Taking out the shiny set of keys the RMP officer had vouchsafed with him, he got the door open. The smell hit him first – whatever was in there, it had been left to fester. But it was truly pitch-black inside, so he was initially spared seeing it. But he wasn’t going in blind, so he raised his rifle and clicked on the weapon light, which he could now do by touch.
He instantly wished he hadn’t.
* * *
It was Luke, not Josie, who started making too much noise when all the lights went off – even those thin and dim light strips at the juncture of walls and floor – leaving them in perfect blackness, hands invisible in front of their faces. Even with this, the little girl was a rock, just sitting wrapped contentedly in her blanket – like the darker and scarier it got, the quieter she knew to become. But Aiden had to cradle his brother, and even put his hand over his mouth to try to silence him.
“Quiet,” he hissed. “Zulus’ll hear!”
The three kids were still huddled in the alcove off the side hallway. The sounds of shuffling had finally passed. Still, the dead couldn’t be far away. And Aiden knew they had good hearing. He couldn’t afford for them to be found now. Not only would it be bad if he had to fire the gun to defend them, as it would draw every Zulu anywhere nearby, but he couldn’t shoot anyway. Because he couldn’t see anything.
Luckily Luke did finally calm down. Even as he did so, Aiden realized he could now see some light again.
And the light was moving.
He pressed Luke and Josie down in place, then stuck his head out of the alcove to see what it was. The light bounced and grew brighter as it approached – and finally resolved as a shadowy figure holding a flashlight. It passed by the hallway they had retreated down, continuing down the bigger one they’d been following before.
Aiden’s eyes went wide and his heart surged – and then he stopped and suppressed the urge to call out. He had to be careful. So instead he moved out to the bigger hallway – and immediately almost slipped. There was something wet on the floor. In the very last glow of the light disappearing up ahead, he could see the fluid was dark.
The man was leaving a blood trail.
Aiden’s mind raced.
That meant he was probably bit. Which meant he was infected. So he could turn at any time. Also, with the light and the smell of the blood, he was likely to draw the dead himself. They had to keep their distance from him.
But… the man also might know a way out.
So they also had no choice. They had to follow him.
* * *
Ali and Homer made it back to the JOC, having hurtled through the pitch-black lobby and up the equally dark stairs. Inside the ops room, though, it was like a sale on a used-car lot, with several handheld flashlights being waved around or clutched between teeth. But there was little work the JOC staff could do by this light. The computers, set radios, and video monitors were all cold and dark.
Ali found Miller shouting into a handheld radio, evidently trying to understand and be understood by the base engineers. As she approached, she could hear the transmission was mostly static. Miller looked up as she appeared in the shifting glare, and he didn’t make her ask him for a sitrep. “The generator should be kicking in by now.”
“So why isn’t it?”
“Not sure. Don’t think it’s been cranked up or tested in a while. I’ve got men going out to try kicking it.”
Ali’s first impulse was to tell them to kick faster. But then she looked over at Homer. They were probably going to have to go out there themselves. She didn’t waste time asking how or why this had happened.
The look she exchanged with Homer said they both had a pretty good idea.
Zulu Barbecue
Enfield Power Station, North London
[Ten Minutes Ago]
Braveen Jamali, Operations Manager and head of shift, stood in the rain and looked back one last time – and knew what he was looking back upon was almost certainly… the end.
Braveen liked his job very much, was good at it, had worked more than two decades to reach the level of Ops Manager. Moreover, he knew his role was an important one. Nothing worked without the power his station and others provided.
London would completely shut down.
Which was why he had kept his skeleton crew in place until the last possible second. But finally the dead, flowing in through the fallen section of ZPW in the north, were not just at their high steel fence, not just being impaled and wiggling on the sharp tips at the top – they were pouring over it.
And he and his people had to go.
Braveen had kept them there, running the station and its operations, because an outage of even an hour would be a disaster. This was why London’s power infrastructure was highly redundant. Unfortunately, that redundancy also meant it was massively and tightly interconnected – and thus vulnerable to cascades in the event of catastrophic surges. But it also had safeguards in place to prevent surges of that magnitude.
But no one had seen anything like this coming.
Braveen also knew the facility probably should have had some kind of armed force defending it at this point. But evidently there weren’t enough soldiers to defend London itself, never mind his tiny part of it. Anyway, seeing what he saw now, he knew it wouldn’t have mattered, not in the least.
In his last look back, what Braveen saw was hundreds or perhaps thousands of dead pouring over and through the power station. From where he stood, he couldn’t tell if all of London was being overrun this disastrously – or else if they were specifically drawn here, perhaps by the loud and incessant humming the station made. Perhaps they even felt the ambient electrical currents.
But none of that mattered.
Because as the seemingly endless mass of walking and running dead overran the transformers, turbines, thick cables and power lines, the switchyard itself… bodies piled up, being crushed under more bodies still, melting and popping from the heat, lines tearing and shorting… producing the horrible smell of cooking flesh floating on the night air through the rain… and then not just smoke but rippling electrical surges like Nikolai Tesla’s lab on its very worst day, on Judgment Day itself…
The rain only made it worse – shorting across everything conductive over to everything else. Not a goddamned thing was grounded now. Luckily he and his people were standing on dirt, in a glen fifty meters away. But from here they could see…
Bright blue-and-white surges racing down thick wires strung high over the fences, radiating out in a dozen directions – and then the lights in the buildings of Enfield Village, and across the greater Borough of Enfield, winking and popping out, the blackout rippling outward in three cardinal directions, but principally toward the south.
And all Braveen could think of was the climactic scene of Titanic, when the lights on the ship finally went out, for good. He remembered that, at that point, the ocean liner had been ass-up out of the water, at a forty-five degree angle to the surface of the ocean. This was just before it broke in half, the stern went vertical – and everything went straight to the bottom.
That was London now. Doomed. And sinking fast.
Braveen turned away, and got his people moving out.
Not at a walk. But at a dead run.
I Don’t Give a Shit
CentCom – JOC
But before Ali could move herself and Homer out toward the generator, the lights came back on. And not just the lights in the JOC. There was also a lot of bright glare coming in the shot-out external windows, and when she stepped to them, she could see it looked like every light in CentCom was lit, on full power. It looked like a night-game at Wrigley Field.
Worst of all, she could see the Common out beneath the prison walls to either side of SHQ to the east were lit up like a Broadway stage. Bright spots mounted on the prison walls were blasting out and down. If the same was true on the north side, where the prison walls were also the external walls, and where the dead were coming from…
But, yeah �
� it was definitely true.
This immediately became clear from the frantic and half-garbled radio transmissions that started coming in from the personnel manning those walls. And the first gunshots.
They were all Broadway stars now.
* * *
When Wesley clicked his light on, the scene inside the canteen looked even worse than it smelled.
He went inside, anyway. He had no choice.
Panning the cone of his light across the sprawled-out and scattered bodies, arrayed in exotic and unlikely poses, draped across tables and the floor, he could see half of them were half-eaten. And all of them had canoes for heads. That would be Fick’s handiwork. Being systematic – and merciless.
Wes tried to do no less, stepping carefully around the pools of gore on the previously white tile floor. In a minute or so he had cleared the room. He tried calling out.
“Josie,” he said, his voice catching in his throat, yet still sounding obtrusive in the close and horrible space. He said it again anyway, louder. Nothing. He could only see one door leading out of there, and it was closed. He moved to that, and put his left hand on the knob.
Without warning, every light in the room went on, causing his eyes to slam shut in pain. By the time he got them levered open a crack and looked around, he was being hailed on his radio. It was one of his team sergeants, back on the walls.
And he didn’t sound happy.
Wes looked a last time at the shut door. And he turned and hauled ass out of there. Back to the walls. Back to his men.
And back to his duties.
The child rescue mission would have to wait.
* * *
As dangerous and terrifying as it was, Aiden knew they needed to follow the wounded man through the sealed-off section of prison, if they were going to have any chance of finding a way out. He went back through the dark and got Luke and Josie moving, hustling them into the main corridor, before the man’s light grew too faint to see. But then a terrible noise ahead made him stop in his tracks, clinging to the two others. It was some kind of grunting, scrabbling sound.
He was afraid it was the man turning.
In which case following him was a bad idea. Instead, they needed to get as far away as possible. Which was terrible, because maybe he had known the way out, and now they’d have to move in the wrong direction. But, suddenly, in an instant, Aiden didn’t have to wonder what the noises were.
Because every light in every hallway came on at once.
And he could see it perfectly well. The man they had been following was pressed up against a wall. And pressed up against him, the two bodies locked in some kind of horribly violent but surreally frozen struggle, was someone who had clearly already turned. And he was trying to eat the first man alive – right where he stood.
Worst of all, the living man, obviously just about out of strength to resist, was facing back in Aiden’s direction, looking over the Zulu’s shoulder as he held its head with both hands, trying to keep it from biting his neck. And looking up the suddenly illuminated hallway with terrified and sick eyes…
He locked gazes with Aiden.
* * *
When Wesley hurtled back up the internal stairs of the guard tower and into his command post, there were a couple of RMP senior NCOs inside, but he could also half make out Fick yelling at him in his radio earpiece. He opened his mouth to ask what the hell was going on – but when he exited again, stepping out onto the tower’s external walkway on the north-facing side, it was as obvious as the sun in the sky.
Seemingly the entire world to the north of CentCom was brilliantly illuminated by wall-mounted spotlights. And, totally vivid in the harsh light, seemingly the entire population of that world was now staring directly up at Wesley where he stood.
And they were all moving forward.
It looked like opening time outside the DisneyWorld gates on the first day of summer vacation, except with dead people instead of kids. Then again, maybe it was more like midnight on New Year’s Eve – with CentCom as Cinderella’s Castle.
Wesley shook his head and waited for the fireworks.
That clever plan to avoid drawing the dead was over. Now drawing the dead was all they were doing. He went back inside to get ready. They were done hiding. The fighting part was about to begin – this was about to become a shooting war.
And Wesley was going to be up to his neck in it.
They all were.
* * *
“How do we fix it?” Ali asked. Operators didn’t do panic, they did solutions – always at their best when things were worst.
“On it, bear with me…” Miller was practically draped over one of the tactical stations and its controller, evidently only keeping his own fingers off the touchscreen through sheer force of will.
“I’ve got it,” the man at the station said. Leaning in, Ali could see he was running through the menus of some kind of industrial control system, manually turning off one set of base lights after another, as quickly as he could stab his finger.
There was nothing Miller could do to help, and anything he tried was going to have the opposite effect, so instead he explained over his shoulder to Ali. “It’s not just that cycling the power appears to have reset the whole damned system. But evidently it goes back to the default setting for the time of day, which this being night-time means lights on, overriding us manually having turned almost all of them off. Worst of all, and I’m only eighty percent sure about this, but I think when we’re on emergency power, it automatically turns on the damned outside spots. I don’t know, we’ve never had this before.”
“Yeah, affirmative on the spots,” Ali said. The evidence seemed to be on Miller’s side.
“It’s as if, with the power out, the stress is on keeping the prison population contained, catching escapers. I don’t know.” He leaned in closer. “Come on!”
The lights in the JOC went off again.
“Not those ones! Goddammit!”
Ali looked around the room, now lit only by monitor glow. Well, at least our devices are still powered up…
She looked over at Homer, who was still standing nearby. “Radio traffic seems kind of wedged,” she said. “Any ideas?”
“Yes,” he answered. “My bet is it’s the same thing that took out power – a generating station or major transfer substation got overrun and then overloaded. A big enough surge would not only take out power across the city, but could result in broadband EMI.”
Ali exhaled. Great. One more goddamned thing.
Miller looked up, clearly confused, so Homer broke it down for him. “Broadband electromagnetic interference. If the transformers shorted badly enough, there would be massive arcing and sparking, sending out powerful EM waves – potentially bad enough to disrupt radio transmissions over a wide area.” He looked back to Ali. “It’ll be worst closest to the station, and should get better over time. But, then again, if we’re having trouble transmitting from here to just a few hundred yards away, you can probably write off anything long-range. Even the other side of London will be black.” He looked back to Miller. “And, depending on how bad the surge, it could potentially travel across the lines and take out other transfer stations, resulting in more EMI emanating from there.”
Miller shook his head. “Jesus. How could we be so vulnerable?”
Homer shrugged. “It’s why these lines are strung so high, and the transfer stations protected by tall fences.”
“Not tall enough,” Miller said.
Homer shrugged again. Enough dead could get over anything.
Ali stepped back to the window – just in time to see the spots on the walls fade to black again. With that sun-like brilliance gone, she could see it looked like the rest of the facility had gone dark again.
But it was probably too late.
* * *
The annex with the guest billets, i.e. the former cell block, was kept pretty dim to start with, and Pred and Juice were fast asleep with their own lights out. So they d
idn’t wake up, or even roll over, when the power went out. Both were buried in a cocoon of slumber deep as an undersea trench, and both immersed in frantic dreams. They had been running bad sleep deficits from the round-the-clock Africa mission, and from all the missions before that, and now were out like the dead.
So they also didn’t wake up when all the lights came on again, snoring right through it. Nor when the lights went back out. However, when a voice came on over the tannoy, summoning all RMPs and home guard to the walls, this finally brought them both back from the dream world. After about two seconds of disorientation, they sat up and faced each other, frowning in the dark.
“Goddammit,” Pred grumbled, rubbing his eyes. “I was dreaming about bacon.”
Juice yawned. “I was dreaming about sleeping.”
Suddenly, they could both hear the faint sound of gunfire in the distance, through the thick walls of the prison. Without another word, they got geared up and grabbed their weapons. As they darted out, Juice saw the door next to his was open and stuck his head in. Kate and Baxter were already gone. He turned, put his head down, and caught up with Pred.
And the two of them raced out toward the walls.
* * *
Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick didn’t need the all-hands announcement to tell him the dead were at the walls. Because he could see a Foxtrot launch over the top of a section of them like some kind of goddamned meat catapult ammunition in a Monty Python sketch, and hit the ground fifty feet from him.
He had no particularly good idea how the hell the thing had made it over a twenty-foot wall. But he hoped the Zulus and runners were piled up really high outside. Because if they weren’t, and Foxtrots could now leap that high – or else had taken up pole-vaulting – then, either way, they were all pretty much fucked.
ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME Page 4
