ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  And then he heard a man scream in pain, and when he spun to face him, saw him hit the ground – all alone, no dead near him. When Wes ran to his aid, he found he’d been shot, at least twice – once low in the belly, under his body armor, and once in the upper thigh. He howled and clutched at his wounds and rolled on the ground. Fighting the impulse to ignore the fight and keep the man from bleeding out, Wes took a knee – and he defended them both, dropping a runner that ignored him and went straight for the screaming and blood. After shooting it in the head, Wes reached out and shoved it as it fell, so it didn’t fall on the wounded man.

  He took another look around at the confusing melee, and verified at least that nothing was coming for them that second.

  Only then did he take one hand, feel around for his aid pouch, get it out and drop it on the groaning man. “Try to stop the bleeding,” he said, still scanning over his rifle. And the next thing he did was reach for his radio.

  Whatever happened to them… he had to report in.

  * * *

  Park led Aliyev and Sarah all the way to the back of the complex, clearing as he went by pointing his pistol over the top of the culturing table that he rolled in front of him. By going deeper inside, thank God, they’d ensured that the dead, although still swarming and coming fast, were only coming from behind them now. Trailing and occasionally beside him was Aliyev, shoving the other table with both hands, one of them also holding his Benelli. Bringing up the rear was Sarah, still shooting backward, steadily but less often now.

  When they reached the door to the warehouse – the last possible stop for this train – they were neither the first nor the last ones there. Other members of the fifty-person Bio staff, all of them apparently unarmed, and without exception seized with panic, were pushing their way in. Someone knocked into Aliyev’s table, and his Benelli clattered off the top of it. But they were almost there so he and the others kept going, getting both tables pushed safely inside. While Park tried to get them up against an inside wall and out of the way, Aliyev dashed back out past where Sarah was covering the doorway.

  It was immediately clear he was in a race with the pursuing dead in the hallway – and unfortunately he was racing toward them. He reached the dropped shotgun, snatched it up, spun around, dug in – and those melted soles on his boots finally came off entirely. Both of them, at once.

  Aliyev sprawled out face down on the cement floor.

  Sarah fired over the top of him, eyes wide, as Simon reached the doorway, raising his weapon beside her.

  Dead were flooding down the hall.

  Sarah lowered her weapon and slammed the door shut. Behind it they could hear fast-approaching moaning – and then shotgun blasts, triggering off faster than any pump-action shotgun could have done. This also meant the weapon would be empty in seconds.

  Park looked at Sarah with wide eyes. “We can’t leave him out there,” he said. Before she could stop him, he flung the door open and raced out, pistol up and firing.

  Sarah cursed under her breath.

  Because if he went out, that meant she was going out.

  * * *

  Fick sent another empty thirty-round rifle mag clattering to the deck, as he flowed through the canteen. Don’t think anyone’ll complain about littering, he thought, the shape this place is in. It was a complete horror show in there.

  Also, there was no one left alive to complain.

  Fick’s QRF, led very much by him, had now totally cleared the facility. That meant not only destroying all the dead but also killing the obviously infected – and in some cases the half-eaten. Which had proved to be pretty much everyone. Fick sure hoped somebody had escaped this death zone, and hoped even more they were healthy. But no one who had stayed in there was getting out. It was a complete charnel house.

  But at least it was clear now.

  Or, okay, maybe it ain’t, he thought, wheeling on some unsavory sounds coming from a door behind the food counter, and seating his new mag with a slap. He didn’t have to issue instructions to his team. They were actually doing a pretty decent job, which mainly involved following his lead – staying behind him, backing him up, and going wherever he went.

  And not shooting him in the ass. Not yet, at least.

  Then again, he kind of had the impression they were following him only because they had to; they weren’t getting too close because they still didn’t like or trust him; and they refrained from shooting him in the ass mainly because they were afraid of what he’d do to them if they did.

  But all of that was good enough.

  Moving silently, Fick grasped the doorknob with his left hand, paused a beat – and yanked it open. Behind the door crouched a runner, which spun around, wheezed in his face – and then dropped to the deck as the back of its head blew out from a pair of Fick’s 5.56 rounds fired point-blank. A second dead bastard popped up and blasted around the side of a cooking island, and Fick had to shoot it ten times before he found the brainstem, but he never flinched – just let it come at him until it dropped.

  Stepping inside, mentally apologizing to his boots, he put security headshots into the two mostly eaten bodies on the floor. They didn’t look too mobile, but he still didn’t want them coming back as lethal ankle-biters. He then cleared the rest of the kitchen, finally pausing at the only other entrance, a closed door in back, with a big industrial can of tomatoes for some reason pushed up in front of it. If that was meant to be a barricade, it was the most welfare, white-trash, sorry-ass barricade he’d seen in two full years of ZA. Looking over his shoulder, he saw two of the RMPs were now in there with him – backing him up, but staying out of his way.

  That was good.

  As he turned forward again, speaking over his shoulder, he said, “One nice thing about a prison…”

  “What’s that?” one of the RMPs asked.

  Fick turned the key that was still in the door’s lock, then pocketed the set of keys. “Locks down and seals off real good,” he said, turning to face the room again. “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”

  A prison cafeteria was depressing at the best of times.

  But as they moved out, Fick’s radio went again, from Ali in the JOC. “Fick, Wes is jammed up – he reports his team doesn’t know if they can get to Bio, or how quickly.”

  Fick cursed under his breath. “Copy that.”

  “And the med wing also reports being under attack.”

  Goddammit, he thought. I finally just caught my breath. Now they had not one new job, but two. And he couldn’t be both places. He had to either divide his force, pull more men off the walls – or else choose. “How bad? What kind of numbers in each location?”

  “Unknown. Reports are conflicting.”

  Fick sighed. Like Ali and Homer, he was acutely aware that Handon was in that med wing. And, like them, he knew it didn’t matter. “Okay,” he said into his chin mic. “We’re heading to Bio. Tell the hospital they’re just going to have to hang tight.”

  He turned to his team. “C’mon,” he said, leading them back out into the yard, accelerating to another run. “Looks like we gotta do everything ourselves around this joint.”

  He didn’t hear any complaints. That was good, too.

  * * *

  “Please don’t do that shit again,” Sarah said, her back pressed up against the door to the warehouse, which they had once again gotten closed, bodies slamming into it from the other side. Ahead of her, space opened up both above and out to the far distance, dominated by endless towering shelving units, all of them filled with small but solid square cardboard boxes, with markings on them in large print on them.

  Also ahead of her were Park and Aliyev – both of them back safe and, she ardently hoped, uninfected.

  Park just shrugged. His manner seemed to say: Some things are more important than saving the world. Or maybe it was just that Aliyev was going to be instrumental in saving the world. Sarah hoped that was it. Otherwise, Park had definitely been spending too much time hangi
ng around no-man-left-behind military types. Right now, he had found a power outlet and plugged both of the culturing tables back in. That was good – it said he was still mission-focused.

  And time definitely wasn’t on humanity’s side.

  Though, Sarah figured, killing time is what we do now. As far as she knew, there was no way out of there but through the lynch mob of runners rampaging through the rest of the complex. And they were definitely too few to fight their way out. Mainly, she couldn’t risk Park. She had to keep them all buttoned up safe here, and wait for the cavalry.

  As Park directed a few of the lab staff in scavenging materials to barricade the door, she managed to get the JOC on the radio, and update them with their status – namely that they were okay for now, but also trapped. Having done that, she started flipping through other channels, scanning for radio traffic that might paint a picture of what the hell was going on out there. And then she and the two indispensable scientists settled down, reloaded, tried to slow their breathing…

  And got busy waiting for rescue.

  Gravity

  500 Feet Above London, Two Miles from the City

  “You’re sodding where?” Charlotte boggled.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Jameson replied.

  As soon as she’d decided to commit this dereliction of duty – conducting her independent rescue mission instead of guarding CentCom – then switched helicopters to one that might actually hold all of One Troop plus the Tunnelers, and finally got moving again, the next thing Charlotte did was plug in the grid coordinates Jameson had sent for their location.

  But by that time she was already halfway there.

  And while she could see it on her screen, and also coming up live and in person on the horizon, she still didn’t quite believe it. So she was getting verbal confirmation. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d received garbled target coordinates. But, if correct, these would definitely be the stupidest ones – the most ridiculous and impossible spot she’d ever even heard about for extracting troops in contact.

  As she regarded the gleaming glass-and-steel phallus shape of it, like a giant sex toy dominating the London skyline, she boggled at Jameson again. “You had to hole up in a building without a bloody roof? Or any kind of a proper top at all?” And it was true – the Gherkin really did just taper up to kind of a slightly dulled point. There was absolutely nothing to set down on – and very little even to hover over.

  “It gets worse,” Jameson said. “I don’t think there’s any way we can get down, or out of here, now. The lifts have stopped working and the stairwells are kind of crowded on the lower levels.”

  Charlotte gritted her teeth but held her tongue, and instead just mapped the extreme curvature of the building’s sides near the top – mentally mapping them to the 30-foot radius of her Chinook’s twin rotor blades.

  Maybe… just MAYBE it could be done.

  “One Troop Actual, I need you to get everyone you’ve got up to the highest level of that structure.”

  “We’re already on the top floor – high as the lifts would go.”

  “Well get higher – and do it fast. My ETA at your so-called HLZ is approx thirty seconds. Plus or minus thirty seconds.”

  Jameson sensibly didn’t take time to respond.

  Charlotte gripped the collective with her left hand and eased it up. Even cruising at 500 feet, she was going to have to climb nearly another hundred to hit her target.

  And to have any prayer of rescuing these knobheads.

  * * *

  “We should destroy the stairwells!” Colley shouted as they leapt up dusty stairs toward levels of the building evidently not meant to be occupied. It was one of their old trademark tricks for surviving outbreaks – and how they had lived through the destruction of Canterbury, and the overrunning of the tenement building they’d gotten stuck in. Though it had also almost gotten them killed when the building collapsed around them after being bombed.

  He was shouting this suggestion at Hackworth, but Marines and Tunnelers were all mixed up in the exodus, and it was Colour Sergeant Croucher who heard him and shouted back.

  “Be my fucking guest, mate – but the rest of us don’t plan to still be here in three minutes!”

  Jameson was unsurprised to find the solid steel door at the top of the service stairwell securely locked. He didn’t dare discharge a high-velocity rifle or pistol in the cramped, crowded, and steel-walled space. There was no room, and no time to back people up. And not for the first time, nor he expected the last, he desperately missed Eli – and his ever-ready crowbar, as well as his shotgun, either of which would have safely and easily opened this goddamned door.

  But as far as he knew nobody else carried either item – because they always knew they could depend on Eli for his. Goddammit. Jameson pulled out his bayonet, jammed it into the sliver of space between door and frame, and used all his strength to try to lever it open. He only succeeded in snapping the blade off at the root.

  “GODDAMMIT.”

  He looked over to see Private Elliot, a small man, slithering his way to the front. He was slightly surprised the Para was still with them – then again, there was nowhere else to go – and more surprised when he rapped on a section of wall next to the door, and it thumped dully. While the stairwell leading up there was encased in steel, this was simply a section of drywall.

  Jameson hefted his rifle and bashed a hole in it, swinging and kicking to widen the breach.

  “So much for Robert Frost,” he said, ducking inside.

  “What?” Elliott asked.

  “Evidently, the best way out isn’t always through…”

  Jameson brought his rifle to his shoulder, pivoted left then right, and stepped forward to start clearing the level – but instantly tripped on an exposed beam, and then lurched as one foot went straight through the floor, which was really a ceiling panel for the level below. They were in what suddenly seemed like a construction site – an unfinished level of the building.

  But as Jameson looked up and around in wonder, he realized that wasn’t it at all. This level truly was the top of the building – open all the way to the circular oculus at the very crown, glass curving increasingly steeply on all sides, tapering not to a point but to a ring, a circular skylight about ten feet around. The streets below were now completely in shadow, but at this height the setting sun was still sending its sparkling rays right through the glass. Finally, it became clear this used to be a building-top restaurant – presumably an incredibly posh one, with amazing views in 360 degrees, and basically open to the sky, surrounded by glass on all sides as well as above.

  The space probably used to be stunning, but now it had gone post-Apocalyptic. All the fixtures had been torn out or torn up, presumably commandeered for use where they were more urgently needed, and the showpiece room left to decay.

  Now the place was a hazard.

  But at least one at the very top, as Charlotte had ordered.

  “Everyone watch your damned step!” Jameson shouted, working to follow his own advice by finding solid surfaces to walk on as he pushed out toward the exterior glass. Finding the outside edge wasn’t difficult; because it was even closer now, because it visibly surrounded them on all sides – and because out beyond it on one side there was a gigantic twin-bladed heavy-lift transport helicopter hovering, like a creature from a Japanese monster movie peering into a skyscraper.

  Jameson went that way.

  * * *

  No, Charlotte thought, already holding hover just about as close to this stylish and absurd building as was remotely safe – and much closer than anyone in her chain of command, had any of them been alive, would have authorized. Not MAYBE – there’s NO WAY IN HELL this is going to work.

  Hell, she wasn’t even rated to fly this aircraft. And this aircraft definitely wasn’t rated for this job.

  And I don’t much rate our chances, she thought, finally.

  But, nonetheless, she then had to yank her cyc
lic and back off another twenty meters – as three or four of the Royal Marines gamely started smashing out a couple of the big triangular panels of glass, the shards sparkling in the last light as they fell more than 500 feet to the street below.

  And then two more Marines ran forward holding…

  A big aluminum ladder, an extensible one.

  Shit, Charlotte thought. She still figured there was absolutely no way this was going to work.

  But now she at least had to try.

  * * *

  “Civvie Street!” Croucher bellowed. “You go over first!”

  The Marine senior sergeant actually thought he was being gallant – keeping the Marines back to defend the level and hold the line, while the civilians escaped. But Hackworth, Colley, and the others looked at him like they’d just been picked as guinea pigs in a lethal-dose radiation experiment.

  “Fuck this,” Colley said in his Moroccan accent, leaning out over the ladder, one edge of which now perched perilously on the edge of the smashed-out window – and the other at least ten feet away on the lip of the open rear ramp of the hovering Chinook. The building wasn’t moving, but the helicopter sure as hell was – which meant the ladder was, as well.

  Also there were about six inches of spare ladder anchoring either end – the helo pilot clearly dared come no closer, and the ladder would extend no farther. The rear rotor blades were already whumping directly over their heads, and nobody even wanted to think about how close they were to the glass-and-steel curved exterior of the building overhead.

  But it wasn’t even the hazards of the wobbly ladder or the deadly blades that caused Colley to curse. No, it was the 41 long stories down to the hard pavement below, nothing but a few aluminum rungs between them and it. The ocean of space yawned at them like some kind of incredibly realistic CGI effect from a Mission Impossible movie. And the drop wasn’t even straight down – no, if you fell, you’d slide and bump and scrape down the steep but not quite vertical surface of the building – until a little past the halfway mark, where you’d be dumped into open air, no doubt screaming, bleeding, and in pain, for your final lethal fall to the street below.