Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  Around his instant hyperventilation, the pilot gasped. “A fucking F-35! Jesus fucking… That was seriously not supposed to be there. It was climbing as we were descending, coming straight in on us… I think I saw the pilot punch out.” He shut up now, and struggled to bring the big bomber back to level, and work out the last evil vibrations in the airframe, after their wild evasive maneuver.

  Handon pulled himself back into the co-pilot’s seat and looked over at the pilot, who was still trying to bring his breathing under control. A massive adrenaline rush had dilated his pupils to saucers, and his hands visibly shook. But they had made it, and the man who had just saved them was getting his shit back together.

  Handon, instantly all business again, said, “What’s our new heading? And how does that impact our jump plan? I need an update.” They’d been thrown significantly off course, very close to their jump marker, and Handon needed to adapt to that if necessary.

  The pilot shook his head. “Hang on. I’m going to try and get us on a new heading to your jump point.”

  Behind them, Fick pulled himself to his feet and said, “Never mind the fucking jump plan. Where does our new course put us relative to the carrier’s flight ops? And the shore bombardment? Remember that bit where we’re not supposed to deviate because we’re so close to their fire lanes?”

  The pilot blinked once, then looked down to check his instruments.

  Outside, one of the remaining three engines exploded, the nearer one on the starboard side – and the only one on that side still running.

  Afterward, Handon decided he’d heard some kind of high-pitched whistling coming in on them, outside to the right, and beneath the noise of the storm. And he had a guess as to what that was – an artillery round from the shore bombardment. But this was only after the fact.

  Right now, he looked out and saw the engine flaming out and disintegrating. The plane began to shudder much more violently – and started losing altitude. The pilot battled the controls, trying to steady them. It also looked like he was trying to keep the nose up. Without looking away, he said:

  “You two gentlemen need to exit this aircraft. And take everyone with you.”

  Handon and Fick looked at each other, both tensing their muscles.

  Stealing a glance out the glass to the right, the pilot said, “We are down to two engines. And I don’t know how long that wing is going to stay attached to this airframe. So I suggest that if you’re gonna jump, you do it right fucking now.”

  Zack Don’t Surf

  The JFK, Flight Deck

  Morgan Wilson stared down at the waves below and shivered as the cold wind and the rain began to bite. They’d been standing at the very front of the flight deck for only about half an hour, but it felt like an age – just standing and staring and waiting – and what had started as a cool breeze on their faces was now becoming a storm. Overhead, the bright blue sky of the morning had turned gray, and then black. He wasn’t sure what was worse, the rumbling of the storm above them or the darkening waves below.

  He peered down into the water again, trying to keep focused, but he was no sentry, and was more accustomed to being kept busy on the lower decks at his normal duties. All this standing around was mind-numbing. Across the water, the swarm of dead still poured into the water, wave after endless wave. But after what he estimated to be fifty yards out they vanished under the waves. Sure, the water looked dark, maybe a little darker than it was normally, but the warning they’d been given, that the dead would fill the sea and then attack, seemed to have been overblown.

  He glanced around, taking in as much as he could of his surroundings. The place was chaos, or so it seemed to him. Helos were coming and going every ten minutes or so, mostly between the two ships, and overhead fighter planes were making constant flyovers. Every few minutes the horizon over the city would light up, and a distant explosion would echo across the water. This would be followed by a massive, rising cloud, and then the aircraft responsible would shoot across the sky, bank around and head back to shore for another run.

  Four times now, the monstrous birds of prey had roared in to land on the flight deck, and only a few minutes later two more would be in place, hooked in and quite literally catapulted off the ship. It took a level of courage, or madness, that Morgan simply couldn’t fathom. How the pilots could strap themselves into tons of metal and be thrown into the sky that way was so far off the radar he could barely think about it. His head hurt when he did.

  At the same time, he could watch the deck gun on the destroyer, the USS Michael Murphy, pounding the coast with its shore bombardment. From where he stood, he couldn’t see the other ship behind them. But he could hear the 5-inch gun barking, and occasionally feel as much as hear the big high-explosive shells whistling overhead. And their impacts on the city, and on the horde, were impossible to miss. The sound of every distant explosion rumbled back to them – and for most they could see the bright flash, the cloud of smoke, and the general mayhem that resulted. That deck gun was firing every three seconds.

  Soon the rain hit them, initially only a light shower, cold from the sea breeze, but actually refreshing until it intensified. There was a rumble of thunder, and then several flashes of lightning, and the rain really began to hammer down, drenching him through. They had all been issued ponchos to help against the incoming storm, but they were about as useful as a woolen hat. His grip on his assault rifle was less steady, the thin work gloves drenched through within minutes.

  He laughed, even as the sky lit up with a crackle of lightning. Maybe those pilots weren’t so crazy after all – they weren’t standing out in the pouring rain, a storm raging overhead and ten million dead things crawling toward them. Maybe there was something in that. Then a lightning bolt shot from the clouds and hit one of the high-rise buildings along the seafront, and Morgan realized those planes were flying up in it. Screw that.

  He was staring at the waves, his vision slightly blurred, when the first shout went up. At least a dozen people on the line noticed it at the same time, and cried out in shock. His vision sharpened and he snapped out of his daze, looking down into the waves below as they lapped against the hull. But it wasn’t the waves that had caught his attention, and everyone else’s. It was what was down there in the depths. At first he couldn’t make out what everyone was getting worked up about, but then he saw the movement.

  Dark shadows shifted under the water and sometimes, just at the corner of his vision, he thought he saw something bob up from the waves, a small splash of foam erupting and then dissipating as quickly as it appeared. But by the time he focused through the torrent of rain, the movement was gone, washed away in the waves once more, and he wondered with each vision if he was imagining it, or if the storm was just messing with the sea and making him see things that weren’t there. But everyone was staring down there, and some of the crew looked pale as hell, like they were about to pass out, or throw up. Or both.

  Then his eyes began to focus on the bigger image, and the movement of the waves vanished, fading into a dull sheen that revealed what lay underneath. Below him, staring up through the dark waters, were a million blurred and featureless faces. Their arms reached up from the depths, not yet breaking the surface. But it was only a matter of a few feet now. Their dead, ravaged skin was already bloated from immersion in the water, even after such a short time, and it disfigured many of the faces staring upward, but their eyes were unmistakable. Dark, hollow voids that somehow, Morgan felt, burned with hatred and hunger, and stared up at only him. Thousands, tens of thousands. Millions. Every single face burning with intent.

  Morgan staggered back a step, his heart nearly leaping from his chest, and noticed many others doing the same. Shouts went up from the commanding Marines, urging them to get back in line and hold their positions. No one broke and ran, but the flash of fear skittering through the militia was tangible, and he could almost smell it. Then another smell hit him, a much darker, horrific one. The rank odor of the dead drifted up
ward, assaulting his senses.

  He stepped back into line, nearly gagging from the stink, but still gripping his rifle with shaking, freezing hands, then turned away, took a deep breath, and stared back down again. Other hands were breaking the surface of the water, and by the thousands. Even as he watched, a few of the dead burst from the sea and clambered on top of ones still trapped below. More broke the surface, dotting the water as far as he could see, but that was not the greatest worry.

  As Morgan looked up, panning toward shore, he saw that the fifty-meter drop-off, the point where the dead fell away into the sea, or at least had done so until now, had ceased swallowing the surging mass. The sea between the shore and the JFK was finally filled with the bodies of the dead, and there was nowhere else for them to go, other than up and over.

  Now, as he watched, they flowed from the city streets, still smashing through the broken remains of what had once been a popular beach resort. They surged down onto the beach like an endless army of insects, rushing across the sand, stumbling and pushing, fighting each other for every yard, and then charged over the top of the water, running upon the bodies of those that had turned a shifting ocean of salt water into a writhing mess. A massive wave of the dead was heading toward them, barely a mile away and closing fast.

  It was at this point that the destroyer’s missiles started piling in again. There had been an initial couple of salvos, but that was before Morgan’s unit had taken their positions out front, and all they’d been able to see were the brilliant launches going vertically into the sky above the Murphy, and then arcing like graceful fireworks off into Virginia Beach in the distance. But now they were targeting the horde out in the surf, massive explosions ripping apart the shallows, even as they ripped apart hundreds of dead bodies. A seemingly endless volley of streaking missiles tore into the sea and the horde directly in front of the carrier, and only a half a mile away – and the pyrotechnics were breathtaking. It was like a wild infantry change into the teeth of the world’s heaviest artillery, the geysers of massive explosions, giant columns of water and body parts, shooting up into the storm-tossed sky.

  But the horde didn’t slow down, and the missile strikes didn’t thin them out enough to matter. They didn’t even notice.

  Ten minutes later, the entire line of defenders watched in awe and shock as the massive swarm of dead collided with the front of the ship. There was no lurch, no shock wave as they hit – the behemoth supercarrier was far too heavy to be rocked by this first charge. Morgan didn’t know what he had expected would happen at that point, but the speed of what followed certainly wasn’t it. As the first wave of zombies hit the hull, they were crushed under those that followed, pushed downward as the mass of bodies clambered atop one another, piling up against the overhanging steel wedge of the prow, and clawing upward, then being crushed in the stampede as yet more climbed on top of them. Wave upon wave of dark figures writhed and climbed, pushing ever upward.

  “Lock and load!” shouted a Marine standing a few feet away, his voice bellowing in Morgan’s ears. The man was checking his own weapons – two assault rifles, one hanging from its strap and the other in his hands.

  Thousands of pale and damaged faces glared up at the defenders with those dark hollow eyes, their hands reaching out desperately, their expressions contorted with rage. With every second that passed, the pile crept higher, closer, and within a minute almost half the distance from the ocean surface below to the deck was filled with bodies. The screaming, moaning, hissing horde was close enough now that individual details could be made out.

  “Acquire targets!” shouted the Marine. Other voices bellowed the same, their Marine leaders maintaining a stoic, determined face that they hoped would keep the line from breaking, keep them focused on the task at hand. They had to stop this irresistible force from getting onto the ship, and Morgan realized in that moment that this was probably the last thing he would ever do.

  He gripped the rifle, lifted it, and aimed, steadying his breathing as well as he could, even as his heart and lungs wanted to burst, and his legs wanted to carry him as far away from this place as possible. But he knew what was at stake. He knew that their mission was to save the rest of humanity. He’d hoped to be part of the bit that was saved, rather than ending up among the dead, and he had no illusions of heroism.

  But he could do this one thing.

  The dead were only fifty feet away now and still they swarmed upward. The pile of bodies grew in real time before their terrified, unblinking eyes.

  “Engage targets!” came the order. “Fire!”

  The militia now opened up, the line of defense sputtering at first, and then erupting into a massive wall of gunfire as the first wave of the storm assaulted the lines. Morgan’s rifle was one of the first to jump to life, the kick of the weapon somehow comforting as he emptied his first clip without really aiming. Anywhere in that mash-up of dead things was a hit, and they didn’t have enough ammunition to kill every one of the swarm anyway. All they could do was hold back the tide as it heaved its way across the top of the ocean, as ten million implacable dead men rushed toward them.

  Or else they could die trying.

  A Hundred Ways to Get Killed

  On Board Chuckie, Somewhere Above the Coastline

  Over the roar of the stricken, bucking bomber, Handon shouted, “What’s our altitude?”

  The pilot stole a glance at the altimeter. “Three thousand! But I can’t hold it!”

  Handon grimaced. All the cells of his body were telling him to get the hell out. But he knew he couldn’t go yet. There was critical information he still needed. “What are we over?”

  “What?”

  Handon grabbed him by the shoulder. Jostling a pilot at work wasn’t a great idea at the best of times, never mind while he was trying to keep a badly damaged plane in the air. But Handon couldn’t push his people out over certain death, regardless of how bad it was up here.

  “WHAT ARE WE OVER? Right now?!”

  The pilot shook his head. The view outside was pure storm soup. “I have no idea! But you’ve got to get out that door while we’re still at a safe jump altitude!”

  Handon chewed his own teeth. “And if we jump into the middle of that herd, we’ll wish we had stayed in the crashing plane!”

  The pilot’s eyes darted to the console. “We’re over water by now! We have to be…!”

  Fick stood frozen, watching this surreal exchange. There was absolutely no time for this. But it was also another case of there being no time to fuck it up. While he stood rooted to his spot, the storm lashing all around them, the gravely wounded plane bucking and flailing, in the middle of all this madness, Fick wondered: Was that dream I had a portent? Is this plane really going down after all? And are all my people going to die, for real? As panic began to grip him, he thought: I gotta get my Marines out of here…

  Handon, his head touching the pilot’s, shouted, “Are you SURE?!”

  “Yes! I could calculate it precisely for you based on dead reckoning and the charts. But I’d just as soon fly the fucking plane. Now get! The fuck! Out!”

  And that’s when it belatedly hit him: this man was holding the door open for the rest of them. And there was little or no chance of him being able to go through it himself.

  Handon looked at Fick, who looked back.

  And they both turned and scrambled out of the flight deck, one after the other.

  * * *

  “Marines! Green light, green light! We jump now! Go, go, go!”

  Some unfamiliar, atavistic, but surging part of Fick was still thinking: I’ve got to get my people out. We can’t go down in this plane. He shrugged into his chute as he ran down the center of the bomber, slapping heads.

  He reached the rear escape hatch, twisted the latch, and hauled it open. The breach in the plane admitted no light – day had turned to night from the aerial ocean of black storm clouds outside – but slashes of cold rain poured in on the screaming, gusting wind.

&
nbsp; I’ve already lost Chesney, Fick thought, watching his men fight their way to their feet. I nearly lost Graybeard. Of course, he’d lost people before, many of them. But it felt surreally different this time. He could easily face up to dying with his men. But he didn’t think he could bear being the sole survivor. Not like in that dream. Not like that.

  No, their old LT had done it right, spending his life to save the lives of the men. Going out early, rather than living long enough to see them picked off one by one.

  Fick shouted, “Everyone out that fucking door! Now, now, now!!”

  But as he looked back up the cabin, and saw the others trying to help Reyes to his feet, he realized with a start that what he was doing was… panicking. Never having done it before, he was slow to recognize it. And he instantly knew that he had to get his panic under wraps – he had to master his fear. Whatever he thought he’d seen in that dream, now was not the time to let it scupper his leadership. They were in a genuine emergency, and the men needed him panicking like they needed magic marker dicks drawn on their faces.

  The LT was gone, and Fick was still here, and it was just his duty to keep serving, to keep leading the men – and to watch them die, if it came to that. It sucked, but no one ever said fulfilling his duty was going to be a goddamned Thai massage with a happy ending.

  He steadied his voice, stepped forward, pointed, and said, “Carry that man. Then toss him out!” Brady and Graybeard moved quickly but carefully to comply. They hefted Reyes by boots and armpits, like a sack of something, and quick-walked him with baby-steps to the rear. The hatch was too narrow for them to swing him out lengthwise. So Graybeard placed the wounded man’s torso in the opening, back first; and Brady swung his feet around, then pushed them up and over. And Reyes did a sitting backflip out the hatch, and off into the sky.

  Brady took a single step to the edge and powered himself out.

  Graybeard nodded once at Fick, grabbed the right edge of the hatch with his hand, and swung himself around and through it.