Arisen, Book Two - Mogadishu of the Dead

by Glynn James

  The man coughed, and stuttered before managing to speak.

  “It’s. Unspeakable. My English is not so good. I am not able to say how this feels. To be free and out from this place now.”

  “That’s wonderful Mr Alderney. Please, if you don’t mind, we haven’t been able to speak to the mother of the child, but could you tell us anything about her?”

  “Oh the girl, she is so beautiful, she is what keep us all going all this time. Little Josie and her mother Amarie have been our driving to be free. So pretty she is and a lifeline to us all. I am sorry; my eyes are hurting from the light.”

  “And am I correct that she was born inside the tunnel, whilst you were trapped down there?”

  “Yes. Yes. She was born in the back of a car in the maintenance tunnel. We had not doctor or nurse, but we had a… paramèdical with us. We thought that they would both die, because it was not a good birth, but they made it through.”

  “That is an amazing story. Please tell us what it was like to live in the tunnel. Were there many zombies down there?”

  “Oh, God. Many of them. We had to fight with metal bars to keep them away. We lost some people as well. Those were the worst to have to kill. Then we managed to make a… barrière?…of the wreckage to keep them away from the supply train but still some manage to get over it. We were living in the maintenance tunnel. No zombies there and we had to always keep the doors shut.”

  “And you lived in the dark all this time, with only the food from the supply train?”

  “Yes. But not all in the dark. One of the other men, he is an electrician from the train company and he find electrical points that are not switched off. We are able to make lighting in some places. Yes, we survived on the food from the supply train.”

  “I would imagine you are looking forward to eating and sleeping somewhere other than in the tunnel today?”

  “Oh yes. So much. I don’t mind what. Anything but tuna.”

  The cameraman panned the camera thirty degrees, focusing beyond the reporter, to the road. A soldier was pointing at the camera and barking orders to those around him.

  Alice noticed this, glanced over her shoulder, saw the soldiers approaching, and then turned back to the camera.

  “Thank you all for tuning in, we will try to report more news as we discover it. Alice Grisham reporting for Midland Central News live from Folkestone, where survivors from the Channel Tunnel have this morning been rescued, including a small child born in the tunnel itself.”

  TO THOSE WHO WAIT

  The bowels of the JFK were like an endless maze, with countless passageways and compartments spreading out across multiple decks. Two years ago, before the fall, the ship had been home to nearly 5,000 crew, and all of that space had been occupied and in use almost every day. But as the number of crew dwindled, more and more compartments on the lower decks became abandoned and disused. Many of these stored scavenged goods that the expedition teams had thought might be of use at some point, but much of it had proven unnecessary, and slowly but surely many of the areas were left closed, unlit, and untended.

  In the very early days of the plague, even the ship’s executive officer, Drake, hadn’t realized the full extent of the risk – until it became apparent that just stepping on shore was dangerous, let alone not meticulously checking those who came back.

  That was how Brian Marlin had got back on board, days before they introduced the quarantine procedure of holding expedition members on the support ships. That was how, after the small skirmish that had left two of the team dead, Brian had returned to his duties, with no one even noticing the small scratch below his left ear that the undead creature had managed to inflict on him just as he smashed its head onto the pavement and crushed it with a trash can. Hell, Brian hadn’t even noticed the scratch at the time, and when he saw it later, while shaving and trying to forget about the half dozen or so creatures that they had fought, he just shrugged it off and figured that he had caught himself on the furniture in the bar, or perhaps the dumpster in the alley.

  He had been drunk after all; they all had. When the fight had broken out he had thought, like all of them, that their assailants were either also drunk or were street bums desperate to take advantage of a group of drunken sailors on their way back to ship after an evening of shore leave. They’d jumped them in the alleyway, appearing out of the dark before any of the seamen had a chance to clock them. Before he or any of his fellows could react, two of the group had been pulled to the ground, and blood splashed everywhere.

  Of course, he hadn’t just scratched himself on the rusty dumpster. From the moment that the zombie’s finger, with its sharp and broken bone poking out of torn, dead flesh, had pierced his skin, causing a thin, half-inch-long line of blood to well up and dry quickly, Brian Marlin’s fate had already been foreclosed.

  The sickness had come quickly. He’d woken up and rushed to the toilet, hurling his guts up. Oh God, too much beer, he had thought – but then he had seen the color of the water in the bottom of the pan. It wasn’t brown, or yellow, or just some mixture of his dinner the night before and eight large glasses of draught beer. No. The bottom of the toilet pan was splattered with black and red.

  He’d flushed the toilet and walked away, telling himself it was just the wings turning a strange color with the beer, and stumbled out into the passageway. I’ll walk for a bit, he thought, maybe go up on deck and get some air and clear my head. But that hadn’t worked. He’d stood up on the flight deck and breathed in the night air and felt even worse.

  An hour later and Brian Marlin was sitting in the storeroom two decks below his own berth, in the place where he and his shipmates would sometimes play cards and lose a few dollars here and there, out of the way where no one could see. He rocked backward and forward hoping that the sickness would pass. It had been the only place that he could think of at the time to sit quietly and not be disturbed; not be ridiculed by his fellows for not holding his drink. He hadn’t locked the door, just in case he passed out and needed help.

  His head swam and his stomach churned over and over, and he found himself focusing on the labels of the boxes that were stacked along one of the walls – 5.56mm rounds, many thousands of them.

  Only his own team noticed him missing, but none of them had time to report it since the next morning they were back on shore, ordered to attempt to quell the rioting in the city. Not a single one of them returned.

  Of course it had turned out not to be a riot at all, and the following morning, while Commander Drake was busy trying to put together all of the new information that was coming from all directions, and attempting to restore some kind of order to the shocked carrier strike group, Brian Marlin passed out in the darkness of storeroom 34 and never woke up again.

  At least not alive.

  Of course, it was not likely that a zombie could have stayed hidden and unnoticed on its own, on a warship, for two years, even locked away in a room on the lower decks that was rarely visited. It was Aaron Carson, a man who in the last year or so had started being called by another name – the Preacher – that found Marlin, or what was left of him.

  Carson was young, and had only been on the ship for six months of his first tour when he found the creature in the disused storeroom. He was still in his apprenticeship, and at the time still thinking he was lucky as hell to be onboard the JFK so early in his career. The carrier was the goddess of the seas, the most powerful ship ever to sail, and he was one of the people responsible for making sure she was solid. He was a steelworker by trade and – until the reports of attacks in the city during shore leave came floating back – he had been content. He kept to himself, not paying much attention to the rest of the world or to the news. His strict religious upbringing had carved him into a quiet introvert.

  Weeks after the quarantine procedure was put in place, he’d gone down to the lower decks, the storage areas, searching for fuel cells for a blowtorch. It had taken him six compartments before he found one in the locker of
storeroom 34. The locker was a massive metal thing, about eight feet tall and six wide, and previously would have been used to safely store larger ordnance such as man-portable missile launchers. But it had been emptied at some point and all that was in it now was a case of fuel cells just like the one he needed. He took out the case, opened it, and began measuring it up when he heard the noise.

  Thunk.

  He frowned, put down the fuel cell and peered through the room, looking to the entrance. The door was still open, and he heard noises from the corridor, but they were faint; the normal sounds of the ship. This had been closer, definitely in the room with him.

  He stood up, took a few steps forward and peered around the corner. The room was an L shape, curving around the back of the next storage area. He saw stacks of boxes, ammunition by the looks of them, but it was darker around there; the light must have been out.

  “Who’s there?” he asked, instinctively lowering his hand to his waist. Silly of him – only MPs and a few officers carried sidearms while onboard ship.

  Thunk. The sound again. What the hell was that? He stepped around the corner, peering into the darkness.

  “Is anybody in there?”

  No answer. Maybe it had been a rat.

  Then something moved in the darkness much closer to him. He felt his chest lurch as a shadow passed behind the stack of crates closest to him.

  Carson grabbed for the nearest thing he had to a weapon – the blowtorch he’d laid down before him. He was too slow, and he knew it. He meant to call out, but whatever it was stumbled from behind the stack of crates and lunged toward him. He spun sideways, swinging the blowtorch, and managed to dodge a clumsy attack, smacking the unknown assailant around the side of the face. The creature’s cheek burst open with a crunch, splashing black gunk across the floor, and then it fell forward into the locker.

  Carson was faster this time, and stepped forward, pushing the zombie hard so that its whole body fell into the bottom of the locker. It tried to fight back, reaching for him, and managed to snatch the cuff of his shirt. But Carson panicked and flailed and its grip loosened, just for a moment. It was enough for him to grab the open locker door and slam it shut.

  He fell to the floor, breathing heavily, nearly retching at the stink that now assaulted his nostrils. It was too much. He emptied the contents of his stomach onto the floor.

  As Carson sat there, trying to recover from the shock of seeing an actual zombie on the carrier, he heard a dull thud from inside the locker, then another. It was very quiet. Those lockers had thick walls and the thing that he had trapped inside was apparently very weak.

  What the hell would he do now? Would he tell his commanding officer? He had to, didn’t he? Or did he? If the chain of command found out that there was a zombie on board, the ship would become chaos as they quarantined everything and everyone nearby, anyone who might have come into contact. That included him. Oh God, no. Quarantine drove him nuts. He couldn’t do that again. He would just leave it in there for a while, while he decided how best to deal with it.

  That had been nearly two years ago.

  Carson had kept it all to himself, in the end. The creature in the locker. God’s cleaner. After a week it had already been too late to tell anyone, he belatedly realized – he’d have been court-martialed, if not lynched. Anyone who opened the locker would have been able to figure out that the thing had been in there longer than a few minutes; they would have discovered it and that would have been the end of him. It would have meant exile – out into the blossoming ZA.

  Of course, once he opened the locker and tied the thing up – a task that had proven nearly as dangerous as the first encounter – it had been more or less safe. Once it was bound and gagged with thick layers of duct tape it could barely move. The bumping against the side of the locker stopped. People rarely went down to storeroom 34 unless they wanted 5.56 ammunition, and he moved some of that to a room nearer the section entrance. He’d used the locker key to lock it up, and kept it with him, around his neck on a chain, so that no one else would be able to open it and discover what he had done.

  After a few weeks, his curiosity started to itch. What could he find out from the fell creature? How had God allowed such a thing to exist? Could he discover something from that rotting, undead but walking corpse that no one else had been able to fathom?

  Over the months that followed he examined the zombie repeatedly, marvelling at how a creature with no living organs could still be alive. All things are equal in the eyes of God, are they not? Surely this thing must be a creation of the Almighty? Surely its presence here was some kind of miracle? As the weeks passed, Carson began to spend more and more of his time off duty sitting facing his captive. There were answers in those eyes, he was sure of it.

  Slowly, but inevitably, Aaron Carson’s mind began to twist. His sanity ebbed as the days passed. He was still able to do his job, but more and more he went to the chapel, to where the chaplain would give his sermons, so he could listen. He asked questions about zombies, pushed and prodded the chaplain, whose faith was already waning, with constant theories that made the man peer at him like he was some sort of leech.

  How dare he look at me like that? Carson had cursed, and he became convinced that the chaplain was not worthy of his position. The man was blatantly gutless and weak, and the idea that he could preach the word of God an insult.

  When the chaplain didn’t turn up to mass one day, people talked. There was a search, but they never found him, and the last time he had been seen by anyone – at least, anyone who would speak up – he had been spotted heading for the fantail deck late at night. A lot of people knew that was where he spent some of his off-duty time, quietly and in prayer. It was presumed that the man, who had recently shown many signs of stress and strain, had simply jumped from the ship, into the cold waves of the Pacific. And in a way they would have been right. The chaplain was indeed floating in the waves many miles away and just below the surface. But he hadn’t gone there voluntarily.

  Without a Christian chaplain to lead prayer, meetings had been reduced to quiet contemplation for most. There was no one to speak the word of God, or no one willing to take up the book and attempt to guide folks. Until one evening, when there was a particularly low attendance, Carson stood up, walked to the front, picked up the Bible from the small table, opened it and began to speak. He didn’t speak from the book itself, instead feeling that he was driven by God himself to speak his own words, channeling the thoughts of the Almighty, the thoughts given to him when sitting staring into the eyes of his undead guest in the locker of storeroom 34.

  “In the End Days, when the Rapture was upon the Earth, the last remaining pure souls would be called upon to fight one last battle, one great battle against the most evil of enemies…”

  And people had listened. Two years had passed since the Apocalypse began, months of prayer and preaching to his followers, those amongst the crew that felt their world was lost. But he had changed all that. He, Aaron Carson, now the Preacher, was a guide to the lost. Slowly his audience had grown, and so had those that he could trust. Those who also believed that they should welcome the will of God, that they should return to their homeland, return to their homes and die, and then ascend, as they were intended to.

  From a few, to a few dozen. Then more, many more. By the time the carrier left on its journey back to the USA, its first such homecoming in six months, his following numbered nearly a hundred. On the night when the special forces from the UK flew off, over his native soil, his country, a place where they didn’t belong, Aaron Carson decided that it was time to go home.

  “This day, my brothers and sisters, we watched as the avatars of evil flew into our homeland for some secret purpose that we are not privy to. What are they looking for, I wonder? To steal what should rightfully be ours? A gift from God to those who are faithful, guarded by millions of his followers?”

  A murmur went through the assembled crowd, and nods of agreement.

&nbs
p; “You all noticed, did you not, how they even sent one of their own amongst us? A spy sent into our ranks, like they thought that they could fool us. That we are stupid?” He meant Homer – who had come down simply to pray, but had become alarmed and taken a probing look around the compartments of the Zealots.

  Louder murmurs and angry faces looked back at Carson.

  “But we are not stupid. We are not fools. And so long as they believe that we are, we have the advantage of surprise. We are, for the first time in many months, merely yards from our home shore. Our homeland. It is time that we make a stand and take what is rightfully ours. In the name of God. And this is how we are going to do it…”

  ZEALOTRY UNLEASHED

  Now Carson stood once again in storeroom 34, looking at the locker, while next to him were two of his henchmen. He had never called them that, but these were his most trusted followers. Right now, others would be moving into place, and in less than fifteen minutes their uprising would begin. All on cue, and all according to schedule, his followers would take up key positions, by deadly force where necessary. The ship’s nuclear reactors, the weapons caches, and the bridge. With many of the officers and sailors in the island busy with preparations for the plane’s return and its refueling, few would be watching the other areas of the ship, and certainly not the movements of a hundred or so of Carson’s faithful.