ARISEN_Book Fourteen_ENDGAME

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  Pred paused his trigger pull. “What’s a Husky?”

  “That is.” This was Juice coming up around from behind, having finished dealing with the rest of the marauders. He stepped to the bulging hood of the truck and patted it affectionately. “International MXT-MV – Most Extreme Truck, Military Version. The British military adopted it as the Husky. We never did. But it’s the little brother of that same International MaxxPro XL we got at Camp Lemonnier.”

  “Ha,” Pred said. “So like a MaxxPro Mini.”

  “Yeah, basically. Great ride.”

  “Good. Because I think we lost our helo.”

  And with that, a dusty and battered figure limped out the front door of Armoury House, rifle in hand, coughing. Charlotte. “Jesus,” Juice said, trotting over to see if she was okay.

  Pred suddenly remembered he’d forgotten about the dude in the truck, but he did find he didn’t feel like killing anyone else today. Mentally replaying the tape, he realized it was the minigunner who had shot this dude, thereby exposing himself to Juice’s headshot, so this guy had probably switched sides. Hell, he’d just told Pred to shoot him and take his ride. So instead Pred climbed up onto the bed of the truck, reached into his blowout kit for a bandage, and got it on the guy’s shoulder.

  As he did so, Juice came back up with Charlotte, then looked up at him and said, “What the hell were you doing, man – singlehandedly wrestling packs of runners to the ground back there? Look at all that slimy-ass shit on you.”

  Pred did, then laughed. “Good thing I’m immune now.”

  Juice checked his watch. “Maybe.”

  Pred smiled. “Nah, I can feel it. I’m totally immune, dude. I got that immune feeling.” He was suddenly in a great mood, and had a funny notion he would be for a long time to come. But they weren’t out of there yet. He scanned the parade ground around them for threats. But all the marauders were down, and not only was the fourth truck still blocking the front gate, but some of the civilians had taken weapons from the marauders and gone over there to man it. Pred could even hear the MG coming back online.

  “Andrew, he’s dead, calm the fuck down, mate.”

  Pred turned again to see one of the civilians still beating on a dead marauder with a cricket bat. Well, they all probably had a lot of pent-up frustration. He turned again as another figure approached. It was the silver-haired gentleman in the suit, actually brushing mud, or worse, off the brass tip of his expensive-looking umbrella. He looked up and nodded, and Pred could now see he wore oval specs, and was a trim and youthful sixty or seventy – or, hell, maybe even older. Pred was even more amazed this guy had personally led the charge of civilians.

  He touched his helmet. “Thanks, dude. I mean, sir.”

  “Just returning the favor,” the man said, his voice elegant, and clear. Pred didn’t have to ask what that meant – it was that he had chosen to let the civilian group in to safety there in the first place. “Besides, these men simply weren’t in the spirit, were they?”

  Pred squinted. “What spirit is that?”

  “The Spirit of the Blitz, of course.”

  Neither Pred nor Juice had to ask what he meant by that. Juice was looking from the old man to scan the faces of all the other civilians in this courtyard, the ones he’d initially been so annoyed Pred had let in there – but who had just saved their asses for them. “Okay,” he said out loud. “Maybe love for humanity isn’t going to torpedo the survival of humanity. Maybe love for humanity actually kicks ass.”

  Pred squinted down at him. “Wait – what?”

  But Juice was already climbing into the cab and firing up the engine, while rolling down the window. “Don’t worry about it, man. We gotta roll.”

  “Yeah,” Pred said. He looked back to the old man. “Hey, we’re rolling back to a secure military base. There are four vehicles here. We could convoy it.” He could hear Juice grimacing from inside the cab, but not saying anything.

  Richard looked around the courtyard. “No, I’m afraid there are too many of us, even for four lorries. And this is also a secure military base. I think we can ride out the storm here. Especially with the weapons and vehicles.”

  “No doubt,” Pred said. “Hey, you think you can get that other truck out of the way so we can exit?”

  While Richard turned and got some others of his group on the job, Pred went to the edge of the bed and helped Charlotte up into it. “You okay, dude?” he asked.

  She just coughed again as she took a seat, legs hanging over the back. “Lost another bloody helo.”

  “Oh yeah? How many have you lost?”

  “Three. Today.”

  “Damn, dude.”

  “Yeah. Quite.” As the huge truck shuddered forward, coming around and pausing again as the one in the drive pulled out of the way, Charlotte reached into a pocket and pulled out her blue Army Air Corps beret and put it on, her helmet long gone, and coughed again. She sighed and looked up. “And that’s finally it for the Fat Cow. She was a good old bovine.”

  Pred patted her on the head. “Hey, we’re just glad you’re okay. Don’t worry about the Chinook. Those things look like two palm trees fucking a dumpster, anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte said, grimacing over her shoulder. “I heard that one. Anyway, I’m all out of aircraft. I’m just a trunk monkey now.” She pulled the charging handle of her carbine.

  “Good man,” Pred said. “Convoy security.” He looked over to the wounded ex-marauder. “Hey, what’s your name?”

  “Jamie.”

  “Can you shoot?”

  He nodded and fished out an L85 from the truck bed.

  “Don’t shoot me in the ass,” Pred said. He then reached into the turret with both hands, pulled out the body of the head-shot man inside, and tossed it twenty feet away like it was a rag doll. He then climbed into the turret himself and got behind the minigun, as the Husky rumbled forward down the little driveway over what was less a carpet of bodies than a landfill of them. Pred checked the power on the minigun, which didn’t need charging, then looked both ways up and down the street as Pred paused at the gate. There were dead coming, but they were unlikely to get them in this thing, as least once they started moving.

  “MaxxPro Mini!” Juice shouted up at him.

  “Yeah! Just don’t drive it into a damned JOC.”

  “The JOC here’s four stories up, not in a sunken pit. Plus Brady’s gone.”

  “RIP, brother,” Pred said, thumping the roof over the cab as Juice rumbled them out. “Crazy jarhead son of a bitch drove it like he stole it.”

  “He did steal it.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  As they accelerated powerfully down the street to the right, which was also south, Pred saw a faint red light – on a hulking metallic shape. It was Randy, still standing post, and still tracking them. Presumably Gordon was also on station behind them up the block. As they rumbled by, its turret followed their motion, and Pred caught a flash of not just the light – but also the mustache. He shouted down into the cab.

  “Once again Gordon and Shughart don’t make it out.”

  Juice shouted back. “And they go down doing their jobs like bosses. Saving somebody else’s ass.”

  “Yeah. Ours.” Pred remembered Juice’s cryptic comment from a few minutes ago about love for humanity actually kicking ass. But now he got it. And he knew Juice got it, too. “Only love, man! Only love.”

  And then they were tear-assing through the darkened, flame-lit, heaving, overrun streets of London.

  Going a million miles an hour.

  * * *

  Ali and Homer, without the benefit of a MaxxPro Mini, were only going about fifteen miles an hour – which was a pretty good pace for two operators who were exhausted, wounded, bit, and had just survived a three-story dirt dive. But then again, it was hardly the Mogadishu Mile if you hadn’t already fought all night. Having to get out on foot through a hostile city while already beyond exhaustion was the whole point of it.

 
; They were now moving down an intermittently halogen-lit boulevard away from the river, south, on a course back toward CentCom. There were a tiny handful of vehicles left on the shadowed street, but they already knew they’d only have been left here because they wouldn’t start. And they didn’t have time to try anyway.

  They had to keep moving.

  They were switching from rifles to melee weapons to defend themselves, shepherding their few remaining rounds, needing to avoid getting decisively engaged. Homer noticed Ali was shooting both pistol and rifle left-handed.

  “Crushed my right hand in the fall back there,” she said. “Can’t close the fingers on it.”

  Homer fired the last two rounds for his rifle and slung it. “Best I recall, you’ve already got holes in your left bicep and left forearm.”

  “Yeah,” Ali said, drawing her sword left-handed. “That gets any worse and I’ll have to switch back again.”

  There were a lot of dead on and around the street, but it was nothing like the parking deck, so they were able to keep moving. No, now the problem was less being blocked or tackled. Now it was to keep running. Physical exhaustion was catching up with them fast. And then, when they passed the next intersection, more than exhaustion caught up with them.

  A pack of runners was gorging on screaming civilians in a pool of streetlight in the middle of the road to their left, and looked up to see the staggering pair, then locked on and took off after them. Habitually checking for other threats, Ali saw another pack down the road to the right, also turning to come their way. They both picked up their pace and got past the intersection, but it was too late. Both packs fell in behind them, one from either side, angling in. And they were gaining. The two wounded and exhausted operators could simply no longer run at full speed.

  “Well,” Homer said, “What’s it gonna be?”

  Ali didn’t need him to explain their options, of which there were three. One, they could turn and fight – but some dead always drew more, so the odds were good they wouldn’t be facing just two runner packs, not for long. There were also infinite opponents back there to the north, and getting decisively engaged against infinite opponents wasn’t a stellar strategy. It rarely ended well for the finite side.

  Two, they could keep running – but they could both see which way that was going. Resilience and resolve were great, but physical strength was also finite, even for the best-trained and most in-shape Tier-1 operators in the world. They would both collapse long before they made it back to CentCom.

  Three, they could get off the street, and hole up in a building. But then it was October 3–4 1993 all over again – Zulu Black Hawk Down. The one good thing about the Mogadishu Mile was that it at least got you the fuck out of Mogadishu.

  And then… and then a fourth option fell from heaven.

  Ali heard the rotor and engine noise before Homer did – her NVGs were flipped up, but a glance at Homer’s IR strobe somehow told her it was on anyway – and both their radios went at once.

  “Need a lift, citizens?”

  And Ali instantly recognized the voice. They both did. Not her absolute first pick of potential rescuers.

  But she’d take it. They weren’t in a position to be picky.

  Redemption

  CentCom – Biosciences Complex, Labs

  [67 Minutes Ago]

  Inside the Bio labs, at the heart of humanity’s last stab at survival, a lone man waited – Aliyev, the Kazakh. Outside, the battle raged – beyond this large white womb, up against the walls of the beleaguered fortress. It was like being in the belly of the whale. If the whale were thrashing around in a tsunami – one that was going to wipe out the entire world.

  There had been no word from the missions to get the HRIG and other shit Aliyev needed, not that anyone was likely to tell him if there was, or tell him anything for that matter. The fabrication facility was running balls out, churning out doses of vaccine in their tens of thousands. Simon Park, having turned rapidly into quite the little martinet, czar of his own bio-fiefdom, was off riding herd on his white-coated douche platoon.

  And there was absolutely nothing for Oleg Aliyev to do but sit there in the lab and literally watch MZ grow.

  This is bullshit, the Kazakh thought. Bullshit in a hat.

  After his hero’s journey across half the heaving globe, he was supposed to at least be the damned hero. Odysseus killing all those assholes and getting his wife back. Grendel beating the shit out of Beowulf. Luke destroying the Death Star, then kissing his sister. Now here he was, little more than a glorified botanist, staring at mold in a culturing table.

  He was the fucking TruGreen lawn care guy.

  Except without the boots. He’d been barefoot ever since his own boot soles, half-melted in the flaming zombie pathogen grenade extravaganza at his Dacha, had finally come off, nearly dooming him to an early undeath just outside the Bio warehouse. After singing the virtues of Durex-sheaths, or whatever ass-stomping brand of boot he personally wore, Simon had tried to convince him to at least take some footwear off a dead man. But it was too fucking creepy, and Aliyev never left the lab anyway, so he’d just gone around barefoot.

  Looking up from the culturing table, he regarded the empty labs area, and its total absence of anyone else to even talk to – everyone was either in the warehouse, in the fab facility, or else ferrying shit out to the plane. Hadn’t he spent enough time alone in a damned empty lab talking to himself?

  Could have saved myself a very awkward fucking journey and stayed back in the Dacha.

  At least back there he had Scotch. And porn. And Tool.

  Instead of 10,000 Days, now he was listening to, somewhere in the distance, what sounded like an artillery barrage. What the fuck was that? No one told him anything. Nobody was even around to ask.

  He decided that hiding out alone in this clean white room was doing his head in. He needed to get out of there. Get some air. See what the fuck was going on. He stood up, grabbed his Benelli, and cinched up his bug-out bag, which he hadn’t taken off since finding himself in a funky Foxtrot haunted-house lock-in, completely out of shotgun shells.

  He looked across the surface of the desk behind him, at a radio Park had taken off one of the dead British soldiers, presumably because a radio had been another conspicuous absence from their extravagantly lit all-night warehouse electro-rave. Aliyev suddenly remembered how a dying Russian radio had saved his life not long ago, so he picked this one up with its attached headset and shoved the tangle in his pocket. He didn’t know how it worked.

  But I’m a fucking scientist. I’ll figure it out.

  * * *

  He emerged into the wet night air to the distant sounds of whooping and shouting. What the ever-living fuck was that? Evidently some kind of fucked-up post-Apocalyptic rodeo had replaced the artillery barrage. He was still totally clueless.

  But at least now he could see more than a white wall in front of his face, and dishes of growing mold. Out in front of Bio, he found the Hargeisa-vaccine bucket-brigade still hard at work loading the plane, which was at least more exciting. But they were too rushed and focused to pay any attention to him.

  Less expectedly, there was a huge group of soldiers, forming some kind of medieval-ass phalanx in front of the Bio complex, and also in front of the plane, to the accompaniment of the sounds of Armageddon and bull-riding outside the walls. But they also didn’t pay him much attention, as Aliyev slipped around their cordon and out into the dark of the Common.

  It was funny how you could go anywhere you wanted if you looked like you knew what you were doing. Plus carried a fucking shotgun. So he was at least out of the Last Greatest Show on Earth, as he’d come to think of it, that stupid giant circus tent. But now he was getting rained on. Inside, at least he’d been dry. As usual, you never appreciated what you had.

  Or Aliyev didn’t, anyway.

  He could hear the noise of a helicopter from somewhere, hardly even overhead, but low to the ground, out beyond the walls, and he definit
ely couldn’t see it. He thought of his beautiful destroyed Eurocopter, which he had auto-rotated down to safety in Moscow. He had skills, man. He used to have his own adventures. Yeah, it had completely sucked at the time, but it was pretty damned awesome in retrospect, in the anesthetic haze of memory. He remembered reading somewhere that was the funny thing about travel – that there must have been moments when Odysseus, years after his return from the Trojan War, relaxed on a sofa with a glass of wine in his hand and muttered to Penelope, “You know, that was actually a pretty sweet trip.” Anyway, it had at least been his own adventure, and it definitely beat standing out in a field by himself in the fucking rain. Barefoot.

  So much for getting some air.

  He’d have to settle for trying to find out what the hell was going on. And a change of scenery. And getting back the fuck out of the rain. He set off for the handful of lights he could see on the four-story SHQ building up against the prison. But even as he did, he could just make out what looked like a big knot of people exiting it stage left, and disappearing to the north.

  In another few minutes he was walking in the front door himself, shaking off the rain like a wet dog. No one was in evidence. He took the stairs up to the top level, to the JOC, where he’d been once before to help plan the mission to get the HRIG. Back when people listened to him. And he did shit.

  I’m doing stuff, Lori. Things.

  But when he walked in the door of the JOC, not only was there no one inside… the goddamned lights weren’t even on. Was this it? Lights out for the world? Was he the last one out? But as he scanned the darkness and monitor glow, he saw there actually was one person in there – a cute one. That lively British female soldier who had helped plan the mission. She looked like she was gazing back at him from inside a dream, and for some reason he doubted she knew anything about what the hell was going on around here.

  Fuck it. I’ll go up and see for myself.

  He walked across the big room to the stairwell door, and went inside and up, emerging out onto the roof. Back into the rain – just with a better view. But as soon as he got it, he wished he didn’t have it. That was typical, too. But it turned out knowing what the hell was going on was overrated, at least around here. At least tonight.