Ainsley rung off and gave Handon a weakly expectant look.
Handon’s expression started out as its usual granite surface. “The Colonel wants us. A briefing.” But then it unexpectedly softened. Ainsley looked like he was in physical pain.
“You okay?”
Ainsley looked away, then back into Handon’s dark and steely eyes. “It’s my family. I’ve been trying to get leave to go look after them for a little while. Fortify the house better. Try to lay in more provisions…”
But with that, Handon’s expression froze back into rock. Instantly, Ainsley realized he’d misstepped. He knew as well as anyone, and better than most, that few of the Americans fighting here had the least idea whether their families back home were alive or dead.
Or that other thing.
Handon didn’t respond, but Ainsley got the point perfectly. He changed the subject.
“Who’s in this briefing? When?”
“Just us. RFN.”
Unexpectedly, shouting erupted from outside – the same noises that caused Juice and Pred to freeze in the ready room. Handon turned and put his palm on the butt of his sidearm. The shouting grew louder quickly.
And then the two of them rushed outside and across the menacing darkness of the compound.
* * *
During the run-up to the fall, the militaries were the last to go down. Military installations – walled, guarded, heavily armed, and generally designed to withstand attack – at first seemed the perfect anti-zombie bastions. But what finally brought them down was camaraderie. Esprit de corps. The military brotherhood.
Not a single American or British military base was overrun from the outside. They all fell from within. When soldiers were wounded, their brother warriors erred – far, far too much – on the side of bringing them back inside the wire. Either not believing they’d been infected… or thinking they could be treated, or at least controlled… or just credulously taking their word for it that they weren’t bitten or scratched… they walked or carried their own doom right inside the walls with them.
Now, tonight, long after the world outside Britain had been overrun… whatever was going on, whatever the cause of the tumult at Hereford, it was near the NCO’s mess. Just outside the entrance, a mass of bodies was grappling in the bad light, grunting and swearing, elbows pistoning for punches. One figure lay on the ground at the foot of others, literally getting the shit kicked out of it. It was violent, shadowy chaos.
Handon kept ten meters between himself and the melee, his .45 in one hand and Surefire LED flashlight in the other, the two crossed at the wrist. Ainsley moved out, spreading the flank on the left. There were no shots yet. Before Handon could work out the tactical situation, or acquire a target, a new, large figure charged in – and immediately started tossing bodies out.
“Cut it out, you goddamned sons of bitches…!”
It was the Colonel.
Somebody went flying and rolled up at Handon’s feet, coughing.
Scanning to either side – constant, total situational awareness is pretty much rule number one in spec-ops, and the first ten rules in zombie fighting – Handon saw a couple of corporals spill out of the mess and swing wide around the perimeter of the fighting. Handon grabbed one of them by the collar.
“Sitrep.”
“It’s just a soldier fight, Sarg.” Handon didn’t let him go. “One of the staff clerks from H&S company thought one of the operators from Echo Team looked dodgy. They were just back inside the wire, and the clerk thought he was twitchy and told him to get tested. Guy’s team told him to get fucked. It went south from there.”
With that, Juice and Predator skidded up to a halt, holding their assault rifles forward at the low ready position, night vision goggles protruding from their faces like African tribal masks. Juice wore only a towel wrapped around his waist, and flip-flops. Predator was ass-naked.
“What went south?” Pred growled, pivoting and aiming.
Handon couldn’t help but crack a smile. “Master Sergeant, get that cannon out of my face.” He didn’t mean Pred’s SCAR. “And stand down. It’s just a fist fight.”
Ainsley stepped up again and lowered the hammer on his .45 with his thumb, his expression darkening at the two huge and undressed men. Turning away, he muttered, “I could have gone my whole life without seeing that…”
By now the Colonel had gotten to the bottom of the dust-up, and was letting the perpetrators have it with both barrels. “The next time you dubious motherfuckers want to have a fight that doesn’t involve Zulus, you fucking well do it outside the wire, where you can’t scare anybody. Except the dead. Got it?”
Several dusty and bleeding soldiers, variously standing, sitting, or lying, nodded or Yes, sir’d in response. The Colonel scanned and pointed at a big and grizzled operator from Echo – presumably Patient Zero of this outburst. “You, First Sergeant. I don’t give a shit how many decades of operational time you have in, or how many thousands of Tangos and Zulus you’ve slotted. You follow the goddamned fucking rules. I don’t give a shit if it’s the soup lady who doesn’t like the look of you. You drop your shit where you stand and get your ass tested.”
“Roger that, sir.”
“Now!”
The operator pulled himself up and stomped off toward the Med Shack.
There were quiet mutters of approval from some of the scrawnier, bloodier guys.
“And you rear echelon motherfuckers. Next time you’ve got concerns about somebody’s health, you goddamn well take it up through channels. You’re no use to me or humanity with your heads torn off and shoved up your asses.”
The four Alpha men, grinning or shaking their heads, were now turning to leave. Juice tapped Pred on the shoulder and pointed off behind them. They could just make out a figure climbing down from the tallest structure in that part of camp, a three-story warehouse. It was slim and lithe, with long hair, black and curly, and a rifle across her back.
“Looks like someone got her rendezvous interrupted.” Juice whistled. “She moves fast.”
“You have no idea, man,” Predator said. “At least we weren’t the only dumbasses who thought the shit was coming down in camp…”
With a toss of his head, the Colonel rounded up the two senior Alpha men and began fast marching them back toward his command post. The Colonel did everything fast. He knew they were all running out of time.
RUNNING BLIND
Aleister leaned back against the laundry trolley and took a long drag on his cigarette. It was a cold night, and he hadn’t seen mist come off the sea like this in months. He exhaled slowly, feeling the nicotine working its magic on his nerves. It wasn’t very often that he got a few moments to himself these days, not with so many soldiers coming and going, and at every hour.
He had worked at the Premier Inn even before the world fell apart. But back then he’d worked the rooms, as cleaning staff. That meant a whole lot of piling up sheets onto trolleys and emptying bins. People had stopped coming to stay after the tunnel breakouts and even though the building was left open, there was barely any staff. The manager had left to head north in a hurry, and most of the other staff didn’t turn up for work. Eventually Aleister was left there on his own. Unlike the others, he had nowhere else to go.
When the military took over Folkestone after the town was abandoned by civilians, he had stayed on. Overnight, the hotel went from being an empty shell to a catering center for the mass of troops now being housed in the multitude of empty houses. Major Grews, the old-school, gray-haired officer in charge of what was now called “Camp Folkstone” had turned up with a group of heavily armed soldiers and informed Aleister that the hotel was being commandeered for military use. When asked who was in charge, Aleister couldn’t think of anyone to name, being the sole occupant and effectively a squatter. So he told them that he was the manager.
That had been over a year ago, and now none of the military personnel who lived in the rooms of the inn, not even Mess Chef Lanslow, questi
oned him being there. Oddly, it was presumed that he was now drafted and in charge of the cleaning staff.
Tonight had been the busiest night in the hotel since he could remember, with every room full of soldiers on their way to somewhere. Aleister wasn’t privy to the comings and goings, but on occasion he would overhear something, and this was one of those occasions. Two of the squaddies had stood at the bar for an hour later than most of the others, drinking cans of cheap lager and talking a little too loudly. Something big was happening, something that involved a lot of people travelling a long distance. The second soldier, the more vocal of the two, complained about suffering from seasickness.
Aleister stood up, dropped his cigarette on the concrete behind the bin and stubbed it out. He was about to go back into the building – back to the unpleasant job of filling up the washers for the night – when something caught his eye. There was movement over on the other side of the motorway. Someone running fast, and whoever it was obviously in a great hurry to get across the bridge. Six months ago there had been a copse of trees obscuring the view, but the Army had chopped them down for fuel, and now – even with the mist as thick as it was – he could see across the main road. The roundabouts on either side of the bridge were clearly visible.
The figure continued to sprint, and was nearly halfway across the bridge when a white van sped out into the road and rushed toward it.
Oh shit, he thought. They didn’t even see the person running.
“Stop!” he shouted, but the van was too far away, and all Aleister could do was cringe as the vehicle ploughed into the running pedestrian at nearly forty miles per hour. The body bounced off the wing of the van, tumbled along the road and came to a halt next to the pavement. The van screeched to a halt.
ACROSS THE BRIDGE
The car shuddered in protest as Wesley swerved the vehicle, nearly taking the roundabout head on. It was a clapped-out old thing, and certainly not used to this kind of treatment. He eased off the accelerator and the juddering stopped.
He squinted, focusing on the road ahead, and further across the bridge. Something was blocking the way, but he couldn’t make out what until it was thirty feet away. A white van had stopped in the middle of the road, three quarters of the way across. Wesley hit the brake, slowing the car, and crawled it forward in the near darkness.
The door on the driver’s side was open, yet there was no sign of the driver. In the passenger seat a man struggled with his seat belt, a double-barreled shotgun lying across his lap. But the blood on his hands was causing him to fumble. Wesley yanked hard on the hand brake, grabbed his own shotgun, swung his door open and rushed around the car to the other side of the van – where he nearly tripped over a headless body lying in the road. He slowed, stepped carefully over the splayed limbs of the corpse, and pulled the van door open.
“Fuck, he bit me,” blurted the passenger, his face pale and his voice cracking. “Alex bit me. I had no choice. I had to shoot him.”
“It’s okay. I can help,” said Wesley, not sure how much he could help.
“That thing. It came out from nowhere. We didn’t see it. I spotted it just before we hit it, but I didn’t shout quick enough. I thought it was a man, but then it got up and rushed at us. No man could get up like that after being run down. It smashed the window and bit Alex’s neck. Oh crap. He was bleeding everywhere. I tried to stop it, but too late. He changed so quickly.”
“What about that thing? The zombie?”
“The what?”
This was delirium setting in. The man was obviously infected, and badly. Wesley’s stomach churned at the thought that he would have to deal with him very soon.
“The zombie. The one you hit. Where did it go?”
“Oh. It ran off. Fucking ran. They aren’t supposed to run like that are they? Not like that. Not that fast. Even the fast ones aren’t that fast. Oh, God, I’m gonna be one of them.”
The man was shaking, his hands still fumbling at his seat belt, but Wesley could tell that he was already losing control of his extremities.
Wesley leaned forward and gently picked up the shotgun from the man’s lap, popped the remaining live shell out of the chamber, pocketed it, then moved the weapon away from the door. He glanced at the scattered shotgun shells littered across the footwell of the van, but decided that the risk of leaning in – even though the man was yet to turn – was not worth it. In a few minutes he could get those in relative safety.
“Do you have a radio?” He immediately felt cold and heartless as he ignored the man’s fear. But it was no use. There was nothing else he could do.
“Yes. In the back. We’re telecom engineers. Alex was my boss. Oh, God, I shot him in the face. I didn’t know the shotgun would take his head off. I’ve never fired it before. Not at someone.”
Wesley nearly wrenched the back door of the van off its hinges pulling it open. He had expected more resistance. Inside the van, piles of equipment lay strewn across the floor. One of the shelves that had held dozens of boxes of screws and nails and small clips in a million shapes and sizes had collapsed, spilling its contents everywhere. Fortunately, he didn’t have to clamber over any of it. The radio was attached to the left side panel, just inside the door. Wesley grabbed the receiver, twirled the channel selector, and pushed the button so hard he felt his thumb pop.
“CentCom, come in. CentCom, come in,” he said weakly.
A moment of silence passed.
“CentCom receiving, over. What is your designation, please?” The voice was female, and cold – emotionless and following protocol.
“Corporal Andrew Wesley, Security Services, Channel Tunnel. We have an emergency.”
“Oh fuck it,” cursed the injured man in the front of the van. Wesley barely heard him as struggled. “Fuck it. Fuck it. Fuck it.”
“What is the nature of the emergency?”
“Zombie incursion out of the tunnel. They’re out here and people are dying.”
“Hold one moment… what did you say? An incursion?” The voice had changed, the simple mechanical tone in the girl’s speech now wavering. “They got out? Where are you now?”
“I’m on the bridge between the Channel Tunnel terminal and the Premier Inn. There was a van in the middle of the road. I think the zombie came this way, because the driver is dead and the passenger infected.”
“What zombie? Where did it come from?”
“Look, this is bad,” snapped Wesley. “A runner got out of the tunnel somehow. It’s into Folkestone. I’ve already lost two guards here and found another one dead on the…”
BANG!!
The sound hammered through Wesley’s head, making his eyes involuntarily shut tight. His ears rang, and he fell to the floor, stopping his fall with both hands, but not stopping his head from colliding with the van door as it swung back toward him. The radio receiver bounced off the aluminum wall of the van with a thud. Wesley could vaguely hear the woman’s voice, but it was too quiet and his hearing overloaded.
A trickle of blood ran into his eyes and he raised his hand to the top of his head, where a long thin cut had appeared. He glared up at the van door, at the two-inch hole – the one the bullet had made as it whizzed past his head at a distance of barely two inches, travelling at 1,200 feet per second. The bullet that had just a microsecond before blown the passenger’s brain all over the cab partition.
“Hello? Hello?” chattered the radio. “Acknowledge! Acknowledge!”
But Wesley was too stunned to acknowledge anything but the arrival of another death.
He staggered to his feet, leaning against the side of the van to steady himself as his head spun. Unsteadily, he walked around the front of the van and peered into the open window.
The engineer had decided that he didn’t want to become a zombie. On his lap, still clenched in his pale fingers, was a handgun. His head was at an awkward angle, leaning off to one side, but his comfort was the very least of Wesley’s concerns right now. The gaping hole in the back of his h
ead, and the spray of blood, bone and brains across the interior of the cab said that this was no longer going to be an issue.
Wesley grabbed the handgun, careful to not get any of the blood on him or make contact of any kind with the dead man. Even a minute or two after a zombie had expired, the virus was still active enough to spread and infect.
The handgun must have been in the glove compartment directly in front of the dead man. It lay open, contents spewed across the floor – papers, empty cigarette packets, pens, all manner of junk. But more importantly, a small black pouch containing two more magazines for the handgun – which was already fully loaded except for the one round expended.
Wesley ran round the back of the van and grabbed the radio. The woman’s voice could still be clearly heard.
“Hello? Hello? Are you still there?”
“Yes. I’m still here.”
“What happened? What was the noise? It sounded like gunfire.”
“Yes, it was. The remaining occupant of the van just blew his own brains out.”
“Ah.”
“Look. Is Three Acres still safe? Are there people there?”
“Yes. I have alerted them and the other checkpoints, as well as the military barracks. You should proceed to Three Acres immediately for debriefing. Let the military take care of fighting the outbreak.”
“What about civilians? There are people still in the town. The thing headed that way.”
“Please proceed to Three Acres immediately. The Army are on their way. You should move out of the infected area as soon as possible.”
“Okay, thanks,” he said, placing the radio back into its holder. He shuddered as he glanced at the hole in the back door that had been barely inches from his head.
Wesley looked toward the town. Lights were on in various places, signs of the few people that had remained. The zombie would be death to them. He had to do something.
And then every window of the Premier Inn exploded outward.
Arisen, Book One - Fortress Britain Page 5
