He didn’t think he could bear it.
Or, even worse, having Pred completely lose mission focus, also this close to the endgame, and getting everyone else killed or infected. Everyone everywhere. Either way, it wouldn’t be a great outcome. Their job was saving the world. And, to a great extent, Predator was Juice’s world. And both seemed to have been put in jeopardy by Pred’s newfound mission to save all the Calis, whatever the hell that meant.
Then again, Juice himself had once before broken through, conquered his own demons, during the mission leading the Marines in Saldanha Bay. He’d passed through his fear, his terrible feelings of inadequacy, and his doubts that he didn’t really belong on Alpha team. And, nearly bleeding out on the cold concrete floor of that warehouse, but having gotten the job done for his teammates and for everyone who fought on the carrier… he’d finally passed through death, to what lay on the other side.
Now Pred was on his own journey.
And Juice knew it was selfish to begrudge him that, just because he didn’t think he could bear to lose him. But, turning it all around again, he knew it was also selfish and reckless of Pred to pursue this at the risk of them all losing the war for the ZA in its final minutes – and having humanity wink out entirely. Pred seemed to be rebuilding his trampled heart, his sense of purpose and humanity, his ability to love.
But could their mission afford it?
Seeing a jigging blur streak by, Juice tracked his weapon and triggered off four rounds. All of them missed, instead tearing into some of the stacked vaccination kits.
“GodDAMMit.”
He felt Pred’s hand squeezing his shoulder, a standard CQB signal that he was behind him and ready to follow into the next area. Without turning, Juice said, “Sure hope there are fewer than twenty-five million people left alive now.” They’d also seen the kits that had been knocked off the fallen shelves in the front.
“Yeah,” Pred said in a quiet rumble like an aftershock. “I’m afraid that’s probably a safe bet at this point. Let’s just focus on keeping the remaining ones alive, man.” He gave Juice a little shove. “Five count, then push forward.”
Without looking, Juice could sense Pred turning and slipping away behind him – as usual, implausibly fast and silent for a guy who made The Mountain look like Tyrion Lannister. He exhaled, did his five count, then pushed out, turned the corner, and started clearing down the next aisle. As the beam of his light aligned with the long narrow space, the impaired Foxtrot was already swelling to fill it – and, around and behind it, he could see the much larger silhouette of Pred, chasing it. He was herding it into him.
He was also in his shooting background.
Juice leaned forward in his shooting stance, planted his back foot, and watched the demented crazy-ass thing literally bounce off the walls as it hurtled toward him, driven to some kind of reverse Foxtrot frenzy by being cornered and trapped. Juice’s fingers jjiggled lightly on his weapon, ready to pivot it minutely, and in an instant.
And in the exact microsecond the Foxtrot reached him, blasting forward at full speed, and pretty damned fast laterally as well, the steel spike of his OJ schick’d forward into the creature’s open mouth and out the back of its neck.
Schick. The spike retracted again.
And the Foxtrot collapsed into a disanimated meat pile.
Pred pulled up behind it, slowing to a trot.
“Come on,” he said, clapping Juice on the arm. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
That suited Juice just fine.
Endgame
CentCom – JOC
“Well, that was a shot over our goddamned bow,” Fick muttered, peeling off his gloves and dropping them on the keyboard at the station of one of the JOC staff. The staffer in question had actually been typing on the keyboard at the time, but looked too scared to say anything.
Along with British ops jocks Miller and Jones, Fick and Wesley were meeting Ali and Homer back in the center of the JOC. Kate and Baxter were still in there, pulling HQ security, which was what had allowed Homer and Ali to go to the med wing. But they were staying out of the way of the leadership meeting, which was there to conduct an after-action hot wash.
And to figure out where the hell they stood now.
“Lucky, too,” Miller said. As so often, he’d been right in the eye of the whirlwind, fielding reports, working out the tactical picture, and coordinating the response. Also, as so many times before, he’d been left in charge when the commander died or decamped – in this case Ali racing off with Homer for a two-man mission to rescue Handon and the med staff.
“Lucky exactly how?” Wesley asked.
“It was all runners who got inside,” Miller said.
“How is that lucky?”
Fick answered for him. “For starters, there were no Foxtrots tear-assing around, infecting people and moving on, nearly impossible to catch, plus turning a shitload more unlucky bastards into dead guys.”
“Exactly,” Miller said. “But also no bog-standard Zulus. Slow and clumsy, they tend to bite people they catch off guard – but then the victims are able to get away alive and intact, then fuck off somewhere to turn into perfectly good new zombies.”
Wesley nodded, getting it. “But not many people get away from runner packs.” As he had personally seen more than once, they fell on you en masse, took you down, then gnawed you to the bone. And if you did turn, there wasn’t enough of you left to get up and go anywhere. He spared the group the story of how his team of RMPs had barely survived the pack that jumped them out in the Common. In part he didn’t want to talk about it because he had failed in his mission to relieve Biosciences. And in part because not all of his men had survived that encounter.
These weren’t his first losses as a combat leader.
But he was nowhere near getting used to it.
And he also didn’t yet know – you never got used to it.
“Yep,” Miller said. “With virtually no Foxtrots or Zulus, it never spiralled out of control.” He eyed Ali – she had called it from the outset. It had been an invasion, not an outbreak. And one they had just managed to repulse.
Ali didn’t look particularly gratified to have been right. “Don’t take any chances,” she said. “I want anyone who was exposed dumped in quarantine. For the duration.”
“Already being done,” Fick said. “Basically anyone who was even in the same room with one. Or the same field.”
Miller’s gaze went long and he looked around the JOC, which still bore many signs of the prior catastrophic outbreak. “Good,” he said quietly. “Because we had just a single Foxtrot spawn in here before.” He pointed around them. “And it killed everyone who used to sit in this room.”
Fick laughed and clapped the alarmed-looking Brit on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, man,” he said. “When the dead get here for real, we’ll have Foxtrots leaping right over the goddamned walls. Won’t matter in the least if one spawns inside.”
“Wait,” Jones said, putting her hand up. “What was that?”
It was the sound of firing – faint and muted through the walls of SHQ, but not all that far away.
Wesley’s radio went. “Need you on the walls, Lieutenant.”
Ali and Homer looked in at each other, across to Miller…
And then over at that service stairwell.
* * *
“So there is a God,” Aliyev said, standing beside Park as they both hunched over the two culturing tables at the back of the labs – one of them plugged back in, humming and glowing; the other with its glass cover completely smashed, unrepairable. “But he’s an asshole.”
Park turned to face the Kazakh. All around them, grim-faced soldiers and lab personnel scuttled around like ants, clearing out destroyed and half-gnawed bodies, righting overturned equipment, disinfecting surfaces, and basically trying to get Bio up and running as quickly, and as safely, as possible.
Park knew what Aliyev meant. It was a damned miracle it was the MZ that had been s
pared and was still culturing. But the Kazakh was also assuming that, without the vaccine against it, his very last designer pathogen was going to kill all the living shortly after it killed all the dead.
Park wasn’t so sure.
“I don’t think it really matters,” he said. “The MZ takes the dead down in thirty to sixty minutes, right? What are the odds, really, that they’re going to infect someone living in that window? And anyone not already vaccinated against the zombie virus is going to have a bigger problem, anyway.”
“Plus being eaten alive,” Aliyev added, seeing his point.
“Right. Dying of MZ will be way down their list of problems.”
Aliyev nodded. “True. And, actually, we don’t even know for sure whether MZ is virulent in humans. I never tested it.”
Park smiled. “Want to have a go?”
Aliyev just shook his head, vaguely annoyed that he had done all that frantic last-minute work on developing a vaccine against MZ, when it probably didn’t matter.
Park looked across at him. “How much is there?” The second culturing table was never going to work again – and they’d already verified these were the only two in the facility. But the culture beds themselves, the MZ vaccine already inside, had mostly survived the collision with the runner.
Aliyev looked. “Perhaps enough for twenty or thirty doses.”
“Vaccinate the front-line troops – starting with Alpha.”
“And the Royal Marines,” Aliyev added.
Both of these men knew who they owed their lives to – and where their loyalties lay. And, not least, where humanity’s last best hopes were.
“First things fucking last, though,” Aliyev said, walking across the lab and retrieving his bug-out bag from where it was still tucked in a corner. He dug around inside and came out with another box of shotgun shells, then put his arms through both shoulder straps of the bag – and cinched them tight.
“Not taking this motherfucker off – ever again.”
And then he started reloading the Benelli.
While he did so, Park patted the thumb drive in his pocket and realized he really was putting first things last. They needed to get the Hargeisa vaccine mass-fabricating – now. But even as he thought it, he looked up to see Lieutenant Colonel Nesbitt striding into the labs on a wave of efficiency, and urgency. She buttonholed Park.
“Good news. The REMEs have got the lights back on in the warehouse – and, more importantly, made the electrical hazard safe.”
Park nodded. “And the bad news?”
“Bob Towson died in the invasion.”
Park frowned. “The guy with the whole fabrication strategy – right up there in his head?”
Nesbitt nodded. “Yeah. And his head doesn’t look too good.”
Park shook this off. “Come on. I’ll take it.” He meant he’d head up fabrication himself. It was the most important job right now – though doing the protein interaction testing to determine that the final vaccine was safe, and wouldn’t actually give people Hargeisa, was a very close second.
As the two of them exited, Park thought he heard faint gunfire again. But he remembered the lessons of the operators: he had to stay focused on his job. Security was somebody else’s now.
Thank God for that…
* * *
Back up on the roof of SHQ, Ali didn’t need binoculars this time. Miller hadn’t even brought any. While everyone at CentCom had been screwing around fighting off their little internal runner invasion from the southwest…
The great mass of dead had crossed the river from the north – tens of thousands of them, having poured through the fallen gap in the Wall, and flooded across all of central London. And they were now crossing the River Thames itself. Even worse, some had already crossed the mile of ground that separated CentCom from the river’s south bank. And those first runners, still dripping wet, were already at the walls. Somehow, unerringly, they had come straight for them.
Ali shook her head. “They must have heard us.”
“There was a lot of unsuppressed firing,” Homer said.
Miller said, “Few of the RMPs have suppressors.”
“We’ve got to cut that shit out,” Ali said.
From where they stood, she could actually see LT Wesley – backlit in the windows of his CP guard tower on the northwest section of walls, back with his men. It had been his RMPs taking shots on the first dead down below them to the north. But Ali had already instructed him to have them check fire – it was only going to make the problem worse, faster – and he had gotten it done.
Turning around to the south and west, Ali could also just make out Fick in the very last penumbral light – down in the Common, back with his QRF, going around and putting security headshots into mostly eaten bodies on the ground. He was meticulously using a silenced weapon. Perhaps too late, but at least noise discipline was back.
Though Noise still isn’t, Ali realized, looking at the dark smudge of the parked-up Dash 8 out on the airstrip. They still didn’t have fuel for the damned thing, so no airdrops of vaccination kits were going to be happening anytime real soon. She made a mental note to try to get a sitrep from his fuel mission.
If we last long enough for it to matter, she thought, turning back to face the threat from the north. The clock was seriously ticking now. Also, night had fully descended – and the first fat drops of rain started falling out of a black and heavy sky.
Now Juice and Pred both emerged into this grimly theatrical scene, clumping up the stairwell and onto the open rooftop.
“What’s up, guys?” Juice asked, falling in on one side of Ali and Homer at roof’s edge, Pred on the other. Finally, the four members of Alpha team still alive and on their feet were back together, standing side-by-side. That was not nothing – it was something profound and powerful, and each of them felt it.
“The dead are at the walls,” Homer said calmly.
Out over the rooftops of the prison, the four of them could just make out the darkness stretching out to the glinting river – and that darkness was undulating. It was swarming. And it was coming straight toward them.
Juice said, “Looks like we’re in for one wild night.”
Pred grunted and spat off the roof in that direction, his tobacco juice mixing with the rain. “Leonidas was a pussy. He got everyone killed, including himself, and lost the one battle he was famous for. This isn’t Sparta.”
“Yeah, but it is madness,” Juice said.
They all knew the army of the dead dwarfed the thousand armies of the Persian Empire – by billions. It was made up of every army on Earth, and everyone was in it. And only Alpha team – not 300 with their allies, but just the four of them with a handful of theirs – were there to hold the line.
That was all they had. And this was it.
The siege of London was over. London had fallen.
Only CentCom still stood. And only those inside remained.
This was the endgame. And it started now.
ARISEN, BOOK FOURTEEN – ENDGAME
launches 14 November 2017
This Is It.
Yes, you read that right. Two new ARISEN books in a month – and for the same reason as last time: because you, the ARISEN readers, are awesome, and you deserve it. And because… this is it.
Come back and live through the beginning of the end of the world in
ARISEN : GENESIS, the pulse-pounding and bestselling first ARISEN prequel.
And then live through it again, except harder and faster, with the SF soldiers of Triple Nickel.
ARISEN : NEMESIS.
Salvation. Vengeance. Vanity.
NEMESIS
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Thanks & Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the incredibly generous and talented people who make up the ARISEN beta-reading team: Mark George Pitely, Amanda Jo Moore, Dave Fairfax, Ron Purugganan (aka Nil Ate), Peter Odukwe, and most especially Electronics Technician Chief Petty Officer Mark D. Wiggins, USCG (ret).
Thanks as always to the amazing Editrice ([email protected]), for making ARISEN bulletproof. (And for finally raising her rates!)
Thanks are not enough for amazing and instantly indispensable publishing assistant Madame Marauder, aka Julia Molin. You complete me.
Thanks also and forever to Anna K. Brooksbank, Sara Natalie Fuchs, Richard S. Fuchs, Virginia Ann Sayers-King, Valerie Sayers, Alexander M. Heublein, Matthew David Grabowy, and Michael and Jayne Barnard, for their indispensable support. Also, Bruce, Wanda, Alec, and Brendan Fyfe for their service and sacrifice. Eternal thanks to Glynn James for coming up with ARISEN.
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