ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  “You heard the Master Guns,” Juice shouted from the rear. He now realized the problem with a pneumatic spike: when the air ran out, the spike finished in, not out – flaccid, rather than erect. Now he was trying to get his bayonet fixed as he ran, and just bodychecking any dead that got past Pred or came in from the sides, protecting Park and Aliyev in the middle. “The roof of SHQ.”

  “And you heard the next bit – the stairwell’s fucking destroyed! Got any bright ideas for getting us up there?”

  “Getting us up is easy,” Juice said. “The trouble is everyone else. Wait, I’ve got an idea. Hey, Ali!”

  “Oh, hey, Juice.”

  Out of the darkness and rain and rampaging dead came a hurtling knot of figures: Baxter, Kate, Elliot, Homer, and Ali – whirling swords first. The two groups were converging on their respective paths heading toward SHQ.

  “Got a plan?” Ali asked.

  “Yeah,” Pred grumbled. “Juice is taking us to an overrun building to get us all killed.”

  “A little faith, man.” Juice shoved Park and Aliyev toward Ali and Homer. “Get these two there for me. Meet you in two.”

  “Check,” Homer said.

  “Where we going?” Pred asked.

  “Tiny detour,” Juice said, tear-assing off into the night, obviously expecting Pred to follow. He did.

  Two minutes later, when the bigger group had gotten inside SHQ and was now fighting to clear and hold the lobby, huddled up in the area around the destroyed stairwell, Juice and Pred finally reappeared – the former fighting as well as shouting into his radio, the latter carrying a bundled-up cargo net that must have weighed 150 pounds.

  “And?” Ali asked.

  Juice led them across the left side of the lobby down to its far end, the group having enough combatants to bash the dead aside and keep the others safe. Then again, there were no more non-combatants in this war, just as there was no more rear or safe area. When Ali and Pred turned the corner Juice had just ducked around, they saw him jabbing a circular button on the wall.

  And it lit up.

  “No one ever destroys elevators,” Juice said.

  Pred grunted, impressed. “Huh. Suppose not – dead might press buttons by accident, but they’ll never get the right floor.”

  The elevator dinged and the door opened.

  The trouble was it wouldn’t nearly hold all of them, particularly with the cargo net. Half the group went up first, the other half facing out and holding the line.

  Facing the longest wait for an elevator in human history.

  * * *

  “Oh!” Fick bellowed as the walkway swayed and rocked under his feet. “Are you even fucking seriously me right now?”

  Maybe it was all the grenades that had got dropped over the sides. Maybe it was the mortars, the main guns on the tanks, the machine guns, armored vehicles blasting by, an armored vehicle getting launched off the top. Maybe it was the weight of the massive meat pile now pressing up against it, or just the extreme age of the stone structure itself.

  It was probably everything.

  But now the prison walls were swaying and buckling underneath the feet of the defenders – even as the last of them hauled ass down the walkway to the east, battling as they went, many falling in the fighting retreat and going down. Fick had put the word out on all nets, getting Jones to patch it through again, then talked to Wesley personally to make sure he understood the plan – but then also personally ran all the way down to the CP on the west side to make sure everyone everywhere along the line had got the message.

  That they were getting the fuck out of there.

  And Handon had waited for him.

  Now the two of them were the last men out, running like hell in the opposite direction, to the right, right behind the Royal Marines, who were behind the surviving Gurkhas – all of them behind what was left of USOC. At first it looked like these two had inadvertently gotten the best deal – with all those teams clearing the way, many being killed or knocked off doing so, it looked like Handon and Fick stood a chance of making it.

  Then the walls themselves started to go over.

  Not collapsing out from under them – but rather falling over backward, knocked down into the yard, underneath and ahead of a twenty-five-foot-high pile of dead, literally flooding into the north prison yard over the collapsed seawall, filling it up quicker than they had ever filled up no-man’s land, which was seriously saying something.

  And running along the top of those collapsing walls, about ten feet ahead of the tumbling wave, was Handon – who was about five feet ahead of Fick. They were actually both leaning nearly thirty degrees to their left, digging in their boots to keep from sliding off as the walkway tilted and the walls went over with them on it, then collapsed into tons of rubble and giant piles of dead bodies not twenty feet behind them.

  The guard tower on the right finally appeared and Handon jumped for it, landing on the circular platform outside it, then turned to see Fick leaping after him as the wall literally went out from under his feet, arms outstretched.

  Handon didn’t let Fick’s arms hit the walkway.

  He caught them in midair, even as Fick’s legs slammed into stone and metal below. And he hauled him up after him.

  Dead were already attacking them on the circular walkway, but they battled around to the far side. The good news was the sections of walls beyond still stood – the tower serving to anchor them, and marking the end point of the collapse. The other good news was the walkway on that section was clear – after the inner and outer walls split at the tower, the fleeing defenders were on an interior section of prison walls, heading south, and the dead in the Common hadn’t piled up that high yet.

  The bad news was they were already piling up on the inside of the prison, from the collapse in the north, and would soon surmount the walls from that side. And the really bad news was the first of the fleeing survivors from the north section had already reached the easternmost point of the inner walls, their destination. This was where the SHQ building backed up against it, and towered an additional two stories above.

  And that twenty feet of building was sheer – and empty.

  There was no way up it.

  Handon and Fick ran toward it anyway. Because there was absolutely nowhere else left to go.

  This was the fall. The final one.

  Alamo of the Alamo

  CentCom – Roof of SHQ

  Predator blasted out of the stairwell door onto the poorly lit and rain-lashed rooftop, carrying a cargo net the weight of a normal human being, and didn’t even slow down. Scanning and assessing as he powered forward, he veered off toward Colley and relieved him of his axe. There weren’t a lot of people who could do that, but Predator was one of them.

  “Need to borrow this, buddy,” he said, thundering by.

  Juice was right behind him, and the two hit the prison-facing west edge of the rooftop and together spread out the net. Pred swung the axe with both hands and buried it in the roof to the base of its blade – then looped one corner of the net over it.

  “And the other end?” Juice said.

  Pred just sighed, grabbed onto it – and sat down in a puddle, his ass and junk soaking and chilling twice as fast as they would have if he’d been wearing underwear, and braced his boots on the six-inch rise at the edge. Juice shouted “Net down!” and hurled the bulk of the thing over the edge.

  Within five seconds, the hanging cargo net was swarming with climbing bodies, like the side of a WW2 troop ship, and the Alamo was being massively reinforced – by bloodied Royal Marines, Gurkhas, special operators of all nations, scatterings of surviving CentCom support personnel, and finally the RMPs and conscripts from the south, east, and west sections of inner prison walls, LT Wesley riding herd on them and last to climb up – except for Handon and Fick, the very last men out, having personally held the two sides of the walkway against the dead swarming it from both north and south.

  Fick and Wesley looked over to realiz
e the two of them were climbing nearly side by side, just ahead of Handon, all of them hauling their exhausted and loaded middle-aged bodies up the side of the four-story building.

  “What’s the situation?” Wesley shouted as they climbed.

  “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news,” Fick said, reaching up to grab the lip of the rooftop. “The good news is I just saved fifteen percent or more on car insurance.” Juice and Homer reached over to haul him up, and he rolled into a black puddle on the deck, lying on his back and trying to breathe. “The bad news is this place is going down…

  “And we’re all about to fucking die.”

  * * *

  Virtually everyone left alive in CentCom was in one spot now, forming up into all-around defense of the sprawling rooftop.

  And they were going to need everyone.

  Dead were still pouring over the extended CentCom walls to the south and filling up the Common, most of them heading for SHQ now. And the prison complex itself, on the side facing the worst of it, the north, no longer had walls. The endless hordes from central London were simply flooding in behind the first great wave that had knocked them down.

  The north prison yard was already full, and spilling out into the other ones, filling them up faster than the area out front, no-man’s land, ever had – because it was a smaller and more enclosed space, and now totally undefended. On the upside, the SHQ rooftop had an extra twenty feet of elevation over the prison. On the downside, the defenders there were not virtually out of ammo – they were totally out of ammo, almost to a man, and were going to have to defend this, their final fallback position, with melee weapons, boots, and bare hands.

  Handon, Fick, and Wesley circled around the perimeter of the rooftop, slotting people in and helping to organize the defense – though most of the survivors up there were blooded pros, and needed little organization, never mind supervision.

  Halfway around, Handon was surprised to hear a single weapon discharging – and looked back to see Ali standing at the west edge, firing her Mk 12 down into the overrun prison yard below. Okay, correction – all but one of us are out of ammo. As usual, Ali had somehow kept a last mag or two in reserve. Though, she was not only shooting lefty – but bracing the barrel with her giant sword hand, like the world’s longest and scariest bayonet. Handon also wasn’t sure what the point was of dumping a few rounds into the giant sea of dead down there, but as always he trusted she knew what she was doing.

  He carried on around the perimeter, and when he got back to the prison-facing edge, and what was certainly going to be their front line, he found the reassuring sight of Predator anchoring its center, Juice beside him, and he clapped both huge men on their backs as he stepped up behind them. Much less reassuring was what they could all see at their feet.

  The prison yard below was already full of heaving dead, nearly up to its twenty-foot walls. There was still another twenty feet to the rooftop – but at the halfway point right between the two was the damned wall itself, with its walkway, and that was helping to support a slope of dead already piling up against it. Packs of runners were now running up the slope, and Foxtrots leaping up it, all of them slamming into the vertical side of the building – the runners impacting way below the top, the Foxtrots alarmingly less so. But as they fell back, they were causing the slope of bodies to grow. Fast.

  Juice voiced the thought he’d had before. “Like the fall of Jerusalem all over again. Right up the damn wall.”

  “Nah,” Pred said. “The Israelis weren’t stupid enough to put a big ledge at the halfway point.”

  “True.”

  Handon didn’t need to tell either of them to do their best, or that he needed them to hold as long as they could. Instead, aware that they had both come from Bio, he asked about the one person he hadn’t seen up there in his initial circuit.

  “Sarah?”

  Pred shook his head.

  “Sorry, Top,” Juice said. “Never saw her.”

  Handon nodded, let it go for now – and turned his head to see Fick trotting up to the line from behind them.

  “Well, they say the trick is knowing which hill to die on.”

  “I think this is the last hill going,” Handon said.

  Fick nodded. “It’ll do.”

  When Handon turned to the rear, he spotted Ali again. But this time she was huddled up with Homer, Park, Aliyev, Kate, Baxter – and Elliot. And she was using her wakizashi to cut the tape on her katana and finally free her right hand. Why she had waited to do that until after shooting, but before the final fight, was also a mystery – but not one he was going to take time to investigate. What he did know was the group of scientists and their entourage there, at the very center of the defense, and in the only rear area left…

  Were what the others around them were defending.

  It was the only thing they were still holding for.

  * * *

  “I don’t think I can do it,” Elliot said.

  “What the hell?” Aliyev said. “Comrade, you are just at the wrong fucking end-of-the-world party.”

  “You,” Ali said, pointing at the Kazakh. “Shut the fuck up. You,” she said, turning to Elliot and holding out a single rifle magazine. “Take this.”

  When Elliot took the mag and regarded it, he could see the protruding top round showed a bright blue tip underneath the lip – it was a simunition. But he could also see it was a 5.56mm round, in a standard STANAG magazine. “This won’t fit my rifle,” he said. “It’s not even the right caliber.”

  “I know,” Ali said working calmly as she talked – sheathing her katana on her back, and unclipping her Mk 12 designated marksman rifle from its sling. “No one makes man-marker sims in seven-six-two. You’re going to have to use mine.”

  Elliot didn’t move. He looked both frightened and skeptical.

  “Let me take it,” Kate said stepping in. “I’ve got this.”

  Left unsaid, but clearly implied, was the remarkable shot she had made to destroy the Black Shark helo, and which had saved all their asses back in Djibouti. But Ali shook her head. “This is different. The kid’s got it.”

  When she looked back to Elliot, he still had all the fear and doubt in the world behind his eyes. Ali gave him a reassuring smile – along with her weapon. “It’s always the violinist, Private. And this is a perfectly good violin. But first gimme my PVS-22 back.” She meant the front-mounted night-vision device he’d swiped from her sniper rifle.

  Fingers trembling, the rest of the group standing around in a circle watching, Elliot got his hex wrench out and started unmounting it, even as the rain lashed down on them from a low and black sky, and the night of living dead closed in on them from all sides – Zulus moaning and thronging the foot of the building, runners hissing and racing across the Common and prison yards, Foxtrots shrieking and leaping toward the rooftop, the defenders behind them already kicking the first mottled hands off the building edge.

  When Elliot got the device off, Ali handed him her Mk 12, relieved him of his rifle, checked the mag – then tossed it over to Homer. As Elliot got the PVS-22 mounted on the front rail of the Mk 12, she dug into his pouches, finding two more full mags for his rifle and passing them to Homer as well. She didn’t comment on Elliot’s fingers, which shook as he worked.

  But Aliyev commented. “This guy can’t operate a screwdriver. How the fuck can he hit Foxtrots?”

  Ali opened her mouth to tell him she’d already told him to shut the fuck up – but then saw his pale skin, and his arm clutched around his midsection. Pulling it away and cupping her hand on his abdomen, she said, “You’re bleeding internally.” She looked at Baxter. “Lay him down over there.”

  Baxter took Aliyev’s elbow and sat him down with his back up against the stairwell structure, operator short sword in his lap. The Kazakh didn’t protest.

  When Elliot had the night-vision device mounted, he clipped the rifle to his own sling, loaded up the magazine Ali had given him, and charged the rifle. Then A
li interlocked her fingers and boosted him up on top of the same stairwell access structure Aliyev was slumped at the foot of – a last extra ten feet of elevation for their overwatch of the end of the world. Then Homer locked his fingers, and boosted Ali up after him. When she climbed to her feet up top, she spared a quick look back down over the side – where Homer, Baxter, and Kate were backing up to guard three sides of the little structure, all but the one facing back in.

  For better or worse, Aliyev and Park had that one.

  She turned and stood up to her full height alongside Elliot. They were alone now, and side by side, at the highest point anywhere in sight – and therefore what would be the last one to go down. They were in the crow’s nest atop the mast of a sinking ship – the last ship afloat, in a sea of dead that now officially covered the entire world.

  “Okay,” Ali said. “Let’s finish this.”

  * * *

  Down below to their east, the Common was overrun, and the Biosciences complex abandoned, burning, and collapsing… but the last survivors of the London Regiment still held a shrinking perimeter around the de Havilland Dash 8, while Hailey sat in the cockpit, finishing her checks, then started up both engines – waiting for that accelerant-glued and shotgun-shell-sealed fuel line to explode from the big-top fire blazing twenty feet away.

  On the upside, they’d actually managed to top the first tank, then get the fuel line, which was actually still holding, around to the second underwing tank, which was now also half-full. Both cabin hatches had been sealed, both loadmasters were on board – and the cargo area was full from front to back, and deck to overhead, with hundreds of thousands of doses of Hargeisa vaccine, all loaded into kits, bundled into pallets, and fitted with cargo chutes.

  Hailey closed her eyes and took a deep breath, as she realized the significance of this. Basically, her payload was the salvation of humanity – the only thing that could save whoever was still left. And it was all piled up in one place, and static.