But it hadn’t been just three months, Eli thought, as he sat in the doorway of the hurtling helicopter, the wind brushing his face and bringing water to his eyes, and he watched the shape of the huge tower looming in the distance. That had been the last he’d seen of her, at the bottom of the tower as they said goodbye, just before everything went to hell. He would have seen Annika a week later, when he was to return to the city from the British military garrison out near the airport, and visit her just before her internship started, but he never made it.
And now, over two years later, he felt a pang of sickness in his stomach as that building came into view. Was she in the city below them, somewhere? Lolling about and rotting like all the other walking corpses? Was she even now standing, mindless and drooling, at one of the windows in the Rhine Tower restaurant, waiting an eternity for nothing, to no purpose?
“ETA five minutes,” came a voice across the radio – their pilot, or one of them. Three Puma helicopters were thundering across the motionless cityscape of Dusseldorf, two carrying the remaining combined squads of One Troop, and the other empty aside from four crew chiefs manning a heavy winch and mass of lines, ready to whisk away their mission objective.
Next to Eli, Jameson was sitting and flipping through a scruffy sheath of diagrams and photographs, given to him during their mission briefing just four hours before. The photographs and specs, which Eli had studied in detail before handing them over, had obviously been pulled from a lab supplies catalogue, and an old one at that. The black-and-white photos were worn and smudged, but the basic shape of the thing they had to retrieve was clear enough. Eli only hoped there weren’t a hundred other machines that looked similar. They had raided a few labs in the last couple of years, but that had been for computer equipment and other gear that was more easily identified. This was different.
“You going to be able to recognize this… contraption?” Jameson shouted, over the noise of the rotors and engines. After the endless roar of battle over the last few days, he worried he might have gone deaf, but instead everything was amplified.
“Yes, mate. No problem. I think,” said Eli. “The thing’s pretty distinct, and… well, it looks pretty big as well.”
“And we’ve got to get it up to the roof.” Jameson’s mind drifted back to the short conversation he’d had with what appeared to be his new direct line of command – Colonel Robert Mayes, the man himself. Mayes had said, “Don’t come back without it, end of. If you can’t get it, don’t come back.” Those were probably the most unnerving orders Jameson had ever been given, and the cold glare the Colonel gave him made him think the part about not returning ought to be taken at face value.
The whole troop had walked out of the mission briefing a slightly paler shade. This was the big one, the mission that could not go wrong. Two hours of being drilled on the current state of the target city and building, taken from drone flyovers made just hours earlier, gave them little to work with. The takeaway seemed to be that Dusseldorf was extremely crowded, and one hundred per cent dead. The only good news was that the six hundred thousand former residents had all gone dormant, and now stood around staring at nothing, due to there being not a single living person left in the entire city to infect or devour.
Enter One Troop.
Who would be hitting the ground in about another three minutes from now. And then all bets were off.
Jameson shook his head. Aside from the absurd danger of this mission, he could hardly believe they were back again – only a few miles from the barracks they’d lived in for nearly a year as part of British Forces Germany, in what seemed like a long-vanished age. Why back to Dusseldorf? Because it had a big biotech industry – and a certain lab there was the only place known to possess a piece of high-tech equipment that evidently was now vitally important to the research effort.
As the Marines had sat in their mission briefing, Eli almost smiled with the irony of the situation. Because they were told in passing that there was actually a much closer one of these machines – right in the center of Canterbury, in fact. And if they had only been asked two weeks earlier, One Troop could have strolled right in and fetched it, no drama. The trouble of course was that Canterbury had been bombed nearly flat, in a doomed attempt to cauterize the outbreak. And the University of Kent lab building in question could clearly be seen, in aerial imagery, to be nothing but rubble.
So now here they were, hundreds of miles inside Dead Europe, about to fast-rope down onto a building surrounded by over a half a million flesh-eating freaks. And if it weren’t for fate’s extremely capricious sense of humor, Eli would not have seen that tower in the middle of Dusseldorf ever again.
“Target structure in sight,” came the pilot’s voice over the headset. “Two minutes to insertion.”
“Right,” snapped Jameson, looking at the dozen men in his helo. The other squad would be readying in the other bird at that moment, but his team was first down onto the roof, and had to clear out fast to make way for the others.
“We’ve been through this drill enough. Hit the ground, move to the outside edge of the roof, and stay low. Then we wait until the noise has gone.”
He stood by the open door, feeling the wind buffeting him, and watched the rooftop of the lab complex coming in fast. A few seconds more and they flared in to a low hover, the pilot shouting, “Good to go!” Jameson was first out, sliding down the thick fast-rope in less than two seconds before hitting the hard surface of the roof. As he landed and let go, he ducked his head and raised his assault rifle to his shoulder, scanning all sectors of the rooftop. Most of his attention was on the closed doorway behind which was the stairwell down into the building.
It was a big structure, maybe ten stories and hundreds of feet across. As Jameson moved to the roof’s edge, and the metal piping that ran along it, he tried to listen for anything that wasn’t the boots of his men, or the loud thrum of the rotors. They were drawing a lot of attention to themselves, and all knew they had to get down and grounded so the helos could get out as quickly as possible. Twenty seconds later and Second squad was dropping onto the roof and also running for cover.
So far, so good, Jameson thought, as the second bird lifted away and rose up into the sky, its engine noise dissipating as it went. Half a minute later, the three helos were only dark splotches in the sky, still shrinking, and inaudible from the rooftop.
And that was when the silence of the city of Dusseldorf hit them. Every man in One Troop crouched low, hidden from view and motionless, none making a sound. This was as planned. They were to hit the deck, make all the racket they had to in less than a minute, then go low and quiet, and wait.
The CentCom expert on behavior of the undead, and on covertly avoiding them, had been confident that a short burst of noise wouldn’t be enough to rouse the whole population. Some would get riled up and seek out the source. But all the reports and studies so far suggested the noise of the helos, as they left the city, would draw off those few that did wake up.
And Jameson was beginning to think well of that little guy in the suit, who had looked as if he didn’t even need to shave. Maybe he was right. Of course, the Marines already knew from long experience on the ground that if you kept your noise and movement to a minimum, you could sneak past an awful lot of dead without detection. It was the small matter of flying directly to the center of a huge population of them, amidst the deafening noise of three rotary-wing aircraft, that was the novelty. Jameson only hoped to hell that they hadn’t just awoken a whole city.
But if they had, there was always that lone Apache out there, waiting for the call if needed.
Now the helos had gone, and the silence was broken only by the heavy rush of the wind. As he knelt there, looking out over the top of the catatonic city, Jameson found his stomach churning with nerves. Below, scattered all along the street, and standing nearly motionless, were hundreds of the dead. None of those nearby seemed to move, aside from the occasional twitch or collapse.
There was
one knot of a few dozen, farther down the street, which stumbled in the direction the helos had travelled. But he couldn’t hear any of them moaning – none of that eerie, sickening siren call that would draw others to them. These few just stumbled along the road, slowly drifting farther away.
And the ones in the street below stayed blessedly dormant. Jameson peered among them, wondering how long they had been just standing around, doing nothing.
Long may it last, he thought.
It was actually something that had always puzzled him about the dead. They were completely unaware of each other, alone in the world, without the slightest consciousness of the existence of other ones. Yet the sounds they made attracted others like a dinner bell. How could they home in on the sounds made by others, and in that way all end up converging on one location, usually that of some poor sap trying his best to get away or hide – yet then shove forward as though there was nothing in their way, let alone a dozen others trying to get to the victim at the same time?
Jameson snapped out of these idle thoughts, aware now that Eli was watching him. A quick hand-signal and Eli was up, along with two other Marines, the three of them fast-walking across the roof to the stairwell, weapons panning, moving smoothly and silently, heel-toe. In comparison to the racket of a few minutes ago, the noise discipline they displayed now seemed almost comical to him.
Jameson alternated his attention between the ground below, where the teeming dead milled, and Eli crouched by the door, working on the lock. A few seconds later, the double doors swung slowly open, and rifles were pointed into the darkness inside, thin light falling across walls that hadn’t been exposed to movement or light of any kind for two years. Jameson could feel it, somewhere deep inside him – this building was as dead as the rest of the landscape around them, a shell bereft of life.
He rose, signaling the others to follow, and made his way across the open roof. As he approached the doors, he pulled down his head-mounted night-vision goggles (NVGs), and stepped into the open maw of the strange building.
First in, last out, he thought.
The stairwell ahead was empty and silent, and a barely perceptible cold breeze drifted up from somewhere down in the belly of the building. As he made his way carefully down the first flight of stairs, stepping over the cardboard boxes and rotting litter that covered the metal stairs like a skin, Jameson’s vision began to adjust. At first the thin autumnal sunlight, filtering down the entrance to the stairwell, had made it difficult to see.
But slowly the darkness resolved, the goggles illuminating what would normally be near blackness. There was very little ambient light down here, even the windows out at the edges of the floor crusted or covered, but it was enough for the NVGs to pick up and amplify. Above and behind Jameson, the rest of One Troop crept quietly after him. Only a two-man crew remained to guard the exit and provide overwatch of the surrounding streets.
Jameson stepped out onto the first landing and stopped to scan the area. Eli appeared at his shoulder with two other Marines, all of them covering their assigned sectors. The corridor went in two directions from here – one lined with closed doors, leading further into the building and past an open elevator shaft; the other, terminating in a dead end, also lined with doors. Only two were open.
This place hadn’t been occupied by the living for over two years, and the shattered glass and broken furniture piled up near the elevator spoke volumes. Someone had tried to barricade themselves in up here, that much was obvious. But the barricade had collapsed, and now black stains were smeared across the floor, leading into two of the rooms.
Jameson was wondering how many of the dead had rushed this floor, and how many of the living had tried to defend it… when the first victims stumbled out of one of the open rooms, lumpy green shapes against black backgrounds in the NVGs. They were slow-moving ones, and seemed barely to register the Marines at the foot of the stairwell, before the snap of suppressed gunfire cut the air. Considering his previous worries about Eli’s state of mind, back in quarantine, his troop sergeant was on form, dropping both of them before anyone else could even target them. Both bodies fell to the ground before Jameson could react. The entire squad then crouched there, low to the ground, unmoving, waiting to see if more would come.
But all that came was silence. There was no more movement, no more dead stumbling out to meet them, and that meant they would have to go in looking for them. The Marines’ occasional tactic of making noise and waiting for the dead to come to them was a no-go today. With thousands of them potentially within earshot, noise was the last thing they needed.
The intel they had been provided with, by whoever requested the mission, was vague and confusing at best. The machine would probably be in a lab on the upper or middle floors, but which one was unclear. The Marines would have to scour each level one at a time, clearing out the dead and searching for their mission objective, before descending to the next floor.
And they had to pull all this off while doing nothing to rouse the endless hordes that stood right outside the front door.
The Gathering
Dusseldorf - Target Building
Jameson stepped over the first body, carefully avoiding the splatter of black blood that had sprayed across the floor behind it, and made his way along the corridor toward the dead end. As he did so, other Marines followed him down from the stairwell and spread out, quietly opening the doors that lined the corridor and scanning the rooms inside. As Jameson reached the final door, while Eli and another man checked the adjacent ones, he heard a short, sharp snap of silenced gunfire from the other end of the corridor. And then it went quiet again.
He stepped forward and tentatively pushed open the last door, revealing a once plush office with a large desk, as well as three bodies, all now dried-up husks, upon the floor. No machine, no lab equipment. There was only a copier, and a table with some sort of broken apparatus scattered across it, but nothing resembling their objective.
As he backed out again and pressed the door closed behind him, he heard more gunfire from the far end of the corridor, again followed by silence.
The squad gathered back near the stairwell, while three Marines covered the darkness below with their rifles. From somewhere down there came the sound of dripping water, a noise that was rare in these fallen places, this long after civilization had shut down. Hand-signals from returning Marines confirmed they had cleared the other half of this floor, and Jameson started down to the next one. As he made his way further down, trying to step silently on the metal stairwell, he heard the sound of water growing. This wasn’t a drip, but a gush of some kind, maybe a burst pipe. How it was still pouring water, he didn’t know. The water supply should have cut out long ago.
The next level was laid out identically to the first, except that the doors were all open wide, and at least a dozen dried husks of bodies littered the corridor. The remains of a headless man leaned against the wall opposite, and Jameson could see no sign of the rest of him. He tried not to think about it, and moved along the corridor more swiftly.
But there were no zombies on this floor, only the dried-up remains of another dozen victims in the rooms they checked. And still no machine.
They were moving to the seventh floor when Jameson froze halfway down the stairs and looked out over a mass of standing, not-quite-motionless figures. He could see now that the stairwell opened directly onto a large open area in the center of the building, with a dozen overturned sofas scattered around the outside. There were tables in among the stupefied crowd below, and a large projector hung from the ceiling, pointing at a white screen that had long since collapsed onto the floor.
A chill ran down Jameson’s spine – was it the thrill of a rapidly approaching fight, or the eerie silence in the crowded room? Even with all of the dead standing around almost motionless, he couldn’t be sure. This was clearly some kind of meeting space, surrounded by a number of small offices. And now, Jameson thought, two years later, it was still a meeting place of sor
ts – one for the crowd of dead, some three dozen at least, all standing stupidly and staring into space.
So this is where everyone is, he thought as he lifted his rifle, squinting as he took aim through his illuminated telescopic sight. All of the figures standing in the room wore office attire, their everyday work clothes, no doubt immaculate previously, but now torn and filthy. The people these shells once were had died two years ago, and the whites had turned to brown with black stains.
“Engage targets when I initiate,” he said into the radio, his voice low.
It wasn’t until the first half-dozen dead fell, as the room lit up with flickers of gunfire, that he noticed the splashes from the ground where the bodies hit the floor. But by then, the whole crowd was waking, stirring, and turning to investigate the new arrivals. Jameson continued to fire steadily, worried about the evident flooding, but aware they had no choice but to deal with the dead now. It was too late for finesse. Their hand had been dealt.
He saw now that the burst pipe was in the ceiling above the conference room, and must have been slowly trickling down onto the floors below for two years. It wasn’t a large volume of water, though still a mystery – the pump system had long ago shut down, and what remained must have come from some kind of upper-floor storage tank. Still, it had seeped through, not only pooling on the floor around the feet of the three dozen dead employees, but also drenching the carpets and leaking into the supports underneath – so the weight and pressure must have been substantial by now.
In reality, the only thing that had thus far stopped the floor from collapsing was the lack of movement from the zombies in the room. And now the survivors of that first volley of rifle fire began to lurch toward the stairwell. Jameson, Eli, and the others continued to fire, dropping another dozen within seconds, but the others stumbled forward, clumsily splashing through the pooled water. Some went down without even being hit, while others clambered on, staggering toward the stairwell and shifting their weight across the floor – passing directly over the weakest spot, right in the center.
Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon Page 21