He raised his rifle and fired, but the runner chasing her was, well, running, plus moving ninety degrees relative to his aim, and he kept missing. In another two seconds the woman was in the dead end, and turned and screamed as the crazed corpse fell on her. McNiven took off at a sprint, reaching them a few seconds later, but probably a few seconds too late. Nonetheless, he reached in and pulled the creature off the woman, slamming it into the stone wall. As it bounced off the hard stone, he raised his rifle to finish it – point-blank.
And another body slammed into him from behind, hammering him into the rough stone in turn. He felt his teeth and cheek crunch on the cold and unyielding rock, then hands pulling him down, and a wet mouth searching for the soft flesh around his body armor. Face pressed down in the dirt and grass, he saw the heavy keyring had been knocked free, and lay on the ground in front of his face.
And then he saw those keys splashed with blood.
* * *
Eight-year-old Aiden physically turned his younger brother in the opposite direction, facing away from their mother, and pulled him to the rear of the kitchen with one hand, circling them both around behind a food-prep island, which had a big knife block perched on it, while clutching the weight of the little girl with the other. He had no idea how to hold a baby, though Josie was bigger than a baby. At least she wasn’t crying. She wasn’t reacting at all; she was somehow totally calm.
Luke on the other hand was blubbering, tears and snot coating his trembling lip. Aiden got him up against the back wall, behind some tall shelving units and out of sight of what was going on up front – though not out of hearing. “You have to hold her,” he said.
Luke just shook his head, face twisted up with crying.
“Brace up!” Aiden said, using a line their father had used on them many times. He tried to say it like Dad, hoping it would have the same effect on his brother. It seemed to, and he handed the little girl over. She was heavy for Luke, but he took her, and started trying to master his crying.
“Where are you going?” he managed.
“Back for the gun,” Aiden said. “We need it.”
“Don’t,” Luke said.
But there wasn’t more time for babying his brother. Trying not to give himself time to get scared, or even to think about it, Aiden turned, crept to the end of the row of shelving, then out to the end of the island, and peeked out into the open area of the kitchen. He kept just enough of an eye on the bodies grunting and fighting – and sliding around a pool of blood that spread across the floor – to stay clear of them.
Mum, he couldn’t help thinking, though he tried to stop himself, as he moved to where she lay nearby. He knew there was no way she was alive. Dad had taught them about headshots. She’d also been bitten, though he couldn’t think about that, either. He couldn’t afford to think about her at all – he knew he’d fall to pieces. Even so, he could hardly breathe, though his lungs were going a thousand miles an hour, and his heart beat in his throat. He found the gun on the floor ten feet behind her and picked it up, its weight heavy but not unfamiliar. But then he had to go closer. The bodies, scrabbling, violence, hissing, and flailing were impossible to ignore, but he didn’t look, he didn’t look at anything. He just took Mum’s handbag.
And he ran – back to his brother.
Luke started crying again when he saw the bag. Aiden dug around inside until he found two things – the spare magazine for the pistol, and a small cardboard box of fifty bullets. He looked at his brother and said, “With these, you can reload for me.”
Luke nodded his understanding, cheeks glistening.
Putting them back in the bag, Aiden knew he now had to get them out of there. Unfortunately, the only other door he saw, other than the one back out into the canteen, was partially in view of the open part of the kitchen. But there was no choice. “C’mon,” he said, and led the way, still keeping half an eye on what was happening nearby, the horrible wrestling and hissing and grunting, which was at least half out of view now. Finally reaching the door, he grabbed the handle.
It was locked. He rattled it with all his strength.
But there was also a little flip-up window and ledge in the door itself, the kind he thought maybe they passed food trays through. It was big enough. It had to be. He took Josie from his brother, the little girl wide-eyed but still bizarrely calm, and put her on the floor. He grabbed his brother by the waist and helped lift him up toward the slot, which was only at waist height for grown-ups. Luke got it – he wanted to get out of there as much as Aiden did – and pulled with his arms, slithering through the slot and out into the dark prison hallway beyond.
When Aiden saw the top of Luke’s head upright again, he passed through Mum’s bag, then hoisted the little girl and passed her through. Luke took her.
Noise from behind caused him to spin around. Forcing himself to look, he could just see two of the dead gorging on one of the living, who had stopped fighting. The fourth man was pulling himself across the bloody floor, face down – heading toward them, and now in full view. Aiden knew even if he was still living, he wouldn’t be much longer. And he knew something else – that was the man who had killed his mother. Another thought he had to push away somehow.
He dashed back to the shelves, pulled down a gigantic tin of some kind of food, rolled it over, and stood it up against the door. It was enough to climb on, so he could go through the slot backward, legs-first. As he got his legs through, he kept the gun in his right hand in case he had to use it.
He was almost through. And then – he got stuck. At the shoulders. He was too big. They wouldn’t go through.
“Aiden,” he heard behind him. “Come on!”
He wriggled and squeezed and shoved. But he wasn’t going to make it. With the flexibility of youth, he twisted his head around and saw his little brother holding the girl, both of them right behind him. “Go,” he said. “Go on without me.”
Luke started crying again, violently shaking his head no.
Aiden stole a look forward, then breathed deeply and looked back at his brother. “What would Dad say?” Luke didn’t answer. “He’d say we have to protect those who can’t protect themselves. Take care of her!” He nodded at Josie.
Three-quarters paralyzed with fear, Luke nonetheless finally nodded, and started to back into the darkness of the hallway behind them.
Aiden looked forward again and aimed the pistol, steeling himself to fire it. But as he scanned the horror-show scene before him, what he saw was… a set of keys, on a retractable lanyard, attached to the belt of the man crawling toward him. He remembered the man had gotten in by unlocking the outside door. Those keys had to be his chance.
But, behind the man, he could half-see the other two dead eating their way noisily and messily through the flesh of the man they’d taken down. How soon would they finish? Would they notice Aiden and go for him before they were even done? He didn’t know. He only knew he had to overcome his own paralyzing terror at going back in there – going closer to all that. But he had the gun. And Dad’s voice sounded in his head again – the words he’d use whenever the boys hesitated before doing something they’d been told to do.
Kindly do the necessary. They always did, instantly.
Aiden slithered forward and out, dashed over to the island, stood on tip-toe until he could reach the knife block, and pulled one out with his left hand. Then, hyperventilating, he turned, forced himself to creep back to the man on the floor, keeping his gun and his gaze trained on the others. The two ashen-faced, blood-covered dead were gnawing the body before them to the bone, both squatting over it. One faced away. But the other faced right in Aiden’s direction. If it looked up…
Hardly daring to look down, Aiden put the gun on the back of the last man, who had finally stopped moving, grabbed and pulled the keyring with his right hand, cut the thin cord of the lanyard with the knife – and looked up again, eyes peeled with panic. He then laid the knife down as quietly as he could, picked up the gun, and backe
d away to the door. Still facing the room, he looked over his shoulder, got the key in the lock, turned it…
And his head spun forward as he heard a hiss.
The zombie facing him had looked up. It was holding a handful of what looked like organ meat, with more gristle visible in the teeth of its open mouth. Its rheumy eyes somehow burned with a kind of hateful fire. Aiden’s first thought was to try to shoot it. But he was afraid he would miss – he knew he easily could. Dad had taught him to stay mission-focused. What was his mission?
To get out of here. Protect my brother, and the girl.
As he saw the runner leap forward like a dog let off its leash, he spun in place, turned the handle, yanked the door open, darted through, and hauled it closed again. At the same instant he felt the impact of the body hurtling into the other side, vibrating through the handle into his fingers and palm.
He turned and ran into the near darkness, finding Luke and Josie huddling around the corner at the first intersection, fifty feet down the hall. The three orphans moved together deeper into the deserted section of prison. They were safe for now.
But totally on their own.
Family
CentCom – Wandsworth Common
Captain Charlotte Maidstone was also on her own, tear-assing across the open Common in the fading light, big helmet clutched under her arm. She wore her flight suit, MP7 machine pistol in its shoulder rig. She hoped like hell she wasn’t going to have to get it out, before she was even airborne, but she could hear sporadic muted gunfire in the distance, and something that might be shouts, albeit thin and scattered.
She hurtled over a grass hillock, running for her first back-up dragon – one of the two Apache attack helos that were still parked up here awaiting minor maintenance. She wasn’t sure about the fuel or armament states of either, but figured they couldn’t be good. Then again, it didn’t matter. She had to get in the air. She’d known that when she first heard that siren go off again. The orders from the JOC, to get airborne, had only added extra urgency to what was already her mission.
And in this moment, for some reason, and perhaps for the first time, she realized very clearly what her mission had always been – it was about family. She was also self-aware enough to know why. Her feckless father had left when she was little, and her mother had never really been there, lost in an alcoholic haze. Her brother and sister had both left as soon as they’d been old enough to get away.
And Charlotte had done the same.
So she had basically grown up without a biological family.
The Army Air Corps had been her first real family, and her first real home, taking her in and teaching her to fly, in every sense. In her two deployments to Helmand Province, protecting “her boys” on the ground had provided the first great meaning for her life.
And with these thoughts running through her mind, she reached the all-seeing, all-killing, all-powerful prosthesis that allowed her to be this protector for her family – her dragon, the AH-64 Apache Longbow helicopter gunship. She got the back-seat canopy up, poured herself in, fired up the APU, flew through some of the fastest pre-flight checks of her life – though she’d had to do it as a matter of urgency more than once before – and finally got the rotors spinning.
After Afghanistan, and after the world went to hell, she’d found another home, posted long-term to USOC, the Unified Special Operations Command, at Hereford, where she provided flight security and CAS to the super-hero special operators there. That had become her place, her truest home, where her skills and contribution were valued, where she was esteemed and even loved for who she really was. And being valued and loved for who you were was a powerful emotional elixir. Hereford had been the place where she truly belonged.
And that day when she’d flown back there to find the entire base totally and mysteriously depopulated had been one of the most wrenching and painful of her life. To this day, she had no idea where the garrison was – whether they were alive, dead, or neither – and it haunted her still. But that pain had soon been salved by her attachment to Jameson and One Troop, and the privilege of supporting and even saving them on their missions to Dusseldorf and Moscow – and, today, at the doomed Battle of the Gap.
She guessed it was just her great consolation that there always seemed to be someone who needed protecting.
As the engines and rotors screamed up to full power, and the weight came off her wheels, she suddenly and belatedly wondered, Wait – where the hell ARE Jameson and One Troop? She’d received their transmission that they got safely away from the defeat at the fallen ZPW, though they didn’t acknowledge her response. After that, she’d figured it would take them a while to drive back – and then she’d gotten lost in meetings in the JOC and post-flight tasks. It was only now that she realized they hadn’t rolled back in the gates as she’d expected them to. They should definitely be here by now.
Not least because CentCom seemed to be under threat of another outbreak. It had only been the quick, violent, and expert action of the Royal Marines that had kept this place from going down the first time. Now they were needed again.
Plus Charlotte needed her family back.
Where the hell was One Troop?
She switched her long-range joint tactical radio to the Marines’ working channel, knowing the frequency by heart now, and started hailing. Wherever they were, she should be able to gain enough altitude to make commo with them.
Even if she had to fly to the sun.
* * *
Jameson half-tumbled out onto the expensive-looking carpet, and turned to see that theirs was last – all the other elevators had arrived, and already had their doors wedged open. He turned again and moved out onto the main floor.
This level of the building was definitely smaller than the last, narrower in circumference – the whole building tapered to a point at the top, and he figured they were at the highest usable floor. Though he didn’t know for sure, as he hadn’t been the one pressing the buttons on the lift. He’d been busy hailing CentCom on their mission command net, his hopes sinking as their elevation rose, and still no response came back.
Now he ran out to the edge of the floor, pressing himself up against the floor-to-ceiling glass, which not only curved more sharply here than it had on the tenth floor, but curved the opposite direction, inward toward the top. He could also see they were a hell of a lot farther from the ground.
This is like being in the nose-cone of a rocket ship, he thought, laughing at the absurdity of their situation. If only we could achieve ignition and lift off from this doomed planet…
But then he belatedly heard shouting in his ear and felt a rough hand on his shoulder. Turning, he saw Tunnelers everywhere, Marines taking up security positions – and Croucher shouting in his face.
“Squad net, boss!”
Jameson blinked and scanned the Marines’ faces. Every one of them was listening to something he couldn’t hear. He switched channels on his PRR, from the mission command net, to their squad’s working channel.
“—oop, Wyvern Two Zero, how copy? Come in.”
Jameson smiled out loud at the wonderfully familiar voice.
* * *
“Thanks for ringing us up,” Jameson said in Charlotte’s ear. “I’m transmitting you our exact grid coords now. But you kind of can’t miss us.”
Charlotte shook her head inside her big bulbous helmet. To be an Apache pilot or gunner was by definition to be one of the best multi-taskers in human history – having to simultaneously deal with the flight instruments, at least four different radio frequencies, the weapons-targeting computers, the defensive suite’s threat reports, and the cameras and radar – plus watching the ground for muzzle flashes and friendlies, and the air for other aircraft. All of it usually in a combat situation.
Which Charlotte suddenly was in again. Or was she?
As she bantered with Jameson, she was at the same time taking her bird in a swooping criss-cross pattern 200 feet over CentCom, methodically sca
nning the ground for threats. The monocle affixed over her right eye showed her electro-optical and thermal camera views, zooming in basically as far as she liked, while her other eye monitored the ground more broadly for any movement. Part of the 18-month Apache conversion course – which you couldn’t even start without already being a fully qualified and experienced combat helicopter pilot – involved teaching the eyes to operate independently. And what all that training was allowing her to see now was…
Not much. She couldn’t see any dead moving on the ground.
“And Charlotte?”
“Yeah, mate.”
“Faster would be a bit better. We’re all out of building.”
“Copy that, Major.”
Still scanning the ground, Charlotte could see there were a few figures running in the open here and there, but from their movement they were human – and zooming in on them, close enough to see nose pores, verified this. Whatever was going wrong down below in CentCom, it was either minor – maybe a false alarm entirely? – or else it was happening indoors. Where she couldn’t do anything to help anyway.
Or, she thought, is this just a story I’m telling myself?
Because she was definitely in a serious dilemma now. She had been ordered to fly top cover for the base. And this was by no means the first time her support from the air might keep a military installation from being overrun. There was having to rocket their own goddamned hospital at Hereford, and then a lot of precision autocannon work during the first outbreak here. Both times her guns had made the difference. Now, even just her optics and ISR were invaluable.
At the same time… her family needed her. Jameson and his Royal Marines were her last remaining family now – and they were out there in that overrun Hell, trapped, besieged, and facing the end. And waiting for her to come rescue them.
Fuck it, she finally decided.
It was so close, only just across the river in the city center, literally a couple of minutes’ flying time. She could be there and back in twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five with loading up the men. Given all that, she couldn’t bear to abandon them. She was going to go out there and bring her boys home. She just needed a bigger aircraft to do it in.
ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Page 29
