ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  But it was going to be a very limited time deal.

  Handon squinted in thought as lightning tore the sky to the north, the thunderclap booming a second later. The worst of the storm was on them – or would be in minutes. A voice sounded out of the rain from his right.

  “Back from the dead, eh, Handon?”

  “Albeit late to the fight as usual. Still, good to have you.”

  Handon turned to see MSG Wheeler and SFC Savard, Charlie team guys, one cradling a rifle, the other with his short sword out, dripping gore and rainwater.

  He took the time to shake their hands. “Almost didn’t make it, with you drunken monkeys covering me.” Turning to find his team right behind him, he took one bag from Ali, the other from Juice, and shoved them both in Wheeler’s chest – then pushed Aliyev toward Savard. “Get these bags and this man to Bio.” Scanning across the Common, he could see someone was still fighting to hold that rear breach in the Bio complex – he didn’t use his scope to find out who – and pointed at it. “Go in the back way, find Dr. Park. He’ll take it from there.”

  Wheeler slung the bags. “Wilco, Sergeant Major.”

  Stepping up, Ali pointed past the two Charlie team men all the way down the line to the guard tower on the far right, the sniper OP. “Get the results back to that position. Don’t dawdle.”

  Savard squeezed Aliyev’s shoulder and pushed him forward. “No worries, Ali. We’ll get it done.” No double entendres this time – just mission focus. The three of them disappeared into the dark and rain, moving down the ramp.

  Handon turned back to check the tactical situation. He realized the minigun on the Husky below had gone silent – looking down, he saw it and its gunner had been subsumed. The channel they had used to get here was filling back in, the dead losing interest in the bomb impact point. There was increasing firing on the walls to either side, and the horde was locking onto that again, and coming their way.

  That singularity out there was like a single organism, or maybe a massive unified hive. And now it was roiling, redoubling its mass, gathering its strength, and coiling up to hurl its globe-spanning bulk against the walls one last time, and finally surmount them. And then subsume everything and everyone inside. The last bastion of the living.

  Handon turned and looked upon Alpha team.

  “Huddle up,” he said.

  * * *

  While Handon had been talking to the USOC guys, Fick could see he was pale and sweaty, definitely not 100% – just gutting it out. Then again, who the hell wasn’t.

  But leaning closer, he could see blood dripping from the tear in the lower back of Handon’s assault suit, and when he lifted it up, the bandage over the wound there was soaked. If his artery had opened up, he was done, so Fick assumed that wasn’t it, but rather the stitches, and just got another bandage in there and taped down, Handon ignoring him while he did so.

  When Fick straightened up, Handon was rallying the troops. Looking around, Fick spotted Miller from ops, of all people, and carrying a rifle. Instead of asking him what the hell he was doing on the front line – that one kind of answered itself – he pulled him aside and said, “Hey, you got anybody left in the JOC? Okay, do something for me…”

  As Alpha and everyone nearby circled around Handon’s commanding presence, Fick pushed through, changed channels on Handon’s radio, and tapped the PTT button. Handon gave him a look, but Fick shrugged and said, “The team needs a half-time locker-room speech. Come on, give ’em some of that hard-ass Ranger top-sergeant shit.” When Handon still hesitated, Fick’s face and voice grew serious. He said, “You want to hold this position, we’re gonna need everyone. And they’re going to need a reason to believe.”

  Handon nodded. He got it.

  And when at last he spoke, his voice was loud enough to be heard by everyone standing in the center of the north walls, despite the lashing rain, the thunder, the firing, and the moaning and shrieking of the dead. But it was also being rebroadcast on every working channel for every team everywhere in this fight – as well as across the prison PA and every speaker in the complex – all by Cpl Jones back in the JOC. Handon’s voice boomed out into every corner of CentCom – clear, strong, and without doubt, fear, or hesitation.

  “This is Command Sergeant Major Handon. All teams be advised. This is it – the end, one way or the other. WE HOLD HERE – together. No one relents, no one retreats. Because there’s nowhere else left to go. Right now, I need a single hour from each of you – the hardest hour of fighting of your lives. Do that and we have a chance. Fail, go down now… and it’s over – for everyone, everywhere. But I promise you if that you stand and keep faith with the men and women to either side of you… we can still get through this. All of humanity can.”

  He paused, releasing the radio button.

  “Damn, Sarge,” Predator growled over the noise of the storm. “That was some real St. Crispin’s Day shit.”

  Cracking a smile despite himself, Handon rekeyed his mic. “From this day to the ending of the world, he that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. Now let’s make sure the end of the world isn’t today. Get it done.”

  He keyed off and faced Alpha team again.

  Juice said, “We few, we happy few, we band o—” but Pred punched him, and he shut up.

  Handon paused to take a last look at Alpha, standing in front of all the others – Predator and Juice, Ali and Homer. They were loading up last magazines, tightening bandages, Homer wrapping 100mph tape around Ali’s right hand, lashing it to her katana. It had been one hell of a long road. That the five of them were still standing was nothing short of a miracle. That they were at the center of the front line of the final battle, each with zero doubt and 0.0 seconds of hesitation before doing so, was absolutely no surprise.

  Thunder and lightning cracked the black sky overhead.

  “Ready to go again?” Handon asked. “One last time?”

  Juice nodded, rain dripping from his beard. “’Til the roof comes off, boss.”

  Giving her mutant katana-arm a little test swing, Ali said, “’Til the lights go out.” One of the spotlights on the other side of the wall popped out as a shrieking Foxtrot hurled its body into it. “Jesus, not again.”

  “’Til my leg give out, then,” Predator rumbled.

  Juice looked over at him. “I thought that shit was healing.”

  Giving his boarding axe a spin in one hand, Homer pulled his shemagh up over his face, just to get in the spirit.

  “Damn, Master Chief,” Fick said. “You look like a gay-ass hajji motherfucker in that thing.”

  Homer laughed, eyes crinkling above the cloth. “And you look like one of God’s children, Master Gunnery Sergeant.”

  Beyond the walls, the dead flooded in to the last trace of channel, sluicing up through it toward the walls – malevolent, glowering, vindictive, as if furious they’d been lured to that bomb impact point, where there was no life to devour. Now they came back with full force, straight toward the top of the walls – toward the last bastion of the living, the last flickering flame of life, determined to finally extinguish it forever.

  As one, the operators turned back toward the fight.

  This was it.

  The Bitter End

  CentCom – East Prison Gate

  “You let us do any shooting required, man.”

  This was Savard, admonishing Aliyev for trying to reload his Benelli out of his bug-out bag, while nearby Wheeler put a gun to a guard’s head to make him open the gate that led out onto the Common. But Aliyev ignored Savard and finished his reload anyway. He’d been out in that overrun Common. And if there was one thing the ZA had taught him, it was reload your goddamned shotgun whilst thou may.

  But these were the very last of his shells, so he finally ditched the bug-out bag, mainly to save weight. He’d already bugged out. There was nowhere else left to bug out to. But even just doing that made his guts twist and scream. Something had pummeled his insides in that helicopter crash.
But he had a funny feeling he wasn’t going to get to see a GI specialist anytime real soon.

  Wheeler finally made the gate guards see it his way, sweetening the deal by handing over all his and Savard’s remaining grenades, which got sent up top and dropped over first, to clear the area out front. A second after they exploded, the gate cracked, and Aliyev got shoved through it, and then hustled forward, the meat in an operator-bread sandwich, getting served up at the all-night dead-guy buffet.

  And then he was running through hell once again.

  He had no idea how he was doing it, the pain in his midsection was so bad. Then again, he knew exactly how – that pain was a lot better than being eaten alive, which was exactly what would happen if he stopped running.

  The two operators, one ahead and one behind, shot unceasingly to clear the way, to keep him safe, and to keep them all on their feet – but had both switched to short swords by the time the back side of Bio loomed out of the darkness and rain and rampaging dead. As the three of them hurtled toward it at high speed, Aliyev could see there was a hole in the back of the big white structure.

  And it was being defended by a single soldier.

  The operators hustled Aliyev inside – but to get there, he had to step over the body of a dead woman, face down in the mud and a thick carpet of bullet casings. Her civilian clothing had been torn in a dozen places, the skin showing sheet-white through the rips, blood pooling around her throat, which had obviously been torn out.

  Jesus Christ, Aliyev thought. Despite all the horrors he’d seen and endured and even perpetrated himself, there was still something uniquely shocking about a dead woman. And this one had bled out right there on the ground. She seemed familiar, but Aliyev couldn’t see her face, or quite place her from behind and covered in blood and mud, and then she was gone, her death just another one on top of the seven billion he would never in all eternity have enough time to feel bad about.

  He, Wheeler, and Savard raced inside the warehouse, the lone British soldier following – evidently his job there now done – and the first dead people came through the gap right behind them, only a few seconds behind. The four living guys covered the full length of the warehouse in seconds, then blasted out the door at its opposite end – right in the spot where the electric dead guy dance contest had taken place – slamming it closed behind them. Dead bodies crashed into it from the other side two seconds later. Aside from being dumb dead sons of bitches, who couldn’t open doors, their own weight and mass should keep the inward-opening door closed.

  Until they took down the whole section of flimsy wall.

  On the other side of the door was Nesbitt, the British officer who nominally ran this place, holding a pistol. “You gentlemen got the goods?”

  “Affirmative,” Wheeler said.

  “This way,” Nesbitt said, hustling them back toward the lab area. “Just the two of you, huh?”

  Savard shrugged. “One riot, two Rangers.” Both he and Wheeler, like Handon and Predator, had come out of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

  The four of them spilled out into the lab as Park and some others raced in from the other direction. Park just nodded at Aliyev, then swept paintball crap off the same desk they’d worked at earlier – then turned and wheeled the MZ culturing table over beside it, while the others carefully laid out the contents of the two new bags on the desk.

  And Aliyev propped his Benelli up against it.

  As everyone worked fast, the sounds of rampaging dead – moaning, shrieking, and banging on the outside of the building – filled the whole interior. Wheeler and Savard took up security positions, one at the entrance they’d come in by, the other at the opposite exit, which led to the atrium and front doors. But as Sarah had discovered during the invasion, there were a lot of entrances to this very central area.

  When everything was in place, Park and Aliyev stood side-by-side at the table, looking down at the materials, then looked in at each other for a single beat. This was it.

  They now had four boxes of big bullets with colorful tips – the simunitions, 120 rounds, already out of their cardboard boxes and pointing up in their little plastic trays. They had a box of fifty glass vials of HRIG, the top of their cardboard box flipped up. And, finally, they had several enclosed Petri dishes of MZ sitting inside the culturing table alongside. Now they just had to get the HRIG and MZ into the simunition rounds – so somebody with good aim could use them to infect all the dead and save the whole goddamned world.

  Aliyev was still in pain and shaking with adrenaline, so he just watched as Park opened up a fresh syringe and used it to suck the paint out of the colored cone at the tip of one of the bullets. He then opened up another syringe, removed one of the vials of HRIG, injected the needle, and withdrew a small amount. But then he paused, looking to Aliyev for confirmation. “Low dosage, right?”

  “Yes. Make the bastards scratch and infect other dead, not tear them into sirloin strips. You used one-sixth last time.”

  “I remember.” He carefully picked up the bullet with the hole in its tip. “These are smaller than the paintballs – I don’t think it’ll hold any more than that, not along with MZ.” He carefully lined up the needle of the syringe with the existing hole in the paintball tip, keeping his hands steady. This was delicate work, not to mention more critical than any he’d ever done before. And he knew they couldn’t afford to fuck up – and wouldn’t get to try twice. And he had to do all this despite the pressure, and the sounds of chaos swirling around outside the building.

  Needle injected, he pressed the plunger. But then he froze.

  The sound of heavy tearing from up a side hallway was followed by screaming – and then pounding feet. The chaos was no longer outside – it was back in the building with them again. Both operators, Wheeler and Savard, turned in a flash from their spots at top and bottom of the room, and rushed toward the breach near the center – but they weren’t going to get there in time, and were immediately overwhelmed when they did. A wave of panicked lab staff, pushed forward by runners, blasted out into the labs.

  “No!” Park and Aliyev shouted in unison – to no avail and too late as the mob, half of them panicked and the other half hungry, surged into the middle of the room, and into their work table, knocking it over and dumping its contents on the tile floor. Simon dropped to the deck, scrabbling to gather and protect the sims and especially the glass vials of HRIG – while Aliyev, guts screaming in protest, threw himself over the top of the culturing table.

  Protecting the MZ with his broken body.

  * * *

  Out at the front entrance of Bio, the defenders there had no idea about the breaches on the rear and side, that those in the interior were being overrun in slow motion and by other means. They only knew they had to protect the front doors.

  And they had their own whole set of problems.

  The part-time soldiers of the London Regiment were going down in their dozens now, trying to protect the entrance and especially the plane – fighting nose to nose, bayonet to tooth, the front ranks of the phalanx smash-mouth clashing and crashing against waves of dead like the English army in the Scottish Highlands of the thirteenth century, getting their asses handed to them by William Wallace and the clans.

  And it wasn’t just the front ranks, though they got the worst of it. The leaping Foxtrot problem had gotten worse, keeping those in back scrambling to survive, even as they had to push forward to replace the ranks of the fallen in front. These reinforcements had also been vaccinated late in the day, so some wounded were turning and some weren’t – and there could be no question of putting anyone down until they were sure. Even many of the immune were too injured to fight, succumbing to their wounds and blood loss.

  The only remotely safe ones were the two squad machine-gunners who had been positioned up on top of the wings of the plane, so they could fire over the heads of the soldiers in the phalanx. It wasn’t too high for Foxtrots to jump – but it was far enough back from the front line that it was a
combination of too high and too far, at least up until now. The machine-gunners were also shepherding their last ammo belts, putting short bursts into the horde where things were worst.

  Beneath and behind them, Hailey “Thunderchild” Wells tear-assed down the ramp from the rear hatch, then grabbed the makeshift wooden ramp with both hands and pulled it clear. When she dashed toward the building and a safer position, she found herself beside Captain Gunn, the London Regiment Commander. She looked at him with wide eyes, having no words to thank him for what he and his people were doing.

  He saw the thanks on her face anyway.

  “That’s it,” she said. “The plane’s completely full of vaccine.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Gunn said, eyes glinting. “Now what?”

  Hailey shook her head. “Yeah. Exactly.”

  Gunn looked back out over his dwindling company. “I was just thinking of Churchill’s instructions when Singapore was falling to the Japanese. He said there must be no thought of saving the troops, that commanders and senior officers should die with their men, that the honor of the British Empire and British Army were at stake – and the battle must be fought to the bitter end.” He sighed. “Afraid that’s us now.”

  They both knew it was going to be over soon.

  And then the two of them stood there and watched open-mouthed as one of those movie scenes played out – the one where the villain and all his minions, about to finish off the hero, are run down flat by a truck, from out of nowhere. Flashing headlights, roaring engine, and honking horn, all of it bouncing dangerously over the open ground from the direction of the prison, bore down on them.