Arisen, Book Four - Maximum Violence

by James, Glynn

  His vision faded in and out as he glanced skyward, watching dark shapes drone across the sky – leaving trails of smaller shapes that fell in long whistling formations.

  There was a buzzing noise somewhere, or was it in his head? Jameson blinked rapidly, trying to clear both his vision and his thoughts. Was it a voice? It was the radio.

  “Come in,” said the voice, distant and fuzzy.

  Or was it his hearing? Had the impact deafened him?

  “Come in, Jameson. This is Grews. Come in. What the hell happened?”

  What the hell HAD happened? he thought.

  The Hammer had happened.

  “Grews, Jameson. Exclusion zone has been hit by friendly fire. Repeat. One Troop has multiple blue-on-blue casualties. Over.”

  There was no reply for a moment.

  “What’s the damage?” asked Grews.

  Even with his head swimming, Jameson could make out the cold concern in the man’s voice. He shook his head again, trying to focus. Around him, the barking of assault rifles had resumed as yet more dead made their way out of the nearby buildings, those that hadn’t been flattened as the bombing run passed over the area. Jameson could see prone bodies of his Marines on the ground, but not quite well enough to count them.

  But it looked like at least a dozen of his men were down.

  “Thirty percent casualties. No confirmation on how many are KIA. Over.”

  “What about the refugees?”

  “The building is still standing and I can see movement inside. Stand by for an update. Out.”

  In less than five minutes, the center of the ancient city of Canterbury had been flattened nearly in its entirety, and in the few minutes the bombs had rained down, on the one place Jameson had been told would be safe, he may have lost a third of his men.

  But at least the tenement building was still standing.

  It was little enough.

  * * *

  On the top floor of the building, Amarie leaned against the wall, eyes wide, holding her sobbing child, Josie, tightly to her side and brushing splinters of glass from her hair. Cement crumbled and dust cascaded from cracks in the walls, and a massive split had opened in the old wooden panelling that ran the length of the room. The door, which until two minutes ago had been intact, now hung from its hinges.

  The whole world was falling apart around her.

  Every one of the windows had gone in the instant of the first impact, and now the floor was littered with millions of tiny shards of glass. They penetrated everywhere, and Amarie could taste blood on her lips.

  She knelt down and lifted Josie’s perfect little face, checking that the child hadn’t been hurt, and she felt a flush of relief as she saw just one small cut on the child’s forehead. That was all.

  That single cut was a kind of miracle.

  She lifted the little girl up and went to the window, her heart jumping at the sight below. There were soldiers everywhere! But many of them also lay in the yard of the building, injured or dead.

  “It’s okay, my sweet, the soldiers are here now,” she said in a hushed tone that only Josie could hear. Everything that she cared for in the whole world was in the tiny girl that she held tightly to her. “They will get rid of the bad things.”

  She glanced over at her backpack, checking that it still sat propped by the door, and was ready to go. She was prepared if need be to leave at a moment’s notice. And if it came to that, she would put that pack on, grab Josie, and run until her legs gave out. And then she would run some more. But the gunfire in the yard was ticking down, and the moans of the dead settling to a low murmur, all of it many floors below them. The soldiers were here now and they would be safe.

  If the bombs didn’t flatten the building before they could get out.

  Amarie prayed to God to protect her darling.

  It’s Coming Down

  Canterbury

  “Yes, sir. We’re evacuating the building now,” said Jameson over the open channel to Grews, one hand on his chin mic, the other resting on his rifle. He looked across the yard, back to the tenement. Half the refugees were already down in the yard and huddled in a group, waiting for the others to climb down the metal ladder that hung off the bottom of the fire escape.

  Jameson had lost six Marines, not twelve, and that included the two that had been taken out by the crazy driver of the 4x4. Four more died during the bombings, killed by flying debris; others had been injured, but would live. And, almost more important, they could all walk. The bombing had seemed to go on forever, but in reality had only lasted two minutes, and only four impacts had been close enough to endanger them.

  But those four had been enough.

  The bodies of his fallen men now lay in a row along the wall, with nothing to cover them. But One Troop was still holding together, maintaining a perimeter as the undead slowly zeroed in on them once more. There were a fair few wandering around even after the horrific bombing run. Yes, they mostly had limbs or other large chunks missing, but their brainstems had made it, and they were still kicking – as well as crawling out of buildings and searching for the next living thing to infect or devour.

  “The road you came in by should be clear,” said Grews’ voice in his ear. “I’ve got the Apaches inbound your location to run top cover for you while you maneuver.”

  “Copy that. But isn’t the plan to evac the survivors by air?”

  “That was the plan, but we can’t do it. No air transport available. Sorry, Lieutenant, you’re going to have to walk them out.”

  “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  “No, I’m not. Look, I know. Okay? I know. Let’s just do what needs to be done, and follow orders.”

  Jameson pressed his lips together. “Roger that, sir.”

  “And keep me updated. Good luck.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. One Troop out.”

  He looked over to where Eli stood at the bottom of the ladder with two of the other uninjured Marines, helping the refugees climb down. Some of the tunnelers had sustained minor injuries, but all were still physically able, and Eli even managed a smile as he helped a little girl and her mother out into the yard. Jameson recognized both the girl and the mother, from the newsflashes, as well as from in person during their evacuation of the tunnel. Her name was Marie, or something like that. The little girl, he knew, had been born underground, deep beneath the Channel. Jameson wondered what she thought of the outside world after knowing nothing but darkness for the first year and a half of her life.

  Amarie moved swiftly away from the building, relieved that her feet were finally on solid ground and no longer trapped in the heavily damaged and perilous structure. She held tightly to Josie’s hand as she set the child on her feet and looked around them. Beyond the wall she saw the ruins of what had just a few minutes before been a modern city. Now it seemed there wasn’t a single building, apart from the tenement, still standing.

  A few yards behind her, Eli was now helping a thin, gangly old man descend, when he heard the noise. A cracking sound, it came from somewhere close by. He turned in the direction of the nearest window, trying to peer through the darkness within.

  There it was again. Another loud crack.

  Eli let go of the old man’s shoulder, hefted his rifle, and aimed it into the window, flipping on his weapon-mounted light and sweeping the room. Nothing. The room was empty, apart from a few twice-dead zombies that lay inert on the ground. None of those was getting back up again.

  He caught a very slight movement in the corner of his vision. He turned toward it, ready to fire, but it wasn’t the motion of a zombie, or even of a human. This was something else, something much more urgent and worrying. From a large crack in the ceiling a stream of dust and powdered cement began cascading to the ground, throwing up a cloud that started to blow out the windows on the opposite side. But this wasn’t a small wafting of dust. This was a cascade.

  Something above was coming apart. Eli was the first to hear the beginning of the
tenement’s death rattle, as the foundations of the building started to fail, fatally damaged by the massive tremors that the bombs had caused.

  “LT, we have got a big problem,” he said.

  Footfalls approached as Jameson ran across the yard.

  “What’s up?” he asked, also peering inside as he made the same visual sweep, looking for targets and not seeing the real problem at all.

  At that moment, as though waiting for perfect timing, the joists that held up the floor above broke under the weight. One moment the two Marines were looking at a dusty room littered with dead and the next the entire floor above came down. Wooden boards, carpets, furniture, bricks – everything crashed ten feet straight onto the ground floor, shooting dust out of the windows so fast and heavy that both men breathed in a lungful of crap before they could stop themselves.

  Then they felt the ground move. Was it the ground?

  Jameson stepped backward and stared at the side of the building. Cracks were beginning to appear, spidering across the brickwork and along the cement seams, as scattered bits of brick fell away and hit the ground.

  “The fucking building is coming down,” said Eli.

  Then chaos.

  “Move move move!”

  Jameson shouted for the few refugees still climbing down the fire escape to get off it. Marines grabbed civilians and dragged them out of the yard and into the street. Eli ran across the uneven rubble, bodily carrying a frail man who seemed unable to scramble away quickly enough. Gunfire erupted now as the flood of people rushing away from the building met a few staggering zombies that had somehow survived the collapse of the buildings on the opposite side of the street and now clawed their way out of the rubble.

  The building groaned, dust and bricks falling away as a huge mouth-like gap opened on the fourth floor. Splintered wood spewed out of it and debris began to fall through the air and hit the ground.

  Two of the men still on the fire escape jumped the rail and fell into the yard; Jameson winced as he saw the second man, short with a graying beard, land hard on a chunk of masonry that had already claimed the life of one of his men. The man’s leg bent backward and he collapsed, screaming. One of the Marines who had been helping people from the building grabbed him under the arms and dragged him away.

  But there were still a handful of people rushing to get down and off the fire escape.

  Amarie, now ten yards from the building, snatched up Josie and ran. She didn’t care if there were undead closing in on them; all she cared about was getting Josie out of the way of the dying building. She ran ten more yards before the roaring sound climaxed behind her, and instinctively she pushed the child to the ground, knelt down and wrapped her arms around her, covering Josie with her body.

  And, once again, she prayed that God was watching.

  Then the building was coming down, but not toward them. Hundred of tons of brick and masonry collapsed into the street on the opposite side. The outer wall on the yard side, merely feet from Jameson as he tried to help a man down from the ladder, retreated inward as the whole building shifted and then fell. The stairwell pulled loose from its concrete footings and lurched away, pulled by the weight of the dying building. One moment Jameson was holding onto the man’s arm and the next he was gone, hurtling away from him.

  Jameson still stood in the same spot when the terrible noise of the collapse finally faded. A cloud of acrid, throat-burning dust filled the air for a hundred yards around him and reduced visibility to nearly nothing, but he still hadn’t moved. He could hear people coughing all around, and the groans of those who were injured. And still gunfire resounded as the undead moved in on them, and the Marines struggled to fend them off, amid the unfolding catastrophe.

  “Jameson. Come in,” snapped Grews’ voice in his ear.

  Not now, he thought. Just. Not. Now.

  “Jameson. Come in.”

  “What a fucking shit day this is!” Jameson said aloud.

  Zulu Jihadi

  Beaver Island

  “Two extra sets of hands,” Fick corrected the mechanic, as the two of them hunkered down near the tail of the bomber, and in the eye of their own coalescing storm of the dead. “You’re also gonna need security, while you do the refueling. Hang on.”

  Fick ducked under the wing of the plane, went down further under the fuselage, stuck his torso up the belly hatch, and hauled himself inside. Ten seconds later, he had the co-pilot out and on the deck. The man carried his flight helmet – which he hastily put back on as soon as he heard all the gunfire and saw the dead running around in the middle distance.

  “Captain,” Fick said, addressing the co-pilot by rank. “You’ll know your ass from your elbow in an airport refueling depot, right? Good. Kindly assist Stan here. Reyes – you pull security.”

  “Roger that,” the big Marine answered.

  “What about Bill?” the co-pilot asked – referring to the lead pilot, and presumably his buddy. He looked like he wanted the company and moral support.

  “Negative,” Fick said. “He stays buttoned up inside. Somebody who knows how to fly this bird has got to stay alive, or none of us are ever getting off this crapsack island.”

  The co-pilot started to mumble something about not really considering himself expendable, but Fick didn’t wait around to entertain further objections. Instead, he turned and ran back toward the control tower, checking his watch on the way. The chaos was growing all around them – thicker volleys of gunshots, shouts from Graybeard and Brady as they coordinated fires, the dead coming in heavier and from more directions.

  Fick didn’t understand this, and he needed to. The whole point of putting Alpha’s rendezvous point (RVP) here was that the island wasn’t supposed to be occupied by very many dead. Their pre-mission intel work-up had the permanent population of the entire island at six-hundred and something. If that was so, they’d already seen a quarter of them, just in their first twenty minutes on the ground.

  It made no sense.

  Fick leapt powerfully up the stairs of the tower, belying his forty-two years and sixty pounds of combat load, and reached the top level panting slightly. He stalked across the wreckage of the room, knelt down, and stuck his face in the Canadian prisoner’s.

  “Okay,” he said. “Who the hell are you? And what’s the story with this goddamned island?”

  * * *

  Over at the fueling point, using his seemingly all-purpose adjustable wrench, Stan got the hand pump rigged up to the main line coming from the underground fuel tank. While he did so, the co-pilot, following instructions, had started connecting lengths of fueling hose, while trying to stay as close to the others as possible. Reyes watched the whole operation from over his rifle optic, occasionally taking single shots, or small groupings, at lurching figures coming around the various buildings or out of the treeline. Some of them were close enough that the work team could smell their stench. And the bodies were starting to pile up, evenly dotting the landscape.

  “These ends don’t match,” the co-pilot said to Stan, holding up two articulated hose joints, like a child with Legos that didn’t fit.

  Hardly even looking up from his work, completely deadpan and professional, the mechanic replied, “Get yourself some gaffer tape and jerry-rig a seal. If there’s not any in the shed behind you, you’ll find a couple rolls with my gear in the front of the plane.”

  Reyes glanced over at this exchange with an approving grin. This mechanic guy was unflappable – and particularly fearless for a non-infantry type. But he was like some of the combat engineers Reyes had known – guys who could meticulously pour level concrete, or wire up a junction box, with mortars exploding twenty meters away and rounds snapping over their heads. Reyes immediately liked this dude.

  The two of them were alike – slightly bored by danger, and more than capable of doing their jobs in the face of chaos.

  * * *

  “You’re right that the population of the island used to be tiny.” This was the Canadian sni
per, MCpl Lightfoot, speaking in answer to Fick’s interrogation. He still looked about as crazed as before, but less like he’d just had a roof dropped on his head. “But then it became a shelter of last resort.”

  “Who for?” Fick kept his face right up in the guy’s. He needed answers, quickly.

  “For Duchemin-Perrout.”

  “Who the fuck is Douche— who the fuck is that?”

  “The Prime Minister. Francine Duchemin-Perrout. The Canadian PM and her whole cabinet. And half the national government.”

  Fick racked his brain, but didn’t recognize the name. If he’d ever known who ran things in their neighbor to the north, two years of much worse shit to worry about had overwritten it. But then his brow crinkled. “Wait a minute. Why the fuck was the Canadian government taking refuge on an American island?”

  Now Longfoot’s half-crazed smile faded. Suddenly he looked to Fick like someone had just fucked his cat. “We were scrambling. It was desperation. The primary refuge for the PM and Cabinet was an underground bunker about a hundred miles north of Ottawa. But that facility suffered an outbreak almost as soon as the first wave of people went down into it. Thank God, the PM stayed at her desk until the end, and was still on her way. We turned the helo back around in mid-air.”

  Fick tried to imagine an outbreak in a high-security underground bunker. Longfoot correctly interpreted his horrified look. “Yeah. You know that scene in 28 Weeks Later, when they’re all locked in an underground car park, and the virus rages through the crowd? Like that. Or so I heard.”

  Fick squinted. “Who’d you hear it from?”

  “One of the two survivors. A colleague of mine in RCMP – Protective Police.”

  Fick’s eyes flicked to the man’s uniform. “You don’t look like a close protection officer.”

  “Does this look like an assassination attempt? Everybody was totally tooled up by the end.”

  Fick blinked heavily. All of this was fascinating. But he didn’t have time for it. “Why here? Where are they? And how many?”