ARISEN
Hope Never Dies.
First published 2017 by Complete & Total Asskicking Books
London, UK
Copyright © Michael Stephen Fuchs
The right of Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him 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 author’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 unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
About the Author
MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS is co-author of the first eight books of the bestselling ARISEN series; as well as solo author of Books Nine through Thirteen, and the prequels ARISEN : Genesis and ARISEN : Nemesis – which have repeatedly been Amazon #1 bestsellers in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, #1 in Dystopian Science Fiction, #1 in Military Science Fiction, #1 in War Fiction, and #1 in War & Military Action Fiction, as well as Amazon overall Top 100 bestsellers. The series as a whole has sold over a half-million copies. The audiobook editions, performed by R.C. Bray, have generated over two million dollars in revenue. He is also author of the D-BOYS series of high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include D-BOYS, COUNTER-ASSAULT, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming in 2018); as well as the existential cyberthrillers THE MANUSCRIPT and PANDORA’S SISTERS, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation). He lives in London and at www.michaelstephenfuchs.com, and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge. You can follow him on Facebook, Twitter (@michaelstephenf), or by e-mail.
ARISEN
BOOK THIRTEEN
THE SIEGE
MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS
For my father.
“They shall eat up your harvest and your food; they shall eat up your sons and your daughters; they shall eat up your flocks and your herds; they shall eat up your vines and your fig trees; your fortified cities in which you trust they shall beat down with the sword.”
– Jeremiah 5:17
“In these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are the zombies.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre
Doomed
200 Meters North of the Gap in the ZPW
Boom.
Headshot.
Boom. A miss. Boom. Another miss. Fuck.
Private Elliot Walker of 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment (2 PARA) tried to blink the burning sweat out of his eyes. He didn’t dare take his hands off his weapon, or his eye from the optic, not for even one second. There was no time. They were all out of time.
Everyone everywhere was.
Track… breathe… settle… squeeze…
BOOM. Headshot.
They didn’t all have to be headshots. Sustained, concentrated fire from the entire battalion – or what was left of it – could bring down the surging packs of runners. They’d been doing it all night. A running dead man too eviscerated or too dismembered to run was almost as good as one that had been destroyed by a shot to the brainstem.
But whether turned off or just immobilized, or else blasted into wiggling meat on the ground, the imperative was the same: they had to be stopped. Before they got to the gap in the Wall. That was it. That was everything – that was the Paras’ whole world now. Everything else – their pasts, any notion of future, their personal identities – was subsumed in this job. They were a unified machine with a single function.
Stop the dead. Plug the gap.
And hold the line.
The trouble was the runner packs just kept coming – wave after endless implacable wave. They surged out of the sodium-glare-edged darkness, one behind another, ravening mouths gaping open, mottled hands reaching out and grasping, moving with an animation and energy the living had lost long ago. It was as if Death itself – all the death in the cold, dark, infinite, lifeless universe surrounding them – knew exactly where the last flickering flames of life sheltered from the storm.
And was coming to swallow them whole.
* * *
The wet earth of the hastily constructed slit trench thrummed around Private Elliot Walker’s body with the percussive force of rapid-firing assault rifles, as the overpressure in the air ravaged his eardrums. Pinging, burning bullet casings bounced off his helmet and body armor, then piled up around his boots. His own weapon – a previously pristine but now mud- and gore-splashed L129A1 sharpshooter rifle – was suppressed. But the weapons of the men in his section were not.
“Fire discipline!” he tried to shout over the roar of the volleys. They’d had a couple of small ammo drops, but even those had stopped now, and he had to assume no more were coming. And when the ammo ran out, that was it. They were done. Sure, they could fix bayonets – had already fixed them, in fact – and fight hand-to-hand, for a while.
But no one was in any hurry to re-stage the Battle of the Somme, only this time against the undead Hun.
Elliot put his eye back to his optic and dropped two more runners in quick succession. The Paras’ lines were constructed as two inverted Vs, flanking the gaping hole where the so-called Zulu-Proof Wall had collapsed into rubble. The outer two lines protected their flanks. But it was the inner two that were heavily and decisively engaged. The dead seemed to know exactly where they were going – either because of the noise, the world-shaking thunder of that hundred-foot-tall bastion of stone and steel when it crashed down and exploded on the ground. Or else because they somehow had the scent of the last eight million living survivors sheltering behind it.
Either way, they now came right at them, emptying out the black map of the overrun south, circling around the entire perimeter of London and the ZPW – and finally sluicing around the Paras’ two thin salients, and into the funnel and killzone they had designed before the fifty-foot gap where the Wall had come down. As the dead approached it, they were subject to withering fire from two sides, a V shape with the collapse and resulting gap as its vertex. And it was in that killzone they went down, in great piles of hurtling and collapsing meat. For a while it had been like the Paras had brought a minigun to a buffalo hunt.
That is, the dead went down – until suddenly they didn’t.
Now Elliot heard the firing ramp up to a dangerous frenzy and men shouting in alarm, as two huge packs of about thirty runners each came out of the dark and powered into the funnel, one right behind the other. As the men trained their fire on the front rank and cut them down, the pack in the rear divided, raced around either side of those falling – and then veered off and bashed into the Paras’ lines on either side.
The dead had, somehow, just gotten smart.
And before Elliot or his section could react, the dead were on them. And now it was hand-to-hand, and none of them were ready. The seven men of 2nd section – of which Elliot had been put in charge after their grievous losses in the south – fired point-blank into the wall of sprinting, pistoning, relentless black bodies that broke over them like a wave. But still every one fell right into the trench with them, their wild momentum making it impossible to tell which had been destroyed and which were still active. Bodies rolled and thrashed, rifles rose up and pistoned back down bayonet-first as foul-smelling black sludge arced
into the obsidian and panic-riven air.
Only Elliot’s sharpshooter rifle lacked a bayonet – it required a special adapter to mount one, which it had never occurred to anyone to issue him – making him feel three times as useless as usual. But the dead on his side of the trench, the far right, got put down in two seconds. It was the left side of the trench getting the worst of it, and Elliot could hear cursing and shouts of rage in the dark, but he couldn’t fight his way through the riot of bodies to get over there and help his brothers.
He couldn’t protect them. But he knew he had to.
Not hesitating, he powered himself out of the trench into the relative safety of the rear side, fired over the top of the foxhole nearly point-blank at a late-coming runner, and dashed around to the far end. Below him in the much deeper darkness, he could see two dead scrabbling and flailing on top of a face he recognized through the gap between them – but he didn’t even need to see the face, because he already knew it was the soldier he specifically put in what was the theoretically safest position, on the inside flank.
This was Beevor, the youngest soldier in the section, and he was in the process of being buried alive in this grave by the dead thrashing on top of him. The men to his side leaned in and tried to help, but couldn’t get leverage in all the frantic struggling in the confined space. Elliot reached down, seized one dead body by its coat, and hauled it completely out of the trench, pivoting and slamming it to the ground, then stomping his boot through its face. By the time he’d pivoted back, the second one had been destroyed. He grabbed it anyway and heaved it out, then squatted down over the lip of the trench, tried to catch his breath, and watched as Beevor got hauled to his feet by Craddock – the oldest man in the section.
“All right, mate?” Craddock asked.
Beevor was too winded and adrenalized to speak; his smooth and unlined face just nodded vigorously in the dark. Both of them ignored Elliot as the older man checked out the younger, who didn’t appear bitten or scratched. He did have some gore splashed on his uniform, which was potentially infectious.
But it didn’t matter so much.
Though nobody had said it, they all knew none of them were getting out of there, or ever going home again. This position, these dirty holes in the ground far from any safety, support, or succor, was where they were going to die.
But at least they were going to die together.
When the Wall originally came down in that peaceful dusk, their orders from CentCom had been simplicity itself: “Hold that position – no matter what. Move for nothing. Don’t bend, don’t break. Your men die in place – and senior officers die with their men. Two PARA holds until relieved… or until you’re all dead.” Sometime in the black night, long ago, Elliot had given up any hope that they would be relieved.
That left only one possible outcome.
And it also meant they needed every man – even if there was a chance they were infected. If they were clearly bitten or scratched, that was one thing. But splashes of gore were simply not bothered about now. Until a man turned, he could fight. And each man knew enough at this point to be able to see the change coming – and so did the man to either side of him.
And they were surrounded, with the dead practically in their lines already, anyway.
What’s one more? Elliot figured.
But now at least the latest wave had been broken, and the living had survived. All Elliot could do was try to keep the men in his section alive as long as possible, to protect them any way he could. That was everything.
And it would have to be enough.
He rose, not receiving nor needing thanks for his heroism, and returned to his own side of the trench. When he got there and climbed back in, the next wave was already hurtling into the killzone. Elliot shook his head and swallowed heavily. This would never end.
Until it was finally all over – for good.
* * *
Boom.
A miss. Boom. Another miss – really wild this time.
Elliot was trying to hit a Foxtrot, which had emerged from the black treeline, coming in fast and crazy. If he could make a headshot on it while still at standoff range, he could save the battalion a huge amount of invaluable ammo, which they’d have to spend cutting it to pieces inside the killzone. But hitting it was simply beyond his powers. He could barely keep the hurtling, leaping, gamboling horror in his damned scope, never mind put a round in its brainstem. He was getting better as a sharpshooter every hour, every minute. He’d had to. He could now drop runners at full gallop – much or most of the time.
But Foxtrots defeated him.
Thank God so far they’d faced only a few of those.
And now Elliot realized that by shooting for the moon, trying to be a superstar, he hadn’t been doing his job of protecting his soldiers. The job of the sharpshooter was to engage and suppress the enemy before they became a threat to the men in his unit – and since it was his unit to lead now, the responsibility pressed down on him with four times the usual weight. If he fucked around and didn’t put the runners down, the dead were going to be back in their trench again. And next time it was unlikely they would all survive fighting hand-to-hand and nose-to-nose. Elliot traversed his aim and picked off runners from the edge of the pack, the edge closest to his men.
He knew he was making a difference.
And when this next pack was finally put down, he just watched that Foxtrot come flying in behind – winging its way into a storm of lead unleashed by the paratroopers in the long V-shaped segments of trenches. As its body came apart, it lost momentum and skidded into the mud in a lumpy pile of itself. And then the guns went silent, and Elliot could actually hear its inhuman thrashing and hissing as still it tried to get to them, trying to locomote on legs that weren’t even drumsticks.
“Walker, mate, you lot all right there?”
Elliot touched the cup of his PRR headset. It was Staff Sergeant Bhardwaj – who, inconceivable as it was, now commanded what was left of 2 PARA. Most of the senior NCOs had gone down trying to rescue Elliot’s ravaged brothers in C Company, after the catastrophically misplaced artillery barrage back in Kent. And then the entire command element had been taken out when the hundreds of tons of collapsing Wall fell on their heads.
Elliot slightly wondered if the officers had been punished for breaking the brotherhood, for their lack of sacrifice and solidarity – by keeping themselves safe back by the Wall, while everyone else was pushed out onto the front lines. Plus, if they had even just stayed at their posts in BHQ (Battalion Headquarters) when the collapse started, they would have lived. But instead they ran – and they died.
It didn’t matter now.
“Yep, no worries, Sergeant,” Elliot answered. “All good.” He knew Bhardwaj was looking out for him, keeping a close eye. He’d shown great faith by putting Elliot in charge of 2nd section. It was a risk in many ways: Elliot was a private, he was from a different company altogether, and the men in the section didn’t know him. But then again…
They were all damned well still alive.
And that, keeping these seven men alive, was now Elliot’s sole purpose for living, his alpha and omega. His brothers in C Company had died on the field under that errant rain of steel fire. He hadn’t been able to save even one, not even Jonesy, as he tried to carry him off the killing fields on his back – instead Jones had died in his place, taking the force of the attack when a Foxtrot jumped them from behind.
And before that, his best friend, Ahmit, who… but Elliot couldn’t even think about that anymore. He couldn’t bear it.
He also couldn’t afford to now.
2 PARA had been taking slow and steady losses all night, being attrited down. But not Elliot’s section.
“We’re all fine, Sarge,” he repeated.
* * *
“Good lad,” Bhardwaj said, hunched over in his trench, facing the rear in the near dark. “You men just hold tight. Next wave isn’t due in for ninet—”
“Oh, no,
mate! Don’t fucking do it! Sarge, Sarge—”
Bhardwaj released the pressel on his radio and spun to face the front. Two men were out of their trenches and stalking toward the flopping Foxtrot burger lying out in no-man’s land. It was pretty clear they intended to finish it.
“What the fuck are those knobheads thinking?” the man next to the Staff Sergeant said. But Bhardwaj knew exactly what they were thinking: Fuck the dead. They were angry, full of sorrow and rage for the friends they had lost. They wanted some payback – and some control over the situation. Mainly, they were scared.
Which was manifesting as anger.
Bhardwaj didn’t panic – a reaction that would have disqualified him from his current role as commander, or even his last one as platoon sergeant – but just switched channels and got back on his radio. “Oi, you two do us a favor and do not get too close, yeah?”
But even as he was saying this, it was already too late.
* * *
The first paratrooper approached the abomination flopping on the black ground, raised his rifle and took aim. It was moving, but not enough to save it. It might take a couple of rounds to do the job, but at this range a headshot was a done deal. He tracked its head movements, spat in the dirt, then hesitated – deciding to get a step or two closer. He paused just to glance over his shoulder and make sure his mate was still there.
He was.
He turned to face forward again.
He never even heard his friend’s shout of warning, as the Foxtrot did the impossible: though mostly tenderized and perforated meat, it coiled and struck like a rattlesnake, scrabbling across eight feet of ground with mind-numbing speed, using one claw-hand alone. And just like that the horrifying thing was on him, wrapped around his legs, tripping him up and stealing his balance. He was holding his weapon and couldn’t flail his arms, but instead just tumbled backward, slamming into the ground – and instantly felt a searing, soul-destroying pain right in his groin.
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