A few minutes later, Emily removed an MP3 player from her pocket, jammed it into a USB slot on the laptop, and cranked the volume again. The laptop speakers started rattling out some edgier, more electronic-sounding rap-rock. Fick grimaced at first. But he soon found it growing on him. Marines around the room started bobbing their heads. Somebody fist-punched the air.
Sergeant Coulson looked over at Fick. “Hey, Gunny, a cute girl shows up – and your temporary command of this outfit draws to an immediate close.”
Fick stood up and jabbed an index finger in Coulson’s chest. “Hey! I’m still fuckin’ this monkey. She’s just here to take pictures.”
Emily turned around, her whole face lit up with amusement – and feigned shock.
“Don’t worry,” Coulson called across to her. “It probably won’t get any worse than this. Then again, it won’t get a whole lot better, either…”
Emily smiled, shook her head, and turned back to her work. Take my word for it, guys, she thought to herself. I’ve heard much, much worse. And lived through it, too…
And she had.
She knew she was in a safe place now.
* * *
As Sarah traversed more companionway on the lower deck, she soon passed sailors walking alone or in small groups. She nodded at a young ensign, then an enlisted woman, as they went by. Neither seemed to know quite what to make of her; though the latter seemed to want to salute, before stopping herself. But, anyway, seeing these young, sharp, evidently capable people cheered her.
She had been a very long time in the wilderness – so many months in that lonely cabin. It had been precisely its isolation, carefully designed, that had allowed them to survive. But maybe she shouldn’t have been hiding out. Maybe she hadn’t been doing her part to save the world. Or maybe it had been all she could do – just staying alive had been her part.
But she’d never been much of a spectator.
Handon’s original idea had been to post her to the carrier’s NSF, the internal security force. It wasn’t too far from her own field of law enforcement (LE), and while possibly a stretch of her tactical skills, it would have been a good fit, and she knew she could grow to fill it. And evidently they needed people – after their onshore mission had gone wrong at NAS Oceana, and they’d had to conduct a frantic flight through shore bombardment to escape the descending storm of the dead.
But then Handon had a better idea, and a more important job for her.
Ali had been responsible so far for babysitting Dr. Park. But now she had to focus on healing up, as well as the team’s work-up for the Somalia mission. Back in the relative safety of the supercarrier, Park certainly needed less protecting than he had when they were fighting their way across Beaver Island, or parachuting into a giant set-piece naval zombie battle. But he was still the most important man in the world, and there were still rumors of lone Zulus wandering the lower decks – and Handon still needed someone he could trust, absolutely, to keep tabs on him.
He also figured he could count on Sarah to get the scientist whatever he needed to do his work, and basically keep the gears of his research churning. He had a strong impression of her as a capable, get-it-done type of organizer. She’d had to be, just to survive two years into the ZA in a tiny cabin, with two dependents, using only her own wits, skills, and good preparation. Also, while she was new to the carrier, she wasn’t new to being in a uniformed, disciplined service, nor to carrying arms – and using them. Handon knew he could depend on her, both to protect Park, and to get shit done for him.
So she’d been put on the NSF personnel manifest – but detailed as personal security to Dr. Park.
Turning onto the companionway with the hospital on it, she saw he was already there, waiting outside, laptop satchel over shoulder, hands in pockets – looking bright-eyed and ready to work.
That was a good sign.
* * *
When the last to arrive had taken a seat around the table in the briefing room, Commander Drake pushed his arms against its edge, biceps swelling a little beneath the short sleeves of his khaki service uniform, and he cleared his throat lightly.
That’s all it took to get their attention.
After his leadership in the Battle of the JFK – inspired, daring and, as he’d be the first to admit, desperate – after he had miraculously saved the ship and its crew from an assault of ten million undead… well, the officers and men had started to regard Drake as something like a minor deity.
Of course he’d been far from alone in pulling that off. Coulson and Handon had effectively run the fight on the flight deck by themselves. Master Chief Shields and his construction ratings had built the fortifications from behind which they fought. And virtually everyone on board had sweated, bled, and battled through their own terror, not to mention battling through the dead.
But it was a funny thing about command – while Drake couldn’t take all the credit for the victory, he sure as hell would have taken the blame if they’d lost.
Not that there would have been anyone left to blame him. No one who could still speak, at any rate.
And, in what was just one more weird mystery of the ZA, the Captain, the carrier strike group’s actual commanding officer, had disappeared again – completely. It had happened sometime after he led the final charge to clear the flight deck with his conscripted army, wielding firefighting foam, water hoses, and catapulted heavy machinery. Now, no one had the least idea whether he had gone down in that final rush – or, emerging victorious, had simply retired once more to some other hidden cabin deep below decks, never to reappear, perhaps until needed again.
Both of these theories had proponents.
But even if he had still been around, the crew would have voted him off their gigantic floating island in favor of Commander Drake. They followed him now without question.
Drake wore this lightly. Because he knew all too well that they, never mind the rest of humanity, were not nearly out of this hailstorm of giant turds – not yet, and not by a long way. Now, when he spoke to his gathering of senior officers, he spoke levelly and simply, his voice resonant – though perhaps a bit deeper and more gravelly after shouting through much of a two-day battle.
“The good news,” he said, “is that the ship’s been refloated, we’re under way – and quite a lot of us are still breathing air. The bad news, as some of you will have heard through scuttlebutt or your own channels, is that Fortress Britain is breached. While we’ve had our asses hanging out here on the edge of undead America, there’s been some kind of rapid infection in the southeast of England, via the Channel Tunnel."
He paused and scanned the faces around the table. Directly to his right was CSM Handon, looking serene and steely as usual, his rebar-like forearms crossed and motionless before him. Down from him was Captain Abrams – former commander of the sunken destroyer, and now Drake’s acting 2IC… after him, the Kennedy’s Air Boss… then Lieutenant Commander Cole, the CAG… and Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick, acting commander of the MARSOC team. Beside him was Marine Sergeant Brandon “Ice Cube” Coulson, who had commanded in Fick’s absence, after everyone senior to him fell… then LT Campbell from CIC… and finally the Brit, Captain Martin, who was serving as the ship’s Chief Engineer.
This wasn’t the traditional line-up, nor even the traditional room, for a senior officer’s briefing. But some of those original officers were dead now, and others had gone missing. Many of their roles hadn’t been refilled – while other jobs, totally unexpected ones, had opened up. (Director of operations for an organic farm, anyone?) Operational requirements had radically redefined themselves over the last two years of post-civilization, and had carried on doing so right up until today.
So everything was always ad hoc now. Drake pulled whomever he needed, to do whatever needed doing. Every job was mission critical, and naval tradition and protocol were secondary considerations at best. And if other officers on board were upset about being left out, well that was just too fucking bad. O
n the long list of things the survivors didn’t have the luxury of anymore, ego was at or near the top of the list.
“Wait,” LT Campbell said, “Wasn’t the Channel Tunnel supposed to have been collapsed?”
Captain Martin, who had been on the scene when it broke open, blinked heavily. “Collapsed,” he said, “turns out to be a bit of a fluid concept.”
Drake waved this off. “However it happened, the fact is that the dead are in Britain, and things are going sideways on them. And now the outbreak is vectoring up through the country – and directly toward London.”
The silence in the room took on a darker cast with this announcement. Almost as soon as the Kennedy had reached the one safe place left in the world… Britain had started going down beneath the same nightmare flood that had submerged the rest of the entire doomed planet.
Drake continued, his voice quieter. “Accounts differ as to how bad things are. CentCom, after evidently being a little on the slow side to take the threat seriously, are now fighting along a wide front, trying to keep the outbreak contained." He paused, trying to keep judgment off his face. He hadn’t so far developed a hugely positive impression of the British central military command.
Then again, he thought, their country is still standing, and mine isn’t.
"Obviously, their main objective is keeping the dead out of London. Because, if the capital goes down… well, I won’t belabor it. Ultimately, what they need to do is quell the outbreak entirely – either destroy all the dead or drive them back into the sea.” Drake looked up at Martin for confirmation.
The Brit nodded. “Yes, that’s about right. Having a moat the width of the English Channel is one thing. But living in a state of siege upon the land… well, as you all know, no country in the world, in the history of the ZA, has ever done it."
Drake paused and scanned faces before continuing. “Obviously… this impacts the urgency of our own mission.”
While the last nation of the living were fighting for their lives on the land there, the warriors on the water here had to give them something to hold out for.
Abandoned
Britain - Kent Downs
The zipping volley of 2.75-inch rockets from the Apache attack helicopter tore into the front ranks of the advancing figures, vaporizing them at the points of explosion. Then, as each warhead sprayed out dozens of five-inch tungsten darts, the bodies that remained were cut down in concentric and overlapping half-circles out to fifty meters. It was like ripples in a pool, or wheat going down under some enormous scythe wielded by a giant.
It was also a lot like mowing the grass – except that this shit couldn’t keep growing back forever. There were only so many living people in England. So there could only ever be so many living dead ones.
This was small consolation to Captain Charlotte Maidstone, as she zoomed and panned with her helo's chin-mounted camera to assess the impact of her rocket volley. Despite her resolve, despite all her carefully honed professionalism, she couldn’t stop scanning those faces on the ground, thinking about her family. It was ridiculously unlikely, but still…
The flechette rockets were the same type that her commanding officer at USOC, the Colonel, had ordered her to launch into their own hospital on the base at Hereford, to cauterize the terrible outbreak that had threatened to devour everyone who served there. Dead, alive, undead, or indeterminate, all those people she had cut down in that terrible minute had been her real family – her truest brothers and sisters. If she’d somehow white-knuckled it through that, then she could steel herself to get through today.
Anyway, she had no choice. There was damn little resistance holding some parts of this line. And along her assigned segment she was pretty much all that stood between the outbreak and the Capital – the ancient and mighty city of London, which had long been the center of the world, and which was quickly shaping up into the last bastion of humanity. But if anyone could hold this line single handedly, it was Charlotte and her fire-breathing dragon.
“Riding the dragon” – that was how they referred to piloting an Apache AH Mk1 attack helicopter. Totally deadly – and ridiculously complex. It has been said that taking one into battle was “like playing an Xbox, a PlayStation, and a chess Grandmaster simultaneously – whilst riding Disney World’s biggest roller coaster.”
Qualifying to fly one required an 18-month conversion course, just to transition from being a regular old combat helicopter pilot. It required learning to deal simultaneously with the flight instruments, four different radio frequencies, the weapons targeting computers, the defensive suite’s threat reports, the cameras and radar – plus watching the ground for muzzle flashes and friendly units, and the air for other aircraft. You also actually had to teach your eyes to point in different directions – because one of the weapons systems was slaved to your retina.
That was the 30mm electric cannon, which spewed ten high-explosive rounds per second wherever the pilot or gunner looked. This was in addition to the pods of anti-personnel rockets and the laser-guided Hellfire missiles – the shape-charged warheads of which pack a five-million-pound-per-square-inch punch. The aircraft also had an array of day and night cameras providing 127-times magnification, thermal viewing, and all-weather radar.
Then again, like so many things in the ZA, riding the dragon wasn’t what it used to be. There were no more air-to-ground threats that needed to be scanned for or defended against – never mind enemy aircraft, which were a feature only of wars long past. And because Charlotte wasn’t being shot at, she didn’t have to make attack runs. She could simply pick a spot, hover in place, and unload from there – which, if less thrilling, was a hell of a lot easier and safer. And with that much less to attend to, not to mention a military-wide shortage of pilots, she was doing without a gunner in the front seat these days.
It was just her, the legions of advancing dead, and her own morbid thoughts.
And she really was alone here. Right now, on this section of the line, there were no friendlies on the ground – for her to support, to look out for and avoid blowing up, or even just to hear their comforting chatter and matey accents on the radio. She knew the Paras were out there somewhere, fighting hard on both her flanks. But they were too far, her altitude too low, for them to be visible.
No, this was a pure anti-personnel mission, and she was the only personnel assigned to it. One living woman, and one fire-breathing dragon, against maybe ten thousand dead guys.
It was this fact of her aloneness, along with the 127x zoom optics, that was unsettling her mind now. She continued to peer through the camera, via the monocular lens in front of her right eye, trying to get a sense of the effect on target of that last rocket volley. The good news was she had basically destroyed, single handedly, the entire front wave of rampaging dead.
The bad news was that she could already see the next one advancing behind it. Another dark line was coming over the horizon – taking over the damned horizon, actually, making their own mass of rotting bodies into a new and twilit edge of the spinning Earth. England was being overrun in not-so-slow motion, the sceptered isle becoming a floodplain.
And the other bad news was… Charlotte could see their faces. All of them. With the high-powered optics, nothing was opaque or obscure to her. She could dial up the detail to an arbitrary level. She could see nose pores from a mile out. And, still very much against her will and better judgment, she once again found herself scanning faces, both hopeful and terrified of seeing a hairstyle, the familiar curve of a cheek or jawline, a scarf given and forgotten a hundred Christmases ago.
Because, for all she knew, her own father could be down there right now. Maybe her mother, too. Or her brother or sister. This wasn’t really her family’s part of the country. But she had lost touch with everyone, after running away and joining the military, the day of her eighteenth birthday. She knew seeing them down there was vanishingly unlikely.
Then again, vanishing was her family’s specialty.
Her fath
er had gone for good by the time she was ten, and had not made himself very present before that, disappearing for weeks and months at a time. Her mother had been around – but only physically, retreating into days-long alcoholic hazes, numbing the pain of her past bad choices and dwindling future prospects. Even when she was sober, her coldness and psychological distance made it seem as if her soul had long departed her body. And Charlotte’s brother and sister, both older than she, had taken off as soon as they were old enough to support themselves.
Everyone had left her, one at a time.
Until she was finally old enough to leave herself.
Home had just been a place to escape from – and definitely not one to return to. But it didn’t matter now. The first proper home she’d ever known was in the British Army Air Corps, which had taken her in, and taught her to fly – in every sense. It had allowed her to make something of her life.
Later, her family and home had been among the operators and support personnel of USOC, the Unified Special Operations Command, to which she had been detached for the past eighteen months. Her job had been to provide close air support (CAS), casevac security, and if necessary defense of the very base itself.
She had found a place where her skills and contribution were valued, where she was esteemed and loved for who she was – a place where she truly belonged.
But, in the last few days, many of the teams at Hereford had been thrown into the desperate defense of the southeast – trying to reverse or at least stem the terrible outbreak. They said it had come from out of the Channel Tunnel – then rampaged through the county of Kent, and spilled out across the borders into Essex and Sussex. And now it was racing mindlessly, implacably, and seemingly unstoppably toward the Capital.
London.
Maybe they’d gotten complacent, letting themselves start to feel secure in the moated castle that was Fortress Britain. After all, no one had successfully invaded England’s green and pleasant land since the Norman Conquest – back in 1066. Even Hitler’s thousand-year Reich, and the blitzkrieg of his Wehrmacht, hadn’t laid so much as a single tank tread on Her Majesty’s soil. No, they had always been safe there, defending their island home, as the Great Man, Churchill, had put it.
Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon Page 6
