Arisen, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  “I knew this day would come,” he muttered to himself, the words drowned out by the roar of shotgun blasts and the shredding of heavy timber by buckshot.

  On the fourth blast, the right-side door swung out, fractions of a second before Eli was about to hit it with his shoulder. He shoved it out of his way as he burst through it and into the open air of the outside street, then cantered down the steps to the road that paralleled the wall, and finally skidded and turned in the direction where he guessed the FN had exited the compound. He turned the corner, running full-tilt along the sidewalk – just in time to hear the screech of car brakes, and see a vehicle slam into a figure thirty yards away.

  The body flew through the air like a penalty kick.

  London Bound

  London - Inside the M25

  The Portsmouth road to London had been a two-hour nightmare for Alan, and even the usually chilled-out Tessa had been nervous. After his phone conversation with his sister Rebecca, who was currently smack in the middle of the troubles kicking off in London, Alan was in a big hurry to get to the city – not least because the outbreak had spread far enough across the south of the country to reach Portsmouth, just a few miles from his quiet home.

  He’d hated leaving the place unattended, and worried that with the dead now stalking the countryside, he might never be able to go back. Nowhere else in the world, as far as he knew, had managed to take back territory that had been overrun by the dead.

  The drive normally took him forty minutes, tops, to reach the M25, and then straight into London. But two hours later their 4x4 crawled slowly through the massive security gate in the wall, and into the security zone around the capital.

  Tessa had commented on the staggering size of the wall as they passed under it – at least twenty or maybe even thirty feet higher than it had been six months ago. But as it finally disappeared in the rearview, Alan wondered if it was anything like high enough to keep the dead out.

  He took a deep breath, and was thankful that the dogs, all curled up in the back of the Range Rover, were calm. Even the new one – his latest addition, and the one that had saved him from being torn apart by the dead – had settled in and seemed comfortable with its new family.

  Once past the wall and out onto the open road, Alan put his foot down. He’d actually worried they wouldn’t let them in, and had completely skipped the bit about nearly being killed by zombies, when he spoke to the border guards. Tessa had complained about lying to the security detail, but when Alan brought up the subject of quarantine, she soon gave in.

  “Holy crap,” blurted Tessa now, as they passed a large stretch of parkland.

  Alan glanced out over the road and toward the spread of fields, and could see what had surprised her. A grid of military tents covered the landscape for miles. Where once there had been open grass fields and farmland, with copses of trees, there was now a flattened and barren sprawl. Here and there were clusters of what looked like tanks, or armored vehicles, as well as a handful of helicopters, sitting immobile in open areas.

  “Jesus,” he said, but then turned his attention back to the road. “That wasn’t there the last time we came this way.”

  “No,” said Tessa. “You think it’s a bad sign?”

  Alan shook his head. “No idea. I guess they have to pitch the tents somewhere.”

  “But so many?” said Tessa.

  The huge makeshift military encampment slowly vanished from view as they sped toward London, passing a long column of military transports heading in the other direction. There had to be a hundred of them, all heading toward the wall.

  * * *

  Half an hour later they pulled off the A3 and headed down a surface street toward the old Wandsworth Prison.

  “Are you sure she meant the actual CentCom base?” asked Tessa.

  “That’s what she said.” Alan tried not to get irritated that Tessa had asked the same question, worded slightly differently, three times in the last half hour.

  “She said to meet her outside the north entrance…”

  Alan tailed off as he slowed the 4x4. Ahead of them, where the road should have carried on south past the prison, there was a sheer wall, maybe thirty feet high, blocking the way. It seemed to link in with the walls of the old prison, off to the southwest.

  “Okay, that’s new,” he said, turning right as they came to within thirty yards of the barrier. “Where do we go now?”

  Tessa pointed at the dirt track leading over what used to be a grass verge. “Around?” she said.

  Alan sped up, bumped the curb, and drove over the verge. It looked as though a lot of others had done so over the past weeks or months.

  “I’ll go to the west side, see if there’s an entrance there. Maybe she’ll be waiting. If not I’ll stop and call again.” Though Alan wondered if his mobile would even work any more.

  They turned the corner and began to accelerate – and even though Alan immediately slammed on the brakes, he wasn’t quick enough to avoid the running figure that raced straight out in front of them, smashing into the bumper and grille head-on.

  “Shit!” he shouted, hearing the brakes screech as he tried to put his foot through the floor, knowing it was already too late. The blurring figure was launched into the air and thrown thirty feet down the road, tumbling across the blacktop and then coming to a stop.

  The 4x4 stopped dead, and Alan threw off his seatbelt, shoved the door open and leapt outside, cursing as he went. He had just cleared the front of the vehicle when he slowed, then stopped dead.

  The person he had just hit wasn’t lying on the ground as he had expected, but was already up and running – flat out, and straight for him. Alan took a step back, wanting desperately to run for the truck again, but the thing closing with him was moving at a nightmarish and totally inhuman speed.

  And he knew he would never make it.

  He heard Tessa cry out behind him, and the dogs barking – and then a series of thunderous blasts from a few feet away. He watched dumbstruck as the running figure stopped speeding toward him and rocketed off to the side, defying any sense of physics or biology as its head half-disappeared in a cloud of mist and viscera, and then finally tumbled over and slammed into the road, where it remained, prone and motionless.

  Alan’s legs went from under him, and he collapsed to the ground, sucking in deep breaths as he looked to the left, at the sidewalk nearby, where a soldier was approaching, reloading a pistol-grip pump shotgun. Alan was vaguely aware of people on the street around him, running away. The soldier looked out of breath, but still managed to nod at Alan as he pressed a radio button on his chest and spoke into a microphone curling down from his helmet.

  “Jameson, it’s Eli.”

  Alan didn’t hear the reply, if any. Instead, he just sat there, stunned into silence as the man walked forward, raised the shotgun, aimed it at the unmoving figure on the ground, and blew off what was left of its head.

  “Grews is KIA. I repeat. Grews is down.”

  And We All Went to Hell in a Crap Basket

  CentCom - Joint Operations Center

  The newly promoted Major Jameson stared at the bank of LCD screens. Every few seconds, the scenes switched. The man at the desk – one of the few surviving CentCom security personnel who was familiar with the camera systems – looked up at him, awaiting orders.

  A few feet away, at one of the desks that had been cleared of debris, two other survivors of the outbreak sat, and in Jameson’s mind these were by far the two most vital. Two actual junior operations officers, who had been found in a room at the far end of the JOC, barricaded into a small storage space. Jameson’s expression was blank as he listened to them try to field the staggering volume of calls coming in, some from the battlefront, and some from other theaters.

  “I have over two thousand troops on the ground, and we’re less than five miles from the first line of defense trenches…” came a voice that Jameson actually vaguely recognized. Squinting in thought, he realized it was t
he officer commanding of the Parachute Regiment, currently deployed to the front – and right in its center, where the action was thickest and the danger most dire. Jameson had spoken to the man briefly when One Troop had escaped into the Paras’ lines on their exodus from Canterbury.

  “…I mean five fucking miles. I was expecting a flight of Chinooks to extract us two hours ago and I’ve already lost several squads just trying to locate the damned supply drops. We’re critically low on munitions. Where the hell is my air lift?”

  “Wait one, sir,” said the ops officer, and turned to look at Jameson expectantly. He stared back down at her, glassy-eyed.

  In the last half an hour, seemingly the entire world had landed on his shoulders – what felt like absolutely every corner of the war, all at once. Before there had been Mayes, and Broads, and half a dozen other senior officers managing an ops center with nearly a hundred specialized personnel. But virtually the entire JOC staff had been killed in the outbreak, or else fled, location unknown. And so now there was just Jameson, his surviving Marines, one security guy, and two junior ops officers, and everything was going to hell out on the front lines.

  And everywhere else, evidently.

  Worst of all, Jameson had both been promoted and briefed in by Mayes in his last minutes, so now this was all his shit-show. And he had to somehow make it go on.

  In roughly twelve hours, a flight of helos was supposed to arrive from Edinburgh with relief staff, and some ranking officers from the Northern Defence Group. But until then there was no one but him to make the decisions, and he knew about as much about the strategic situation – what forces or support or logistics were available, the immediate or long-term strategic objectives, availability of air assets, state of the battlespace – as a junior infantry officer out in the field might be expected to.

  He pretty much knew jack shit.

  “Do we have air lift for these guys?” he asked.

  The ops officer looked up at him with a confused expression. “We had the flight that dropped them off a few days ago, but those are currently deployed north of the city, moving ammunition and supplies.”

  Jameson nodded, and then glanced at the screens in front of them as they flicked through new camera views, all of them placed along the outside of the ZPW, and showing views of the landscape to the south. The security guy, fortunately, knew the system pretty well, and was used to performing this same duty with Mayes standing over him.

  Colonel Mayes – who now lay dead in the office behind them, having shot himself.

  “How soon can they finish the supply drop and haul ass to pick those Paras up?” Jameson asked. “Is it feasible?”

  The young woman took a heavy breath, and started tapping at the keyboard. Jameson saw screens of tabulated data blur by in front of her.

  “I’ll find out, sir,” she said.

  “And put me on with that colonel.” He heard a click in his ear, and the noise of battle assaulted his ears. “Colonel Briars? This is Major Jameson.”

  “Major!” snapped the field commander of the Paras. “What the hell is going on over there?”

  “Sir, there’s been a bad outbreak at the Strategic Command Center. We’ve taken heavy casualties, including virtually all of the command element. And until—”

  “What the hell? Where’s Mayes? Or Broads?”

  “Both dead, sir.”

  “So who the hell is in command?”

  “That would be me, sir, until we get relief from Edinburgh.”

  “Holy fucking shit.”

  “Yes, sir, roger that.”

  * * *

  Jameson took a steadying breath before continuing.

  “As for your situation, we have air lift that we can mobilize and send as soon as they’ve finished supply drops. I’ve got someone here doing her best to find out how long that wi—”

  “Major. With all due respect to your current fuck-up of a situation, I have two thousand men out here, and maybe two or three hours to get the hell off the ground – or we’ll have to climb through the goddamned outer trenches to get back.”

  “I understand that, sir.”

  “And those helos were supposed to be on standby, just the other side of the wall, for when we needed them.”

  Jameson frowned deeply. He could see the other calls from the field backing up ten deep at the ops officer’s station. And way out in front of him, at the other end of the room, was the ruined face of the massive digital display that used to show a complete and real-time view of the deployment and posture of all units in the field. Now it was smashed beyond recognition, and even the bank of computers sitting beneath it, which ran the damned thing, were ruined. So, basically, Jameson hadn’t the least clue who was where or what they were doing. The joint operations center was effectively blind – and inoperative.

  “I will absolutely see what can be done,” said Jameson.

  “Thank you very much,” said Colonel Briars. “And in the meantime do you suggest we just sit here and mark time?”

  As Jameson watched the smaller map display in front of him at that station, showing lines of trenches spreading out for miles from the ZPW, he realized that it had fallen to him to make the kind of call he was never intended to make.

  Jameson thought again of the last twenty minutes of Colonel Mayes’s life, and the startling situation report he had given him.

  “There is no extraction for units deployed along the south edge of the wall,” Mayes had said. “They are to fall back until they run out of rear area to do it in – and then hold for as long as they can. They are there to provide us with time.”

  But Jameson couldn’t understand the point of leaving thousands of troops to die on the front if they had the wall to defend from behind. He kicked the nearest chair, sending it skittering across the room, and startling the handful of other people in there with him. How the hell could he leave all those troops out there, when they could be behind the wall?

  “Colonel,” he said, finally. “I suggest you pull back and withdraw through the nearest gate on the wall.”

  “That’s fifteen miles from here,” said Briars. “Are we abandoning the front and switching to static defense? And am I supposed to run my men fifteen miles along the MLR?”

  “I don’t see another way.” Jameson was about to add that there was no helo extraction imminent. But he decided the men out there facing an army of the dead didn’t need to know they had been put there to die.

  “Sir, we have updates from Portsmouth,” said the other officer.

  Portsmouth? thought Jameson. What the hell is happening in Portsmouth? Then he remembered what Mayes had said. They were evacuating, and dangerously close to losing the city.

  “Go ahead.”

  “The lines are breached and they’re falling back to the port.”

  Jameson sighed out loud. And he thought:

  I am in WAY over my head.

  Only an hour ago, it had already looked to him like Fortress Britain was going down fast – falling to a rampaging outbreak that they simply could not get under control. Now, somehow, he and a handful of others were all that remained to coordinate the final defense of the last flickering remnants of humanity.

  Jameson had no idea how they had got here.

  And he didn’t know how to fix it.

  He only knew that he had to somehow keep their heads above water… long enough for the life raft to arrive.

  The vaccine.

  Beginning of a New Beginning

  The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains

  It wasn’t even the fact that the Brits and Americans were somehow on the verge of successfully developing a vaccine against the zombie virus – if Aliyev had even heard them right across that ghostly radio transmission, and also presuming they had any idea what the hell they were talking about.

  No – it was that Aliyev knew the man who had done it.

  He shook his head in continued disbelief as he dashed around the lab, pulling out drawers, rifling and removing
slides and beakers, and racking his brain for the basic principles of vaccine development.

  Jesus Macarena-Dancing Christ… It couldn’t really be SIMON Park – could it?

  Then again… Park had been just about the most blindingly smart sonofabitch Aliyev had ever worked with, even amongst the community of geniuses and bioscientific badasses they had at the biotech in Dusseldorf. If anyone could pull off such a thing as developing a Hargeisa vaccine…

  Aliyev paused his ransacking of the lab and dashed back out to the living area, running his finger frantically across the biomedical reference section of his bookshelf, until he found something that might tell him what he needed to know. He yanked out two heavy volumes and carried them back to the lab. He needed to catch his breath, and clear his head. Because, at best, this wasn’t going to be easy.

  The funny thing was, this new, sudden, frantic, unbidden, and wildly unexpected vaccine development project of his had nothing to do with Park’s claimed Hargeisa vaccine. No, Aliyev had spent eighteen months on that, and proven only that it was well beyond his skills. With that chimera virus, he had created a puzzle too complex for he himself to solve.

  No – what he needed to produce now, and produce fucking fast, was a vaccine for meningitis Z. Because if that glorious bastard Park actually did come up with a vaccine to protect the living against Hargeisa… then that changed everything. If the tiny remaining dregs of humanity could somehow be vaccinated and rendered immune to the zombie virus… then they could also, at the same time, be vaccinated against Aliyev’s bad-ass zombie-killing pathogen. And then the two could easily be bundled up, like the MMR jab (for measles, mumps, rubella), which all kids in the developed world routinely got.

  And then Aliyev could release his MZ out into the wild to do its wonderful, terrible work of killing the dead. And it got even better: London, with the zombie horde right at the gates – especially with the horde all mobbed together in one place – was the perfect place to do it. Out here in the ass-end of Mongolia, with its negligible population density, Aliyev could certainly infect a few of them. But the disease would never reach any kind of epidemiological critical mass, and wouldn’t reliably spread anywhere, never mind to the whole world.