by J. Thorn
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 looked 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 soulless 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 walking dead 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 ones 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 dead 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 the possibility of 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 dead 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 their 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 the dead 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, mags, 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. 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.”
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.
Handon moved over and hunkered down beside Ainsley, who pulled out a ruggedized tablet device. The two of them reviewed maps and drone video of the target area. They had an insertion to plan. Ideally, they’d plan it in some way that wouldn’t get them as jammed up as the SEALs were. Or maybe at least not as quickly. You can’t help anyone when you’re dead.
And you’re a positive menace when you’re undead.
* * *
By the time they got the five-minute warning in the air, the TOC had lost comms with the SEALs completely. Everyone knew what this probably meant. But everyone also knew enough not to jump to conclusions. Loss of radio contact wasn’t the same as death, or infection. Radio comms are fiddly, and they get wedged for all kinds of reasons. Wedged comms are more often the cause of getting killed, than the result.
Anyway, the rescue force had come too far to turn back now.
The red combat lights flashed twice – two minutes.
The helo flared down into a flat area in the dark and shadowed western ruins of Calais, near the Channel Tunnel entrance. Scattered debris was the only obstruction to their insertion. This bird was a hell of a lot louder than their normal ride, though, so the only tactic to play here was to come in low and fast, kiss the ground just long enough for the four operators to pile out and take off, and then for the bird and the soldiers to part ways fast.
By the time the Raider was zooming out to its stand-off marker offshore, the four-man team, back and shoulder muscles hunched up, rifles held expertly at the shoulder, moving fluidly and as a single organism, had slithered out of the open landing area and into the maze of abandoned buildings and the ruins and detritus of fallen Europe.
Correction: the buildings were abandoned only by the living. The dead still lived there. A mass of them were already making their way to the LZ, drawn by the fading noise of the helo. But by then the operators had gone.
As long as they kept quiet and moved with speed and perfect economy, they could, with a little luck, stay out of contact. At the very least, they’d avoid a firefight, and getting jammed up in a nexus of hungry dead bastards. The odd one or two, sometimes even the faster Romeos, stumbled upon and surprised, were never a problem. They could easily be dispatched with melee weapons.
Homer took point, moving like a man on a mission. Out front, not even slowing, he quietly topped three undead in the first minute of their movement – just wrong place, wrong time dead guys. Unusually amongst the operators, Homer eschewed the Samurai swords, carrying instead a boarding axe – an old pirate standby, like a long-handled tomahawk. Its bladed edge could cleave or remove heads; and the spike tip opposite it, when deployed expertly, could puncture a brainstem right through an eye socket.
A handful of dead went down without ever quite waking up.
They had just got between Homer and his brother SEALs.
* * *
The moving map GPS on Ainsley’s heads-up display told them they were 200 meters from the location of the SEAL team’s radio transponder. The captain touched Homer’s shoulder, and communicated the distance. Almost everything was touch and hand signals on live ops. Chatter cost lives.
The team, which had fanned out somewhat, slithered back into a tight line, and slipped into the dark entrance of the ruined building next door. All four paused to pull down their NVGs (night vision goggles) from their helmet mounts. By now, there was a little thin light outside. But the interior of this building would be much darker – and they wouldn’t dare turn on the lights even if they worked.
The four now executed their room-clearing drills as they made their way to the northwestern edge of the structure. As they hoped, sections of wall there had crumbled or been torn down. They paused at the edge of the adjacent structure for a full thirty seconds, to tune in to the new building. They didn’t hear anything as they passed through the vestibule – but did soon after that, freezing in place while they tried to make it out.
Whatever it was, it was in the next room over. This was also pretty close to the location of the SEALs’ transponder. (In the GPS-degraded era, with fewer satellites working less reliably, geo-location was a thornier problem.) The noise they heard could possibly have been whispering, or rustling. It could also have been shuffling, or feeding. This wasn’t necessarily the death of hope – the transponder could have shaken loose. Also, the rescuers already knew the SEALs had casualties. They could still have survivors.
Homer dictated the hard entry parameters with hand signs, and the other three stacked up behind him. On the count, they spilled into the room, splashing it with the IR lights mounted on their weapons – and making the room bright as day through their NVGs.
A SEAL in full assault kit knelt in the corner, over the prone form of another. Homer’s heart leapt with hope – that stupid, intransigent hope – thinking it was a medic working on a wounded SEAL. The “medic” turned around instantly.
And then issued a deep, hissing groan from between blue lips.
“Mikey,” Homer said flatly, flipping his NVGs up onto his head and staggering back.
The others saw that what used to be Mikey had two handfuls of his brother SEAL, which he resumed stuffing into his mouth. Handon grabbed Homer by the arm and hauled him back into the other room. Pope and Ainsley stayed inside to do what was necessary.
Later, Handon would say that he saw Homer’s faith flicker out in that moment.
Whether there was still a smoldering ember, something that could be fanned back into a cleansing flame, would be determined in the next few days.
SECUNDA MORTEM
The reunited Alpha team, all eight operators, sat now in two ranks of chairs, in one of the USOC bri
efing rooms at Hereford. Ainsley, Handon, Homer, and Ali in the front; and Pope, Predator, Juice, and Henno jostling for space in the rear. Absent from this room, but also very present, were the eight SEAL team members who would never be coming back from their one trip outside the wire.
Standing at the front, before a large digital whiteboard, the Colonel shared a brief look with Handon. Neither repeated Handon’s “keep this up and we’re going to lose a team” line from the day before. But each knew the other was thinking it. Captain Ainsley, seated beside Handon, looked away.
The Colonel wasn’t prone to big presentations or theatrics. So his opening line got the men’s attention: “They’re calling this one Operation Secunda Mortem.” His emotionless ice-blue eyes scanned the faces in the room. “And they think it might be the big one.”
The Colonel picked up a folder of papers and put his narrow ass on the desk in its place. “The pointy heads in Edinburgh have gone through the data you pulled out of Merck in Germany. The bad news is, it doesn’t look like Merck had shit. No breakthroughs, nothing promising in either therapeutics or vaccine research. As you already know, this bug is a double-stranded RNA virus, and a complete cocksucker. It took down humanity before we even made a dent in it.”
He flipped open the sheaf of papers to the first page. “So, Merck didn’t have shit themselves – but they did have some email that makes for a helluva read. As you’ll also know, all the labs and biotechs were collaborating like crazy sons of bitches, before the lights went out. IP protection went out the window when everyone’s ass was on the line. So a couple of scientists at Merck had some incoming mail – from an outfit that wasn’t even on our radar before today…”
He paused to pull a rectangular pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket, and refocused on the page. “NeuraDyne Neurosciences was, and I quote, ‘a specialty biopharmaceutical company focused on the development, manufacturing, sales, and marketing of bespoke biopharmalogics, as well as game-changing neuroscientific research.’” He looked back up to room. “Big on brain drugs. Breakthrough, fourth-gen antidepressants. Alzheimers. Behavioral genetics and molecular and cellular neuroscience.”
