Where you’d also be eaten by the dead.
“Yeah,” Hackworth said, also leaning over the edge, but looking across at Colley in the blasting rotor wash. “Fuck that.”
“Fuck both of you. Stay if you want.”
This was said in English – but with a heavy French accent, in a voice also female and raspy. It belonged to old Cherie – the kind, gentle, retired, and very elderly woman from north of Paris, who now habitually carried a baseball bat to fight the dead with. She flipped the bat over to Hackworth and, without even pausing, crawled out onto the ladder.
Then, on hands and knees, she started going across.
“Hey, check this out,” Simmonds said, elbowing both Jameson and Croucher. All of them were facing away, instinctively securing the perimeter of their “HLZ.”
“Brill,” Jameson said, turning to look over his shoulder.
“Let’s get her enrolled at CTC,” added Croucher.
But all three faced forward again with a violent start as crashing and shouts erupted from the spot where they first came in, audible even over the rotor noise and engines.
Okay, the best way in, Jameson thought with a heavy sigh, is the damned hole we bashed through the wall.
There had been no way to secure it, and no time. And now it was spewing out panicked civilians, running for their lives.
Followed closely by frenzied dead – running for their dinner.
Love and Duty
CentCom – Med Wing
Royal Marine Younis stirred in his soft hospital bed, brought slowly awake by the warbling sounds of the prison siren outside. He knew where he was, and he knew what had happened – he remembered everything from the mission in Moscow, including the grenade-throwing contest with Spetsnaz Alfa Group in the cobblestoned center of Red Square.
Shrapnel from which had landed him here.
Pulling away the thin blanket and looking down his body, he could see thick bandages wrapped almost all of his left thigh, as well as much of his left upper arm. He felt stiff and woozy, but didn’t really have any pain. The docs knew their business. He felt wonderfully taken care of. Hell, it was fantastic just to be back on home soil, and out of the line of fire. And, despite the injuries, he knew he was damned lucky to be here at all.
Because so many of their number were still back there, either killed in action or else left behind – the latter probably never coming home.
Looking up and blinking in the dim light, Younis saw – on top of all the other pleasantness – there was even a pretty nurse, standing in the open doorway. She had been peering at a tablet, but now turned to speak with someone out of sight. It sounded like they were discussing what to do about the siren that was going off, but no one seemed to be panicking.
Plus the nurse looked good to Younis from every angle. Essence, he thought with a smile. He realized he was now staring – but she hadn’t noticed, and he figured he probably owed it to his fallen friends to look at her for all of them. Also, he concluded, snuggling down under the blanket, but pulling his pillow forward to prop his head up, if I don’t enjoy looking at pretty girls, the zombies win.
Belatedly, he looked around to check out the rest of the hospital ward. He’d been groggy, at best, when they first wheeled him in here. Now he saw there was only one other patient. It was a big and serious man, obviously a soldier despite being in a hospital gown, lying a few beds down, asleep. He had an IV in his arm and quite a lot of sensors monitoring his vitals, but otherwise looked uninjured. Younis found the man, even in profile, strangely compelling – solid jaw covered in black stubble, dramatic forehead, dark wavy hair.
He looked like he’d been round the block – and not only gotten vittled up along the way, but given a lot better than he got. He looked like a sleeping god, dangerous even in repo—
A scream erupted from the doorway – and when Younis’s head snapped forward again, the pretty nurse was being tackled by someone who didn’t look the least bit god-like, but definitely dangerous. The young Marine had seen undead a few times before, and recognized a runner when he saw one, even in surprising circumstances. But before he could react, the nurse had fought free, and scrambled back out the door.
But the runner remained. It looked up at Younis where he lay in bed, lowered down into a crouch – and hissed.
Younis found his strength as adrenaline blasted his system, and he rolled out of bed on the opposite side, instinctively moving to put his body between the typically aggressive dead twat and the helpless man in the other bed – all despite his left leg only having half strength, and even less feeling. He then had about one second to cast around for a weapon of some sort, anything he could improvise to swing or stab with.
But there was nothing.
Even the clipboard hanging on the end of the other man’s bed didn’t have a pen on it, as he found when he snatched it up. But then his second was spent, and the runner hurtling toward him. Younis wound up the clipboard with both hands and bashed the dead guy full in the head, knocking it to the side, if not stunning it. But it gave him enough space and time to shove it to the ground, straddle it, reset his grip on the clipboard and – his injured left arm screaming – bring the edge straight down into its rancid and sore-covered mouth, cleaving the half-rotted head in two.
The runner went limp.
Younis took a desperately needed breath, perhaps the first he’d had since this started – and looked up to see a second runner powering in the door and straight at him. When it hit, its weight bowled him over on his back, and their two bodies slid into the foot of the bed of the unconscious man…
Knocking it back across the smooth floor.
* * *
“We’re heading to Bio. Tell the hospital they’re just going to have to hang tight.”
Sarah looked up into the eyes of Park, and then Aliyev. She had unplugged her radio earpiece and twiddled up the volume on the little speaker so the two of them could follow along with the chatter. Neither of the two scientists reacted to this transmission from Fick – but she could detect relief, in the way their shoulders slumped, and their breathing slowed.
Help was on the way.
But, for Sarah’s part, she was not feeling relieved at all.
Because while help was on its way here, the med wing, also under attack, was on its own. Which meant Handon was on his own – not to mention unconscious, and utterly helpless. Even the thought of it made her nerves fire madly – some kind of fight-or-flight response, the desperate yearning to protect a loved one.
But I can’t protect him. Because I’m not there.
Instead, she was barricaded in a giant warehouse, protecting people who were already perfectly safe – and who were about to be rescued by a large and heavily armed military force, led by the meanest Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant left on Earth, all of them only minutes away.
And Handon might not have minutes, she thought.
He had no one – no one but her.
Sarah got up and moved to the door, putting her ear to it. When she heard nothing outside, she started quietly dismantling the barricade. She felt both Park’s and Aliyev’s eyes on her back. But instead of taking her to task for running out on them, Park just gently said, “How are you feeling?”
Over her shoulder, she said, “What do you mean?”
He pointed at her ass, where she’d injected herself with the Hargeisa vaccine.
“Okay. Maybe a little feverish. I can’t tell.”
“All right,” Park said, just watching her.
Aliyev, on the other hand, didn’t have a relationship with Sarah, and cared too much for his own safety to just roll with being abandoned. “Where the fuck are you going?” he asked.
Sarah couldn’t meet either of their gazes. “You’ll be safe here. And help’s on the way.” As she got the door clear and eased it open, she could feel not just those two, not just the twenty or so other Bio staff, but all of humanity judging her.
She went out anyway.
* *
*
“Oh, you sons of BITCHES…”
Fick cursed as he thumped the bottom of his fist on the heavy wooden door in the prison walls. Now those dumb Limey bastards managed to do what he ordered well over an hour ago – shut and lock this goddamned inside gate. But not only had they locked the barn door after the damned zombie horses had bolted, now Fick desperately needed to go through it himself. It was not only the quickest way out of the prison and into the Common, across which lay the Bio complex, it was also the only route he actually knew offhand.
He’d just flipped through every key on the ring he’d pulled out of that kitchen door – but hadn’t even bothered to try any, as none were remotely the right size or shape. But while he was turned away radioing in to the JOC that his team was going to be delayed, at best, he heard a crack behind him – and turned to see one of the RMPs had produced a crowbar from somewhere, and had now used it to break the lock. One of the heavy double doors swung open.
Fick wasn’t crazy about destroying door-locking mechanisms in the last stages of a zombie apocalypse, and wished the dude had asked him first. Then again, it would at least get them where they needed to go. Fuck it, he thought, hefting his rifle, and darting through the door… where, ten feet beyond, he was confronted by another set of double doors.
He stopped in the near dark and cramped space of the little security station inside the walls, then looked behind him to see the man with the crowbar, standing ready and wide-eyed. And then he remembered what he hadn’t had the breath to tell Wesley a little earlier: that plans were what you had for when things went to shit. They couldn’t tear this whole place down just because there was an outbreak in process, or an invasion, or whatever the hell it was.
They needed to keep their heads.
And Fick had a funny feeling they were going to need that door before this thing was over. Also, Ali had just reported that Park and Aliyev, and at least some of the lab staff, were now safely barricaded in the back of Biosciences. They had time – at least a little.
“Out,” he said, shoving RMPs ahead of him. “One of you chuckleheads take us the next quickest way around.”
* * *
“How does it feel?” Aliyev asked, personally putting the last piece of the barricade back in place after Sarah’s exit.
“How does what feel?” Park asked, moving back to hover protectively over the two culturing tables – and also patting at the USB drive in his pocket. He realized it was slightly more relaxing to have humanity’s salvation stuck in his pocket than to have it stuck in his head – to be that salvation.
“Being a post-Apocalyptic badass,” Aliyev said.
“What?”
“I saw you pulling magazines out of her pouches – like you were Sarah Connor and she was Arnie, in T2.”
Simon smiled at the ridiculousness of this. Aliyev was a very funny fish – perhaps even stranger than he remembered him from their time working together at the biotech in Dusseldorf. But then he recalled that both of them had spent the last two years in total isolation, hiding out in their respective bunkers. It was amazing neither was crazier than they were.
“Believe me,” he said, “she’s both Sarah Connor and the Terminator rolled into one.” Simon wasn’t thrilled that Sarah had left them there. But he trusted her – both that she knew what she was doing, and that she was right when she told them they were safe. He certainly felt safe. The door was barricaded. The dead weren’t pounding on it. He’d definitely been in dodgier situations – repeatedly and recently.
And then the screaming started.
Park looked up to see lab techs running toward him from down the long dark center aisle between the rows of high shelving units. He frantically cast around for the pistol, which Sarah had left him, along with her last spare magazine. Both lay on top of one of the culturing tables, and he snatched the weapon up and stepped out to face up the aisle, where Aliyev already had his shotgun to his shoulder.
These two theoretical non-combatants stood shoulder to shoulder, weapons up, watching white-coated people run straight at them in a panic. And they definitely weren’t running from nothing. The conclusion was instant and obvious.
The dead were in there with them.
Park felt like a Scots clansman waiting for heavy cavalry to run him down – battling to keep his courage and stand his ground, while trying to spot through the bobbing figures for the ones he needed to shoot, not that he had the least confidence in his ability to hit runners, or anything for that matter. He knew how to operate the pistol, and he’d hit one or two in the fight outside in the lab, probably because he’d had no choice, and hadn’t stopped to think too much about it.
But now his hands were trembling and he could hardly see at all – the light in here wasn’t great. Inches to his right, Aliyev was also holding fire, and Park realized they were both stepping slowly backward, in his case unconsciously. But there weren’t more than a few feet of room to retreat.
And then just like that the small sea of lab techs parted.
And there it was – and it wasn’t another runner. Park recognized it from that nightmare flight across Chicago, from the unmistakable way it moved, and from the blood-freezing shriek it now issued, which filled the cavernous space with its otherworldly sound. It was a Foxtrot. And in that frozen moment Park realized:
We’re not in T2. We’re in Alien.
They were trapped in a tightly enclosed space with a vicious, horrible, and slime-dripping monster, one that had every intention of catching and subduing them – but not to kill and eat them. No, it was going to inject them with its seed, and let its offspring grow inside their bodies. And, in this case, soon after being injected, Park and Aliyev would be the offspring.
But at least there was only one of them. Which was a hell of lot better than being in the sequel.
Park started firing at the same time Aliyev did.
Buckshot pellets and blistering hot 9mm rounds filled the aisle, tearing down and through it all the way to the far end of the warehouse. Park wasn’t anything like a trained marksman, never mind an experienced one, but he knew how to use his sights and he knew to keep pulling the trigger. The Foxtrot was heaving and lurching and jogging at them like some kind of marionette with its strings caught in a combine, but the corridor was so long they had a few seconds to work with. It was also relatively narrow, so the Foxtrot was forced to move in something like a straight line – which, coming directly at them as it was, meant it was something a little bit like a static target.
And then one of Aliyev’s shotgun blasts caught it in the chest, which had the effect of squaring it up – and, if only for an instant, nearly stopping it in place.
Park exhaled, lined up his shot on the momentarily frozen head – and squeezed his trigger.
The M9 cracked.
Gunk flew from the side of the Foxtrot’s head.
And the creature dropped to the floor.
Park’s eyes went wide and he whooped, looking over at Aliyev. “Did you see that!? I made a headshot – on a Foxtrot! Even the operators can’t do that! Erm, usually…”
Aliyev partially lowered his weapon – but then brought it back up. “Kind of a glancing headshot, I think.”
Park looked forward again.
The figure was still on the deck – but also still moving, kicking and pirouetting around on its side, sliding on the concrete floor, no doubt lubricated by spilled fluids and black gunk, and spastically thrashing its limbs. Park and Aliyev watched, transfixed. And then they gasped.
As it started pulling itself up off the floor again.
Park looked down to his pistol. The slide was locked back. His head spun to the left – where that spare magazine still lay on the culturing table. Motion drew his gaze forward again. The Foxtrot was up. It jerked and spasmed, one shoulder dropping, moving like something between an epileptic having a bad seizure and the little girl in The Exorcist, about to make its move for the ceiling.
But it didn’t fly upward.
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It also didn’t fly forward, at them.
Instead it jerked, spun, turned – and took off at a lurching sprint down one of the perpendicular rows of shelving, ninety degrees to them, away and out of sight.
And just like that – it was gone.
“What the ever-living fuck?” Aliyev muttered, side-stepping back toward the corner with their tables in it.
Park was already there, snatching up that last magazine. Because whatever the ever-living fuck it was…
That thing was definitely still in there with them.
A Rough Stuff Type Deal
London – The Gherkin, Top Level
Jameson, Croucher, Simmonds, Webb, Sledge, Akers, and the rest of the Royal Marines were also having to pick out hostile targets in the midst of a fleeing mob of panicked civilians – many of whom were also probably infected.
“Why is it suddenly all runners in this ZA?” Croucher yelled.
“Hang about,” Jameson said. “They just got here first.”
Jameson stole a look over his shoulder, at the Tunnelers – a group of civilians who had definitely been in more than their share of harrowing situations – trying to negotiate what might be their worst yet. One by one, they were crawling across an unsteady and shifting ladder into the back of a hovering helo, more than 500 feet above the ground, while men with assault rifles fired at dead charging them from the rear, and other civilians swarmed the area, desperately trying to get away.
And it was then, when Jameson had to grab a civvie by a handful of jacket and shove him back, that he realized: crawling across that ladder probably looked like a pretty good option for guys who were otherwise looking at becoming a hot lunch. He forearm-shoved another young man who tried to break through the Marines’ lines, and shook his head as Croucher actually clothes-lined one, dropping him to the deck, where he lay choking. Twisting his neck, he saw one civilian had broken through, and then another, and Colley, the huge black Tunneler, guarding the others, had to knock both of them to the deck with his axe handle.
ARISEN_Book Thirteen_The Siege Page 32
