Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  “Helix Actual, this is Central, send status, over.”

  As he was about to speak again, a cracking noise erupted from near the front screen, and Grews spun around and looked straight into the eyes of a frantic, flailing runner as it shoved its way through the gap in the glass and started to haul itself inside. Grews raised his handgun and didn’t hesitate before blowing the creature’s brains back out the window, spraying them on yet another one trying to crawl in behind it. Grews nearly screamed into the radio, but he took a breath and steadied his voice first.

  “I am down inside the hot zone. Aircraft is a total loss. Crew dead and I am in heavy contact. I need immediate extraction. I repeat—”

  “Geolocating you now, Helix, wait one.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Grews aimed the handgun at the second, brain-spattered zombie, which was now pushing past the destroyed one in front, and pulled the trigger. The noise of the gun going off in such an enclosed space made his ears ring yet again, but the result was satisfying enough. The zombie lurched backwards and fell, vanishing from view, leaving another splatter of gore alongside the first.

  “Helix Actual, Central. We have your grid coordinates.”

  “Thank God. Now get me a fucking CSAR bird here ASAP or we won’t be having this conversation in the next few minutes.”

  “Roger that, Helix. We have scrambled a CSAR mission and it should be inbound within a few minutes—”

  “Minutes? Get them here now! There’s a goddamned field full of dead converging my position!”

  “Copy that, Helix. Wait out.”

  Another interval of silence, stretching out even longer.

  Grews crawled over the debris and looked down through the gap in the window. There was no movement down there, and anything that wanted to get in now would have to crawl under the smashed blades and torn metal, and around the two bodies blocking up the hole. He looked up at the open door above him, stood up, and pulled it carefully shut. He hoped to hell there wouldn’t be something crawling on it when the time came to climb out himself, but he would have to risk it. If one of those runners jumped up and came through the opening, he would have almost no time to react. And the thought of one of them inside that tiny space there with him…

  “Helix Actual, Central, be advised: rescue mission is inbound, ETA three minutes, over.”

  Grews huddled down and listened to the moans rising and falling outside. The structure of the helo rocked slightly, and he felt his stomach lurch. How many of them were out there now? How many were trying to crawl under the wreckage to get at him? There was nothing he could do but wait it out, and hope his ride out of there would arrive soon. Very soon.

  For, all around him, his greatest fears approached.

  Now he was truly among the dead.

  Run the Gauntlet

  Kent Downs - Crash Site

  Three minutes was a long time to wait when you were sitting in a downed helicopter, surrounded by the dead, who were angrily pounding on the thin fuselage that was the only thing between you and them. Just inches away from Grews’ face, was a young man who would have been alive a few hours ago. He was dressed in a torn and muddy suit, and had probably been on his way to work when he was attacked and turned. To Grews he looked like one of those young, high-powered arseholes who hadn’t the slightest clue what was going on in the world around him. Still wearing suits, still trying to look smart, with the dead in their billions devouring the planet.

  The young man had probably looked dapper a few hours ago, with his hair combed, and nice white teeth gleaming. Now half his face was missing, and as Grews irritably watched the thing thudding its broken and bloody hand against the window, he wished he could put the gun to the man’s face and silence him, but he knew that doing so would only break yet another window, one that was more easily accessed from the ground outside. In fact, he thought, he was lucky another runner hadn’t come by in the minute or so that he had been hunkered down in the cabin. One of those probably would have had no trouble breaking a window, or pushing through the bodies blocking the way. The young dead man was a slow mover, though, what Grews thought of as the dull ones, and all it was capable of was continually smacking that bloodied stump of a hand against the glass.

  Grews looked at him more closely and noticed that the gaping hole in the man’s face actually had teeth marks in it, and that made him shudder.

  He looked at his watch. Two minutes had passed. Another minute to go, if the rescue turned up as promised.

  Yes, three minutes was definitely a long time to wait when you were in the company of the dead.

  More movement by the broken window, and Grews lifted his handgun and took aim. He had killed four more of them in the last two minutes, and he thought there had to be quite a pile-up going on outside, maybe even enough to block the damned hole up completely if they kept coming. Only one had been a runner, fortunately. The ones that followed were slow, and gave him plenty of time to draw a bead through the hole in the glass, as they started to crawl inside.

  This one was no different, coming arms first, then the head. Another young man, also suited up, and as Grews aimed and fired, he wondered again why these men were wearing suits. Canterbury had become an agricultural center in the ZA, acting as a marshaling yard for the output of all the farming projects that had sprouted up around it, and farmers didn’t get dolled up like this. Another place nearby, maybe?

  And then he finally heard the low thrum of an approaching helicopter, and his heart leapt. They were here, he thought, and he stood up and peered through the intact windows, scanning the sky for a glimpse of his rescuers.

  The thrumming grew louder as the Puma approached, and eventually the huge beast flared in to hover over the crash site.

  “Helix, this is Delta Nine Zero, over.”

  Grews jabbed the button on the radio.

  “Delta Nine Zero, this is Helix. Is it damn good to see you.”

  “We have an issue with your extraction. Your position is completely surrounded, and it’s impossible for us to set down. We need you to make your way to the highest point of that wreckage, and we will lower a line, over.”

  Grews took a deep breath. This was it. He was going out there. From the cockpit, with the dirt and smashed machinery all around, he couldn’t see clearly how many of the dead were around him, but he knew that this could be nasty.

  “Delta Nine Zero. I want to see that line coming down before I climb out of here, and that is a fucking order, over.”

  Silence for a moment.

  “Roger that, Helix, will comply.”

  A moment later he saw a line descending. He checked his gun, making sure it was ready to fire, pushed open that side door – now effectively the roof door – and pulled himself up, pushing off from broken seating.

  He was already outside, and standing up, when he nearly dove back inside in sheer terror. There weren’t just a few dead surrounding the crash site, there were hundreds. They crawled over one another, scrambling to get to the prize inside, but they weren’t looking up at him. They were jammed into the gap under the helo. Several dozen were crammed underneath the wreckage and clawing at one another to get through.

  He stood perfectly still, waiting, the effort to keep his breathing slow and steady almost more than he could bear. But eventually the line came down within reach, and he shoved his arms through the straps and gave the rope a tug.

  It was when he looked back down, just after his feet had lifted into the air, that one of the things struggled out of the crowd below and launched itself at him.

  Grews saw it coming, but could do very little to stop it. He could only watch as the creature climbed out of the pile of writhing bodies, scrambled across them like they were solid ground, climbed up the side of the helicopter, and then leapt into the air.

  The wind swept across his face as the Puma rushed skywards, dragging him with it, while Grews watched, as if in slow motion, the corpse barreling through the air toward him. It reached out,
fingers grasping, its mouth wide and full of broken and jagged teeth covered in black gunk. He felt his trouser leg rip as it tried to latch on, to grab hold of him before he was out of range, but the fabric tore, and it plummeted back toward the ground, landing headfirst out at the edge of the heaving crowd, which Grews could hear roaring even over the noise of the engines thrumming above him.

  Then it was up again, and chasing across the open field, following the Puma’s path even though the bird was climbing quickly. Grews felt several hands grab him from above, and he was unceremoniously yanked inside. He lay there on the metal deck, taking deep breaths for a moment, before sitting up and looking down at his trouser leg. The bottom half had been torn clean away, but that didn’t matter. He was looking for much worse than a ruined uniform.

  But there were no scratch marks, and no blood on his leg, so he collapsed back to the deck, drawing breath, relieved to still be alive.

  Seeing an ICS headset nearby, Grews pulled it onto his head with shaking hands, and caught the tail end of traffic between their pilot up front, and CentCom on the other end.

  “Affirmative, Central. Helix Actual has been recovered. We are inbound to rally point four. Delta Nine Zero out.”

  Fluids

  JFK - Biosciences Lab

  Ten minutes after Park and Sarah got back to the lab from lunch, Lieutenant Commander Walker, CO of the hospital, stuck her head in. “Just want to see how you two are getting on.”

  Sarah was on her back behind a cabinet, re-plumbing the pipe on a water purification system, nearer to where Park needed it. He was sitting at his laptop, as usual.

  “Good timing,” Park said, turning to face the door. “I’m going to need a pretty significant volume of both scintillation fluid, and solvent – toluene, ideally, but benzene or phenol will do. So far, we can’t find any in the lab.”

  “If we do have any, it’ll be down in Stores. Not the kind of thing we use every day. Hang on.”

  Her head disappeared out the hatch again. Two minutes later, a compact man in blue overalls and a ginger crewcut appeared. “Hiya,” he said. “I’m Dietz. Lab tech. You need some solvent? Benzene, that kind of thing?”

  Park nodded, as Sarah climbed out from under the bench, dusting her hands on her thighs.

  “Not the kind of thing we use every day,” Dietz said.

  “We heard that,” Sarah said.

  “Any stocks we have are going to be down in Stores.”

  Sarah restrained herself from saying they’d heard that, too.

  Dietz cocked his head. “How much, you figure?”

  “At least five or ten gallons,” Park said. “Probably all you’ve got, realistically.”

  “Okay, no problem,” Dietz said. “But we’re short-handed today. Hell, who am I kidding, we’re short-handed every day. I could use some help carrying. Or else loading up the cart, if by some miracle the cargo elevator’s working.”

  “Sure,” Park said, hopping off a stool and to his feet.

  “Not so fast,” Sarah said. “You’re expected up top in forty minutes, to meet the British scientists when they land.”

  “No problem,” Dietz said. “We’ll be back before then.”

  Sarah didn’t move. It took her a second of introspection to realize the time wasn’t what she was worried about. She pinned Park with her cagey eye. “You’re also still the most important man in the world. And I like you locked away in this nice, safe lab.”

  He looked a little crestfallen. Maybe he’d been looking forward to the walk. Maybe he didn’t enjoy feeling like he was under house arrest, or in protective custody. As if he were some precious and fragile object, rather than a human being.

  Dietz said, “Don’t even worry. The ship’s totally secure now.” Sarah still hesitated. Dietz lit up, put one finger in the air, said, “Hang on,” and disappeared out the hatch. He returned ten seconds later – with a Remington pump shotgun slung over his shoulder.

  “That put you at ease?” he asked. “’Cause I am gonna need at least one of you if the elevator’s still out.”

  Sarah considered. She could go herself, and probably should. But there was also something to be said for keeping Park in her sight at all times. Screw it, she thought. Looking seriously at him, she said, “Okay. But you stay behind him, and in front of me, at all times. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  * * *

  As the three of them descended ladder after ladder, heading toward the very bottom of the ship, Dietz chatted happily. To Park, he said, “Is that sort of an English accent you got?”

  Sarah realized she had noticed it, too. Park sounded a bit like the expat Hong Kongers she knew back in Toronto, with traces of the British Empire clinging to their speech. But she was pretty sure he wasn’t from there.

  She said, “Dr. Park’s Korean – right?”

  He nodded up in front of her, his head bobbing as he descended. “Korean-American. Not tough to guess, from my last name. But after my PhD, I did a long post-doc at a lab at Cambridge. But then I worked for two years at a biotech in Germany.” He paused while they hit another landing, then resumed descending. “And my parents spoke only Korean at home when I was a kid. So my accent’s kind of a mess.”

  This was a world far beyond the experience of an enlisted sailor – even one with a Medical Laboratory Technician rating, who had joined the Navy and seen the world. “So I guess you must speak German?” he asked.

  “Not really,” Park said. “It’s an old joke that most educated Germans speak better English than most Americans. Anyway, it was only English spoken in the lab. We had a lot of international people – and English, as usual, was the one language everybody had in common.”

  Sarah smiled. “Another global soul – or post-national. I knew a lot of people like you in Toronto.”

  Park shrugged and smiled. “I feel American. Even if I got bullied a lot in school…”

  “Too smart?”

  “Too much of a smart-ass.”

  And with this, they ran out of stairs – they were now as low as they could get without actually lying down in the bilge tanks. As Dietz pushed through a dark hatch, Sarah noticed one of those fire/damage control stations built into the wall just beyond it. Dietz carried on, leading them down a short stretch of empty companionway, maybe forty feet, and then through one last hatch. As they emerged through that, Sarah clocked another stairwell (or “ladder” as the sailors called them) to their left – one that presumably didn’t go where they were coming from – and then a wide open space. And, crossing that in a just a few seconds, they finally plunged into it proper.

  The great, sprawling maze of ship’s Stores.

  * * *

  Nearly a hundred feet above them, Drake was trying to get out of the Flag Bridge, but had been buttonholed by a slightly belligerent Master Chief Petty Officer. Drake outranked the man – every officer outranked every enlisted man – but, then again, nobody ever really outranked a Master Chief.

  Master Chiefs ran the entire Navy – surface vessels, subs, port facilities, SEAL teams. And everyone knew this, including and in particular Drake. So he was listening, for approximately the hundredth time today, to a long story about a set of intractable problems – organizational problems or supply ones or logistical or manpower or mechanical – that were in urgent need of some action by Drake or his senior leadership team to get fixed.

  Drake, his expression sagging, checked his wristwatch, realized he was out of time – and decided this set of problems was going to have to fix itself. Or, at any rate, it was going to have to get fixed by someone other than him. When the Master Chief paused to draw breath, Drake leapt in.

  “Well, Chief,” he said brightly, “You know what Rick said.”

  “What? No. Wait – Rick who?”

  “Rick said: ‘Everybody in Casablanca’s got problems. Maybe yours will work out. Now, if you’ll excuse me…’” And with that, Drake physically pushed by the man, whose barrel chest took some pushing by, and stepped
out of the island into the clean air up above the flight deck. Beneath him, and a little over halfway up the carrier’s kilometer-plus length, he could see colorfully-shirted flight deck crew preparing for aircraft recovery operations. And he could also see a growing knot of spectators milling around the end of the angle deck, waiting for the show.

  There was an aircraft inbound.

  And they didn’t get a ton of visitors here.

  As he lightly descended the outside stairs, Drake wasn’t sure how thrilled he was about the arrival of these ones. Basically, all he knew was that CentCom was fobbing off a team of bioscientists on them to coordinate with Dr. Park. Since Drake had previously ignored their order to leave his sub in Portsmouth, and had more recently declined to follow their instruction that he bring Park back to England where they could get their hands on him, he was afraid this latest move was a power play. Basically, the British command was making sure they maintained some kind of positive control over the research and the vaccine.

  But, then again, he was fair-minded enough to consider that maybe it just made good sense. All of humanity was on the line, on the brink actually, and they needed all the resources they could bring to bear. He was also educated enough to understand that science very rarely progressed on the back of one man. The lone scientific genius was a staple of the popular imagination, but the Einsteins of history were the exception. Big breakthroughs were almost always the result of a team effort – as you could tell from all the joint Nobel prizes, and the thick pages of citations in the backs of research papers and scholarly journals.

  These thoughts were interrupted as Drake hit the flight deck’s “non-skid” surface, and his feet went out from under him.

  “What the fu—?!”

  He caught himself before he went down. Regaining his balance and composure, he squatted down to examine the deck, where he found a thick coating of viscous liquid. Putting two fingers to it and sniffing them, he recognized it as hydraulic fluid. He shook his head and cursed under his breath. The last time this deck had been slick with this stuff, it had caused a three-ton forklift to crash into a gigantic ammo supply point. And it had ended with Drake charging at a burning crate of grenades, and shoving it overboard to prevent the death and destruction of everything and everyone on the entire fucking flight deck.