by James, Glynn
Juice shook his head fractionally, spat off to the side to avoid dribbling on him, and braced himself to haul the kid back over. But the boy’s eyes went wide, looking over Juice’s shoulder.
Before Juice could turn, he felt a heavy impact – and his vision went black as his legs noodled out from under him. The wheel blocks on the anti-aircraft gun had come loose – and the whole gun carriage had rolled forward, one of the big barrels striking Juice brutally across the back of the head.
As the grip on his belt suddenly relaxed, the kid fell free through the air.
And Juice collapsed to the deck like a really big sack of elite, bearded commando.
* * *
Predator saw Juice go down from the pursuing boat. After roughly hauling Henno back in, he had hobbled back up to the very tip of the prow, and put his rifle sight on the stern of the Diablo. The Three Brothers was slowly, agonizingly gaining on it. Standing erect, leaning forward, rifle extended, Pred looked like a particularly menacing figurehead on the prow of a British man-o’-war, or maybe on a Viking raider.
In this picturesque stance, he saw Juice stumble, saw the kid go over – and then saw Juice rescue him. Then he saw Juice get hit by the ZSU barrel and drop to the deck. And despite Pred’s mental exhortations, Juice didn’t get up again. Predator looked back at Handon and bellowed in his T-Rex voice:
“MUST… GO… FASTER!”
Handon gritted his teeth. The Three Brothers was already maxed out. It looked like it had a slight speed edge on the Diablo, but it was going to take them a while to make up the distance after the latter’s head start. And every second it took them to do so was another second Juice was MIA – and Predator powerless to go and help his friend.
Pred clenched his jaw in frustration, then put his eye back to his sight, scanning for targets of opportunity. Just as he looked ahead, Dr. Park popped up from the cabin below, obviously wondering what the hell was going on. Emerging into the open air, he looked at Handon, then Pred, and then around in wonder. He spotted the Diablo up ahead – and gave Handon a look like, We’re CHASING the guys who just shot us to shit?
It occurred to Handon the guy had a point. He saw that Park was still clutching his laptop bag to his chest. And suddenly Handon remembered that was the only thing that really mattered – it was what they were doing all this for in the first place. And, for some reason, Handon was now sailing both the scientist and the research back into danger.
Over the roar of the engine and the sea spray, Handon heard his radio go again. He guessed it was Fick, calling for another sitrep. He snatched up the radio and shouted, “Mortem, Charles, repeat your last, over!”
“Yeah, I said, ‘Where the hell are you stupid sons of bitches?’”
Handon blinked heavily and checked the compass on the console. They were, in fact, now heading nearly due south – directly away from Beaver Island, and at high speed.
Fick came on again: “Because we are now on station at your extraction point… And for reasons I don’t want to get into right now are none too fucking excited about hanging around waiting for you assholes.”
Suddenly, Handon realized with perfect clarity what he needed to do. He needed to turn the boat around. Simply, the fate of humanity’s last fifty million survivors was there with them, in the form of Park and his research and vaccine designs. Weighed against that, the lives of two of Handon’s team members were nothing. They were as dust, as lint.
Plus Handon knew that Juice and Ali were big kids, and could take care of themselves. They would make their way home somehow, escaping and evading. Hell, their whole job was to operate independently, and show individual initiative. Handon simply couldn’t let force protection get in the way of mission accomplishment. And he definitely couldn’t let personal attachments, concern for his own people, sink their whole mission.
He loosened his grip on the throttle, preparing to bring it down; and gripped the wheel at the top with his other hand, getting ready to bring them around ninety degrees. And to head back toward their extraction point.
But with only three members of the original eight-man team.
“Oi! Handon!”
Handon looked over his shoulder again. It was Henno, sitting on the deck with his back up against the stern, legs stretched out before him, pointing the same direction as the protruding crossbow bolt. But, more to the point, he was sitting in water up to his lap, which was sloshing over it, in fact. He gestured at the huge ragged holes that had been shot in various places around the deck and superstructure. Water was pouring in from many of them, and none too slowly.
Fuck. They’d been scuppered, by the ravages of that anti-aircraft gun. Not right this second. But they were definitely taking on water. And soon they would be under it.
In that instant, the line from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations flashed into Handon’s head: “Soon, earth will cover us all.”
Not all of us, Handon thought with a grimace.
He abandoned his plan to reverse course, tightened his grip on the throttle, and tried to estimate their time of intercept with the Diablo – as measured against their imminent rendezvous with the wrong side of the lake surface.
Because there was only one seaworthy craft in sight on this lake.
And they had damned well better get to it. Fast.
Hive
On Board the JFK, Coast of Virginia
Commander Drake, executive officer and acting commander of the USS John F. Kennedy, the world’s last surviving nuclear supercarrier, leaned forward and put his head in his hands. In the few blessed seconds of blackness and solitude this brought, he thought to himself:
Being in charge is bullshit.
He swore to himself that, if he somehow got out of this job alive, he would never again aspire to be in charge of anything. And being acting commander was a lot like being awarded the prize of a pie for winning a pie-eating contest. He’d honestly give just about anything if all the problems that were now his could become somebody else’s. But it wasn’t going to happen, and the job was simply too important for him to abandon it.
Though others have abandoned it before me, he thought mordantly…
Right this minute he had many more problems than he could realistically stay on top of. He had too few people to delegate tasks to, and way too few resources to support them. He was running out of time. And, perhaps most dire of all, he was running out of faith.
Scratch that, he thought to himself, finally raising his head and opening his eyes to the little officer’s room, just off the flag bridge, where he’d now been camped out for nearly two days, dealing with shit. In truth, his faith had long ago abandoned him.
What he was losing now was: the all-important ability to fake it.
He hadn’t believed, not for a long time, that things were really going to turn out okay. He wouldn’t have wagered a horsecock sandwich for humanity’s chances, never mind that of the carrier strike group and its surviving crew. But bitter fatalism is a terrible characteristic for a military commander.
So he’d had to carry on, not in hope – but as if in hope.
Admittedly, Drake’s hope had perked up slightly when, against all odds and expectations, he had regained contact with Alpha team in Chicago, most of them still alive, and in possession of their all-important mission objective – the scientist and his research. His hope had necessarily flared up a little when his Marines and sailors had put down the mutiny of religious Zealots, controlled the zombie outbreak below decks that came out of nowhere like a biblical plague – and then managed to shut down the nuclear reactors just in time to keep the ship from crashing into shore at high speed and sinking.
But life wasn’t like in the movies, with a “happily ever after” that followed the big climax, when the credits roll and victory is frozen in time. That very phrase, the very concept of happiness, seemed like a cruel taunt here in the ZA. Aside from the world and humanity being generally fucked, Commander Drake now had great sprawling rafts of smaller and more imm
ediate problems to deal with, many of them seemingly insoluble, and all tormenting his every waking minute and thought.
These included repairs – not least, of the great gaping hole that had been blown in the port side, across the Gallery and 02 decks, by the explosion of the Sparrow missile magazine during the mutiny. It also included getting the vessel off the shoals and refloated – which was, at the least, going to require restarting one or both of the nuclear reactors. Which he also couldn’t do since he had lost the vast majority of his senior engineering ratings, not to mention almost all the nuke guys.
And hovering horribly above all these other problems was the big one: the surging storm of dead, miles deep and wide, with perhaps as many as ten million ravening, leaping, gamboling corpses, which was even then bearing down on them straight across the Atlantic seaboard.
Drake exhaled heavily, and decided to take himself downstairs to CIC and get some updates. Mainly, what he wanted was some air. A break. But he didn’t even make it out the door before they came for him again. This time it was in the form of a junior officer, who said, “Sir. We’ve got Fick and his team on the horn.”
This was a call he had to take.
* * *
Stepping out onto the flag bridge and picking up a radio headset got Drake a major change of atmosphere – all the way out to the pitched battle on Beaver Island, thousands of miles away in the northern reaches of Lake Michigan.
“We’ve been trying to hail you for the past two hours,” he said into the desk mic he held up in front of him, as he huddled out of the flurry of activity around him.
“Yeah, I’m up in an air traffic control tower,” Fick said, his voice slightly stretched and flattened by static. “Good for reception.” He sounded a little frantic himself.
“Listen,” Drake said emphatically. “You’ve gotta get back here. Now. Seriously.”
“Love to. But no fucking Alpha yet, so no extraction.”
Drake swallowed his frustration. He already knew it was unlikely Fick’s team could make it back in time to get in under the storm. So it was really all just subtle gradations of catastrophe from there. “At least give me some kind of an ETA.”
“Once again: love to. It’ll either be two and a half hours after Alpha arrives, if we’re still alive at that point. Otherwise, never. Alpha keeps assuring us they’ll be here any second.”
“You’ve got comms with them?”
“Affirmative. Intermittent, though.”
“Okay, Fick. You be advised. That storm is still incoming our location, and it looks like hitting us dead on.”
“Copy that.”
“Now listen carefully. If the Kennedy falls, you’re going to have to jump out of that silly-ass museum-piece bomber, land in the ocean, and try to get recovered by the Michael Murphy. You can then sail back to England on her. The Murph’s search and rescue helos and divers are on alert. Do you copy?”
Fick didn’t respond for just a second. Drake could almost see him mouthing, If the JFK falls…? But he didn’t say it. “Charles Zero-One copies all. Gotta go. I’m in a fight right now. Out.”
Drake put the mic back down on the desk. He wondered to himself whether Fick was really as unflappable as he sounded. Or if he just didn’t have time to freak out about the storm because he already had too many things to freak about right under his own nose.
Drake made a move for the outside hatch, in a second bid to get that air. Once again, he was intercepted on the way. Another junior officer cut him off.
“Sir. The CIC watch commander requests the pleasure of your company.”
Drake snorted bitterly at that. It had been a long time since his company had been a pleasure. Even to himself.
Oh well – he’d just have to keep faking it a little longer.
* * *
Swinging into the big, dim, high-tech room, Drake immediately spotted the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Campbell, standing over one of the radar displays, and its operator.
“Good news?” he asked, striding up, trying on something like a smile. Though a handsome, fit, clean-cut officer in his mid-thirties, he felt positively ghoulish right now. He couldn’t even remember whether it had been longer since he slept, or showered. He certainly hadn’t changed his uniform recently enough. It stuck to him like a shroud.
“What was the last good news we had? Sir.” Campbell moved to the side to let Drake see the console. One display showed a wide radar view, and the other one live drone footage from an aerial platform flying over the storm. After losing a manned aircraft and pilot to the leaping, roiling herd, this time they had sent out their X-47A Pegasus, a last-model stealth flying-wing drone. It was a $15-million-dollar asset – not that money meant anything anymore – and Drake winced when he saw its evident low altitude.
“Goddamnit, LT, can we not lose any more aircraft, please?”
“Yes, sir.” She reached for a control and zoomed out the powerful camera on the nose of the drone. With this, it became obvious the aircraft was actually at pretty high altitude. Drake shook his head, but didn’t bother cursing himself, or apologizing. He merely noted that both his temper and his judgement were starting to go. And neither he, nor the JFK, could do without them.
Taking a breath, focusing on keeping his voice level, he said, “What’s its status?”
LT Campbell nodded. “Now moving faster than we measured it before.”
“ETA?”
“We now estimate the edge will hit us in four and a quarter hours.”
Drake shook his head. Jesus.
“There’s something else,” Campbell said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s, um, demonstrating some unusual behavior.”
“Such as?”
“Well… particularly when we zoom out to a high-level view, and when it passes through towns, neighborhoods, any previously populated areas… well, the movements of the herd take on certain patterns. These shapes emerge, then collapse. Like a dance, or a moving collage. It’s almost like they’re dividing up the buildings and areas, and methodically clearing them – something like a really big special ops team might do.”
Drake looked across at her. He tried to decide how clichéd to make his next comment. Fuck it, he thought. I’m too tired to be original. “That’s impossible. How can they possibly coordinate? They’re dead. Their brains are off. All they do is shamble around and eat people.”
The LT held his gaze. “Yes, sir, that was pretty much my take on it. But I brought Lieutenant Commander Roberts up here.” LCDR Roberts was the ship’s Senior Medical Officer – and, in the absence of any genuine experts, their local authority on all things undead. “He said it looked like… like hive behavior. Like the individuals were following very simple rules, based on terrain, and what the one next to them was doing… but which then in aggregate produced surprisingly complex behavior. Like an ant hive, or bee swarm, or flight of birds.”
Drake watched the video for a few more seconds. He could now see many thousands of churning bodies, with fractal levels of individual detail… but all together making up enormous aggregate shapes and flows and waves… all seeming to move with purpose, with resolution – and with implacable hatred and malevolence.
It did seem something like an organism. A supremely evil one.
Drake spoke quietly through parted lips.
“We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”
The Gathering Storm
Naval Air Station Oceana
Second Lieutenant Wesley, former security guard of the Channel Tunnel entrance, and now a million miles from his home country, stood looking out the window of the observation tower and wondered what the hell they were still doing there. He had an aching throb behind his eyes that he knew was down to lack of sleep and nerves, and a week’s growth of beard that itched. The day so far had passed very slowly for him, as he wished like hell that he actually had something useful to do, instead of just standing around watching other people lugging gear from the warehouse. Th
at had been constant until an hour ago, when Commander Drake had pulled the plug on the scavenging op. Endless crates and pallets of equipment still lay stacked on the dusty concrete floor of the building, and Wesley wondered how long they would sit there before human eyes saw them again.
Years perhaps, or maybe never.
At least up on the top of the observation tower, looking out through the binoculars he’d found among the overturned tables and piles of discarded reports of the lower offices, he could feel like he was doing something. Even if that something was staring west over the sprawling urban emptiness that surrounded the base, and even if he knew that wasn’t really helping at all. Scanning out across the buildings and the golf parks, into the distance where the dark line had appeared, he tried to calculate how much time they had left.
He’d noticed it almost immediately, even without the binoculars, and thought it was just his eyesight or the headache that had been pounding at him ever since the bomber, with that comedy name of Chuckie, had taken off. A dull thump thump just around his eye sockets made him feel as if he were slowly being punched in the face.
The dark line out there was everything he had feared.
The binoculars were very powerful and allowed him to see right into the midst of what was slowly, inexorably approaching them: a wall of stumbling, writhing, clawing bodies that stretched across the entire western horizon. Or at least the whole horizon that he could see. And they didn’t just stumble along, pushing and shoving each other; they were actually climbing over one another, three or four high in some places, and at a distance it looked like a swarm of flies, or grubs – or locusts. Wesley supposed that in some way that is what they were.
For some obscure reason this sea of the dead continued to surge across the landscape, lapping ever closer. It would take a while for it to reach the naval air station, but that would still be too soon – much too soon for Fick’s Marines and Alpha team to make it back and land. And when the storm finally reached the water’s edge, surely not a single living thing would be left in its wake. It would be like the denuded landscape left after a plague of locusts had passed.