Lance Sergeant Tharp pressed her back up against the cold stone wall and struggled to manage her breathing. The even colder panic and dread was physically constricting her torso, and making it difficult to get air into her lungs.
And she was desperate to keep breathing air.
For even a few minutes longer.
She continued to grip her weapon and point it toward the inside of the door to their control room, which was heaving and banging behind its barricade – heedless of the fact that she was out of ammo for the rifle, as well as for her side arm. As was Lieutenant Foster – the only living person in there with her.
They were both empty.
When she tore her eyes from the besieged door and looked over to him, he dredged up a smile for her. “At least it’s the control room going down last. We stood our post.”
Tharp shook her head. Precious good that did them. Yeah, they still had some video displays up, and had been able to monitor some of the cameras outside. So they had seen the steady trickle of dead that had somehow been getting through the ZPW at that spot and into London. They figured it had to be through one of the tunnels underneath the motorway interchange. Those were supposed to be sealed up. But pretty clearly something had gone wrong.
Everything had gone wrong – had gone completely to hell.
Including the radios, which had gotten shot up in the fighting inside the control room. So they’d been unable to report the incursion – even if they could have gotten through all the weird radio interference. They hadn’t even been able to communicate with the tanker squadron when those guys turned up and let themselves in through the gate, though they’d been able to watch it on their screens.
None of this mattered now. Nothing did. Including how the breach had happened.
Perhaps Abs – Corporal Abigail Webster – could have told them. Neither Tharp nor Foster knew for sure that she had been down there in the tunnels below. But she’d been out of the control room, and she’d been part of the outbreak that took down the entire garrison there. They knew this because she was in there with them now, lying in the middle of the room. But she had two bullet holes in her face, and a lot of black spiderwebbing around her open, rheumy, staring eyes.
So she would be keeping the story to herself.
As far as Tharp knew, she and Foster were the last two living people left in the tower. And they weren’t going to stay that way long. Their barricade wasn’t going to hold, not forever – maybe not even another minute. The door was already damaged, and the sheer weight and fury of bodies smashing into it from the other side would ultimately prove irresistible. Just as had the flood of dead that drowned the world and was now submerging Britain, the last little island of humanity. And London, the last dry spot on that island.
This was the end. For everyone.
But even sooner for these two. The weak, frail, lonely, and beleaguered pair hunkered down in that control room were out of hope, out of strength, definitely out of places to hide. And completely out of ammo. All except…
Tharp dropped her rifle and went over to the wall.
She looked up at the NLAW rocket (Next-generation Light Anti-tank Weapon) hanging by its strap from a hook there. This had been gifted to them, or really just to Abs, by one of the men in the tanker squadron, the one who was sweet on her.
She pulled it down off its hook.
When she turned around, LT Foster was looking at her with dead eyes. “This room’s tiny,” he said. “We’ll never survive it.”
Tharp nodded. “I know. I’m not ending up like those others.” She looked down at Abs where she lay on the floor. When she looked back up at Foster he nodded back, in resignation.
They both looked up again as the barricade shifted – the door was out of its frame now, shoving the piled-up furniture ahead of it. Moaning and hissing grew in volume and they could see dead hands reaching through the crack. Grasping.
Foster moved to her side, helped her get the heavy weapon up on her shoulder, then disengaged the dual safeties. She pointed it at the heaving door, wrapped her hand around the ergonomic firing mechanism on the side – and Foster wrapped his own hand around hers.
He squeezed her shoulder with his other hand.
“We did our best, Sergeant.”
Tharp mustered a smile. “See you on the other side, sir.”
There was nothing else left to say.
* * *
Blasting flame, smoke, and debris shot out of three sides of the tower and into the black night, twenty feet below the 100-foot-high ramparts. Most of the structure above that, two stories, collapsed on one side, down into the control room.
But in addition to the genesis of the outbreak in the tower, another thing Corporal Webster hadn’t lived long enough to tell the last two survivors was… about the bad cracking she had seen down in the tunnels beneath the tower. It wouldn’t have come as a big surprise – there had been structural problems all around the rapidly constructed ZPW, particularly its foundations under the hundred-foot-high sections, which had never been designed to support that much height, or weight.
Maybe Foster and Tharp could have predicted this, and avoided what happened next. Maybe it had been impossible for them to see past their own doom and despair, or think about anything except not ending up as the living dead.
Or about their last choice – dying together.
But the collapse didn’t stop with the top two stories. Like the Twin Towers before it, the damage to this one started at the top – but then the tons of stone and steel beneath simply fell out from below it, and the tower dropped out of the sky, collapsing to the ground in a massive roar and rush of dust and debris. One that no one but the dead was there to see or hear.
But the dead definitely heard it.
The crash was audible for miles around, an area filled with hundreds of thousands of dead, all of them surging north, either to the gap in the ZPW there – or else just to infect and devour everyone left in the north of Britain. But now there was another gap. One much closer. And tens of thousands of dead turned and started pouring through it, racing from the southwest toward central London – runners and Foxtrots first.
They would arrive in about three hours.
The trickle had turned to a flood.
The Way Through
St. Thomas’s Hospital
“Solid copy,” Homer answered into his chin mic.
He didn’t get a response from Ali, but he didn’t expect one.
He had heard her, and of course believed her. She wouldn’t tell him the helo was gone if it wasn’t, and she wouldn’t direct him to exfil via a ground route if it weren’t necessary. The ugly crash he and the paramedic heard from above a few seconds later, which shook the whole stairwell they were in, tended to underscore her message. No, he believed all that. He just had to decide what to do about it.
He had to decide whether to leave her.
He looked across at Rob, who was taking slow, careful, measured shots up the stairs – wisely conserving ammo. Homer was shooting as well, but only to defend them. The landings above were basically impassable – as much a meat locker as the prior stairs, which they’d abandoned to try these ones.
And Homer knew if they couldn’t get up, then Ali couldn’t get down. That didn’t mean she was dead – nothing like it. As always, no Tier-1 guy was dead until you saw the flag on the casket, and all of it being lowered into the ground by six guys in full dress. But it did mean they couldn’t join up again, not right now. Because, like all of them, Homer knew one other thing – and this above all else.
Their mission couldn’t fail.
Everyone in the world was depending on them, and upon the two boxes with their hundred vials of HRIG in the bag on his back.
“What’s the plan?” Rob shouted – not panicking, but clearly a little antsy to be standing where they were this long.
“We just lost the helo,” Homer answered. “Have to move to secondary exfil.”
“Okay, what�
�s that?” His slide had just locked back, and Rob gestured to Homer’s pistol-mag pouches. He nodded, and the ex-combat medic dug in. Then Homer smiled as he answered.
“Secondary exfil is get out of the building and run like hell.”
As Rob dropped the pistol slide forward on a fresh round, he said: “I might have a better option for you.”
“All ears.”
“Follow me.”
The EMT led them down, explaining as they ran.
* * *
When Predator trotted back up to the Armoury House gate, after his WWF smackdown on the shit-bird bot-nappers and Cali-killers, he quickly learned a variety of things, almost none of which made him happy. And the one thing that did – the fact that all the civilians had gotten safely inside – wasn’t going to make Juice any too happy.
Luckily he didn’t have time to feel bad about it.
Because now, for one thing, the British Army Reserve defense of Finsbury Square had completely collapsed – and the square was ejecting multiple packs of runners, heading in all directions, but not least theirs. Pred was already forced to start taking careful shots on the frontrunners.
Randy was still on station, but in addition to being black on MG ammo, he must have fired his last few grenades, because now all he was doing was swiveling his turret and impotently tracking incoming targets as they ran by. He’d fought the good fight, but now he was out of it.
Much worse, Pred guessed one of the other HIC soldiers must have made it back here – someone with a keycard definitely had, because the vehicle gate was no longer closed and locked with just three bars bent back. No, now the whole thing stood wide open. When Pred swung the gates closed again, they wouldn’t lock. Worse, they opened inward, so would swing open again as soon as anything shoved into them. When he checked the security shack just inside, there were controls for the gates – but no power to them.
This had stopped being a chokepoint.
Now it was an open floodgate.
And when Pred got back out front, he could see the flood on its way in. He raised his rifle and dropped a couple more at the front edge. But there were plenty behind them, and ammo was soon going to become a problem.
Wait, Pred thought. Where the hell are the two guys I left to guard this position? But even as he thought that, he spotted them coming back in, running flat out ahead of the ejecting runner supernova in the square. Before they even arrived, the woman, Miranda, was apologizing and explaining.
“We were both out of ammo – dashed back to the square to try to find some. Damn!” she added, when she saw the gate was open, Andrew running up beside her.
“Find any?” Pred asked.
“Couple of mags each,” Andrew said.
Pred nodded. He didn’t blame them. You couldn’t defend against runner packs with bayonets and mean looks, especially when you hadn’t been vaccinated. They’d probably done the right thing.
As the sound of helo rotors and engines started to float indistinctly out of the misty night sky, Predator said, “Hey, listen, we’ve got air transport inbound. You guys should get on it.”
They both shook their heads, and spoke over each other.
“Not leaving our regiment,” Andrew said. “Whoever’s left.”
“And we’ve still got a job to do,” Miranda added. “Helping you defend this position.”
“Okay,” Pred said, not in any position to refuse help. He put the two of them in a line, with him in the center, twenty meters behind the gates. He planted his feet, brought his rifle to his shoulder, spat once onto the glistening blacktop ahead of them…
And he started shooting.
* * *
Juice only emerged from cover at the edge of Armoury House when the Chinook rotors started blowing away the last clouds of green smoke from the smoke grenade he’d tossed out onto the parade ground.
Nice, he thought, smiling through his dripping beard. Popping smoke had actually worked. Kicking it old school.
But then he realized the helo wasn’t descending but only hovering. And he was pretty sure he knew why. To their credit, and Juice’s equal surprise, the gallimaufry of random civilians Pred had allowed to waltz in there through his security perimeter were behaving themselves – mostly huddling around the periphery of the parade ground and staying out of the way. But the big unsecured crowd was also, he was pretty sure, causing their helo pilot to hesitate before descending down into that courtyard. They’d discussed the danger of civilians mobbing the helo in their mission briefing.
Damn your humanitarian bullshit, Predator, Juice thought, flashing an IR light up at the descending helo, then a visible one, trying to coax it down.
Wait – where the fuck IS Pred?
And then he heard firing – and moaning – coming from the alley that led out to the gate, and the street.
Goddammit.
“Hey,” he radioed. “Time to go, buddy. Get your ass in here.”
* * *
Rob the paramedic’s alternate secondary exfil plan involved him and Homer getting to the basement parking garage.
“My ambulance should be okay!” he shouted over his shoulder, both of them leaping down stairs a landing at a time. So far, the way down was proving a lot clearer than the way up. No one was going to get away fleeing up, but it would get them farther away from the dead rampaging in from the street – for a while. “They keep the garage locked up for our rigs – you need a security badge to get in.”
“Sounds good.” Homer wasn’t sure the door wouldn’t be battered down like the other ones, but he didn’t have a better plan – and driving back to CentCom in a big heavy vehicle sounded a lot more appealing than riding there in Mk1 boots.
In two minutes they were racing out into the dark basement garage – and found no one in it, living or dead. In another ten seconds they were in the cab of Rob’s bright yellow ambulance, engine growling, and rolling out. Rob used a remote to open the rolling steel door – and they launched up the ramp and tore off through the dark, fire-lit, rain-splashed, panicked, heaving, overrun surface streets of south London.
Homer kept his window up, but kept himself ready to shoot, while hanging on for dear life. Rob was clearly not an ambulance driver by accident, and soon had them moving at high speed on the narrow streets, dodging abandoned or overturned vehicles, swerving around obviously living people, and running down obviously dead ones.
At first, the paramedic was clearly just trying to get them the hell away from the chaos at river’s edge, and Homer let him focus on it – but the chaos wasn’t getting any better. They kept making turns to avoid the worst snarls, and just to keep them moving. Rob reversed direction, then reversed again. The surface streets were starting to look like a no-go.
“How far to Wandsworth Common?” Homer asked, gripping the oh-shit handle as buildings, bodies, fire, and darkness swept and spun past them.
“Too far in this shit storm.”
Homer didn’t disagree. There was no telling how indirect a route they would end up having to take, and every minute they were out in this they risked getting jammed up and stopped for good, foundering on any of a hundred possible hazards.
Homer checked his map and GPS – then stuck his head into the windshield, looking up and out, finally pointing up to a big six-story parking deck a couple of blocks out. “Still got comms with that air ambulance?”
Rob smiled and hit his radio with one hand.
And with the other he twisted the wheel to take them through a shrieking, sphincter-puckering, right-hand turn.
Steering them toward that parking deck.
* * *
Predator knew trying to hold the gates shut would be a mug’s game. The strategy with a longer shelf life was to try to drop incoming dead before they got there, so the fallen bodies would slow up the ones behind, making shooting them easier – and if they really got lucky they might build themselves a wall.
They didn’t get lucky.
The dead were coming way too fast, fa
ster than he and the two HIC soldiers, or any three shooters, or thirty, could put them down. They dropped ten or fifteen right outside the entrance – and then the ones behind shoved the gates open and pushed through. Firing four rounds a second with perfect precision, Pred dropped the front rank, then yanked his pistol and engaged the rank behind that, pushing forward to get ahead of the two un-vaccinated HIC soldiers – because it was obvious what was coming.
He flash-reloaded the pistol, emptied it again into the blurring, moaning, hissing mob racing at them, then holstered it in a blur and drew his bat equally quickly, gripping it with both hands and laying about him. Heads exploded and dead bodies left the ground, flying through the air into the stone walls on either side, twenty-five feet apart, with enough force and momentum to still be ascending as they impacted, then dropping down in piles at the sides of the alley.
In twenty seconds, Pred had broken the wave, putting down two big packs of runners, with the help of the two behind him. The good news was now they had a lull in the onslaught. The bad news was there were already more coming up the street. Ahead of the next pack was another knot of civilians, and Pred waved them in, watching them run to join the fifty-plus already inside the courtyard. The other bad news was, when he turned around to do so, he saw Andrew and Miranda were empty – dropping out mags and not replacing them.
“Any more ammo inside?” he asked.
“No. We cleaned out the armory.”
“Okay, great job,” Pred said. “Now get out of here.”
Both of them just set their feet and gripped their rifles. Both already had bayonets fixed. Pred shook his head, stepped forward, and tried to push the gates closed. But there were too many bodies on the ground, and there wasn’t going to be time to move them, so he just reloaded his weapons – his ammo situation was nothing like good news, either – and fell back in front of the other two. He could now hear the helo louder over the parade ground behind him – and also hear the next runner packs on their way in. Finally, he heard Juice in his ear.
“Freedom bird, buddy. NOW.”
Pred raised his rifle and shot fast and perfect, even for him, taking it up another notch. A small pack of six went down just beyond the gates. Then he hit his radio. “Can’t do it, man. I fall back from here, runners swarm the courtyard.”
ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME Page 36
