Even Eli leaned back and smiled. All three of the Royal Marines, the only occupants of the Beechcraft King Air main cabin, could definitely use both sleep and food. It had been a long flight from Moscow – and a much longer war before that. But they were still alive, they had their plane and pilot back, and they had even found fuel. Moreover, they were the hell out of Russia – and nearly home.
“Word with you up front, Staff?”
Eli’s smile faded as he rose and went to the cockpit.
The smile started to come back again when he looked out the cockpit glass and saw the lights of CentCom ahead in the blanching darkness – and didn’t see any tracer rounds or explosions. That was definitely a good sign. But then Gibson tapped his NVGs, and Eli pulled out his night-vision binoculars and took a look. And he could see why there wasn’t any firing.
“Aww, shit.”
“Yes,” Gibson agreed. “Quite.”
CentCom was completely overrun.
Crowds of bodies covered nearly every part of the Common, and all of the yards of the inner prison as well. The world hadn’t been saved. It had been lost. Or CentCom had, at any rate, which meant London must have fallen, too. It was just as Eli had feared all along. London and Britain always had to go down. It had been inevitable, only a matter of time. The Marines were too late, the Kazakh’s pathogen too little. And now they were back only just in time to be the last ones to die.
There’d been no point to any of it.
And then Eli realized the plane was descending. “What are you doing? We can’t land there.”
“Not quite true,” Gibson said. “Because we don’t have the fuel to make it anywhere else.”
Eli shook his head. “Surely there’s somewhere better than that – a motorway or something. CentCom’s gone.”
“Not quite.” Gibson nodded down and to the left. “Someone’s still alive down there.”
Eli raised the binos again and saw a single lonely IR beacon flashing on the roof of the main SHQ building, on its east side by a stairwell access structure. And then he could just make out a square of bodies ringing the rooftop. And they weren’t dead.
They were fighting the dead.
“Kindly take your seats and fasten your seatbelts.”
Eli raced to comply. By the time he and the others were strapped in, the plane’s landing gear and flaps were down. A few seconds after that they touched down – but not on the airstrip. On heads, and then bodies, the propellers and wings tearing through what felt like a solid wall of the dead.
“Shittest landing ever!” Halldon shouted, gripping his seat.
A few seconds after that, the landing gear snapped off.
And then the wings.
* * *
“Holy shit,” Hailey said aloud in the cockpit of the Dash 8, as she watched the little Beechcraft crash-land on the airstrip, tearing a swath through hundreds of dead bodies as it went, albeit destroying itself in the process. When it finally veered off near the foot of the runway, missing all its landing gear and one and a half wings, then settled on its side, the runway was actually somewhat clear.
But, then again, only somewhat.
Then Hailey heard a voice speaking in her ear. “I told you Ik Onkar would provide! You are cleared for take-off!”
Hailey realized Noise was right – and felt pretty sure she was never going to get a better chance than this. The runway was as clear as it was ever going to be, and it wasn’t going to be that way long. She wanted to warn the surviving reservists about the 12-foot propellers spinning at 1,000rpm coming their way, but figured they’d get the message.
She pushed power to fifty percent, rumbled over the verge, turned onto the runway, and pushed power to maximum – accelerating insanely and bouncing like hell over the carpet of destroyed bodies that remained, mowing down the odd runner or Foxtrot running or leaping out into her path, propeller blades liquefying bodies and sending them splashing skyward… for a second fearing the airframe would bounce and shake itself to pieces before she could get off the ground. But then she remembered at least there wasn’t a fucking Black Shark firing 30mm HE at her face from the end of the runway.
She’d had worse than this.
Her nose lifted… and then the rear wheels…
And she rose into the air over the swarming dead, and then over the walls, and finally up above this falling world – soaring into a sky clearing of clouds and definitely starting to lighten with the dawn.
She was away.
* * *
When Noise personally wrenched open the wedged hatch of the mostly destroyed Beechcraft, which was lying by the airstrip mostly on its side, three dazed and battered Royal Marines climbed and staggered out of it, along with a wounded and equally loopy RAF group captain.
“Gentlemen!” Noise said. “Welcome to CentCom.”
“Thanks for nothing,” Eli said, shaking his head and scanning the area. They had just stepped out into a thin ring of soldiers from the London Regiment – who were forming up another perimeter around another static aircraft.
But this time for their last stand.
The dead of the overrun Common were converging on them from pretty much all directions.
“Have you any ammo?” Noise asked, patting at the Marines’ vest pouches. “Now would be the time to load it up.”
“A little,” Eli said, checking his rifle, looking over as Sanders and Halldon did the same. Even Gibson had his carbine, though held it none too steadily with his shot-through and bandaged right hand.
“Tea and medals,” Halldon snorted. “Fuck off.”
Noise stepped out to the front of their crescent formation. At least they had the ravaged airframe of the Beechcraft to their backs. At Noise’s position on point, there was already a pile of boxed shotgun shells, along with two big drum magazines for his AA12. As the Zulu dawn closed in on them, he hauled on the heavy bolt of the shotgun, brought it to his shoulder…
And he dumped thirty twelve-gauge buckshot rounds into the mob, sweeping smoothly from left to right, and dropping the entire front rank of attackers. As he pulled the empty drum clear, and picked up another, he saw the Marines stepping up on either side of him, also going cyclic, tearing into the heads of the second rank. It also went down. Now the Marines were reloading. And the third rank was coming in.
With more behind it.
But as Noise brought his weapon to his shoulder again… he held his fire, finger easing off the trigger. The third rank was already going down.
But no one was firing.
He lowered his weapon slightly and squinted into the dimness, trying to make it out. Runners and Zulus were moving in a very strange way, spastically – some of them with their limbs turning at impossible angles, causing them to stagger and then stumble over their own bent legs, tripping others behind them, which were also starting to shudder and lurch and basically lose the plot. Within seconds, dozens were on the ground, twisted up and immobilized and spasming.
Others, so far unaffected, were climbing over the dying ones, so Noise flipped his fire selector to single-shot and started taking off the heads of those still coming through. But there weren’t that many of them. And fewer all the time.
“Fuck me,” Eli said from Noise’s elbow. “The crazy Kazakh’s zombie-killing potion works. We’re not too late.”
“Never believed it, myself,” said Bird, on Noise’s other side.
Noise smiled. “You must have faith, my little red-hatted friend!” He looked down and checked his watch…
And he saw it had been almost exactly an hour since he had watched Predator, Juice, and Park emerge from Bio – along with Aliyev, who had hurled his test tube of MZ into the dead out here, before taking off again. Evidently the MZ infection had taken root – and now the epidemic was raging like wildfire through the thronging undead of the Common.
Noise triggered off a few more blasts, then looked up and across the field to the prison complex and the top of the SHQ building, which he could now s
ee smudged in the first early morning light. And he remembered the tens of thousands of dead that had been threatening the prison from the north when he drove through the front gates in the tanker. There was still a twenty-foot stone wall between the prison and the Common, where the infection finally raged.
And even Noise started to worry. A little.
* * *
“It’s done,” Ali said, touching Handon’s back. She was just back from her Foxtrot-infection mission with Elliot – her totally successful last mission of the ZA. And the one that would ultimately end the ZA, forever. A dozen MZ-infected and HRIG-exposed Foxtrots were even then marauding outward toward central London.
Handon still stood in the front rank of defenders on the prison side, hacking and stabbing to keep at bay the dead who were getting through the rabid Foxtrots. He lowered his blades, chest heaving, and turned to face her, stepping off the line.
“So humanity’s saved?”
“Yeah, I’d say so. What’s left of it.”
“Thank God,” Handon said, wiping sweat and gore from his forehead with his knife hand. “Now we can stop fighting.” It was obvious he was months past exhaustion.
Ali smiled at him. “Keep fighting just a little longer.”
“What for?”
“For that.” This was Homer, stepping up to join them, and pointing over Handon’s shoulder. When he turned again he could see it: the first dead getting halfway up the slope – and no farther. Instead of attacking, they were spasming, twisting, and falling over. They were sickening and dying. Handon squinted in thought and scanned his memory, remembering Ali firing down into that prison yard with her Mk 12, when they all first got up there. Then he turned and looked back at her.
Homer stood behind her, his arms around her waist, looking out and watching the show. His chin on her shoulder, he turned his head in and said, “I thought you couldn’t hit Foxtrots left-handed?”
Ali shrugged. “Not out at four hundred yards, bouncing around outside the walls. Inside of twenty-five feet, though, and coming straight at you, it’s not so hard.”
Handon laughed and shook his head. “And doing it with a giant sword-hand, no less.”
“Cool points, Top. Cool points.” She sighed and exhaled. “I actually mainly shot runners and Zulus. Anyway, I figured it was worth spending ten out of our sixty rounds to save the people on this rooftop. Gotten kind of fond of you. You know, just lately.”
“We love you, too,” Handon said, squeezing her arm.
“Hey, none of that back-patting top-sergeant man-love shit.” This was Predator, turning from the line, along with Juice. “Bring it in for real.” And he enveloped the other four members of Alpha in his Predator-sized arms, and squeezed. Hard.
When he let go, and the others got their breath and turned around again, there were no more dead reaching the edge of the roof. They were all either being annihilated by the rabid Foxtrots, or just falling down and dying on their own – the wave of spasming and collapsing bodies spreading out to the prison walls, and then beyond them.
The plague was definitely on.
And beyond that, out there somewhere, were the Foxtrots Ali and Elliot had hit with both MZ and HRIG, going forth and infecting even farther afield, and even faster. They couldn’t be seen, but Ali knew they were there.
“Now those are God’s cleaners,” she said.
“I believe it,” Homer said.
“You never stopped believing,” Ali said. “That we’d make it. That everything would be okay.”
Homer just shrugged, and held her.
Handon held his palm out and found that, without anyone quite realizing it, the rain had stopped, and a clean breeze now blew – not just blowing away the clouds, but clearing them out entirely from the horizon in the east, behind them. And in that gap, the sun was just cracking the edge of the Earth, and not only lighting up the world – but seeming to warm it, as well.
Handon shook his head. It had been a really long night.
And when he looked to the north into the clearing and brightening sky, he could also just make out graceful white parachutes blossoming and falling in a trail leading away from them, also heading toward central London.
“And those,” Homer said, “are angels descending to earth.”
Alpha team stood together, side by side.
And they watched the dawn break on a new day.
Epilogue: Beginning of a New Beginning
CentCom – SHQ Rooftop
Ground Zero for Humanity Reborn
Handon took Elliot’s rifle back from Juice and quietly slipped away from the others, off to the northeast edge of the rooftop.
Where he could look back out over the Common.
From here he didn’t have as good a view to the rear of Bio as he’d had from the walls, but he could just see the area back there, albeit from the side. And when he brought the sharpshooter rifle to his shoulder and peered through its 6x scope in the dim but growing light of dawn, he could see what he needed to.
He could look down upon the price he had paid.
There she was, lying just in front of the breach in the structure, face down – but everything about her, from her hair to her clothes to her body shape, was intimately familiar to him. And he could see she was lying in a pile of her own brass. Sarah had held that position – until she and her team were KIA.
Just as Handon had ordered her to.
His only consolation, and it wasn’t much, was that her life hadn’t been spent in vain. They’d had to hold that opening, to get Park and the raw materials of the bioweapons back in there, and there’d been no one else to do it. So he hadn’t squandered Sarah’s life, thrown it away for nothing. Instead, he had spent it – to buy everything. For everyone. He knew it had been the right decision – it had to be. And yet it still felt like it was his own heart bled out on the ground down there.
It should have been him lying dead in the mud. Not her.
He’d had the wisdom to make the right call, and even found the courage to make it. But now he was somehow going to have to find the courage to live with it. To live on, after all of this, after everything.
And that was going to be a lot harder.
Even knowing how pointless and stupid it was to lacerate his mind with these thoughts, with the crushing guilt and remorse and regret, he did so anyway. So much for happiness… for love and joy… for having a child… And for not being alone, in what was, even before the fall, a very cold and hard world.
Handon tried to tell himself that at least he’d experienced a moment of joy, the thrill of life and possibility, that stark stab of lightning-strike romantic love, back by that stream. It was a lot more than many people got, particularly now. Billions had died, many before even living at all, and others had lost so much.
This one was just Handon’s loss to bear.
He had finally, as Henno said, done what was necessary.
And now he was paying the price.
* * *
“I’m sorry, Handon.”
He turned away from the roof edge and found Fick.
Fick knew. He’d been there when Handon gave the order. Stepping up beside him, he said, “She should have made it – a lot of people should have. And neither one of us should still be here, not by rights. Not by the law of large numbers. And not if there were any justice in this shitty world.”
Handon couldn’t deny any of it.
Both of them should have gone down a hundred times, in the last two years alone. And yet here they still were at the end, standing side by side. Banged up, exhausted, bereft – but still on their feet. Handon also knew Fick’s losses were many times his own. Fick had been married to the Corps – and he’d had to watch as all his Marines went down one by one. He’d ordered a lot more good people to their deaths than Handon ever had.
“But seeing as we are still here,” Fick said, pulling out a cigar tube.
Looking over, Handon thought he actually recognized the tube, and the label. “T
hat the Colonel’s?”
“Not anymore.”
Handon smiled faintly. “Dead men don’t smoke cigars?”
“You too good to smoke a dead man’s stogie?”
“No. And we might not see too many more Cubans.”
Fick got it out of the tan tube, broke it in the middle, and passed half over. “Hell, nobody might ever see Cuba again.”
To his amazement, Handon found he still had his lighter on him, and was even more amazed when it lit. The two battered old warriors stood in silence, puffing into the cool morning air.
Alone with their victory.
And alone with their losses.
* * *
The second it was over, and the rooftop secure, Wesley found Amarie. To check on her, to make sure she was safe, to… he wasn’t sure why else. He only knew he had to find her.
He’d come a very long way to do so.
She was standing in the very center of the remaining Tunnelers, the rest of them protecting her and Josie with their bodies. As they parted to make way for him and she emerged, she was still holding the little girl tight to her breast. Both smiled as Wesley slowed and approached.
“You two okay?” he said, leaning in and over them.
“Yes. We’re okay.” Both mother and daughter squinted into the rising sun – and Wes suddenly remembered they had been underground a long time. He rotated the three of them around so those two faced away from it.
When they both opened their eyes again, Wesley looked into the little girl’s, which were locked with his. Once again, she was holding his gaze without fear, with curiosity… and maybe something else. And once again, her eyes seemed strangely familiar. When this had occurred to him before, he’d assumed it must be because they were like her mother’s. But looking over to Amarie, he could see they weren’t.
“I’ve got someone you need to meet,” Amarie said. “Officially. Josie…”
And suddenly Wesley knew why the little girl’s eyes were so familiar. He recognized them from looking into the mirror every morning.
ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME Page 57
