ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  Still operating on pure hardwired operational experience and muscle memory, Juice spun in place like a top to check and clear behind them – with the threat to the front blunted, he needed to make sure they weren’t about to get jumped from their six. They weren’t. Then he spun forward to help finish the fight.

  Except Pred wasn’t fighting.

  With the second half of the runner pack crashing into them, he had leapt on top of the mother and little boy, pushing them to the ground – and covering all three members of the family with his huge body.

  “Oh, for the love of—”

  But Juice didn’t have time to finish his sentence.

  Because now he had to finish the fight – on his own.

  Electric Dead Guy

  CentCom – Biosciences

  Less than half a mile away in the barricaded Bio warehouse, Park and Aliyev had retreated to the corner with their culturing tables in it, and consolidated there. They’d also counted their remaining ammo, which wasn’t much, Aliyev reloading with the last of the shells from his pocket.

  Worst of all, twice now they had caught sight of that wounded and seemingly demented Foxtrot, running across the center aisle in the distance, from one concealed area of the warehouse to another. It kept appearing – but also kept not coming after them.

  Which was almost worse. It was certainly more unnerving.

  “I think perhaps you caused some kind of neural impairment,” Aliyev said, looking thoughtful. “A brain-damaged… what did you call it? Foxtrot?” To the hyper-intellectual Kazakh, this was evidently an interesting new puzzle of biology.

  But Park just shook his head, having no idea even how to respond to that – or why. He looked around them, to where several staff in lab coats huddled nearby. He felt responsible for these people, and didn’t want to unnecessarily terrify them.

  But then, suddenly, nothing he said was going to matter much regarding their terror levels. Because a new panic erupted, as another frenzied figure ran down the main aisle toward them. Confusingly, this one wore a white lab coat – but as both Park and Aliyev dashed to the end of the aisle, they could see it was a runner. One of the Bio staff had been infected somewhere along the way.

  And now it had turned, and was coming for them – fast.

  “I wonder…” Aliyev mused, raising his shotgun, “if perhaps this warehouse is not such a fantastic sanctuary after all.”

  Park didn’t disagree. But as he raised his pistol and took aim, he said, “Looks like we’re in the sequel after all.”

  “What?” Aliyev asked. Both were holding their fire, waiting for it to get closer, as both were almost out of ammo.

  “The plural version,” Park said. “Never mind.”

  They both started firing at once, and two seconds later the white-coated sprinter dropped to the deck. Both ceased fire as soon as it did, to shepherd their few remaining rounds.

  And in the echoing silence that followed, screaming erupted from their right, and panicked people came from that direction now, racing for the door. Park was worried about them dismantling the barricade – or maybe that was the right idea at this point – but they never made it that far. Instead they got jammed up at the corner of one of the tall shelving units, and Park could not so much see as sense a runner tearing into them from behind, and the crush of bodies began to push the long and tall section of lightweight shelving over…

  And when it came down, it didn’t just come down on the heads of the lab techs, it didn’t just slam into the barricade in front of the door – it also tore out a section of electrical cable strung across the ceiling to the hanging lights. Sheets of sparks fired off overhead, falling and cascading, and became for a second the only illumination as every light in the warehouse popped and shorted and winked out.

  Now they were in there with the dead – in the dark.

  Correction, Park thought, looking to his right. There was still a bit of illumination. It was faint blue sparking and pulsing – where the yanked-free and exposed electrical wire had gotten tangled up with the twisted metal shelves.

  Which, electrified, now completely blocked the door.

  “And I thought my cheap-ass Chinese contractors were bad,” Aliyev muttered. “This place sucks a big hairy one.”

  Park still didn’t bother to respond.

  * * *

  Juice fired six times into the last runners in the rear half of the pack – the ones who weren’t on top of Pred and the family yet – before his rifle went dry. He dropped the empty mag and brought a new one up and in before the first even hit the ground, not slowing his relentless advance while he reloaded, still closing with the enemy. The dead never got intimidated by opponents who just kept coming.

  But old habits died hard.

  Fresh mag seated, he dropped the last two coming in with a pair of flawless double-tap headshots, then took a bead on the ones already flailing, biting, and clawing at Pred’s big sloping back and arms – but then pulled up, and checked fire.

  They were all too tight and tangled up.

  So he closed the last few feet, lined up his weapon, and triggered the compressed-air pneumatic spike mounted beneath the barrel – his OJ. Firing it out and back four times in rapid succession, pivoting and side-stepping each time, he aerated four half-rotted heads, then reached in and started yanking bodies off, before they could leak too much gunk on the living below. He hoped.

  In any case, this method definitely produced a hell of a lot less splatter than point-blank execution head-shot exit wounds would have – never mind the danger of his rounds passing right through the rotted heads and striking his best friend. And what seemed to be his new family.

  “Are you bit?” Juice asked urgently, checking Pred out as his gigantic bulk unfolded and rose up like some mythical half-mortal half-god. “Scratched? Splashed?”

  But as he’d gambled when he took the extra seconds to use his powered melee weapon, the bite-proof assault suit had saved his friend. He grabbed and checked out Pred’s wrists and neck, but he seemed okay – and he was already checking out the family anyway.

  “Goddammit, dude,” Juice said to his back. “Work with me here.” But Pred was squatting down and saying something soothing to the woman and two small kids.

  Juice scanned the area around them again, then checked his watch. They’d burned an entire minute with this crap. Moving half around Pred’s giant squatting bulk, he squinted in confusion, trying to work out what the hell was going on.

  His best friend seemed… he didn’t quite want to say happy. But somehow awake and alive. Animated with some sense of purpose. Like he wasn’t just going through the motions now, and for the first time in a while.

  “‘Every Cali left’?” Juice asked. “What does that mean?”

  This got Pred’s attention, and he looked up, his expression softening into something like a smile. “Just something somebody said to me recently.” He stood up, then picked up the smaller child again. “Come on.”

  This time Juice brought up the rear, staring at the back of his partner with concern. Pred’s new sense of mission and love for humanity was great – for him. And it was nice seeing him come back to life in this way. Then again, if it got the two of them killed, and there wasn’t anyone else around to finish the damned mission and save the world, and they thereby got everyone else killed…

  Well, Juice didn’t think that was so goddamned helpful.

  Love for humanity, he thought with a shake of his head, might end up torpedoing the survival of humanity.

  He looked up to see Bio was close, just up ahead.

  But for some reason the lights were out now.

  * * *

  Park and Aliyev were now backed into the very front left corner of the warehouse, backs almost literally to the wall. The only things behind them were the two culturing tables, both still humming and glowing as they slowly bred and multiplied what they hoped was humanity’s salvation: the death of the dead.

  But only if the dead we
ren’t the death of them first.

  Park gritted his teeth as he reseated his nearly empty pistol magazine, and considered that the one thing Sarah hadn’t left them was her damned radio. If there were any RMPs or other soldiers with radios, he hadn’t seen them, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to go stumbling around in the dark looking for them now. So while the powers that be knew they were in the warehouse, they thought they were safely barricaded in.

  Not trapped in there with a brain-damaged Foxtrot and an unknown number of runners, and with a giant electrified metal barrier blocking the only exit.

  Making things worse, not better, Aliyev had clicked on the tactical light under the barrel of his Benelli shotgun, and was methodically panning it from side to side, illuminating tiny little ovals of pitch-black warehouse, a section at a time. Having the light on felt like sending out a homing beacon, and Simon had to resist the temptation to tell him to put it out. But he knew as well as the Kazakh that while light might draw them, sound and smell were more compelling to the dead.

  And at least this way they could see them coming.

  And then the beam of light started to flicker. “God fucking dammit,” Aliyev muttered, shaking the shotgun.

  “What?” Park said.

  “I don’t know. Aren’t these goddamned expensive-ass lithium batteries supposed to last forever? Jesus!”

  “Haven’t you got a spa—”

  “Yes, of course I do. Along with a shitload more ammo. All of it in my damned bug-out bug. Back in the goddamned lab.”

  But the light was still on, albeit dimmer and flickering, and Aliyev carried on panning it around, trying to keep them informed – and alive, which might be much the same thing. Park tried to keep his hand and the pistol it held from shaking, as the cone of light fell on the hunched white backs of several lab staff huddled nearby, just beyond the sparking of the electrified shelving unit. Their slight motion was weirdly inhuman, like a field of large eggs getting ready to hatch.

  Back to freaking Alien again… Park thought.

  He felt better when Aliyev panned left, back up the long black aisle stretching away into the dis—

  A white-coated runner filled the cone of light, spot-lit and vivid like a Broadway star, hurtling flat-out, already practically in their laps. Aliyev’s shotgun was already pointing in the right direction and he thumped off his last two shells as Park raised his pistol and fired his own last three rounds.

  The runner jerked and kept coming.

  The two of them had exactly enough time to dive out of the way, Park left and Aliyev right.

  Glass shattered and metal scraped as the runner crashed into the culturing tables. Park’s eyes went wide in the near dark, and all he could think was he had to get the thing away from the MZ and MZ vaccine. He rose, turned, charged in, grabbed the runner by its lab coat – and slung it with all his strength away in the opposite direction.

  This sent it crashing into the electrified shelving unit. Of course, getting electrocuted didn’t faze it in the least, and when it rose up again and turned, it was tangled in the coils of exposed wire that had been draped across the shelves. Plus now it was buzzing, twitching, and slightly sparking. And it started coming straight back for Park.

  Evidently to cook and eat him, all at once.

  * * *

  Ali had no particular problem running the fight from the JOC, stuck inside the brain of CentCom, rather than being out on the ground shooting. She was a Unit operator, and could pretty much do it all, which included controlling tactical operations. In any case, she’d do what was required, without complaint, and to the limit of her abilities – even if that meant hanging tight and helming the ship while her team leader might be in jeopardy. The only important thing was to get the job done.

  She hit her radio. “Juice, Pred, sitrep and ETA for Bio.”

  “Inbound, one mike out.”

  “Copy.” She flipped channels. “Fick, how copy?”

  “Solid copy.”

  “Can you divert to the med wing?”

  “Yeah, but we’re pretty much on the opposite side of the damned complex from it now.”

  Ali looked up and across the JOC as banging sounded on the outside of the door. But Homer, still faithfully providing headquarters security by kneeling and pointing his weapon at the door, calmly rose and pulled it open. Behind it stood Kate and Baxter – both tooled up and looking switched on.

  “Got anything for us?” Kate asked, cradling her weapon.

  Ali and Homer locked eyes, trading a look – one that said they were thinking the same thing.

  “Yeah, we do,” Ali said, grabbing her weapon. “Guard this place.”

  * * *

  Aliyev was slower getting to his feet after escaping the collision of runner and culturing tables, stunned by his impact with the hard concrete floor. When he looked up and saw the sparking zombie closing with Park, and intuited its plan to first electro-cook and then consume him, he frankly wasn’t the least surprised. In his experience, this kind of shit was just like the dead, just like the zombie apocalypse in general…

  And just like my goddamned luck, he thought, hauling up his empty and useless Benelli after him.

  He also didn’t think he had a chance of getting to Park in time to save or even help him – the man was already backed up against the rows of shelving, and the live-wire electric dead guy was on him. Park had nowhere to go. But then, perhaps remembering the post-Apocalyptic badass status Aliyev had conferred on him, Park raised one of those big asskicking Durashok boots he was so proud of, braced himself from behind – and shoved his thick rubber sole into the sparking chest of the electro-corpse. This knocked it back a good five feet, and bought them a few seconds.

  Aliyev used the time to grip his Benelli with both hands, wheel on the electroshock non-victim, and wallop the shit out of it with a wide-arc full-arm swing. As the shottie impacted, Aliyev felt his hands buzzing – the stock and pistol-grip were polymer, but the barrel was forged steel, and he got enough of a shock to cause him to drop the weapon to the deck.

  Now the sparking zombie turned and locked onto him.

  And he no longer had anything to defend himself with. He backed away, desperately calling, “Simon…!”

  In the uneven illumination from the light mounted on the dropped Benelli, he could see Park pull his crowbar from his belt and advance on the zombie – but then stop.

  “SI-mon…!”

  Aliyev felt the wall bang into his back as he backed away – now totally out of room to retreat, and the runner still shooting off sparks and advancing. At least being continuously electrocuted seemed to slow it down a little. But then it was on top of him, and Park was fucking around doing something by the smashed culturing tables. But then he turned and attacked the zombie from behind, stabbing it through the back of the head.

  It dropped to the deck at Aliyev’s feet, still sparking.

  Behind it, Park was holding a big bloody shard of glass and smiling in the dim light.

  “Glass! Totally non-conductive.”

  Aliyev couldn’t even speak. He just slumped to the floor with his back against the wall, then kicked himself farther away from the electrocution and infection hazard at his feet. Trying to catch his breath, he had no idea why Park looked so happy. They were still trapped in there, and now completely out of ammo. They were defenseless.

  But Park had picked up the shotgun and was aiming the light at the two tables, advancing on both. Aliyev could see that actually only one of them had been smashed – and held his breath while Park examined them and reported.

  “It’s the one with the MZ vaccine,” he said.

  Aliyev breathed. “And the MZ?”

  “That table’s intact. It looks okay.”

  Well, that was something, at least. Without the MV vaccine to protect them, anyone left alive would probably die from Meningitis Z infection, shortly after they infected the dead with it. But, hell, that was hours or days away. Until then, they still might stan
d a chance. Except, oh yeah…

  They were still trapped in there. And still out of ammo.

  And when next the dead came…

  They would come right through them.

  No Jameson Left Behind

  500 Feet Above London – A Mile South of The Gherkin

  Liam, the barely legal British Army truck driver with the huge ears that stuck out on either side of his head, managed to get both Siobhan and Amarie strapped into two of the jump seats in the front of the Chinook cabin, then took the seat next to them, fumbling with his own straps. All around them, Tunnelers and Marines were getting themselves untangled, not to mention trying to slow their panicked breathing. He looked over at Amarie who, like him, was still wide-eyed and hyperventilating. The look they shared said the same thing:

  That was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced.

  And they’d both lived through the Battle of the Gap – and its collapse. And even worse before that.

  But while crawling across a ladder over a 40-story abyss was one thing, and doing it into the back of a hovering and swaying helicopter another, they’d just done it with hundreds of panicked civilians and dead chasing them, while a troop of Royal Marines fought desperately to keep them at bay.

  Liam just shook his head, still not believing it, and squeezed Amarie’s arm. He could see tears, perhaps of fear, perhaps of relief, leaking from her eyes. He took a deep breath. At least they were out of there. They’d survived it. Somehow.

  And then he saw one of the Marines, a young and fit man of southeast Asian descent, wearing one of the aircraft headsets, wrinkle his brow in concern as he listened, then turn and stalk back down the cabin. Liam looked up and saw another of the headsets hanging there, so he reached up and put it on. A woman’s voice was in mid-sentence when he did: