had no souls. Medical science was divided on how much was actually going on in there, whether there was even anyone home. It was known that the creatures lived for just one purpose – to devour the living – but little else was understood as to what drove them, what motivated something that should be rotting away quietly under six feet of soil to haul its ass up from the ground and seek out the nearest anything with a pulse.

  He had questioned every theory he’d heard in the last two years, but Command Sergeant Major Handon’s doubts on the subject didn’t really matter, and he sure as hell didn’t voice them openly. It was best if his guys had only need-to-know access to what was going on in his head. He could shelve his own doubts, put them to the back of his mind, for now. But for those who depended on him, well, his resolve had to be unquestionable.

  “Unfriendlies, nine o’clock,” came the call on the team’s radio. “Multiple Zulus.” This time it was Predator, their enormous and seemingly unkillable assaulter and combat medic – everyone did double duty these days – who would now be standing fifty meters to Handon’s right, holding the north side of their landing zone at the edge of the target structure. Handon didn�
�t need to glance in that direction to know this, and even if he had he wouldn’t be able to see the man, or most of his team for that matter. The mist that had descended in the last hour was so thick you could almost drink it.

  “Yeah, ditto on our three.” This was Pope, a seasoned paramilitary with what used to be the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division. That was in what used to be the United States. African American, soft-spoken, keen on knives, he was also rumored to have killed more people than smallpox, back in America’s counter-terror wars. That was before virtually everyone was dead already.

  And now the dead were surrounding them. Again.

  On the other hand, they were always surrounded, even at the best of times, holed up as they were in Fortress Britain. But right now, the four of them, Handon’s detached half of Alpha team – and for all he knew a significant fraction of the Tier-One special operators still left alive anywhere in the world – simply needed to hold this one building entrance. The large plain lettering on the front of the warehouse-like structure read “Merck KGaA.” The top of the letter M had fallen off and the final A was cracked and barely legible. Handon wondered how in just two years everything could go so quickly and completely to shit.

  His team was raiding the research labs of what used to be Germany’s largest pharmaceutical company – from back when there were things like companies, and Germany. This also meant they were way too deep into fallen Europe for anybody’s safety or comfort – so deep that one screw-up could mean disaster for the whole team. But there was nothing for it. It was, if anything, an understatement to say that any hope of survival humanity still had hinged on operations like this one, even if the remaining population would never know about it. Most of the time it was best that way.

  Handon blinked, but maintained target lock as he heard Pope switch smoothly to the command net. “Hotel X, this is Alpha-Two, requesting ETA on extraction. We’re pretty much ready to hit the road here.” Speaking of understatement, the first thing about Tier-One operators is that they are not prone to panic. Even when panic was fully justified – especially then. Unconsciously, Handon cocked his head into his earpiece, willing the channel to perk up. But it stayed silent as the grave. Maybe they were in a radio skip zone, in addition to being neck deep in zombie soup. A dead zone.

  Fifteen seconds passed, several lifetimes in a combat situation. All around the team, the mist shifted with movement. And with that, and no other preamble, the lead creature, the one with only half a head, was upon him. Handon placed the red target reticule of his EOTech holographic sight on the zombie’s chin point. Directly behind that would be the brainstem. He applied a quarter-pound of pressure to the trigger, then hesitated. The creature, almost instantly driven to frenzy by the scent of living flesh, wheezed out a guttural roar, accelerated to its top speed of about 7mph, and lunged forwards.

  Handon let his rifle – a heavily customized HK16, one of the last in the universe and thus nearly priceless – swing down on its single-point tactical sling, and switched in a blur to his secondary weapon. In this new, fallen, deeply strange world, that was no longer his .45 autoloading handgun. It was a wakizashi, a samurai short sword, worn in side-draw configuration above his duty belt in the small of his back.

  In the same motion as the draw he whirled the razor-sharp blade around in a tight arc – the curved blade was designed precisely for drawing and striking at once – and separated what was left of the creature’s head from what was left of its body. The fragile, torn abomination lost its animation and fell forward at Handon’s assault boots, its knees cracking as the weak bones splintered with the impact of the hard pavement. The body fell sideways, hitting the pavement with a rich, wet sound. Decapitation wouldn’t actually kill the head – only destruction of the brainstem could do that – but it would stop it getting to him. It would be a few weeks or so before the head dried up and whatever constituted the zombie inside it finally died. Until then it would lie in the same spot, gnashing its jaw at the open air.

  And then he heard it, just a split second before it came thrumming into view – the indistinct electric whir of suppressed rotor blades cutting through the muffling mists. It was the unit’s Stealth Black Hawk, inbound on short final. You didn’t hear these things until they were practically on top of you. And, especially in poor visibility, you couldn’t locate the origin of the sound with any accuracy. All of which was intentional. Sound drew zombies. Any sound. In a world shut down by the dead, almost anything audible was the sound of a survivor.

  Handon’s thoughts of their dead world suddenly became less abstract, as the Stealth Hawk flared, nearly instantly blowing away the mist for a hundred meters in every direction. And in every direction, Handon could now see the soulless… hundreds upon hundreds of them, back up to the tree line, oozing forward like a mass of maggots, searching for healthy flesh. He had no idea where this many had come from that damned quickly. Aerial recon hadn’t given any indication of this kind of density. Blame the thick mist. Plus, in the Zulu Alpha, sometimes you just got swarmed out of a blue sky. Pretty damned often, actually, Handon thought with resignation. Surveying the incoming horde, he saw there were too many for his sword, and many more than he had rounds for his rifle or pistols. The team’s priority now had to be to exfil, RFN – “right fucking now.”

  The helo rocked on its four wheels as it touched down dead center in the diamond described by the three operators and the building entrance. As Handon got a boot on the lip of the open side door and heaved his heavily loaded frame inside, he heard the first suppressed shots being fired by Pope and Predator. If they were shooting, things weren’t good. The ammo situation had gone from tight to catastrophic in the last few months. But the helo had landed facing south, which meant Handon could still cover his sector, the east, from inside the cabin. The other two would have to hold their positions, until their entry team, and their haul from the target site, got out and got onboard.

  Handon spared a look over his shoulder and saw their PO (“Procurement Officer,” a fancy term for a scavenger with heavy IT skills and biotech experience) and his security escort emerge from the front door in a hurry. The ‘escort’ was the fourth member of their detachment, Juice – a large, puffy, heavily bearded man in a ballcap, and former operator with what was sometimes called The Intelligence Support Activity. (AKA the Field Operations Group, Gray Fox, Sentra Spike, and a host of other opaque names – but usually just referred to as “The Activity.”) Juice now served as the team’s comms operator and all-round tech badass. Also a completely lethal commando, he was the perfect choice to keep the PO alive. And as an IT genius, he was also uniquely suited to help him do his job.

  Which it looked like he had done – the fifth man, more lightly armed and armored, had a full rucksack, sagging with weight, slung over one shoulder. He held one hand in front of his face against the swirling dust and rotor wash. The pair emerged from the entryway and pivoted left and right, the PO with a handgun, Juice with his SIG SG 553 assault rifle at his shoulder. Handon could see their mouths going wide in response to the Zulu Dusk that had risen up on all sides of them. The mouth shapes for “FUCK me” were familiar enough at this point.

  Ordinarily they’d be doing this extraction up on a nice safe rooftop. Zulus – what the military had designated the regular, slow moving zombies that were the early stage victims of the disease – climbed poorly when they climbed at all, and rooftops were the preferred ways in and out of buildings. However, drone footage had indicated this building had likely taken fire and looting damage in the weeks after the fall. A couple of winters of heavy snow on the rooftop, with no maintenance, hadn’t helped the world’s structures any either. It was too unstable to be trusted. This intel flashed through Handon’s memory as he now watched the front of the building collapse – disastrously, and without warning.

  It was either the heavy rotor wash, or the press of dead bodies surging around the corners, that kicked it off. Maybe a bit of both. Either way, it happ
ened in one second of shuddering crash, a whole lot of dust, and the shouts of the men in the doorway. By sheer luck it didn’t extend to the helo, which was parked nuts-to-butts with the building for security. Juice was knocked clear, but lay prone and still. The PO was face down on the pavement, the lower half of his body crushed by hundreds of pounds of concrete and rebar.

  Handon didn’t spare the time to curse fate. Turning to face out to the east again, he spun up the door-mounted GAU-17 minigun and burnt through 400 irreplaceable rounds of linked 7.62mm. On any other mission, with any other team, the rounds might actually be worth more than the men. But not on this one. Firing in an arc from extreme left to extreme right, a bit below neck height, Handon watched the first dozen ranks of amassed undead collapse into a rancid meat pile. Many of them were effectively turned off, with nerve connections severed between their bodies and the unholy infections raging in their brainstems. Others simply got too dismembered to locomote. With this precious breathing room, Pope and Pred could hold the flanks for the few seconds Handon needed here.

  As he hurled himself back out of the door facing the building, he drew his sword with his right hand and his custom Kimber .45 autoloader with his left. By the time he hit the ground, a handful of leakers had already slipped through the perimeter and were rampaging in their rear, going straight for the incapacitated men on the ground. Wheeling and flashing, Handon took off two heads and sent single .45 ACP slugs whumping into three other brainstems. Back in the world, he had been trained always to fire doubletaps. Now they were a luxury.

  He came to rest and kneeled at the side of their PO. The man was obviously in unendurable agony. But everyone here already knew that this pain was almost certainly the best thing he had left to look forward to. Just to try it on, Handon threw his weight into the largest piece of rebar pinning the man on the ground. It didn’t budge.