Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  But now Predator was bellowing for his Yorkshireman again.

  “Begging your pardon,” Henno said, stepping over them. “I’m comin’, you old nag…”

  When he reached the rear of the plane, he saw that Reyes – who had been peppered with shrapnel and knocked cold in the explosion at the airfield – was still stuck in the tailgunner turret. And Predator needed help hauling him out. Even with a gimpy leg, Pred was a man-mountain with the strength of Hercules, and could have pulled Reyes out by himself. He just couldn’t do it without exacerbating the Marine’s injuries, not to mention subjecting him to a lot of unnecessary pain.

  Wordlessly, Henno and Pred arranged themselves behind and to either side of him. They then got their hands under his armpits and thighs, and coordinating only with a nod, smoothly hauled him out and laid him down on the deck.

  Still wordless, Predator got an aid kit opened up, and handed Henno a pair of angled, blunt-tipped bandage scissors, to start cutting away their casualty’s fatigues. Henno started work around the bloodiest parts, figuring himself to be on physician assistant duties. While he did this, Pred got an IV set up and a drip jabbed into Reyes’s arm; then injected some broad-spectrum antibiotics into it. He then got a light out and shined it into Reyes’s eye, which he held open with thumb and forefinger.

  “Where are you, dude?” Predator asked.

  “Airborne.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Got blown up. While saving your punk asses.”

  “Good enough.” Pred clicked off his light, and turned back to the aid kit.

  Having passed his concussion and traumatic brain injury assessment, Reyes propped his head up on something, then looked over at Henno, who was still undressing him. “Hey, man,” he said. “I know you. From the briefing on the JFK.”

  “Aye,” Henno said. “You wanted to hear about the Queen.”

  Reyes laughed. “I think it was more you wanted to tell me about the Queen. I’m American, man. Sic semper tyrannis, and all that. But I’m glad to see you again. Wasn’t sure I was going to.”

  “I always come back round again,” Henno said. “Like a bad STI.”

  Reyes squinted in confusion. “What the fuck’s an STI?”

  Predator handed him a couple of painkillers, which he had to swallow dry, then removed and tossed one of the field dressings that Fick had slapped on Reyes’s leg back at the airfield. Then he handed a clamp with a bandage on the end to Henno, who held it in place while Pred injected some local anesthetic around the edges of the worst wound – then opened up a sterile pair of forceps and started digging around for the chunk of shrapnel he knew was in there. While he poked and prodded, and Reyes grunted in pain, Henno finally answered: “Sexually transmitted infection.”

  “Oh,” Reyes said through gritted teeth. “Got it. You Limeys even got your own special-sounding herpes.”

  “No, that I got from your mum,” Henno said, carefully wiping away blood around the wound.

  Reyes erupted with a belly laugh – which shot pain all through his lower body.

  But it was totally worth it.

  * * *

  With his regular chaperone (Ali) having moved on to watching someone newer, greener, and younger (Emily), Dr. Simon Park now hung out with Juice, the two of them sitting up against the bulkhead behind the command deck. Juice wanted to make sure their “precious cargo” was safe and squared away. He was also worried about the man.

  “I’m fine,” Park said. “I feel incredibly lucky to be alive.”

  “Yeah,” Juice said, smiling from under his thick mat of beard. “That was some kind of a day. Hell, this is my job, I’ve been doing it nearly non-stop for nineteen years. And I’m exhausted. Plus amazed to still be breathing. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like our last forty-eight hours.”

  “Well, that’s a relief, then. It’s not just me.”

  “No. I’d say you’ve held up like a world champion.”

  Park nodded. He was thinking that he now actually was the world’s champion. Everyone left alive was depending on him to make his vaccine work. He said, “I’m a little new at saving the world. In some ways, it would be less pressure if I were still buried in that bunker in Chicago.”

  Juice looked across at him in the thin slashing light that fell diagonally across the cabin. “Well, the way it looks to me, you’ve already stepped up three times. First in creating the prototype vaccine. Then again when you survived – unlike everyone else in Chicago. And finally hanging in with us on our withdrawal under fire, all the way up the lake. The rest should be easy. Right?”

  Park smiled, partially with relief. Other than Ali, he decided Juice was his favorite of the Alpha operators. For a deadly soldier and IT genius, he had a lot of teddy bear in him. “I hope so,” he finally said. “I hope it’s not too late.”

  Juice spat dark tobacco juice into an empty water bottle. “It’s not too late. And look at it this way: the virus spared exactly the wrong guy, from its point of view. It killed everyone in Chicago but you. And you’re the one who’s going to get this thing.”

  Park shrugged, and then seemed to steel himself. “I guess… but if I’m going to, I should probably be working every minute. I should be working on it now.”

  “Go for it.”

  As he hauled his laptop out and started it booting, Park glanced at the large, bearded commando who physically was so unlike him – but was perhaps not all that different on the inside. They were both tinkerers – one in computers, the other in living cells. “Well, it’s thanks to you that I can work – because of you draining and drying the laptop for me, after our swim in the lake.”

  “Yeah, it’s generally not the water that causes the problems. It’s the electric current shorting across the water when the power comes back on. Just have to make sure it’s totally dry before powering it up again. Rinsing the lakewater silt out with clean water first is also key, though counterintuitive.”

  “I don’t know why I never picked up on any of that. I suppose when you’re a scientist, it takes every minute just to stay current with developments in your own tiny subfield. It makes you stupid about other things.”

  Juice pursed his lips somewhere beneath the cumulus cloud of beard. “I think the consensus right now is that you’re just about the smartest man on the planet. Anyway, don’t worry about it. IT stuff is my job. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “That, and single-handedly fighting off an entire forest full of flaming zombies.”

  “Yeah, that was fun, too. One of the perks of this job – no two days alike. Oh, I forgot to mention: I also duped your drive, while you were sleeping. That data’s way too important to have only one copy of.”

  Park looked across at him. “Wait a second. How’d you get in without my password?”

  Juice just winked at him, an unmistakable gleam of intelligence in his eye, which seemed at odds with the matted beard and the reversed ballcap. Park wondered whether this meant he hadn’t needed to log in to dupe the drive, or else he had hacked in. Or, worst of all, if he had just guessed or stolen or otherwise somehow worked out his password…

  “Unfortunately,” Juice said, “we lost the data-capable burst radio to the bottom of Lake Michigan. So, just like before, we’re still going to have to walk this out of here. But at least we’re data redundant now. How you doin’ on battery power?”

  Park looked down as the machine finished coming up. “Good, for the moment. I got it fully charged at the cabin. I don’t suppose there’s a power outlet on the plane.”

  Juice shook his head. “No, not on this old gal. I had a power inverter in my ruck, but that went out the window before take-off. But go ahead and work. We’ll be on a U.S. Navy warship in little over an hour. Probably one with two nuclear reactors on it.”

  Park nodded.

  Maybe everything was going to be okay.

  Wings

  Pilot’s Ready Room, the JFK

  Lieutenant Hailey Wells stared at th
e playing cards in her hand and then back up at the other three pilots sitting around the plastic crate in the middle of the room. Two sevens – that was all she had. But it didn’t matter. She liked to play the other guys off anyway, pushing them as far as she could, whatever hand she held. Sometimes it even worked, but it was a damn good thing they never played for cash. It just wasn’t her game. Oh, sure, she could bull out a poker face with the best of them, but for some reason she just didn’t have the killer instinct.

  That was also, she knew, why she was sitting in the Ready Room after several sorties had already been flown out to engage the storm, and why she wasn’t being picked each time a replacement was needed to give the main fliers a break. Not enough initiative, they had said after she barely scraped through qualification on the F-35. How she had made lieutenant, she didn’t know. It had been a quick promotion after missions into Japan and South Korea the year before had gone well for her. Effective close air support provided for the Marines on the ground, with minimal fuss. She figured her performance was generally good, but was also very aware she held the lowest rank of any living pilot in the JFK air wing.

  Hailey had wanted to be a pilot ever since she was a child, and when she flew her first training missions it was like a wish coming true. She didn’t score very high, never did throughout her training evolutions, but it didn’t matter.

  She had earned her wings. She was a fighter jock.

  But today she didn’t feel much like one. It had been months since they dumped her beloved F-35 over the side and relegated her to other shipboard duties. Hell, they had dumped most of their aircraft over the side that day, or shortly after. She knew it was all going to shit everywhere, and they all had to pull their duties wherever they were needed. But to finally be sitting in this room during combat air ops, just waiting for her chance to get on deck, and knowing there were five times as many pilots as planes, and that every one of them out-ranked her… all of it was about as depressing a feeling as she had had since the numbheads – what she liked to call the zombies – had torn the world to the ground.

  Every one of the other pilots sitting at the poker table would be called before her, no doubt. So when the door opened and the air-wing leading petty officer called her name, she didn’t even react, but carried on staring at the cards in front of her. A few seconds later another pilot, Johnson, who had been at her elbow for the last hour, pinned her with his eye and spoke. “You did hear that, right?”

  Hailey stared at him and then looked around at the others. It wasn’t her turn, was it? Had she been so far off in her own head that she had missed a round completely? She replayed the last few seconds and tried to pick up what she had missed… the hatch banging open, a voice… “Wells, you’re up. Checks in two mikes.” And then the hatch clicking shut.

  She dropped her cards onto the crate face up, and stood up too quickly. “Pair of sevens. I’m out.”

  Thirty seconds later she was beating deck down the passageway and up the ladder, ignoring the laughter that she heard as she rushed out of the compartment.

  Laugh all you want, assholes.

  Her turn. It was her turn.

  And it was all happening too quickly for her head to catch up with. She hit the fuel-laced open air of the flight deck within two minutes, ran across to the only aircraft present with its cockpit glass tilted up, and climbed the ladder. At minute three she was hatch down, helmet on, and going through the checks, calling out to the Plane Captain louder than she needed to. Her head was buzzing, and her nerves burning. Thankfully, her hands weren’t shaking – her discipline was enough to keep control of that – but she was so adrenalized she felt as if they were.

  At four minutes the countdown began.

  Green-shirted flight-deck crew got her bird hooked up to the EMALS catapult. This consisted of a slot that ran part of the length of the bow runway, roughly a football field long. From the end of the slot emerged a metal lug, attached to a shuttle – which was now hooked into the towbar on her plane’s nose gear. When the EMALS was fired, it would accelerate her to 165mph in two seconds.

  At four minutes and ten seconds, the blast shield was raised behind her, to keep the plane’s gigantic jet engine from barbecuing everything and everyone behind it on the flight deck.

  And at four minutes and twenty seconds her brain was trying to exit through her ears as she was propelled off the deck, and launched into open air. Three seconds of g-force acceleration later, and the sky opened up around her for the first time in what seemed like an age. She was free again. The worry of whether she would even remember how to fly dissipated as her muscle memory took over, everything working just as it was supposed to. There were no zombies where she was now, only the endless sky.

  She took a deep breath, and grinned. The plane jolted, buffeted by increasing winds and the turbulence out of the northeast, but gray skies, rain, even lightning weren’t going to slow her down or demoralize her. She was in the air again, finally. She cleared her throat and checked in with PriFly.

  “Tugboat Jack, this is Thunderchild. I am clear and feet wet, ascending to three thousand, and turning on heading one-zero-five to initial target package coords, over.”

  “Acknowledged, Thunderchild. We’ve got you on the big board, and show you clear on that heading and altitude. Be advised that weather conditions are intensifying, over.”

  Hailey banked the aircraft, arcing out over the expanse of water then overflying the carrier the other way, watching as the massive hunk of steel shrank in size with every second. Straight ahead of her, the sprawl of the Virginia Beach seafront stretched out along the coast, the shells of once populated and busy hotels and resorts now empty and falling into disrepair. Even from altitude, she could see the signs of two years of abandonment. Windows had shattered where main water pipes had burst and sent torrents of water gushing through upper levels. On some of the buildings, entire chunks of the exterior had fallen away where the elements had battered them, and not been kept at bay by the careful maintenance of human hands.

  As she soared over the slowly crumbling skeleton of the city, Hailey spotted things that made her heart sink. On the top of one of the high-rise seafront hotels there were the remains of some sort of hastily built shelter, and a line of long-fallen, broken-through defenses near the fire escape. There were no signs of human movement on the roof, and she realized this particular bastion of resistance had collapsed a long time ago. All that moved now was a washing line, blowing in the wind, and heavy with clothing that might have been hanging there for two years, never to be taken down.

  Then there was the storm of dead itself, stretching out for miles and blanketing the landscape – a massive herd that looked like history’s largest army of ants, swarming through the streets on the outskirts of the city, covering everything. It wouldn’t be long before the main bulk of it swept across the beach and started rolling out into the sea. She could already see the fastest and foremost of them, hundreds of scattered, tiny figures splashing into the waves.

  That was why she was up here. To prevent that from happening, or at least to delay it for as long as possible. That was why the plane felt heavy and sluggish – the weight of her payload of ordnance was adding nearly half again the weight of the plane.

  She glanced at the flight status indicators in front of her, and checked her position and heading, altering course only a little. Two kilometers northwest and just inside the swarm. That was where she would drop her first munition.

  The target came up fast, and Hailey banked left to correct course to within a meter of her intended trajectory, waited for the the target to be acquired, and let rip.

  She waited the slightest of moments for that feeling to come, but it wasn’t there. The empty feeling, like she had just cut off a small part of her soul as she sent a deadly weapon careening into a target that contained real, living people. No, this wasn’t like Libya or Syria at all, and she knew that if there were nightmares she would be able to handle them. The animated things be
low may once have been people, but all they were now was empty, heartless shells, each screaming for mercy. No emotion came, and no guilt. This was an alien invasion, or a horde from hell. Hailey wanted to feel something, anything, but nothing came.

  “Tugboat Jack, Thunderchild. First JDAM is away, over.”

  “Thunderchild, Tugboat Jack. Acknowledged. Awaiting BDA, over.”

  Hailey started to bank the plane, taking a long arc around the edge of the swarm, intending to circle, observe, and allow the cameras on the plane to record everything for the analysts back on the JFK, as well as waiting for the combat system status monitor on her console to indicate a successful strike. But she didn’t need that. On the edge of her vision, the ground, already darkened by the mass of dead, erupted in a black cloud hundreds of feet across. A 2,000-pound JDAM going off was hard to miss.

  “Tugboat Jack, Thunderchild. First JDAM has impacted. I’m seeing a large amount of dust and debris. I am not visual with the ground at the moment, but looks like a hit. Over.”

  There was a moment of silence as she waited for a reply. Right now, she knew, a dozen pairs of eyes would be scouring the video feeds she was sending them, and analyzing the results.

  “Thunderchild, Tugboat Jack. We show good effect on target. Maintain overwatch and await confirmation of next target package. Over.”

  “Copy that, Tugboat Jack.”

  The cloud of dust below began to dissipate, blown away and across the mass of dead by the wind of the incoming weather front. As Hailey watched, glancing out every few seconds to get a clearer picture, she noticed a shifting in the writhing mass below her. The area near where the bomb had impacted was temporarily motionless, just a mass of broken bodies, but the gap was being filled. The dead were pouring into the opening, and spreading toward the impact crater.