Arisen, Book Four - Maximum Violence

by James, Glynn

  When the first Zulu emerged from the forest, it was merely smoking – as if it had been in an outdoor hot tub on a cold night and just stepped out of it.

  But the two after that were actually on fire.

  As Juice stepped forward to engage them, he thought, Well, hey, good old Zulus. They were indeed moving at a slow shambling speed, and Juice was happy for it.

  Handon watched the big bearded one thrust his bayonet through the mouth of the first, then withdraw it as the creature fell. It was the age-old tension with them – even with their suppressors, their rifles made noise, and noise drew more. A knife through the head was quiet – but stabbed Zulus can squirt, making for a bad infection risk. The bayonet was a good compromise – quiet, but it kept them at arm’s length. And it didn’t mean slinging a rifle in order to draw and wield a sword.

  Plus Juice was a crap swordsman.

  He pivoted heavily and took down the next two. They fell and lay in the sand, both still burning. More sounds of thrashing could be heard from deeper in the woods.

  Handon turned forward as his radio went again. It was Fick. “Now would be good, you dog-faced dipshits. Though you can pretty much take your pick of now or never…” Massive gunfire squelched out the little radio speaker, a second or two ahead of the fainter live version through the burning forest. Handon moved his hand to twiddle down the volume knob.

  He looked up at the older girl again… at Courtney. She had the hammer back on her handgun. And there was no chance the safety was on – the weapon had just been discharged. Handon thought upon this. He looked out of the corner of his eye at Henno, who, like Pred, had his rifle stock pulled in tightly to his cheek, and was also stepping very slowly to the side, tweaking the angles.

  The older girl spoke again, her voice trembling now. The sight of the dead had evidently unnerved her, hollowing out her initial brazen confidence. “So, first, we’re going to take your med kit, with whatever drugs are in it. And then we’re gonna take your super-important laptop guy here. And we’re getting back on the boat, and we’re going out on the lake again and we’re going to find our friends, the ones you didn’t kill.”

  Handon shook his head. Jesus Christ. Of all the goddamned times for Stockholm Syndrome…

  The girl adjusted her grip on Dr. Park. She said, “And when we get a safe distance away, we’ll put your guy in the motorboat and he can come back.”

  “You’ll only have the motorboat if you find your people,” Handon said.

  “Then we’ll put him in the water and he can swim back.”

  Handon grimaced, then spoke in a very level but totally unyielding tone. “Listen to me carefully. You’ve got to put the gun down, and you’ve got to do it right now. There’s no time for anything else.”

  “Fuck you,” Courtney said. “You obviously like being in charge. But you’re not in charge of me.” Handon mentally cursed his luck. This girl pretty clearly had some authority issues. Probably some daddy issues, for that matter…

  “A little help…” This was Juice again, from behind. Handon stole another look – there were now more than a few smoking and flaming Zulus emerging from the treeline – and at intervals too wide for Juice to sweep them all up. Predator turned, drew his short sword and went to work alongside his battle buddy.

  Handon faced forward again. They were really running out of time now – every possible hourglass was draining out. He could see the girl’s face whitening – and also saw her tighten her grip on the pistol, her finger curling around the trigger, which was already most of the way back. This was because the gun was in “Condition 0”: a live round in the chamber, the hammer cocked back, and the safety off. All of which meant she was less than 4.5 pounds of finger pressure from blowing Dr. Simon Park’s brains out on this beach. And, with them, the current best hopes of all humankind.

  Courtney looked over at her younger sister. “There’s only us,” she said, almost smiling. “We’re going to get out of here. Together.” She was also thinking, in the privacy of her head, in the safety of her soul, that once they got back out on the water, they were going to find the sweet boy William. And they were going to save him, together…

  Handon caught something else in peripheral, and purposely didn’t let his eye go to it. While the younger girl was edging away, Henno had been edging toward her – which left the two of them now only a couple of steps apart. In a brutal flash, he let his rifle drop on its sling and lunged for Emily. In a quarter of a heartbeat, he had his left arm around her slim neck and his own side arm, the terrifying-looking SIG P220 Combat, jammed into her right temple.

  Handon had seen it coming. But still he thought, Jesus, Henno… Both he and the pistol looked enormous wrapped around the small, slim girl.

  Henno merely stared over the girl’s right shoulder, dead into the eyes of her older sister. And he didn’t breathe a syllable. He just held the older girl’s gaze, his expression cold as a snowman’s heart attack. He didn’t need to speak.

  One hundred percent of his meaning was contained in his actions.

  The two of them stood motionless now, staring at each other around their hostages. Courtney’s eyes widened with fear, and her breathing grew rapid and shallow – none of which reassured Handon any. She looked to be wrestling with a surge of panic, which threatened to envelop her. Aside from the distant gunfire and the forest fire, the only sound was the cresting moaning of the dead, as they emerged from the forest, and got methodically cut down by Pred and Juice. Each hit the sand with a dry slap, and the burning ones continued to crackle quietly, their dead flesh cooking, skin turning black and curling off them.

  Bits of it floated upward in the heating air, rising and falling like undead fireflies in some backyard barbecue in hell.

  In the quiet of this bizarre tableau, Ali had risen back to her full height, and smoothly brought her rifle back to her shoulder. She was thinking that if they let this girl go back out and recover the survivors, the pirates were back in play. There were still weapons all over that boat. And they were just going to do it all over again.

  Handon clenched his jaw and took stock, probably for the final time. He saw that Ali had her rifle up, trained on the older girl’s head. And he saw she had the best shot of any of them. She flicked her eyes over at Handon. Simply, she was waiting.

  Waiting for him to decide.

  As the very last grains of sand slid out of this hourglass, Handon racked his brain, trying to come up with some kind of solution – some way, any way, to guarantee Park’s safety without killing the girl. But he could think of nothing. If they lowered their weapons, they had no leverage – absolutely no guarantee the girl wouldn’t slot Park, or else take him away with her, which was nearly as bad. These were the horns of an extremely ornery bull: either risk Park, whose value was incalculable; or kill the girl – the effect of which on Handon’s immortal soul he could not know for sure, not in this moment.

  But it didn’t look or feel very good at all.

  Handon tiredly closed his eyes.

  He heard a single round crack out of Ali’s rifle. He saw it catch the older girl in the point of her chin, traveling through her jaw and severing her brainstem, killing her instantly – but also instantly canceling all nerve signals, including any to her trigger finger. He heard her crumple straight down into the water with a tiny splash. He could hear Park gasp audibly as he staggered away. Finally, he saw Ali lower her rifle, go back down into a squat, and place her head in her hands.

  And he felt himself swallow something very dry and heavy in his throat.

  Not quite a sob. But something like it.

  It wasn’t just the killing. It was that, in order to ensure the girl wouldn’t execute Park by squeezing her trigger as she died, they had to shoot her in the brainstem.

  The exact same place they shot the dead.

  But when Handon shut his mind’s eye and opened his real ones again, the girl was still alive and on her feet. Park was still trapped in her embrace. And Ali was still
standing like David, posture perfect, weapon lethally poised – waiting for Handon to make the call.

  He shook his head once, barely perceptibly. Ali saw it, and lowered her rifle.

  Handon just couldn’t do it. Putting the pirates out on the water, leaving them to their fates, and probable bad deaths, was one thing. But killing this girl – however much of a drug-addled, rebellious, entitled, Whiskey-Tango pain-in-the-ass she was… well, he couldn’t stomach it. There was no way her life was logically worth more than fifty million others. But he just couldn’t make logic the measure of all things. Not after everything that had come before.

  Some things were out of line.

  And some lines could only be crossed with no going back.

  “Stand down,” he said to the others. “Let the girl go,” he said to Henno, who hesitated. “That’s an order.” So Henno released her – but he kept his pistol pointed at the back of her head.

  Finally, looking upon the older girl not unkindly with his tortured blue eyes, Handon said, “Go. Take the med kit. Take whatever you want.” He looked over to Ali.

  “The med kit’s still on the fucking boat,” she said. “Top deck.”

  Handon shook his head slightly at that, and nearly laughed. “If you reverse the engines full you might even get off this beach. But the scientist stays. That’s your only deal.”

  The panic seemed to ebb out of the girl’s eyes. She released her grip on Park, and started to back out into the water – presumably toward the ladder on the stern where she could climb back on board. Ali darted out, grabbed Park, shielded him with her body, and backed them both away. Courtney continued her retreat – but she’d only taken a few steps when she realized her sister wasn’t following.

  “Emily. Come on.” She slowed her retreat but didn’t stop. Her panic was returning as she saw more and more of the dead emerging from the trees only a few meters up the beach. The moaning was now reaching a crescendo – and the effect of all of them warbling and croaking together was worse than the sum of them individually. It was becoming a frenzy, and it was terrifying. And however good these soldiers were, surely they’d be overrun soon.

  “Can we go now, boss?” Henno asked, not disguising that he’d had enough of this crap.

  The younger girl, Emily, was on the verge of tears. She held her sister’s eye. But she didn’t move to follow her. “I don’t want to go back,” she said, voice quavering.

  “What?”

  “I’m going with them,” she said.

  “What? You can’t! You can’t.” Courtney looked disbelieving.

  Emily shook her head, tears overrunning her eyes now. “Come with us. Please.”

  “Not a chance,” Handon said. “She stays. You can come if you want. But we’re leaving now.” He nodded to Henno, and the whole team slipped into a crescent formation, guns facing outward, with Park at the center. And they began advancing up the beach toward the treeline. Within seconds, they were all firing steadily, suppressed rifles and unsuppressed pistols sounding at even intervals. Loud booms came from Pred’s shotgun, the Mossberg Tactical he had rescued, giving him profound satisfaction – both that it worked, and that he was getting to play with it. But it was damned loud.

  And if their presence on this beach had been any kind of secret before, it sure as hell wasn’t now.

  Left behind, Emily shifted her feet in place – torn between the pull of her only living family member, of everything she’d ever known… and some unknown future that she sensed would be less horrible than the one she’d been living. The commandos were now disappearing into the treeline, cloths up around their mouths, weapons up and extended, firing methodically. The pop-pop of the gunfire, much closer than the distant gunfight at the airport, thickened and crested. Emily pressed her lips together in terror. She looked one last time at her sister, who pleaded with her eyes.

  And she turned and ran into the burning forest.

  On the Run

  NAS Oceana

  The truck skidded to a halt thirty feet from the lone helicopter that waited on the deck. Anderson was already leaping out and running toward the three men in uniform who stood nearby, even before the truck’s engine had finished juddering to a halt. He nearly fell on the ground in front of the nearest Marine.

  “We… have to get… out of here,” he said, gasping for air.

  The three Marines looked taken aback, and one of them walked toward the truck, a tall black man wearing a stony expression as he cast around.

  “Where’s the rest of your team?” he asked. They’d heard the sounds of distant gunfire, and then a few seconds of quiet, and then another, much longer firefight. So they’d already guessed that something had gone wrong – at best.

  Anderson bent over double, breathing heavily.

  “They’re all dead,” he said, hating himself for the lie even as he spoke it. He knew the others had still been alive when he drove off. But there was no way they could have survived that second wave of runners. No way. There had been too many of them and they had come out of nowhere. Shame burned in his throat, but it was too late now. It was done.

  “Runners. Packs of them. We took out one group, but another jumped us. There must have been a hundred of them. I managed to get into the truck and drive away. Everyone’s dead. They were all over the place.”

  Anderson straightened up, but he couldn’t look the Marine in the face. “They’re all gone and we need to get the hell out of here. There are packs of runners everywhere.”

  Another of the Marines turned away, stepped toward the helicopter, and spoke into his radio. Anderson waited, trying to be cool, but his nerves were ready to explode. He didn’t want to be on this dead continent another second. He didn’t think he could take it. It was all he could do not to bellow at the Marines, beg them to get him out of there.

  Then the one with the radio nodded at the pilot, and Anderson heard the helo’s engine firing up.

  Two minutes later, they lifted smoothly and powerfully off the ground. It was the last remaining bird, meant for Wesley’s team, and it rose up above the base, turned in a half arc, and headed out to sea.

  * * *

  Less than two miles away, Wesley was running flat out. In front of him were Melvin, Browning, and the group of civilian survivors – perhaps a dozen of them – and limping alongside was Derwin. Wesley’s heart pounded as he forced himself to keep going. Sweat poured from his head and back, and he could feel his fatigues sticking to him.

  The last few minutes had been the longest and most terrifying of his life. He’d thought that staring down a charge of zombies in the streets of Folkestone had been bad, but, no. That was nothing to facing a pack of runners.

  As the bedraggled and injured group crossed a wide field, heading toward where Melvin estimated the outer fence of the base would be – and beyond which would be that blessed helicopter – Wesley tried to make sense of those horrible, manic seconds.

  The second pack had hit them from the side, one of them charging Wesley full on and knocking him to the ground. Everything after that had been a blur. He knew he had fired his weapon, and that the runner that bowled him over had been shot before it could bite or scratch him. And he remembered seeing a dozen or more swarming over Scott, tearing the man apart in a froth of blood as he screamed for help. But the rest of it he couldn’t call up. There had been a lot of gunfire, and he knew now that the survivors were well armed. He recalled kneeling on the ground at some point, firing in multiple directions as the pack closed on them.

  After that, he only remembered running, his head and constricted vision both slowly clearing. Now he felt a heavy throbbing on the side of his face. Had he hit his head when he fell? He didn’t know. All he knew was that he wasn’t dead. They had lost Scott, but everyone else was on their feet, running, still alive.

  And there were runners everywhere now. The first two groups had just been the start. Now they appeared in packs all around them, charging out from the sides of buildings and from tree-line
d fields. Everywhere Wesley looked, groups of gaunt shapes sped toward them.

  As crazy as it was, it all made sense now. The storm was not much more than a mile away. He could hear the thunderous rumble of the moaning masses, overwhelming in its resonance and volume. These runners made up the front edge of the storm, ranging ahead of the main body. And they were now a mortal threat to the last living humans who had remained behind.

  Wesley had left it until too late. He should have gotten himself and his men out when he still could. Instead, he had led them off on some stupid, doomed, quixotic rescue mission.

  And now none of them were ever going to get out of here alive.

  Wesley glanced over at Derwin. The big man was struggling, limping along, but managing to keep up. For now. Wesley saw a red patch spreading across the waist of his field uniform, and his face was growing pale. It was a gunshot wound. Who the hell had fired it would never be known. During that desperate battle, everyone had been blasting in all directions, at runners all around them, inside their lines. Finally, when the last had fallen, Wesley found Derwin lying on his back and groaning, holding onto his side.

  But they’d headed out then, and they kept going now, determined to live. Every few seconds one of the survivors or one of the sailors would slow, turn, and lay down covering fire. Wesley was saving his bullets for those that got close, and so far they hadn’t. But it was inevitable. They couldn’t keep these things off long enough to make it to the helo – could they? Every time Wesley looked off to either side, or behind, all he saw were gray figures, many only fifty or a hundred yards away, loping toward them. They just couldn’t widen the distance; they were all exhausted, many were injured, they had children with them now, and the undead were relentless and fast.

  The two kids were, ironically, holding up best on the punishing run. But the pressure, the hopeless task of keeping them safe, added to the crushing atmosphere of danger and desperation. And the toddler carried by one of the women had to be slowing her down, though she hadn’t complained yet.