Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  Ali was very happy to defer, and let them have the ride.

  Turning back, shaking more violently from the chill, she saw the sub captain now shaking Simon’s hand. He said, “Dr. Park, I presume! I gather you’re an individual of some strategic importance. That your laptop? We’ll get it drained and dried out for you.”

  Park took his hand. But he said, “Thanks – but I can do it myself.”

  “Very good. Welcome aboard.”

  The Seahawk lifted off again, turning and putting its nose down, causing the wind across the deck to blast up, and making Ali shiver again. But, looking up now, she suddenly realized that, without her noticing it, the rain had stopped entirely. And the sun was beginning to leak through the dark clouds above – for what seemed like the first time in an age. Craning her neck, she followed the arc of the helo’s path, as it headed back east toward the carrier. And, out beyond it, she could see the virgin sunlight illuminating the JFK, as if washing the darkness away.

  And as she watched the ship magically bathed in light, she also witnessed the beginning of a full-on miracle.

  She could see now that the gargantuan chain connecting the Kennedy to the destroyer was taut. Looking to one side, she could see the Murphy straining, pulling for all she was worth. The plume of white water in her stern plowed high into the air and far behind her, as her engines ran at full power.

  From this distance, the noise of its screaming engines was just audible – though not so the sound of the 110,000-ton carrier as it began to slide across the ocean bottom. From their angle on the sub, behind and to the port side of the carrier, its movement wasn’t quite perceptible.

  But while Ali and her charges and the sub crew couldn’t see much of the motion of the towering behemoth as it began to slide backward into the ocean, as if being launched for a second time… what they could see was the unimaginably enormous mountain of dead piled up around the prow. They could see it around the port side, presumably with a mirror-image on the other, both of them sloping out and down, away from the front edge of the flight deck.

  Ali glanced back behind and around her, and saw that the dozen-plus people still standing on the glistening deck of the Washington all stood rapt – their eyes trained in the same direction as hers. They were all witnessing a miracle:

  The exodus of the USS John F. Kennedy.

  They could all see the mountain of Zulus up against the prow slowly collapse, tumbling heavily down upon itself like an uncontrolled avalanche on an ice- and snow-blanketed Alpine peak, seemingly falling in slow motion as the carrier pulled away and the unimaginable volume of bodies lost purchase and dropped out from under itself. Immense geysers of ocean water rose up to the sky as the millions of pounds of dead bodies plunged into it.

  And, as the distant sound of crashing and splashing faded out, a new sound took its place.

  It was the wild, distant cheers of the exuberant men and women on the carrier – and as it carried across the water, it was met with a cheer in response from the destroyer as well.

  And the air was clear enough now that Ali could see a couple of tiny helmets tossed into the air off the carrier’s fantail deck, arcing gracefully down into the ocean below.

  Giant swells of water from the refloating carrier began to rock the submarine.

  Ali just laughed out loud, and smiled into the breaking sunshine.

  Time

  The JFK, Sparrow Missile Deck

  Dawn broke in the east, way out on the endless horizon, right at the seam between sea and sky. This was the second morning after the Battle of the JFK. The sky was largely clear, with a thin scattering of broken clouds on the horizon – just enough to make the sunrise gentle and pretty. The breeze, most of it an artificial wind from the giant vessel plowing through the ocean at its top speed of forty knots, was cold, crisp, and clean.

  First Sergeant Aaliyah Khamsi, formerly of the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, now seemingly permanently on attachment to the Unified Special Operations Command at Hereford, United Kingdom, sat alone in the first morning light. The sharp sea air felt cleansing in her lungs. But in this moment, she was not sure she’d ever felt so completely alone. With everything she had already dared and risked and lived through, and all she’d lost along the way, there were definitely some competing moments for that title.

  She sat on the cold outcropping of the little side deck, two levels beneath the flight deck, which nestled between the Sparrow missile launchers and the Phalanx CIWS. Homer had showed her this spot, and taught her this trick. Aside from being one of the few places to find any real solitude on this floating commune, it had seemed to her like the right place.

  The right place to sit in silence – and to nurse the pain of missing him.

  Ali hadn’t cried in longer than she could remember. She hadn’t cried since saying goodbye to her sister, for what had turned out to be the second-to-last time, when she fled their native Somalia, long before the fall. Back when she had set off into the unknown, so innocent of what the years ahead held – all that she was to learn, and achieve, and discover in herself. Not to mention the looming end of the world, about which she’d had no more real premonition than anyone else.

  She hadn’t cried since then; and she wasn’t going to do so now. She’d survived worse than this before. Everyone still alive had.

  Or, then again… maybe she hadn’t. Maybe this was rock bottom.

  Ali had never really faced up to how much she had grown to depend on Homer. Not until now, when he was gone. Maybe she’d never wanted to depend on anyone so much. It didn’t fit with her proud self-reliance, her towering abilities, the way she was so self-contained. That much dependence on anyone was a kind of weakness, and one ill-afforded by someone in her line of work – plus far too risky in the ZA, where anyone could be taken away in the blink of an eye. It had happened over and over again.

  And now it had happened to her.

  Of course, Homer wasn’t dead, and she wasn’t grieving for him. Homer was a Tier-1 operator. And unless and until a corpse turned up, he was still in play. If any living human being could survive a land journey across a third of an undead continent, and then somehow make his way home, it was him. But there was no getting around the fact that they were leaving him behind. Of course they couldn’t do anything else.

  And with every nautical mile the JFK put between itself and North America, that was another mile, and an even more uncrossable gap, between Ali and the best all-around human being she had ever known. She had interacted with some incredibly high-quality people in her time in the military, and particularly in the special operations community. But Homer was it – the real deal. His goodness, his faith, his belief in the power of love, had never deserted him.

  No matter how bad things got.

  And, at least for now, Ali had to carry on without him.

  And as the end of the world marched on, it was starting to feel like everything was going to be taken, just torn away from them. One piece at a time, they would be stripped down. And naked and defenseless they would have to face the whirlwind that was this fallen world.

  She rubbed her bandaged upper arm with her bandaged hand, both of which she’d had looked at in the hospital. Her wrenched back had also been wrapped up, though there wasn’t much that could be done for that. All of the injuries were bright little nexuses of pain in her much-abused body. But they felt warm, and she liked them, because they reminded her she was alive. She felt grateful for these sensations, when others now felt nothing.

  She began to steel herself to get up and get moving again. Because she had one more errand, one more terrible loss to reckon with today. She had been putting it off, by coming down to commune with the empty ocean. But now it had to be done. On the one hand, it was just one more damned thing. On the other, it was a sacred debt of honor she owed to another amazing warrior – one who had given all his remaining days that others might live.

  It was her duty now to go to Pope’s berth – and clear ou
t his things.

  She stood, blew into her hands, and climbed back up to the flight deck, then paused there and had a look around. In one or two spots in the distance, sailors went to and fro, or conducted little work parties. But the sprawling surface of the flat-top was mostly desolate – and it was peaceful. Like after a bad storm, when the sun breaks through on the still-dripping world.

  The post-battle effort to thoroughly clear the flight deck and the rest of the carrier had been ugly, meticulous work – but relatively safe. Everyone had wanted to do it the least dangerous way possible, despite it taking longer. Nobody wanted to get killed or turned after having survived all the way to that point. And officers really didn’t want to order people to their deaths now. Those that remained had come too far.

  Ali looked down at the deck beneath her feet. It was so clean it actually looked like you could eat off it, less than two days after the battle. All the shell casings, grime, blood, viscera, and other unspeakable gore had been hosed off. Hell, it looked like the deck had been scrubbed with toothbrushes. Cleanliness really was next to godliness on U.S. Navy warships.

  By the end of the battle, when Ali had gotten helo’d over from the deck of the Washington with Park and Emily in tow, she’d figured the JFK would never look the same again. Then she’d watched, amazed, at how quickly the swabbies swabbed the thing up. Of course, it wasn’t just about esthetics – there was also infection risk in every dollop of Zulu gore.

  And, of course, there was still a lot of damage that couldn’t just be swept away, or even painted over. She looked now up toward the prow, which looked like it had been carpet-bombed. But even the devastation there had been policed up as much as possible, then wrapped around with yellow hazard tape.

  And now the flight deck was nearly empty again, which was a nice state for it in the new dawn. Virtually everyone among the crew, plus the Marines and the survivors of Alpha team, were down below – resting, recovering, licking their wounds. And marveling at the miraculous fact that they were still breathing air.

  A raucous, unfamiliar noise sounded overhead – and when Ali snapped her head up toward it, she saw a huge, jet-black raven soar by, then settle out on the edge of the deck. It called twice more, seemingly right at her. She mentally flashed back to the last time she and Homer had been alone together – on the front porch of that cabin in the forest by Lake Michigan. A raven had perched over their heads then. She’d wondered if it was the harbinger of Homer’s death. And now – was this one here to tell her something? That Homer was okay? Or was it actually the spirit of Homer, there to say goodbye? God knew she’d never seen a bird like that so far from shore. It was very hard to account for.

  Ali felt a lump rise in her throat. But she fought it back down. No, she wasn’t going to cry now. She just wasn’t. As the raven stretched out its wings and took flight again, she heard someone call her name in a deep, resonant voice. When she turned back to face down the length of the ship, she saw a lone figure walking slowly toward her, no assault suit, no weapons or ammo now, hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped, lit by the rising sun ahead.

  It was Handon.

  He got within a few paces of her and stopped. They faced each other in the cold breeze and thin morning light, and both nodded in acknowledgement. Ali noticed that, though he had showered and gotten out of the clothes they’d all been in for a week, he hadn’t yet shaved. A thick covering of straight, black whiskers was carpeting the lower half of his face.

  Swallowing heavily first, she tried to brighten up as she greeted him. “Hiya, top. So, what, are you growing the beard of sorrow now?”

  “The beard of what?” Handon seemed at a loss.

  “Beard of sorrow. You know, like on Battlestar Galactica, when everything went to shit, and there was a time skip, and the male characters all turned up with thick beards – to symbolize all their pain and all they had lost.”

  Handon half-smiled. “It wasn’t intentional.”

  Ali nodded and paused a long beat. “What are you doing now?”

  “Just looking for someplace to be alone, actually.” He seemed slightly unfamiliar to her in this moment, and slightly out of sorts – far from his usual role of being in charge, being the gruff top sergeant. Clearly he’d had enough of command for the moment. Now he was just a man alone on top of an enormous ship sailing across an empty and godless sea.

  “I’ve got just the place for you,” Ali said. She described how to get down to the Sparrow deck. Handon nodded his gratitude and started to head off again. But then he stopped almost as quickly, and turned back to face her.

  “Hey, I forgot to ask,” he said, pausing before going on. “What happened up there?”

  Ali thought she knew what he meant. “What, in the bomber? After you jumped?”

  “Yeah. And after the wing came off.”

  “You saw that?”

  Handon nodded. “Yes. And I was pretty sure that was the last I was going to see of you.”

  “You weren’t the only one.” Ali took a look at her boots and reached back into memory. “Well, I got Park out the door first.”

  “I figured that, him still being alive and all.”

  “And after that… well, I couldn’t make it to the door. We were spiraling out, and the g-forces were too bad. I figured that was it for me. But it was okay, because I’d saved the mission objective. It was a pretty good note to go out on. Plus I’d die human, which wasn’t so bad.”

  Handon squinted through the brightening sunlight at her. He didn’t have to say anything.

  “But, then… then the plane came apart in mid-air. And instead of being crushed to death between an engine and a strut or something… instead I found myself falling through open sky. The whole bomber just sort of… came apart, opened up, and released me. Like I was being born. Or reborn, I guess. And I got clear enough of the debris to deploy my chute. I really don’t know how it happened.”

  Handon held her gaze tightly. “I know what Homer would say.”

  “Yes.” She smiled sadly. “That it was a miracle.”

  So maybe Simon Park had been right, after all. Maybe she had died on that plane – and then been reborn. And was now the angel of her previous self.

  The two of them stood that way, saying nothing more, for a few seconds.

  Finally Handon said, “Okay. I guess I’ll see you later.”

  And he wandered off toward the edge, leaving her alone again.

  * * *

  Henno minutely adjusted the little rectangular photograph on the table in front of him. Ainsley’d had it laminated – so he could take it with him on deployments to variously shitty and dirty places around the world, without carrying the weight of a frame. He’d found it beside Ainsley’s bunk. It showed both of his boys, and their mother, smiling in the sunlight in some pretty, green, peaceful place. Some place and time before all this.

  Henno didn’t know whether humanity would ever get back to that.

  But he knew Captain Connor Ainsley wouldn’t.

  And, right now, the man’s wife was back in Blighty, not knowing she was a widow – nor that their two children had lost their father. It was a hell of a price to pay. Henno damn well hoped it would be worth it in the end.

  He was sitting alone, in the near dark, in the Petty Officer’s mess below decks. This was the long table where he and Ainsley had last sat together, right before they launched on this mission. Ainsley had told him he hadn’t been able to get through to his missus on the phone before they left England. She hadn’t even known what her husband was flying into. Henno recalled thinking that was hard.

  And he remembered something else.

  He had asked Ainsley whether he thought they were going to make it back from this one. His answer had been: “Don’t worry too much about that. Worry about what kind of world we leave behind.” Unlike a lot of officers Henno had served under, Ainsley’s actions had always matched his words – one hundred percent. The two of them came from very different backgrounds. But the
y understood each other. Their values were aligned. One of those values was: actions count.

  And he had bloody well made his count.

  Henno snorted and shook his head.

  He thought briefly about the turn of events that had led him to parachute down onto the carrier – after having finally convinced the others that the destroyer, and safety, were the only place for the team which the fate of the whole world depended on. But, when Handon had turned for the Kennedy, and the others followed behind him like baby geese, it quickly became obvious to Henno there would have been damned little point in him going to the destroyer by himself. He hadn’t liked it one bit. But the decision had been taken out of his hands. Handon had simply reneged on his one sane decision of the mission, and they’d nearly all snuffed it – and the world had nearly paid a terrible price. The carrier had been saved by inches. What if it hadn’t?

  Henno then thought back further, to his run-in with Handon in that pirate boat on the lake – and the latter’s spiritual crisis, or whatever the hell it was. Worrying about them all losing their souls, or becoming dead inside, in doing the job they had to do. Henno figured it wasn’t the very daftest idea in the world. He just had to somehow make sure the whole world didn’t wink out for the salvation of one man’s soul. Or for all of theirs. If they had to pay instead, then they paid. That was obvious, and it was simple. Ainsley hadn’t hesitated a single second before paying with everything he had.

  The rest of them could damned well do no less.

  Henno knew who he was, and knew where he came down. Neither looked like changing any time soon. The only difference was now he had to carry on without Ainsley – and without Ainsley running top cover for him. Henno now survived as the only Brit on a spec-ops team based at Hereford, home of the SAS, for fuck’s sake. Well, he’d just deal with that, too. If it ultimately came to some kind of a final showdown with Handon, then it would come to that. And Henno didn’t think much of Handon’s chances.