ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  But because no one had any wind left.

  As Jameson slumped down, watching younger and stronger Marines barricade the stairwell door, he felt an awkward wedge in his chest. Reaching into his load-bearing vest, he came out with Eli’s scruffy old notebook – which he’d been carrying, right beside his heart, all through the doomed Battle of the Gap, and ever since Eli gave it to him on that rooftop in Moscow.

  The hell with it, he thought, flipping to the first page, figuring he may as well read some. Eli might actually outlive me in the end. Plus, the troop and the Tunnelers were safe for the moment, and Croucher was taking charge and putting security in place. And Jameson was tired, and could do with a little sit-down. On the first page, in straight neat lines, underneath a very familiar date, the first line read:

  It’s all over now. It’s just begun. And it’s only us. Me, LT J., and the 36 men of One Troop. Which is how it ought to be.

  Jameson’s breath caught and he flipped the cover of the notebook closed again. It actually did sound like the voice of a dead man – and this was a notion he still couldn’t deal with. Not Eli, not his best friend – he couldn’t be gone. But, at any rate, Jameson now realized this was effectively Eli’s ZA Journal – a record of the whole war. And, being as he had seen his troop sergeant quietly and carefully inscribing notes into it right up until the end… it must have recorded his thoughts all the way to the end. Taking a breath and steeling himself, he turned it over and flipped to the very last page.

  —never of course believed we were going to make it. Not long-term. Not forever. No, we know how this is going to end, and it won’t end well.

  Jameson looked up from the page, and into his mind’s eye. And he remembered what Eli had said to him when they came back inside the Wall to quarantine, after the debacle in Canterbury. He’d asked why anyone would think Britain could survive a full-on outbreak, when every other country on the planet had fallen. They had just personally witnessed the hopelessness of the situation in Canterbury – when they threw everything they had at the outbreak to try to stem it, then ended up bombing the city flat… and then even that hardly slowed the dead. They just kept coming.

  Jameson exhaled mournfully and thought about the dead running amok in the streets of central London, right beneath their feet. Eli had predicted all of this. And it looked like his final prediction was going to be correct.

  They were going down. All of them. This was the end.

  He looked back down to the dirt-marked pages.

  But, you know what? None of it matters. All that matters is doing my job: being there to support J., and keeping the troop together, taking care of the men. That’s it for me. That’s all there is. Keeping the men alive, and making J’s command a success. Maybe we’ll get out of this godforsaken place, maybe we won’t. Maybe this insane gambit in Red Square will work, and we’ll get back to Blighty with something that’ll help. Probably we’ll all just snuff it in Russia. But as long as I have the honour and privilege of doing my job, til the end, I don’t really give a damn. The rest will take care of itself.

  That was it – the last line. Jameson swallowed a heavy lump in his throat, and closed his eyes, just for a moment.

  And he shut the notebook again.

  * * *

  A minute later, he stood facing the big glass walls out at the edge of the floor, hailing CentCom again – hailing them over and over. But even from here, he could see all the steel, stone, and glass that surrounded them, in the heart of the City of London. Given that, as well as the distance, it was going to be too much for his personal role radio (PRR) to stretch. There was a chance. But it wasn’t paying off right now.

  He turned and went back into the interior of the floor, to check on his Marines, as well as the Tunnelers. Some of the former were treating the injured among the latter, while others stood stag at the stairwells and elevator lobby. Walking the perimeter, he found the lone survivor of the Paras slumped up against a wall, just as he had been, all on his own, head in his hands. Earlier, Jameson had seen him looking after the women in the Tunneler group, seeming anxious to help.

  But now he didn’t look good.

  Jameson sat down beside him. “Well done looking after the females,” he said.

  Elliot nodded without looking up. “Grew up with three little sisters. Makes you kind of protective.”

  “Good lad.” This made Jameson think of his beloved cousin in Canterbury – the one he’d been unable to save, to do anything for except… but he pushed that thought away, unable to bear it right now. Instead, he asked, “What’s your name, then?” As Elliot answered, Jameson noticed he was rubbing the back of his right knee.

  “Caught a piece of shrapnel,” Elliot said, noting Jameson’s look of concern. Then his gaze went long, like he was seeing something he really didn’t want to see, watching it play in his mind all over again.

  Jameson wanted to ask him if he was okay. But of course he wasn’t okay. He’d just lost his entire regiment. No heavier loss could be imagined for a soldier. Jameson searched for something to say that might help, but knew how ridiculous that was. Finally, just to say something, he managed, “Being protective’s a good trait for a soldier.”

  Elliot snorted. “Not when you can’t actually protect anyone.” He looked across, his eyes full of pain. “I’m a sharpshooter, it’s supposed to be my whole job, to protect my platoon-mates. But I’ve failed at every step.”

  Jameson rubbed his shoulder. “I doubt that, Private.”

  Elliot hung his head again, and spoke in a voice of deathly despair. “Back during the campaign in Kent, I went out with half a section to locate a mis-dropped ammo pallet. I was the only one who came back. Last to fall was my best mate, Ahmit, who got infected. I had to shoot him in the face.”

  Okay, Jameson said, thinking of all his pain and losses of the last two years. Maybe I actually haven’t had it so bad…

  “And that was just the start. I was cut off behind lines – so wasn’t there when my entire company was wiped out. I should have died with them. But I wasn’t there. When I went back for them, and tried to carry just one wounded platoon-mate out on my back, somehow he died protecting me instead.”

  He shook his head like none of it made the least sense.

  “When I finally linked back in with what was left of 2 PARA, I thought I’d found some hope, or enough to keep me going. I figured that, facing certain death, the only thing that gave life meaning was sacrificing for the people you love. But it’s them, not me, who keep doing all the sacrificing. When we were circling around London, we led the dead into an encampment of civilian refugees. Instead of protecting them, we used them to break contact and get away.”

  “You had a job to do,” Jameson said. “An indispensable one. Defending the gap in the Wall.”

  Elliot shrugged. “And up there, in that battle, I got put in charge of a whole section. All of them dead – and most died protecting me, instead of the other way around, no matter how hard I tried. And after them, the entire 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment. All gone, to a man. I literally couldn’t save a single goddamned one.”

  “Sometimes it’s not for us to control. All we can do is try.”

  Elliot hunched back over his knees, looking as if his God had forsaken him. “Finally, I thought all I wanted to do was to die with them. Just finish it, standing beside my brothers, all of us going down, defending each other to the last. But I wasn’t even allowed to do that.”

  Jameson winced in silence. But if Elliot was indicting him, for rescuing him, he didn’t seem aware of it.

  “What I just can’t understand is… why I’m being kept alive, through all this, alone out of anyone. It’s obviously not to do my job, not to protect people, not to save anyone. The only possible answer I can think of is… that it’s to punish me.”

  “You’re still alive,” Jameson said. “Which means there are more chances. You’ve still got a role to perform, and you can still save lives.” He left out that he di
dn’t honestly believe anyone, anywhere, could be saved at this point. Other than that, he was at a loss, so he just asked, “Where’d you take the shrapnel?”

  Elliot’s voice was flat and affectless. “In the same action that killed my whole company. It was a misplaced artillery barrage. A complete fuck-up. And all of them, all of my closest mates, were caught in the middle of it. Like I said, I was separated, so was able to run out ahead of it, somehow surviving. And when I went back to try to help the wounded… the dead were eating them alive.”

  Jameson tried to speak, but his voice caught in his throat.

  * * *

  Jameson stood in the middle of the room now and listened to Croucher report on their status, trying to focus. But there was a terrible ringing in his ears, and he couldn’t hear.

  “Sir? Do you agree two men should do the job?”

  Jameson blinked violently, trying to clear his head. They had been talking about sending men down to try to retrieve one of the more powerful set radios from the trucks in the street below. They still couldn’t reach CentCom on their PRRs. And the building was hemmed in worse than ever. Air extraction was their best, and perhaps only, option.

  “Affirmative,” Jameson said. “Send Simmonds – and Elliot, the Para lad. He needs a job.”

  “Yes, sir.” Croucher moved out to round them up.

  Jameson moved to the exterior glass walls again, and watched the streets of London descending into chaos below. But he wasn’t seeing any of it. He was looking back into memory, racking his brain for foggy details, missing data… from that horrible couple of days when he had been in the JOC at CentCom, somehow briefly responsible for running the whole damned war.

  He could definitely remember trying to organize that massive artillery barrage that went in down in Kent. It had been intended to allow the forces there, including the Paras, to break contact with the dead, and get back to the Wall. But in the middle of it all, literally a thousand things had been happening at once, a million calls on his attention, totally unqualified personnel getting shanghaied into roles they didn’t know how to perform, and all of them looking to him, for every decision, every life-and-death call…

  Jameson tried to recreate the scene in his mind’s eye.

  He could vaguely remember being at the indirect-fires control station, with some damned cooks or something, trying to finalize the artillery strike coordinates and timings, but then getting called away… There had been radio calls from the John F. Kennedy – Americans asking for aircraft, Americans asking for bloody gene sequencers…

  And, in the middle of it all, the flight of Chinooks from CentCom North, which held what was supposed to be his relief. And rather than landing and taking the war off his hands – instead the entire world started blowing up outside the window, a total cataclysm, both helicopters knocked sideways, breaking in half in spilling gouts of flame, as well as bodies, all of it falling out of the sky, crashing horrendously and lethally to the ground. And all this caused by the unexplained explosion of the fuel tanks beneath the aircraft hangar…

  But what the hell had happened after that?

  He couldn’t even remember. It had all gone to shit around him so fast, chaos turning to worse than chaos, and now it was all a blur. He knew only one thing: that he had been responsible for that artillery barrage, just as he’d been responsible for every aspect of the war.

  And now he knew he was responsible for one other thing.

  For killing all of Elliot’s brothers.

  * * *

  “I heard you address your commander as ‘Major’,” Elliot said to Simmonds, as the two young men leapt down the inside stairs of the Gherkin. “But he’s wearing the two pips of a lieutenant and looks like a platoon leader to me.”

  “Troop commander,” Simmonds said. “But, yeah.” He paused to suck in a breath as they both turned a corner onto another landing. “But he got a field promotion. Hell, he was put in charge of everything for a while.”

  “What’s everything?”

  “The whole war.”

  “What?”

  With this, the pair reached the bottom landing and paused behind steel double doors. Simmonds crouched forward, preparing to crack them and peer out into the lobby. But he paused and looked back at Elliot.

  “Back at CentCom, for a couple of days, he was controlling the whole bloody defense of the realm.” Elliot looked disbelieving. “There was a bad outbreak, right in CentCom HQ. All the Ruperts got taken out. We rocked up at the right time. Jameson got the nod. Commanded the whole fight in the south, he did.”

  Simmonds turned back toward the closed doors, but Elliot grabbed his arm and spun him back around. When he did, Simmonds couldn’t read his expression. Elliot’s voice was an emotionless monotone when he said, “So he controlled things like… troop movements.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Casualty evacuation, air extractions – or the lack of them.”

  Simmonds nodded, looking impatient, but Elliot’s grip on his arm was growing even firmer, borderline painful.

  “And artillery barrages.”

  “Yes, everything, I told you, mate.” Simmonds yanked his arm free. “C’mon, we got a job to do.” He cracked open the door.

  It didn’t look good out there.

  Jacked

  London, Surbiton – Zombie Paintball

  As Juice coughed out plaster dust and pushed himself up off the dusty and glass-strewn floor with his hands, in peripheral he could already see frenzied figures leaping over and around both him and Pred and disappearing into the arena.

  He could also see Pred still face down on the deck a few feet away, unmoving. But it was like your basic helo crash, or IED strike. First secure the crash site, and suppress the enemy. No one would get any help if everyone was dead.

  Still coughing, Juice got up on one knee, turned to face the front of the building, and raised his rifle. A runner filled his EOTech sight, and in a quarter of a heartbeat he flipped his fire selector up and put two rounds through the bottom half of its head, then leaned to one side as it tumbled past and collapsed in the rubble and debris that covered the floor.

  This really is like stepping out of a helo crash into the middle of a firefight, Juice considered – like the downed Black Hawks with Delta guys on them in Mogadishu. You had to shake it off fast if you wanted to stay alive any longer.

  Now he had time to notice that the front of the building was on fire – and also blown wide open to the parking lot out front. And a fair number of crazy civilian sons of bitches were still fleeing – into a burning building.

  Zombies make people nuts, Juice thought.

  He held his fire on two dudes who might be infected, but definitely hadn’t turned yet, as they dashed inside and around him. He considered trying to pull a Predator/Neo maneuver by physically stopping them, but he had bigger problems right now. Namely his friend, and the mission objective.

  First he stood up and pushed a little farther out toward the licking flames and smoke and dropped two more frenzied runners – one straddling an unconscious person and clawing out handfuls of guts, and another running in their direction across the lot. That seemed to take care of the immediate threat.

  He backed inside again, scanning over his rifle, dust and glass crystals in his beard, then turned and knelt, and found Predator was alive – and coming around. By reacting instantly, and moving fast, they’d both gotten just far enough away from the incoming car crash and resulting explosion of compressed-air tanks to save themselves.

  “You okay, man?” Juice shouted.

  Pred coughed explosively, then reached for his rifle beside him on the deck. “Fine,” he said, shaking his head.

  Juice let him get to his feet on his own, and instead pushed out to the rear, into the first part of the arena. The cart, containing their mission objective, was right there, having been rolled back by the force of the explosion, about twenty feet inside. Most of the contents were still on it, and Juice policed up the coupl
e of paintball guns and air tanks that had been knocked off. By the time he had, Pred was back on his feet, rifle up and scanning, moving past him into the arena proper.

  They didn’t need to discuss their exfil plan. Not only was their truck parked out back, but the front of the building was a no-go – the explosion, the fire, the unstable structure, and fleeing civilians, aside from being hazards in themselves, were drawing more dead. So now they had to clear back through the arena to the rear again.

  But it was a whole different game of paintball this time.

  * * *

  With smoke starting to fill the dark and labyrinthine space, it was even spookier, weirder, and more annoying than the first time through, or so Pred thought. It was also more crowded.

  “This is some bullshit,” he muttered, panning the cone of his weapon-mounted light fluidly and methodically from side to side, as he smoothly stepped through the twists of the arena and around barriers, trusting both that Juice was right behind him, pushing the cart – and that he would hear his griping. “Another damned building burning down around us.”

  “Hey,” Juice answered, “no flaming zombie bats. No singularity outside.”

  Pred took a breath. Juice had a point. “Yeah, and we’re not in fucking Somalia.”

  “Seriously. We’re fine, dude.”

  Pred tried to calm down, but in a flash an undead face appeared in his light and he instinctive-fired a double-tap through its chin point – which flapped and flaked away, just like the paper target it was. It was one of the zombie cut-outs.

  “Goddammit.”

  But as he paused and reset, lowering his rifle and taking a breath, the whole cardboard cut-out tumbled over, a real runner knocking it over from behind and coming straight at Pred’s face. It was already inside the radius of his weapon, so he pivoted and slung it to the deck, coming up with his pistol and double-tapping it in the head. He looked up over the suddenly disanimated corpse to see Juice standing behind the cart, calmly waiting for him to finish – but then Juice nodded over his shoulder.