“Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me. You prepare a feast for me in the presence of my enemies…”
SHADOWS IN THE MIST
Andrew Wesley, Corporal with the UK Security Services, and officer in charge on the night watch at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel in Folkestone, England, shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He pulled a precious cigarette out of the crushed packet on the desk in front of him and lit up. He looked up at the clock and was relieved to see there was only an hour and a half of his shift to go. It had been another long and boring night. Addison and Chambers, his two subordinates, were likable enough, but boy did those kids talk a load of rubbish, and he had to put up with it night after night. If it wasn’t aliens then it was superheroes. If it wasn’t superheroes, then it was Bible conspiracies. He was tired of it.
“They never bother with zombies anymore,” he muttered under his breath, guessing that subject was now far too real to allow for many “what ifs,” even with the mystery of the creatures’ origin still intact.
It had been half an hour since he had sent the pair of young recruits out into the dark to walk the perimeter. They had to do it every hour, on the hour, and even though they complained about it, Wesley had to admit that they always just got on with it – even though the Channel Tunnel terminal was probably one of the dullest security duties going. The soulless still walked up onto beaches, straight out of the Irish Sea or the North Sea, well into year two of the ZA. But the Channel Tunnel was sealed up tight. It had been for a long time.
As usual, the two young men had complained a bit before trudging out into the cold. Tonight was particularly miserable as far as the weather – the mist that had descended at around 2am was biting cold. Wesley normally smoked outside of the building, even though no one bothered with the smoking laws anymore – or any of the other old health and safety laws, for that matter. Tonight he had gone out for just one smoke outside the door, and he hadn’t been out since.
He took a deep drag on the cigarette and watched the smoke swirl around the room as he exhaled. He wondered how long his two apprentices would stay at the tunnel. They were very young and far too enthusiastic, he thought, to be stuck in a post this dull.
How many zombies had been spotted in this sector? Maybe ten in the whole year that he had been in charge, and they had been putrefied enough that they were barely mobile. And none had come out in the last six months, which meant the Conspiracy Twins – as Wesley liked to think of them – had quite likely never even seen one. Why Central Command, CentCom, had even bothered to send him two additional people was puzzling. He could understand them replacing Jones; the old man was just too frail to be traipsing around at night, and the old guy had been suffering with his knee joints for the whole time Wesley had been there. But two young and untrained guards? Wesley would have traded them back in for Jones any time, even with the arthritis.
He stubbed his cigarette out and looked up at the clock again. Where the hell were they? Twenty minutes, tops, was all it took to walk the perimeter and check the tunnels. They didn’t even need to check them, really. Both entrances were sealed off, and the maintenance tunnel was locked up tight. He hadn’t been there when the teams of soldiers blocked the entrances off completely in just a couple of days, with debris from abandoned buildings; that had been done before he arrived, but old man Jones had told him all about it. They had filled the tunnels with the rubble from demolished buildings, and there were plenty of those around Folkestone. No one wanted to live near the tunnel anymore, at least not after the early days when the dead making a break out of it represented a constant threat, even after the military had flooded some of the sections to get rid of the problem.
Wesley picked up the radio from the desk.
“Addison, come in,” he said, and coughed. He needed a drink. A beer would be nice. His throat was dry.
“Addison, come in,” he repeated.
All that came back was a static hiss.
“Addison, come in, you little git. Where are you two?”
Nothing. Just dead air.
“For crying out loud,” he cursed, heaving himself off his chair and grabbing his coat from a row of hooks near the door. He stepped out into the cold, pushing the radio into its holster and pulling his torch and short-handled axe from his belt. He glanced back at the cabinet on the wall of the office, wondering whether he should take the shotgun with him, but then decided that getting it out and loading it was more hassle than it was worth. He knew exactly where the two young guards would be and why they were late.
The gravel underneath his feet crunched as he started along the track toward the fence, carelessly leaving the door open behind him. The cold mist that had settled over the entire area seemed even colder now. It was the kind that clung to you and bit your throat with every damp breath. Wesley hadn’t realized quite how thick it had become whilst sitting there in the warm office. It also meant that visibility was reduced to a few dozen yards, the white blanket of it seeming to just hang there, casting an oppressive pall over the landscape. Wesley always found it creepy in the yard when the mist settled, which seemed to be more and more often these days. He had never lived this far south before taking this posting, but he was sure that Folkestone was supposed to have had reasonably clear weather most of the year. He had no clue where that idea had come from.
He went the opposite way round the perimeter, trudging up the long gravel track that wound around the fence, and eventually descended back toward the train tracks themselves. Years ago the area had always been clear, but that was back when the trains ran with a startling regularity through the tunnels to France, and before the military had taken over Folkestone. Where there had once been open ground, with only the tracks running toward the tunnel, there were now row upon row of containers and derailed train carriages, all used for storage. He had never asked what the military stored in them, but it was important enough to warrant daily visits, enough for the dirt trail from the gate to the storage area to have compacted and formed a road of sorts. They never spoke to him, the soldiers who came and went each morning, they merely showed him their badges and went about their business. And Wesley had been given strict instructions to stay in his office when they were onsite. Dodgy as hell, he thought. But he also knew it was in his best interests to ignore it. Ignorance was sometimes best.
Tonight, the outer fence was quiet. Too quiet, he thought. The only sound was the crunch of his own boots on the gravel path, and he was relieved when he finally rounded the fenced edge and started down the slope back into the yard. He presumed Addison and Chambers would be sitting there, on one of the containers, chattering as usual. He had lost count of the number of times he’d had to tell them to get their circuit done on schedule. It wasn’t as if he was that bothered, but over at CentCom they liked their regular calls to confirm that all was still clear. One more box to be ticked. This didn’t seem to have registered with the pair of new recruits, but at least they had taken note of his complaints about their endless nattering and scheming, and taken their conversation elsewhere. No doubt they were arguing about what secrets were held in the yard right now, instead of seeing to their own jobs.
Wesley had been a security guard for most of his forty-five years, including in a number of very well paid jobs back before the zombies turned up and changed everything. He had actually been working over in France when the outbreaks began, and he vividly remembered standing at the bar in his favorite drinking hole in the Latin Quarter and staring up at the TV screen, dumbstruck, as report after live report from around the world played out. He couldn’t remember the exact night it had happened, but he could remember how haunting it had been when the first live news team went down under a zombie swarm attack.
The whole world had been shocked by that scene, and until then most people had talked about the trouble as though it was a foreign thing, and something that would never affect them. Then the footage had been shown of the reporter and the camera crew being pulled to the ground a
nd literally torn to shreds by the marauding dead. Even though the camera had fallen on its side, it clearly captured one of the horrendous creatures gorging on the neck of a reporter. Within an hour of that news event, which seemed to replay on nearly every channel over and again, Wesley had received the call from his boss, instructing him to get his ass on the next train home.
It was hard to think back to those days. They seemed so far in the past, even though only two years had gone by. All the folks he had worked with during his time in Paris, all of the other security personnel, the airport workers, the shipping office clerks, the girls in the main office – all gone now. He often wondered what had happened to Amarie. Had she managed to escape? Had she fled back to the south of France to be with her parents? Wesley felt a twinge of regret at failing to find her in her flat when he had paused in his frantic flight from the city to look for her. He had only known her a month. Yet it pained him deeply to know that he would almost certainly never see her again.
His thoughts drifted to the streets of Paris back then – people rushing in all directions, the first looting in the shops, police sirens rising and falling. That was before the virus was even close to the city, and before the first real outbreak – the one in Villiers-le-Bel that people initially thought was just a riot. He could clearly remember the feeling of shock and revulsion as he watched a group of young men ransacking a shop across from his apartment. They hadn’t even waited for the cover of night, or for the shop to close.
“You need to get the next train back,” his boss had said on the phone, just after the first reports of rioting in the city had hit the headlines. “Everyone is heading home as soon as possible, before the docks are closed. Rumour is they are closing the border completely.”
It wasn’t good news. Civilian air traffic into the UK had been brought to a halt for three days already, meaning that anyone who wanted to get back had to use the tunnel or go by ferry. There had been all sorts of stories coming back about the difficulty of getting into the country, even for those who held British passports.
But Amarie’s phone rang through every time he called, and she hadn’t been at home when he went there. Wesley had rushed around the apartment building, asking the neighbours if they had seen her, but no one knew anything. Finally, he had sat in the kitchen of his own apartment, counting the hours and watching the news, before he finally grabbed his bag and headed for the station.
The throng of people trying desperately to get onto the trains was mind-boggling. Thousands struggled even to get into the station, let alone the terminal itself. Wesley was too jaded to be surprised at the outbreaks of violence amongst the crowds, and it was evident that the police had little control over events. What few officers hadn’t been called up for riot control in the streets were too few to control the mob of people pushing and shoving to buy tickets.
Wesley felt a pang of sadness to remember that the train he caught was the last one ever to travel the Channel Tunnel. The chaos in France had exploded out of control after that, and by the time Wesley arrived at his old flat in Peckham and switched on the TV, most of Paris was in flames. The riots had spread so quickly in the City of Light that a state of complete anarchy existed within hours. The police and emergency services collapsed shortly after. Most of the police and ambulance staff had abandoned their posts and run for their homes and family.
What about the Scottish family that he had become friends with over the last week before the end? They had stayed in the hotel opposite and had taken to dining in the cafe on the street below Wesley’s apartment. Had they managed to get out? He hadn’t seen them for the whole day before he left. Wesley sighed, and hoped to God that they got their two little kids out. He shook his head, trying to push the memory from his mind, but it was difficult.
Maybe that family had been lucky. So many hadn’t been as the virus spread with alarming speed. The progression of the infection varied from person to person, but rarely took more than ten or twenty minutes to render the victim unconscious. Wesley had even seen it claim a person merely seconds after she stopped bleeding. As soon as a victim was no longer in control of his or her body – either out cold or else done bleeding to death – they were at its mercy.
He remembered the old woman outside the pharmacy, as he made his way hurriedly to the Metro. She had been the fastest turning that he had ever seen, and she had been one of the first that he had witnessed. The woman had been trying to leave a shop when an infected man had stumbled out of the alleyway next door. Before Wesley even clocked him he had bitten the woman on the neck, tearing out a chunk of flesh and ripping open her jugular vein. Wesley remembered the alien feeling of battering the man to the ground. He had been in fatal conflicts before – it sometimes couldn’t be avoided if you worked for a major international security firm – but this had been different. The man hadn’t even tried to defend himself. He was too busy trying to grab hold of and devour the woman. Less than a minute later, as Wesley staggered away from the man’s body, the woman had grabbed him by the leg from her prone position on the ground and bitten him. Fortunately, she bit into his boot, or else Wesley’s survival of the apocalypse would have been very short lived.
Now he snapped out of his reverie, and realized that he had stopped walking, and was standing at the foot of the slope and the beginning of the storage yard. He was just staring at the ground and had been completely lost in his own thoughts.
He looked around, and then grabbed his radio again. This was where he had expected to find Addison and Chambers, and if they weren’t here then they hadn’t even gotten a quarter of the way round their circuit.
“Addison, come in,” he said. “Chambers, come in. Anyone? Where the hell are you two?”
He peered through the mist and began walking across the yard between the huge containers stacked high on each side. The place seemed so peaceful now in comparison with the chaos of the last two years. Was it like the calm of the Phony War at the beginning of WW2? After the invasion of Poland, but before the Battle of France? No. Only if Hitler had overrun the whole world, and those he killed risen up again. This was more like the silence of the grave.
A noise snapped him out of his thoughts. It was distant, but he was sure that it was a cry.
He dismissed it, thinking that it was probably just a bird or a fox.
No. There it was again. Not a cry. That was someone screaming.
WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT
Herefordshire was dead and black by the time Alpha team zoomed low over its hills and flared into the former SAS compound at Hereford – now home to the Unified Special Operations Command (USOC). This was where the last few hundred of the world’s very best military superheroes operated from, deployed in defense of the world’s very last hundred million or so human beings.
The perimeter of the dirt helipad was bathed with red combat lights – the UK countryside was relatively cleared and safe, but white light was still just too damned irresistible to the dead – and Handon’s boot hit sod before the bird had settled onto its four fat tires. He lit the remnant of a cigar with one hand and with the other smacked the two rucksacks full of hard drives into the chest of Juice, who had followed him off the bird.
“Check these in,” Handon said, blowing smoke off into the fragrant night. “Report the loss of the POs. With our respects.” Juice nodded, sliding his ballcap back over his matted mane. Through his trademark beard – thick, dark and red – he said flatly, “And the other thing?”
“Yeah, that too. Put in an intel spot report.” Handon hesitated. "How's your head?"
Juice nodded. "All squared away, Sarge." The building collapse had basically just knocked him cold for thirty seconds. The two men turned and strode off in opposite directions as the rest of the team unassed the helo and began hauling down their kit and the remains of their combat load-out. Ainsley had already stalked off wordlessly for the BOQ (Bachelor Officers Quarters).
Juice spat again in the red-tinged darkness, hitched up the two rucks on his
shoulder, and began to thread the rows of uniform wooden structures until he found the Head Shed. Opening the door and pulling back the blackout curtain, he entered and hailed the officer of the watch. The guy was expecting them, had heard their inbound radio chatter on the air net. Had already heard about the casualties.
“Mission outcome?” he asked, taking the rucks as Juice handed them over.
“Successful,” Juice said, still squinting through animal eyes into the brighter light of the Ops Center. “Both target sites taken, both exploited. It’s all there in the bags.” The officer gave him a long, vacant look. Both of the dead POs were his men. Juice got it. “Sorry, man. We did everything we could.”
A pause. “Shit happens in the Zulu Alpha,” the officer said, shrugging. “We’ll go down the list and try to get you new attachments.”
“Thanks.” Juice paused, reining in the impulse to spit on their floor. “There’s something else.” The officer arched his eyebrows. “We lost the Second Detachment PO to a Romeo.” Another pause. “But not one like we’ve seen before.”
“Like what, then?”
“It was fast.”
The officer just gave him a No, shit? look. That was sort of the whole point of runners.
“Faster. A lot faster. Plus it could jump – like a meth-head on Wile E. Coyote springs. I’ve never seen anything like it. It took a leap at your guy on the SPIES rope. It scored him across the face, hit the ground – and then ran away.”
The officer didn’t react for a couple of seconds. “You got any video?”
Juice unslotted a flash memory chip from his shoulder rig – he’d earned the call sign “Juice” because every single thing he carried ran on batteries, which constantly needed charging – and handed it to the officer, who jammed it in a machine. Juice took the mouse and fast-forwarded through the video. Expressionless, the officer watched from Juice’s POV, looking out of the helo and down, helping reel the others in. A gray shape came out of the bottom of the frame and flashed by. It latched onto the rope and there was some kind of scuffle. And then it was gone. Juice froze the frame, unwittingly on the mauled face of the PO. He looked up at the officer, then killed the window.
Arisen, Book One - Fortress Britain Page 3
