The other man’s expression turned a few degrees more grim – more even than everyone in this unit looked all the time. “We’ve been getting scattered and broken reports of Romeos like that. On over-the-water raids. One border patrol. They think it might be some kind of mutation. A new kind.”
“What kind?”
“The kind that doesn’t feed.”
Juice worked his wodge of tobacco. “What kind of zombie doesn’t feed?”
“They just seem to infect people and move on – fast. The guys in the Med Shack think maybe it’s a new adaptation of the virus. Now that the dead outnumber the living by such a high multiple, they’ve given up on trying to feed. They’re now just out to spread the virus. Or, rather, the virus has hijacked them to spread itself.” The officer ran the fingers of his right hand across his regulation buzzcut. “Into the last corners of the living.”
Juice shifted his weight. He was still wearing eighty pounds of combat load. “Got a designation for it?”
“Not an official one. But, colloquially, they’ve been calling them Foxtrot Novembers.” Juice held his gaze. “The Fucking Nightmare.”
Juice nodded his goodbye – SOF guys didn’t salute very much, in the old world or this one – then turned and exited. Great, he thought, angling for the Alpha complex, with their ready room, briefing areas, and billets. As if this world wasn’t nightmarish enough already.
As he banged through the door toward his gear locker, Juice realized this month would be the second anniversary – two freaking years since the quarantine, and the fall that came almost immediately after. Now into year three of the ZA.
And welcome to it, he thought, the exhaustion hitting him, stumbling through camp like the walking dead himself.
HELL HATH LESS FURY
“Oh my fucking God!” screamed the voice that echoed across the yard.
Wesley took off at a run, his boots crunching heavily on damp ground. He crossed most of the distance in just a few seconds, but then slowed to a halt as he rounded the last train carriage. Ten yards away he spotted Chambers leaning over the struggling form of Addison. There was blood flowing heavily from the latter’s arm. Wesley felt a wave of fear as he ran forward, drawing his axe and pulling it back, ready to strike.
But he didn’t have to. Chambers turned round as he approached.
“Oh thank fuck. Help. We’ve been attacked,” he yelled. Wesley slowly lowered his axe.
The look on Chambers’ face changed as he realized what had nearly just happened. He was holding tightly onto Addison’s arm, and Wesley could clearly see blood trickling from between his fingers.
“I’m not infected!” he yelled. “It didn’t bite me. It didn’t bite either of us.”
“It?” Wesley hissed.
“It came out of nowhere,” said Addison.
“Keep your voice down,” said Wesley, spinning around and peering into the mist. Nothing moved around them, no wavering shadows or sounds. His mind raced. Where had it come from? It couldn’t be the tunnel, which was flooded, and had been for well over a year, the entrance filled with rubble. Nothing could physically get through.
“It came from nowhere,” repeated Addison, obviously on the verge of tears. “It was so fast. I didn’t even see it. All I knew was the pain in my arm. Oh God, it’s not a bite is it?”
“No,” said Chambers, shaking his head. “It’s just a cut. Same as what it did to me. it just cut you deeper. It’s okay. No bites.”
Wesley turned back to the young trainees, thinking how naive they were and wishing that he could be so innocent. But he knew. A bite was a guaranteed infection. A scratch? It was still high risk. If the creature had blood or gore on its hands then the two young officers were as good as dead. He needed to get the gun.
“We need to get you back to the office. Get up. Quickly.”
Chambers struggled to his feet, then helped Addison up, and they both followed Wesley as quickly as they could.
“Where did it go after it attacked you?” Wesley asked, without looking back, hoping that the injured junior officers were close behind him. He didn’t have the luxury of keeping track of them; he was too busy scanning the dark corners of the yard and the gaps between the storage units, searching for signs of movement or a distant noise.
“I don’t know,” stuttered Chambers from a few yards away. “I was in shock. I didn’t see it run off. I thought we were going to die.”
“Okay. Right. I need the gun. I’m going to run for it. Get in the office as fast as you can and shut the door behind you.”
The search for the two youths had taken Wesley along nearly the entire circuit of the fence, and this end of the yard was only a few hundred feet from the office. He hurried through the gap between two huge train carriages and by the time he hit the foot of the grass slope he was already running.
“Three Acres, come in,” he wheezed as he tried to climb the slope and use the radio at the same time. He wasn’t feckless like the young guys, but he wasn’t young like them, either, not anymore. Dirt and grass churned underneath his feet and he had to stop for a moment to regain his footing. “Three Acres, come in.”
What the hell was it with people not answering their radios? Three Acres was the centre of communications in Folkestone, and had once been part of a retail park. Now there were armed forces from six different countries occupying the warehouses, and this included the security monitoring office that should be answering his call very quickly. They had people in that office 24/7 to organize every coastal patrol from Margate to Eastbourne. On a clear night, Wesley would have been able to look out of his office window, across the M20 motorway just a few hundred yards away, and see the lights of the Comms Centre. But tonight the mist obscured everything further than fifty feet away.
“Three Acres come in… Come on, God damn you, answer me,” Wesley spat as he contemplated contacting CentCom in London directly. But that would mean a military reaction, and a single zombie escaping into the countryside wasn’t something that CentCom wanted to be contacted for.
He glanced back down the slope. The two injured men were halfway up now and still climbing. His gaze drifted across the yard. So much of it was obscured by the fog and darkness that the creature could be anywhere. It would be there somewhere, stumbling in the darkness in search of more prey, Wesley thought, as he ran up the remaining forty yards of slope and through the open doorway to the office. He didn’t stop, but made a dash straight for the cabinet.
“The keys… the keys. Where the fuck are the keys?”
The shelf above the kettle, where a spare set of office keys always lay, the set with the gun cabinet key on it, was empty. Had he moved them? Wesley glanced over to the wooden cabinet in the corner. The door was still shut. He looked on top of the cabinet , but there was nothing, just a layer of thick dust. He rushed around the office, pulling open drawers and scattering the contents, frantically searching. How could they be gone? No one had been in the office and the keys were always on the shelf. Always. Had he moved them and forgotten? He stood in front of the cabinet looking at the lock, and then reached to his waist, pulling the axe from its loop.
A noise behind him made his nerves tingle. He spun round to see the first shadow pass the office window. The office door creaked open, mist obscuring his view out. Chambers or Addison.
“Have you seen the…”
The words died in his throat. Addison lumbered into the doorway and stood glaring at him – except this wasn’t the young, foolish trainee that Wesley knew. Addison had changed. His face was drained of all colour, his skin an alien, pale gray, with darkening lines that had once been veins visible beneath. Zombie Addison’s eyes now burned inside blackened sockets, with what Wesley could only feel was hatred. Hatred of him. Those eyes almost bored into his mind. From Addison’s mouth there hung something bloody and dripping; something that Wesley couldn’t identify. The blood had soaked into a spreading patch on the dead officer’s shirt.
Addison hissed and bared h
is teeth, dropping the lump of flesh to the floor. He stumbled forward and tripped over the chair next to the door. He fell sprawling, his hands reaching out, but not to stop his fall. Those hands reached out for Wesley.
Another shadow loomed in the doorway behind the undead officer. Chambers staggered into view, and hit his head on the glass panel in the door, smashing it in his desperation to get inside. As Wesley backed up toward the far end of the room, he saw that the left side of Chambers’ neck had been torn out. The dead trainee’s head swayed unsteadily as he moved, his neck no longer able to hold the weight. There was blood soaking his jacket, but no blood flowed from the wound now. Chambers had bled out already.
That was what Addison had been eating. He’d eaten his own friend.
A survival instinct that Wesley didn’t even know he had snapped him out of his panic. He was no longer frozen to the spot as the two creatures struggled to negotiate their way through the office and around the furniture, toward him. The mess that Wesley had created during his rush to find the keys now slowed them down. Chairs that had been moved out of the way, tables that had been pushed and drawers that were still open; all of these meant precious seconds as the dead clambered across the room to get at him.
He turned to the cabinet and smashed the door with his axe, grabbed the shotgun and turned over the box of shells, snatching the nearest.
Addison was barely three feet away when the single chamber snapped shut and Wesley raised it to the dead man’s face and pulled the trigger. Addison’s head vanished in the blast, replaced by a cloud of blood and gore that splattered across the office. The noise was terrific, echoing in Wesley’s head for seconds afterwards. He had forgotten how loud shotguns were, especially in enclosed spaces. He sidestepped the body, slipped a new shell into the chamber, snapped it shut and aimed over the desk at Chambers.
The one thing that had always unnerved Wesley about the undead was their sheer lack of fear, and their complete ignorance of any form of danger. He aimed the shotgun at Chambers’ head, and the zombie just kept coming. It was only a few feet away when Wesley pulled the trigger, and right up until that moment the creature hadn’t even acknowledged the weapon, hadn’t considered the danger that it was rushing toward. Not until it was too late, and its unthinking brain splattered across the brick wall at the back of the office.
Wesley jumped over the nearest desk, slammed the shotgun down and grabbed the radio from the wall.
“Three Acres come in! Come in!”
A minute later, Wesley’s boots were thudding against the tarmac road as he jogged toward the car park. He unlocked his car with his key fob and jumped into the driver’s seat, throwing his radio and axe onto the passenger seat. He carefully placed the reloaded shotgun into the passenger footwell, double-checked his pocket for the remaining shells, and then rammed his keys into the ignition. The car skidded out of the gravel drive and tore up the ground as he raced toward the roundabout that would take him over the M20 and toward the Security Centre. He put his foot down, speeding up the slope toward the main road, but something caught his eye, something in his peripheral vision.
He skidded to a halt and wound the window down. There, down in the yard, right near the blocked-up entrance to one of the tunnels. There was movement, and lots of it. For just a moment the wind must have blown the mist away, because his view of the tunnel entrance cleared, and in the darkness amongst the rows of storage units, Wesley saw dozens of figures moving about. He saw clearly that a small section of the blocked-in tunnel had now been opened up.
There was a hole.
Wesley slammed his foot on the accelerator so hard that his knee popped. The car shuddered once in defiance before it lurched into motion and screeched up the road toward the bridge. Wesley knew what was happening now, and he realized the urgency.
He changed channels on his radio with one hand, then pressed the transmit button. “CentCom come in,” he shouted into the pickup, but cursed as he saw the battery indicator go dead. He tossed the radio aside and grabbed the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
He had to get to Three Acres and warn them.
Fortress Britain was breached.
LOVE SPREADS
Predator and Juice sat in silence in the Alpha ready room, squaring away their weapons and gear. In this world as in the old one, it was the personal responsibility of every Tier-1 operator to ensure the perfect functioning and reliability of his own kit. After a mission, but before secondary matters like sleep and food, weapons got cleaned and lubed, magazines and grenade pouches refilled, radio batteries recharged – and everything carefully stowed away where it could be got at on a second’s notice.
One difference between this world and the old, though, was that if you failed to take care of your shit, there might not be any replacement weapons, parts, or repair services. You only appreciated industrial society, and international trade, once they were gone. Predator in particular mourned for Delta’s master gunsmiths and armorers, all of whom were presumed to have died when Ft. Bragg, in North Carolina, went down.
He sat at a bench, carefully stroking a wire brush on a brass rod down the barrel of his beloved 7.62mm SCAR (SOF Combat Assault Rifle). He’d been carrying this weapon since 2nd Iraq and had no plans to break up with it now. Predator originally got his call sign for seeming to be seven feet tall, unkillable, and unstoppable; for being expert at a wide variety of extremely deadly weapons; and, in particular, for moving awfully close to silently and invisibly for a guy the size of a truck.
Juice, hairier and cuddlier, stood nearby, pulling batteries out of his devices and plugging them into a wall multi-charger. Neither man spoke, both working in the cordial silence and placid concentration of a ladies’ sewing circle.
Other members of the team would be doing the same, but elsewhere, so they weren’t all on top of one another. (In a depopulated world, space was strangely at a premium.) Ali and Pope were next door, in the quad billet they shared with Pred and Juice. While the latter two were still stripping off dirty assault suits, they caught sight of Aaliyah slipping out of the room, pressing the door closed, and padding off into the blacked-out moonscape of the base.
“There she goes again,” said Juice, checking the soles of his assault boots for gore.
Pred grunted in response, sniffing at a pair of thick socks. “Yeah, it’s funny. I’ve worked with Ali for a decade. Ordinarily, she’d sooner chew her own head off than get involved with anybody she’s serving with.”
Juice nodded, grabbing a towel and a pair of shower shoes and shutting his locker. “Ordinarily, the dead wouldn’t be walking the Earth.”
“True. True.”
Pausing at the door, Juice looked thoughtful. “She hook up with someone in headquarters company, maybe?”
“Maybe. But somehow I don’t quite see her hooking up with a REMF, either.” Tier-1 guys were so far removed from “Rear Echelon Motherfuckers” that they generally couldn’t be bothered to look down on them, as the regular infantry grunts did.
Suddenly, the sound of shouting floated in through the propped-open door – then crescendoed and multiplied with frightening speed. The two big men exchanged looks with each other, then looked back at their shut weapons lockers.
* * *
His kit and weapons squared away, but the grime of the mission still on him, Captain Connor Ainsley took a few breaths sitting on the rack in his private quarters in the BOQ. He then speed-dialled his wife. The sat phone he'd previously depended on to reach her from around the world was now just a particularly heavy and useless brick – ever since the telecom sats started falling out of their orbits. And the civilian mobile network was dodgy at best. But military packets at least had priority.
She picked up after a few rings – probably the degraded and patchy network of towers trying to locate her. “Hello?” She’d never learned to keep the fear out of her voice, even just answering the phone.
“Hello, darling. It’s me. Everything alright?”
“You’re okay?” Neither wanted to take the time to answer, before the other did.
“Fine, just fine.”
“Us, too. The boys are okay.”
“How’s the city?” Ainsley’s wife and two boys lived in central London – in theory one of the safest places in Britain, and thus in what was left of the world. They used to own a house in Surrey, but moved in after the quarantine, and a bit before the fall. And with military comms and scuttlebutt being as unreliable they were, he often got better intel straight from her than from briefings in his own chain of command.
He could hear her pause and swallow before answering. “It’s okay. The regular military units are still like the bloody Gestapo – every time I get stopped on the street, I want to tell them my husband is a real soldier, an elite one, out fighting the real war.”
“We’ve all got our roles to play, sweetheart.”
“I know… The streets seem safe. There have been no outbreaks that I’ve heard of. Just the odd one wandering in from the countryside. They don’t get far or last long. So far.”
“You’re all staying indoors after dark, though, right?”
“Yes. But it’s hard. The rationing bites a little worse every month. The boys are on the verge of boycotting potatoes, no matter how I cook them… I feel like they’re not growing as quickly as they should do…”
“It’s fine. They’ll be fine.”
“What about your leave, Connor? What did they say?”
Ainsley sighed quietly, not wanting to upset her any more than necessary.
“It’s still no. For the time being.”
His door knocked, then cracked open. It was Handon.
“I’ve got to go. I’ll call again in a few days. Inside after dark. Okay? Bye.”
Arisen, Book One - Fortress Britain Page 4
