Park realized now that what he needed to do was exercise some mental discipline. His bad thoughts were running away with him. And if he went along for the ride, they were going to lead him down a dark spiral of mental self-torture.
And down that road madness lay.
And if he had learned one single thing in his few days with Alpha team, it was this: not to panic, not to give in – to fatalism, to fear, to despair, to anything. To keep operating, keep trying to survive, to succeed. One of the operators, he couldn’t even remember which, had told him: “Whatever happens, keep moving and thinking. Countless millions have spent their last moments on Earth paralyzed by confusion. Don’t be among them.” He had only been a few days in the company of these people. But the lesson, their example, had come in a very high dosage.
It was almost impossible to be around these men, and one woman, and not have their calm, dynamic, unflappable, never-quit attitudes rub off on you, at least a little.
Maybe it would be enough to see him through this.
* * *
Park had just decided to act, to take responsibility for his own survival, and had started paddling toward the distant source of the tracer rounds, hoping it was the destroyer… when a semi-translucent green rectangle blotted out the tracers and faint ambient light, darkening his patch of ocean even further. After startling, he immediately realized it was another parachute, coming down only a few feet from him.
And as it flared and splashed in, he could also instantly tell who it was – Ali.
Oh, thank God for that. He tried to remember the last time he had invoked a deity, in anything other than jest or mocking. But he sure as hell meant it this time. He felt weak with gratitude and relief. But he also felt pride – that he had formulated a plan of action, and had started executing it. Maybe next time it would count, and his resolution and calm would make the difference.
But right now, within seconds actually, Ali had gotten free of her chute, inflated her vest, paddled efficiently up to Park, and grabbed him by a life-vest strap.
“How we doing?” she asked, quietly and calmly. The two of them floated, facing each other, the rain coming down on their heads and all around, as if it was them against the world.
“Okay,” he managed – feeling his lip tremble from the chill. The water wasn’t freezing, but it was no hot tub, either. Not in late November, and in the mid-Atlantic. Or maybe he was trembling because he was so happy Ali was alive, and that she had found him. “Wait – how did you find me?”
She lifted the flap of his satchel and flexed out one of the inner pockets – revealing a small, rugged electronic device of some sort clipped in there.
“Personal transponder,” she said. “Only one we’ve got left. But you won that lottery.”
Park shook his head in wonder. She’d obviously tagged him with this without his knowledge, sometime before he jumped. (And it had been sometime before he jumped – back in Chicago.) But what really flummoxed Park was how she’d gotten out of that spiraling bomber. “Back in the plane—”
“Hang on,” she interrupted. “I’ve got to call for our ride.”
She reached into the long pouch on her vest, pulled out the rubber-banded flexible antenna of her MBITR radio, unwrapped it to its full length, and switched to what she ardently hoped was the right channel. Then she hailed the Combat Information Center on the Michael Murphy.
“DG One-One-Twelve, this is Mortem One detachment, on open water in your AO. How copy?”
To no one’s greater surprise and relief than her own, a response came back almost immediately. Advantages of being local, finally. They had come a long way. “Mortem One detachment, you have CIC on the Murphy, we are call sign Warhero. Go ahead with traffic.”
Ali decided to screw the formality of radio protocol. “Yeah, Warhero, we were sold some story about a helo and rescue swimmers fishing us out of this soup. Also be advised that our group includes the Papa Charlie from Op Secunda Mortem. Repeat, we are the precious cargo. Over.”
“Warhero copies all, Mortem. But be advised: both of our rotary-wing assets are currently engaged with replenishment and fire-support ops for the flat-top in contact. We are retasking one of them to recover you now – but she’s close to bingo fuel, so will not be able to linger long. We’re going to need you to stay at your current position and be ready to move. Repeat, stay put. We’ve got your grid reference, and will come to you. How copy, over?”
Ali spat some water – more heavily loaded than Park, she was even lower in the water – then pressed her PTT button. “That’s a solid copy on all, Warhero. However, that is negative on maintaining our position. We still have one pax unaccounted for, and we have to move to recover. Interrogative: do you read our transponder signal?”
“Wait one… That’s affirmative on the transponder, Mortem. We have you up on our big board now. Still strongly recommend holding that position. And if you do move, mind where you do it. There are multiple hazards in that water – debris from the battle, not to mention one shit-ton of Zulus, over.”
“Roger that, Warhero. Just have your fliers follow our beacon, and watch for our IR strobe.”
“Roger that, Mortem. Your ride is call sign Firehawk Two, and will be en route your location shortly. ETA approx eight to ten mikes, over.”
Ali exhaled some chilled breath. Eight minutes – they could do that. “Roger that, Warhero. Signing off now to save juice. But stay in touch. Out.”
As Ali folded her radio antenna back up and got it stowed away, she scanned the splashing, hazy surface of the water around them, as if plotting a course.
Park asked, “Where are we going?”
“To find Emily. I didn’t get her off that pirate boat and all the way to the coast just to lose her now. Come on. Stay close.”
The only thing Park liked less than the idea of blundering around this haunted stretch of ocean was being separated from Ali. So far, Alpha had meant life. He wasn’t about to place his bet elsewhere now, so he started paddling quietly after her. Still, he couldn’t help but be terrified that they seemed to be swimming in some random direction; and he couldn’t keep from asking her about it.
“Not random,” she said over her shoulder, and around a mouthful of seawater. “I spotted her chute in the water on my way down. I just had to pick you up first.”
Park calmed down, reassured by this. Though the dim light, the unknown black ocean below, the splashing and haze all around, and the raging battle overhead still jangled his nerves.
And then suddenly they heard the sound of screaming – a high-pitched female voice.
Park froze.
Ali stopped paddling – but not for long. She unclipped her life vest, pushed it at Park, and said: “Wait here.” Then she took off in a high-speed crawl stroke.
Straight toward the sound of the screaming.
The Floating Dead
Off the Coast of Virginia Beach
The yacht skimmed across the water, now four hundred yards from where thousands of undead staggered down the beach and into the ocean. It was, Wesley believed, one of the most bizarre scenes he had ever witnessed. They couldn’t all be following his small group in the boat. In fact, most of the creatures weren’t even heading toward them, but just pushing forward in the same direction as the others, staggering into the water in a lemming-like exodus, and then disappearing under the waves about fifty yards out.
There was nothing driving them forward that Wesley could see. It was baffling. But, what he could see out in the distance was the JFK, just coming into view. Visibility was getting worse by the minute, with the rain now lashing down in a torrential downpour, and the wind buffeting everything that offered any kind of resistance. When the towering profile of the giant warship came into view, and Wesley saw what surrounded it, his stomach nearly dropped out his ass. This was not what he had promised the bedraggled bunch of survivors who had joined them – a safe haven, and a way to escape from the U.S. to relative safety in the U.K.
; Even though the Kennedy lay a good distance offshore, the dead had still somehow managed to reach it. And now, as Wesley watched the creatures pour down the beach and into the water, he finally figured out where they were all going. A new landfill had formed between the shore and the carrier, one not only built by man, but built out of man. Dead ones. Wesley could see the trapped ones writhing in the water, trying to break free, but they were crushed by thousands of others running across the dead-flesh bridge and piling up against the front of the carrier. And there had to be tens of thousands of them trying to get up there.
Hovering above the very tip of the massive ship was a helicopter, its door gun firing into the the tip of the pile of bodies, cutting it apart. Across the front of the carrier Wesley could see that a rampart, a defensive wall of sorts, had been built, and now hundreds of the dead were pouring over it.
They’re already losing this battle.
Wesley turned to the man standing next to him, and Burns looked back, shock evident in his eyes. “This doesn’t look like the kind of rescue party I was hoping for,” Burns said.
“No. Not really,” said Wesley, shaking his head. “This isn’t what I was expecting, either.”
Burns sighed, and looked around at his bedraggled group of survivors, some of them injured.
“Look,” Wesley said. “They have a hospital on that ship, and Melvin says we can get on board at the back. The dead may not even get to that part of the ship. And they must have an escape plan of some sort.”
Burns shook his head, but kept the yacht heading out to sea, toward the stern of the carrier.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “I’m out of fucking ideas. We can’t go back on shore without heading at least fifty miles north or south, and we don’t have a lot of fuel, so it’s a one-way trip whatever we do. But this shit show…” He indicated the battle for the carrier. “It doesn’t look like a good option.”
Wesley kept his silence, and glanced over at Derwin, now slumped on the deck. One of the women was cradling his head and trying to give him some water from a Thermos cup. But he was looking more pale by the minute, and Wesley knew he had to get him back to that hospital, and fast. “Can you at least drop us off at the back? Melvin says there’s a dock back there that we can get onto.”
“Sure,” Burns said. “We can do that, at least.”
Wesley scanned the sea ahead, boggling at how dark the water was. It hadn’t seemed that way when he had been up on deck, looking out at the clear, blue waves a few days before. It had to be the weather, he thought, but that just didn’t feel right. Ahead, about 150 yards, he spotted something, or somethings, bobbing along, drifting slowly out to sea. He squinted, trying to focus in.
There were two bodies, both submerged up to their chests, maybe five feet away from each other. Burns must have clocked them too, because he frowned at Wesley.
“Floaters,” he said. “I’ll steer us around them. Don’t want those bastards clinging on to us.”
The yacht veered right and started to circle past the two bodies. As they got closer, Wesley noticed that one wore a helmet of some kind, and Wesley thought it looked like one of the big bulbous pilot helmets. The front visor was smashed, and he could vaguely make out pale skin in the dark interior. Both of the bodies were wearing inflated life jackets, though the one worn by the pilot looked only partially inflated. Nearby, maybe a dozen feet away, a sheet of gray-white material, probably a parachute, drifted in the water.
Then Wesley got a good look at the second one. It only had one arm, the other just a raw, red socket that revealed glaring white bone across the shoulder. Most of the creature’s face seemed to be missing, leaving a bright, washed skull exposed, the jawbone and teeth opening and closing mindlessly. Its other arm was intact, and reaching out toward the pilot, reaching out and trying to grasp and pull.
Zombies don’t bother with other zombies, Wesley thought. Everyone knows that. So what’s wrong with this picture?
Then it hit him. The pilot wasn’t dead.
“Melvin!” Wesley barked. “Get over here, I need you. Burns, that one there isn’t dead.”
Burns turned quickly, his eyes wide and staring at the two figures. One was motionless, the other reaching, clawing, slowly moving toward the unconscious figure in the water – just five, four, then three feet away…
But then Melvin was there, lifting his rifle.
“I’ve got it,” he said, steadying himself against the railing, and leaning out as he carefully aimed. The rifle cracked once, and then again as the others watched. He squinted deeply at the two figures, and let out a long sigh, then fired a third time. The one-armed zombie went over on its side, most of its already smashed-in face now missing. As the boat swung closer, Wesley heard a faint hissing sound, and he just caught sight of the hole in the inflated lifejacket that Melvin’s second shot had made, before the creature sank below the surface.
The second one snapped to consciousness at the sound of gunfire, and now began flailing, panicking.
“Let’s get him in,” said Melvin, but several others were already at the side of the boat, two of them reaching out toward the thrashing pilot, and another pointing a shotgun at him.
“Careful,” cautioned Burns. “He may be alive but still infected. Check for wounds before you pull him in.”
Wesley held on to the handrail and watched as they pulled the body on board. The pilot slumped against the deck, then reached up and struggled to pull off the smashed helmet. With some help from the others, it finally came off, revealing a mane of long, wet hair and the bruised and battered face of a woman.
She coughed, and then breathed heavily, looking around at her rescuers.
“You’re the folks in the boat. The ones who were trapped in the inlet…”
“Yes,” said Wesley, kneeling down next to her. “That was us.”
“Good…” she said, between gasps for breath. “Wasn’t all pointless, then. I was afraid you wouldn’t get out.”
Wesley smiled. “You were in the plane that blew the shit out of the bridge?”
The pilot nodded.
“I’m Andrew,” he said. “Erm… Second Lieutenant Wesley. Thanks for helping us out back there. I owe you.”
“Hailey. Lieutenant Wells. And thanks for stopping that numbhead from munching on me. Really, I think we’re even now.”
Wesley sat, back, impressed, and watched as the bruised but not badly injured woman caught her breath.
“Lieutenant, eh? I guess that means you’re in charge.”
But the pilot shook her head and grinned. “Nice try. With my aircraft gone, now I’m just along for the ride…”
Without Limit
The JFK Flight Deck
Handon slapped in a new mag from one of his vest pouches, which he had refilled at the forklift – as had everyone else stuck in this Zulu-Dawn-style shit-storm. He was shooting a lot, but not as much as the militia standing on the front line. Right now, he was mainly doing what the remaining Marines, as well as his own people, were – running to the spots where things were worst and pitching in there. By this means, and using a lot of fingers, they were holding the dyke.
Barely. And for the moment.
The rain had slackened again, and there was more ambient light with lighter and thinner clouds. But it was still cool and windy, and it looked as if the storm could rekindle itself at any moment. Handon hopped up on the forklift for a better look at the tactical picture. A couple of sailors and one of the Marines were already up on there, shooting down into the attacking dead. Casting around, he got a good look at the state of play, his first in a while.
In a way, having the line pushed back was not such a bad thing: those dead that survived the fire from the destroyer and came over the ramparts now had a good eighty meters of deck to cross. And they were taking fire the whole time – from the skirmish line, from the guys on the forklift, and even from the Marine sharpshooters and grenadiers back on the island.
They also now had
hundreds, if not thousands, of their destroyed buddies to climb and clamber over. The whole front of the deck was turning into a huge, open-air, dead-meat market.
And it was a hell of a daunting sight. Handon had never seen so many in one place – not even in Chicago. It seemed to be a mix of Zulus (the slow ones), Romeos (runners), and Foxtrots (the nightmares). Luckily, the proportions were pretty favorable – maybe 70/20/10. Handon didn’t know if the storm had been blowing across North America, picking up dead guys in various flavors as it went. But he did know that if all of these had been Foxtrots, their lines would have been overrun, the defenders wiped out, and the carrier lost, all a hell of a lot earlier in the day.
It was also starting to look like Handon’s big coup of recovering three or four pallets from Ammo City was a fairly minor stopgap measure. Because, looking behind him at the front of the forklift, he could see that most of the crates had already been hollowed out. He wasn’t in a position to do a precise ammo manifest, but suffice it to say there was a hell of a lot less of it, only a few minutes after he secured it.
Looking out to both flanks and forward, Handon now belatedly but very clearly perceived something else that he hadn’t before: the dead were no longer coming over only the front edge of the carrier. When he’d first touched down, he could see they were already surging around the sides, out to maybe 10 or 15 meters – and, in fact, the ramparts had been built out around the sides somewhat, to account for this, and counter it.
However, that 10 or 15 meters had already become 30 or 35. And it was pushing out more, and fast. With a sinking shock of realization, Handon knew now this had always been inevitable. There were thought to be ten million of them. They weren’t all going to pile up at the very tip of the boat. Of course they were going to spill around to both sides, and start piling up there. And with every additional foot of flight deck they came over, they stretched the ranks of the defenders ever thinner.
Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Page 24
