Homer smiled. “They won’t have told you much yet, I guess.”
“We’re getting briefed in the morning. And going out in the afternoon. No time wasted.”
Homer squinted slightly at his old friend, concerned. “Got a sense of what you’re going to be getting into out there?”
Mikey chuckled. “That’s the whole point of the years of ballbreaking SEAL training, right? So we’ll be ready even for the things we aren’t ready for. Especially them.”
“Good enough.”
Mikey sensed Homer’s unease, though, and shifted slightly. “What’s your thinking, brother?”
Homer pivoted, a little evasively, regarding the blackness outside the wire. He let out a long breath. “Honestly?”
“You know how to be anything else?”
Homer laughed once, not very mirthfully. He put his hands on his hips. There was an orange glow out in the hills. He didn’t know where it came from. He turned again and locked steady gazes with his old friend.
"You know, when it all started I honestly thought the Rapture was here – not some freakshow zombie apocalypse. And all I could think of, for the longest time, was, Why am I still here? Why do I have to get my gun in the fight, in the last battle between Heaven and Hell, while everyone else is sitting pretty in Heaven? I’ve done my service for God and man. Don’t I get to go to Heaven?”
Mikey reached out and put his hand on Homer’s shoulder.
“But you know what worries me the most? It isn’t who will win. It isn’t what’s going to happen to me, or to any of us. It isn’t even whether any of this will ever be over.” Homer looked back in his friend’s kind face. “It’s, which side am I fighting for? Am I fighting for God? Am I fighting for the good of all? Or am I one of the bad guys? Did you ever consider that we might just be the evil ones? And those things out there are God’s cleaners?"
He hadn’t been able to tell anyone else this, all this time.
And Mikey knew just what he was talking about. He hardly had to say it.
The SEAL Brotherhood – stronger than death, stronger than the end of the world.
THE STREETS HAVE NO NAME
Wesley swerved the car sharply to the right, missing the girl by just a few inches. She fell backwards, buffeted by the strong breeze and reeling from the surprise of it. She had appeared from nowhere in the mist – and, from her perspective, so had the car. It now barreled across the road and smashed into an abandoned vehicle, which sat across from the house that the girl and her parents had been given when they arrived two weeks earlier.
She saw the man in the passenger seat burst through the front window and roll across the pavement. The man in the driver’s seat stayed put. The noise had been overpowering, like nothing she had ever heard – first the screeching of brakes that pierced her eardrums, and then the loud crash as the car collided with the other. Windows exploded outwards and metal crumpled as the front end of the moving vehicle compacted to two thirds of its original length.
“Oh, God!” It was her father’s voice, from behind her. He had seen the whole incident while trying to open the driver’s door on the other side of their own car. The girl, Alison, leapt to her feet and ran to him. He held her tightly.
“Mary, get out here!” he yelled. “There’s been an accident.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” Alison sobbed, her whole body shaking with fear. “I didn’t see it.”
“It’s not your fault.” His heart was beating double-time as the dread thought of what could have just happened dawned on him. He had sent his daughter out to get into the car. They had been told to evacuate ASAP to the harbor zone.
Mary rushed out of the house with their other daughter – two-year-old Madison – in one arm, and a rucksack filled with a few possessions that she couldn’t leave behind slung over her shoulder. “What happened?” she stammered as she saw the wreck and devastation on the other side of the road.
“No time,” barked her husband, Ruben, as he threw the carryall full of supplies onto the back seat. “Get the kids in the car. I’ll see if I can help them. Ali, get in the car, sweetheart.” The eight-year-old sobbed as she jumped into the back seat, closed the door, and buckled up. Ruben knew that she would be distraught after this, but he also knew that she was a tough one, and the two passengers in the crashed car might need his help urgently.
He rushed over the road, and around the car to the driver’s side, hoping not to see some gory mess that had once been human. He kept his hand on the gun at his waist just in case he needed to stop them from turning. But the driver was still conscious and rubbing his head.
“Are you okay, buddy?” he asked.
“I think so,” said Wesley. His head was swimming, and he shook it, trying to regather his thoughts. Then he remembered the last few moments. The girl’s eyes bright in the headlights. The swerving and the crash. “Is she okay? I didn’t hit her, did I?”
“She’s fine. Are you injured?”
Wesley sighed with relief and then moved his legs, pushing open the now bent car door and stumbling onto the pavement. He steadied himself against the side of the vehicle as his brain tried to catch up with all the sudden movement. Then his instincts clicked and he reached in and grabbed the shotgun from the floor and checked that the handgun was still in his belt.
“Yeah. I’m okay. Look, you need to get the hell out of here, and fast. Zombies on the way. You have maybe a few minutes. Crap. Where did the soldier go?” He spun around, noticing the broken front window for the first time. “Fuck.”
“I’m good,” called a voice from a few yards away. “Well, nearly.”
Wesley spun around again, to see the man lifting himself up using the side of the parked vehicle they had destroyed, a red convertible.
“Shoulder hurts pretty bad and my ankle is even more screwed. But I won’t need to be put down just yet.”
Ruben’s jaw dropped.
“You flew out of the car. How the hell did…?”
The soldier leaned down, picked up his helmet and showed them the dent in the top.
“It probably saved my life,” he said, dropping it to the ground. “And the body armor helps.”
“Rube, we need to go,” called Mary from the car.
Wesley looked up the road. Dark figures were now stumbling through the shadows, deep guttural moaning echoed down the street. Ruben was also staring at them.
“Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes. Now go,” said Wesley. “Get the hell out and don’t stop til you’ve gone through a line of squaddies. They’re on their way.”
Gunfire erupted from a few feet away. The soldier was already back to work. The nearest shadow in the mist fell backwards and didn’t get back up.
“Are there many other people near here?” Wesley called to Ruben as the man ran to his car.
“Yes,” he yelled, trying to shout over an automatic weapon that was now lighting up the whole street. “Lots on this street and the junction down the road. They would all have got the call.”
“The call?”
“CentCom called and told us to evacuate immediately.”
Even as Ruben finished speaking, the doors of houses were opening, spilling out the families that had lived in them for only a few weeks. Most of them rushed straight to cars and started bundling children and possessions inside, jumping in, and firing up engines. Wesley realized that these people lived their lives this way – frontier families used to working in the border towns near places that were quarantined. They were civilian scavengers, people who the government used to retrieve supplies from abandoned towns across the country or reclaim an urban location that those in charge deemed useful. They were ready to move out at any moment.
A man ran out of the building next door and stopped dead, backing away from the soldier as he fired round after round into the zombies that now appeared in greater numbers. Wesley had also taken up a position across the road, behind another rusted car. This one already had broken windows and loo
ked as though it had been sitting there since the apocalypse began.
“My car,” the man mumbled. “It’s trashed.”
The soldier stopped firing for a moment. No more zombies in view.
“You seriously chose an open-top car?” he asked.
“It was what was there and no one needed it. Shit, I have to get out of here.” The man took off at a run down the street away from them, pushing and shoving his way past the families that thronged the road, and not appearing to give a damn who was in his way.
“Selfish fucking idiot,” cursed the soldier. He glanced over at Wesley, who was swapping out his handgun magazine.
“How many rounds you got left?”
“About thirty, I think,” replied Wesley, his voice barely audible over the noise of people and cars rushing away from them.
“Take these,” he said, and pulled two magazines from his belt. Even from ten meters, he recognized the same model as his own sidearm, a SIG P226, standard British Army issue. He dashed across the road and dropped the mags on the bonnet of the car before Wesley.
“Cheers.”
“No problem, mate. Heads up. Here they come again. Better make those count. What is your name, anyway? If I’m going to die standing next to you I’d like to know.”
“Wesley. Andrew Wesley.”
The soldier nodded. “Martin. Captain James Martin. Pleased to meet you.”
They stood next to each other, staring into the mist as the next wave of zombies appeared. There were not merely fifty as he had suspected, and when they surged into view even Captain Martin’s heart skipped a beat. There must have been one hell of a breakout through the tunnel, for now the whole street heaved with them. Hundreds of the creatures pushed and shoved each other as they shambled through the streets. The howls and moans intensified as the one at the front spotted the soldier and the security guard standing waiting for them.
Wesley glanced behind him. Cars were pulling away nearby, but they weren’t moving fast enough. Most of the civilians were making a good escape but they were queued up. The terrified eyes of a small child stared back at him from the rear screen of the nearest car.
“We have to hold them,” shouted Martin as he opened fire.
Wesley spun back to see the mass of zombies clawing their way down the street, lifted his pistol and took careful aim at the nearest. “Absolutely,” he said. He knew that the two of them would never be able to stop all of the creatures. There were just too many. They didn’t have enough bullets and the creatures were coming too fast and too thick, but he was going to make damn sure those frightened eyes that stared back at him from the window of the rearmost car wouldn’t close forever.
The two guns echoed down the street, and for the first time in his life Wesley felt a surge of hope. Not for himself, but for redeeming himself for his failure to find Amarie. He thought of her now as the mass of raging limbs and bloodshot eyes surged down the street toward them. He thought of her long hair and her smile. How they had laughed until they nearly cried that first evening that he had met her in the bar in Paris.
I expect I’ll be with you soon, he thought. He had never been a religious man. But right then, just when he knew that his end was rapidly rushing toward him, he felt something stir. A calmness that he had never felt before flooded his body. Those fearful eyes of the child in the car flashed in front of him. This is what I was meant to do, he thought.
“Pray, let me hold,” he muttered under his breath and squeezed the trigger again.
Someone somewhere answered.
One moment there were but two guns blasting their noise into the night sky, and the next moment they were answered by many. Wesley almost felt the air move around him and tried not to take his eyes off his task as other figures appeared in his peripheral vision and more guns blazed at the horde. First one, then two, then dozens.
The British Army was here.
And the zombies began to fall.
FORLORN HOPE
“Sarge. Wake up, man.”
Handon came awake instantly. Sleepyheads didn’t make it into Delta. And the drowsy were all dead now anyway. He followed Pope out of his billet into the dark – it was still a good two hours before dawn – and the two threaded the alleys of Hereford to the Tactical Operations Center (TOC). There, they found a full house: commo guys, aviation desk, tactical, ops, medical, everyone. Back in the days of the world, the TOC would hum all night – night missions were all the missions. Now, usually, people slept. No one went out at night.
“What’s up?” Handon approached Captain Ainsley, who was hunched over a console with the Colonel, as well a couple of ops desk guys.
“The new SEAL Team,” Ainsley said, not looking up. “They’ve got into a spot of trouble.”
Handon knew about the new SEALS. Homer had briefed him.
“Who are they out with?”
Ainsley paused a beat. “Just the eight of them. A Stealth Hawk crew inserted them.”
The TOC speakers were even now playing the radio traffic from the mission command net. Handon and Pope could hear the TOC-side mission commander going back and forth with the SEAL team on the ground.
“Mud Snake Six, interrogative: can you update me on your casualty status, over.”
The channel squelched as someone on the ground team keyed his mic. “Hotel X, Mud Snake, wait one.” Behind the SEAL’s voice came the sound of rapid firing, one or more people spitting out curses – and the now totally unmistakable moaning of frenzied dead. Ones that were riled up, hungry, and attacking en masse.
Pope and Handon shared a look. It said, This ain’t good.
“Where?” Handon asked.
“Calais,” Ainsley said, still not looking up from a digital multi-map display.
“Mission objective?”
Ainsley looked over at the Colonel, who frowned, paused, then finally answered himself. “They’re checking the fortifications at the Frog end of the Channel Tunnel.”
“At night?”
“It was priority highest. And their skipper volunteered them. All of them volunteered.”
“Of course they volunteered,” Handon said. “They’re fucking SEALs. There are no words for ‘negative’ in their vocabulary. But they’ve been in theater for about five minutes.”
Ainsley sighed. “They’ve been fighting zombies for two years, just like the rest of us.”
The Colonel removed a headset and laid it on the console. “Or so they said.”
The radio traffic was going from bad to worse. From the chatter around the TOC, Handon worked out that the SEALs had been in a running urban battle for the worst part of an hour – and hadn’t yet been able to fight their way to an extraction point. And that they’d also taken casualties – dead or bit, or both.
Handon straightened up. “Let me get this straight – you sent a bunch of FNGs out on a mission over the water, at night, and by themselves. And now they’re getting eaten and everybody’s all surprised.”
The men at the desk suddenly realized that someone was standing behind them. It was Homer. And he was completely kitted out and tooled up – weapons, assault suit, ammo, the works. The Colonel turned to face him. “Appreciate your initiative, Master Chief. But stand down. Alpha’s not going out into that. Not now, anyway.” He didn’t elaborate on that. It probably meant Alpha had already been tasked for a new save-the-world mission. They generally were.
With Handon, Ainsley, Pope, and the Colonel watching, Homer didn’t speak. He just gave them that look. Pretty much everyone knew it meant he was going to Calais if he had to backstroke it. He turned on his heel and marched out.
“Just four men,” Ainsley said to the Colonel. In his heart, he honestly didn’t know how he was going to stop Homer either. All he could do was go with him. “We’ll be careful.”
“Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ,” the Colonel said, putting his palm to his face. Why had command become such a fluid concept since the world ended? He waved his hand tiredly. “Go.”
&nbs
p; The three Alpha men jogged out. In eight minutes they were on a rotors-turning helo with their weapons and go-bags. They’d suit up in the air.
* * *
This time their ride wasn’t a Stealth Hawk, but a Sikorsky S-97 Raider. With twin coaxial main rotors, two vertical stabilizers, and a pusher propeller, it had a theoretical top speed of 299mph – making the Raider the fastest military or civilian helicopter in the history of the world. (And, most likely, its future, too.) It was also a prototype, and the only one flying.
Ainsley, Handon, Pope, and Homer sat in the near-black cabin pulling on their assault suits, face shields, load-bearing vests, radios, pouches, grenades, and other combat load. The sky was still dark purple, with a little orange on the horizon in the east. Finally, the four charged their weapons, monitored radio traffic – and waited, as the bird blasted low through the sky.
Well, Handon thought to himself, if we get killed or turned, it’s only half the team, anyway. They used to say that death walked with SOF guys every day. Now that was so literal it was beyond parody. The real difference was that dying was no longer merely accepted as a price that might have to be paid. Sometimes it was relished as a possible escape. The world was fucked, and didn’t look like getting particularly better anytime soon. Santayana had said, “That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.” But it was getting harder to assume all the time.
Oh, well, Handon thought to himself. He’d do what he’d always done – Ranger on. Maybe the world would take care of itself. Though he doubted it.
He looked over to Homer. The man looked untroubled as always. A little more determined perhaps. Handon watched him unconsciously rub the gold crucifix that always hung around his neck. The guy’s faith really was a sword and a shield. Handon truly envied him that. After the undead, the greatest danger to survival in the ZA was doubt, loss of faith. When hope is all you’ve got, doubt is a lethal and implacable foe – always surging, never going down for good.
Arisen, Book One - Fortress Britain Page 8
