Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  “I’m shutting those doors. You’re all on me. Drop anything that comes at us. I’ll get the left door. Elson gets the right.”

  The others nodded and moved into a crouch, ready to go.

  “On three… two… one.”

  Jameson stood and moved swiftly toward the front of the lobby. Rushing forward, he grabbed one of the heavy doors and shoved, just as Rotte fired a single shot at the stumbling dead man that had been moving toward them. The creature fell back down the steps outside and lay still. Elson grabbed the other door and heaved it shut, and then Jameson flipped the catches. It wouldn’t hold off determined runners for long, but no stumbling, slow zombie would get through. At least not in the next few minutes.

  And they’d closed up shop just in time. Two, then three slow ones turned and began to stagger toward the entrance. But they weren’t the real worry. Beyond the open grass in front, three or four hundred yards out, Jameson could see a dozen, and then two dozen, extremely fast-moving dead burst from between two buildings and start running full-tilt toward them.

  “This is overwatch. They’re here.”

  Jameson knew they needed to stop them, or at least slow them down, somehow.

  “Overwatch, you are weapons-free,” he said. “Everyone else, get your asses moving to the roof and pitch in. I need those things slowed down, but when the birds arrive and the package is away, everyone get the hell off that roof. I want you all loaded up and out of my way by the time I get up there.”

  Then he turned, with the others on his heels, and ran for the stairwell, hitting the bottom at a full sprint and not slowing down.

  “Eli. Please tell me you’re at the roof. Or damn close.” The first flight of stairs flew beneath them, the four Marines barely touching the ground. All the time Jameson scanned for somewhere to hole up, some place to make a stand and fight off the incoming horde. There might be some advantage in holding their ground on the floor that had collapsed, but the area around the stairwell was still intact. And there wasn’t enough time to build a barricade.

  “We’re on… the ninth,” replied Eli, his voice heaving with exertion. “Half a minute and we’ll be up top.”

  “Roger that,” said Jameson, his breathing also heavy as the strain of running the stairs in all his combat kit began to hit him. “Keep going. Clear the stairs. No fucker left behind, you got me? Everyone to the roof.”

  That had to be it, he thought as he labored up another endless flight, leg muscles screaming and lungs burning. There was no place else to hold off the dead but right up at the top. As his group took the third floor, he saw the backs of two other Marines climbing out up above them, and as they ran up toward the fourth, he heard a loud thud below. There was no sound of breaking glass, just a dull thud.

  “Everybody keep moving!” he shouted, as more loud thumps echoed below them. The fifth and sixth floors went by in a flash, at each level the stairs above filling with more Marines. Then the seventh. Only a few more to go – and Jameson presumed, or desperately hoped, that by now Eli was on the roof. And that was when the massive roar of breaking glass resounded up the stairwell from the ground floor.

  “Raven Three, update status, over.”

  “This is Raven Three. We are inbound on short final, ETA one minute. Holy fucking shit,” added the pilot.

  “Yeah,” said Jameson. “We have some company. Raven Three, make sure the mission objective is extracted first. Over.”

  “Roger that. Carrier is out front and moving into position.”

  The noise of thundering feet on the stairs below hit them as they rounded the stairwell to the eighth floor. Just two more flights and they would be out. The noise from below sounded like a crowd roaring and stampeding.

  Jameson stopped at the next landing and turned around, aiming his weapon back down the stairs. Looking down into the gap, he saw the dead were already only three floors below them – and moving much faster than the living. Rotte stopped next to him and also took aim, but the others carried on, stopping only at the very top, then covering back and down. As the breeze blew in from outside, Jameson watched the wave of runners flood up the stairs. He couldn’t allow that mob free rein to climb up here. They were too fast, and if he stood his ground at the exit to the roof, there was every chance they could surge through before the helo even got the cargo away, let alone his team.

  I’m going to have to make a stand right here, he thought – knowing that doing so would probably mean he wasn’t going to get out of the building alive.

  He began to fire.

  * * *

  Out on the roof, Eli waved frantically at the crew chiefs as they leapt out of the helo, not nearly fast enough in his opinion. The Puma was now hovering just feet above the deck, its blades thrumming so loudly that Eli could feel them in his head rather than hear the noise. Everything else was a numb silence.

  The crew chiefs scurried around the giant white box the Marines had just hauled up, and looped heavy canvas strapping all around it, with luck securing the shell for good and keeping all the loose crap inside. They then clipped the strapping onto the lines that dangled from the Puma.

  Eli felt himself growing frantic as the sound of gunfire erupted in the stairwell, and he glanced quickly at the door, where Elson had just appeared. He wavered on the question of going back to join the fight, but decided his best bet for helping them get out was to not be in the way when they came running up. He turned and saw the crew chiefs scrambling back up into the Puma, and the slack in the ropes going out – and then the box, wrapped tight in webbing, finally lifting off. Seconds later it was rocketing skyward and away, and Eli was weak with relief to see the next bird flaring in – one of the two that would carry the Marines away from the hell that was climbing up toward them.

  “Objective away,” he said into his chin mic, hoping Jameson heard him.

  Out along the edges of the roof, twenty Marines were now kneeling and firing down at the ground below – in every direction. And Eli wondered how the hell he was going to get them all off this roof alive.

  Last Stand

  Target Building - Eighth Floor Landing

  The creatures hurled themselves up the stairs with a furious force, and directly at Jameson and the three other Marines left holding the stairwell. They were like nothing he had encountered before. He was used to runners, and had fought them a number of times. Those were fast, but they were still clumsy, and so long as he just overclocked his nerves, he could manage them with little more effort than the slow ones. But these dead bastards pouring up the stairwell toward him now, straight into the teeth of their full-auto fire, weren’t having any problems negotiating the stairs, or one another, in getting to them.

  They were locked on, and wired tight.

  They came in waves, a dozen or so at first, and then more with each wave that followed, clambering over the bodies of the already fallen with a malevolent intensity that Jameson could see clearly in their eyes. In seconds, he had burned through three magazines and was wondering where more were going to come from, while above him he could hear the thrum of the first helicopter as it flared in and then, achingly slowly, dusted off again. Finally he heard the words he had been waiting for.

  “Objective away.”

  The damned machine was finally in the air and sailing far away from there, and he could hear the next helo coming in behind it. And as Jameson leaned hard into his rifle and the next wave of attackers, he stole a glance at the stairs just three feet away from him. They would need to move fast to get out of this one. Right now, he knew from the sounds above him that half his men were piling into their lift, scrambling to get the hell out of the nightmare threatening to subsume them from below.

  Another thirty seconds and his remaining Marines would be making a dash up those last flights of stairs and onto the roof – and then they would have to move quickly enough to get to the helo before the dead did. But watching the inexhaustible masses of them rushing up the stairs directly below him, Jameson wondered
if any escape would even be possible for him, and the other three men still with him.

  There was a heavy crescendoing of rotor and engine noise, and then the call on the radio: “First squad away.” Jameson gunned down the last few in the wave that had nearly reached them. It took all four Marines, concentrating their fire, to hold the flood back, and how the hell they were going to achieve that on the roof, he didn’t know. They would somehow have to get the doors shut behind them.

  He bellowed, “Go, go, go!”

  Rotte, closest to him, took off up the stairs faster than Jameson could follow, and was halfway to the top when the next wave of dead appeared behind them. Jameson leapt up, taking the first flight in just three bounds, then skidded and slammed into the wall, but pushed himself off it and ran for the last section. That doorway was gaping open up there, and Johnson and Elson were still firing down over his head, with two other Marines covering the doorway, when the blurring of violent motion below somehow shifted from the stairs beneath him to the railing above.

  The creature leapt wildly, and impossibly high, somehow coming unscathed through the volley of fire from the Marines, and then snatched at the railing and lashed out at Rotte. The Marine staggered, tripped, and went headfirst down onto the stairs with a bang that Jameson heard even over the roar of the guns and the shrieking of the dead all around him. He tried to swerve to the side, to avoid falling over the now unconscious Marine, but the Foxtrot hauled itself over the railing and pounced, leaping at him even as Johnson turned and was about to gun it down, before he clocked Jameson and checked his fire.

  Jameson slammed into the wall, knocked aside by the force of the lunatic zombie. He staggered backward, feeling his balance leaving him, and then felt the world around him tilt, as the weight of the dead maniac sent him backward, tumbling head over feet down the stairs, to roll out into the corridor of the level below, coming to rest terrifyingly close to the open elevator shaft. He hit the ground hard and felt his grip on his rifle fail as it clattered away from him. The zombie also lost its grip on him and carried on tumbling into the corridor beyond.

  Still at the top of the stairs, Johnson tried to aim for the one that had taken Jameson, but it rolled out of view, so instead he turned and fired down the stairs at those rushing up – but four more lurched over the railing beside him. Jameson could see one land on Rotte and start to clutch and bite, then two more fall on Johnson, knocking him to the ground. But now he had to focus on the half-dozen climbing over each other to get out of the stairwell and at him, while the one that had knocked him over, farther down the corridor, was even then getting to its feet.

  He was boxed in. And the trap was snapping shut.

  All obvious directions of egress were blocked, and his rifle lay ten feet away on the other side of the one that had pulled him down here. For a moment he considered jumping for it, but the creature in the corridor hissed and lunged at him. His right hand flew to his side, and his handgun came out firing in a flash, taking the zombie in the chest and throat and knocking it down. But he knew his side arm wasn’t enough to hold off half of what was closing in on him.

  As he saw the light at the top of the stairs, and the back of Elson with it, both rapidly vanishing as the doors were pulled shut, he glanced around, looking for somewhere, anywhere, to run to. The corridor behind him led to offices, and he could hole up there and try to fight them off, but he hadn’t enough rounds. They would break through in minutes, if not seconds. The other corridor led to a dead end, and no way out.

  And the one he’d shot was getting up now anyway.

  Escape. That word began to recede in meaning for Jameson, who looked now at the open elevator shaft, with seconds left before the dead fell upon him. He had no other choice, and simply shot forward, jamming his handgun into its holster and hoping it would stay put, as he dove headfirst into the shaft, hands flailing in the dark for cables, or struts – anything he could hold on to.

  He tumbled and picked up speed as the blackness swallowed him whole.

  * * *

  On the roof above, Elson sprinted across the gap between the closed doors and the last helo. It hovered near the edge of the building, all its restrained power seeming poised or even desperate to launch itself into the air and to safety. Twenty feet ahead of him, Eli glanced up at the pilot, and wasn’t surprised at the fearful expression on the man’s face, as the four remaining Marines rushed across the rooftop toward salvation. Eli leapt in the side door, rolling and clearing out of the way as quickly as he could, hoping the others would be close behind. He shuffled into a kneeling position and hefted his rifle.

  And then the door to the stairs burst outward, spilling a half-dozen of the insanely fast-moving ones, with more following behind. Elson, at the rear of the column of fleeing Marines, stumbled and nearly went down, but righted himself. He still had twenty feet of open roof to cover when the first zombie fell upon him, grabbing hold and pulling him to the ground. Others poured out of the door as Eli opened fire.

  Another one of the last four Marines dove for the helo as it lifted off. He grabbed the lip of the doorway, and a man inside leaned out to pull him in, but then a dark flash of movement burst from the crowd below and vaulted the gap, latching on to the dangling man and clawing at him. He screamed, and grasped desperately, but the weight of the pawing corpse pulled him free as the helo rose and banked. One moment the man was there, the creature latched on to him, trying to claw its way up to the others inside, and the next the two were falling away, ten feet, then thirty, then a hundred, as the aircraft shot up and away from the building. And Eli watched with horror as the last of his Marines, left behind by the pilots, were now set upon by the dead.

  He turned, and clambered over to the cockpit.

  “We have to turn it around!” he shouted. “Jameson, Rotte, and Johnson are still inside the building, and may be alive.”

  “Negative,” said the pilot. “We’re not going back. It’s too risky.”

  “That’s not a suggestion!” shouted Eli. “That’s an order!”

  The pilot turned from his controls for a moment, and stared Eli in the eyes.

  “You may be in command of your unit now, Sergeant,” he said, his voice low and toneless, “But I outrank you, and this is my air mission.”

  “But…”

  “Not happening,” said the pilot. “We are mission complete.”

  Eli stared at the man who had just sentenced his friends to death, and then looked back at the target building. Inside, as far as he knew, three of the men who had been his best mates since he joined up, many years ago, were now either dead or fighting for their lives. Elson, a man he had known for fifteen years, had already fallen, and soon Jameson, Rotte, and Johnson would be gone. He knew there was no possible way out of that building for just three men. The dead were too fast and they outnumbered the living a hundred or even a thousand to one.

  Godspeed, my brothers.

  Just Hanging Around

  Target Building - Elevator Shaft

  Every muscle in Jameson’s body screamed in protest as he gripped the cables, trying desperately to slow his descent, but still he plummeted too fast down the cold, dank, and pitch black shaft. He knew that in seconds he would hit the roof of the elevator car, which he remembered was all the way down on the ground floor. Ten stories, or would it be nine?

  He squeezed harder, feeling his gloves, which were made for fast-rope descents, heating up and burning. They were protective enough on nylon rope, but on steel cable? He could feel the heat increasing on the palms of his hands, but gradually he began to slow. Dank air rushed past his face as the darkness below still sped rapidly toward him.

  The flow of air slowed as he finally, and painfully, came to a stop and just hung there, breathing raggedly and wrapped around the cable with both hands and both legs. He felt something shift at his waist, and his heart jumped as the handgun popped out of its holster and fell into the darkness below. He let go with one hand and scrambled to catch it, grasp
ing at the air with clutching fingers, but he was too slow. It was gone. But then, barely half a second later, he heard a loud thump as it landed below. He looked down, wishing to hell that he had managed to keep his night-vision goggles on, but they had broken off somewhere during the fight, or subsequent fall.

  But the gun couldn’t have fallen far. It had only dropped for a second, maybe less, and there was no other sound of impact after the first. It had to be close by.

  He eased his grip on the cable and started to slide down, two, three feet, then five, and then finally his boots hit the solid metal roof of the elevator.

  Holy fucking shit, that was close.

  He had slid nearly the entire length of the cable, the full height of the building, and only just stopped five feet from the bottom, seconds before he would have crashed into hard steel.

  He squinted into the darkness and went down on his knees, searching for the handgun. He had another in a holster at his lower back, just for emergencies, and quickly checked that it was still there. It was, but he wanted both weapons. How many pistol magazines did he have? Four in a pouch on his tactical vest, plus one in each gun – if he could find the other in the dark.

  He ran his hands along the roof and found something, but it wasn’t his handgun. He lifted it up, trying to use the tiny sliver of light from the lift shaft above to see what it was: his night-vision goggles, and still mostly intact. He managed to clip them back onto his helmet mount, hoping they would still work, but not expecting much. In that, he was not disappointed. Nothing, just more darkness, except… he switched on the visible-light LED on the side and it glowed for a moment and then went out. A couple of taps and it jumped to life, emitting a tiny glow into the corner of the elevator shaft – where his handgun lay just inches from the edge, threatening to fall into the gap down the side.

  Jameson scanned the tiny area, and felt a surge of claustrophobia as he realized his situation – stuck at the bottom of a 150-foot shaft, surrounded by hundreds, or more likely thousands now, of the dead. He was completely alone for the first time in years. Alone except for – he suddenly learned as he panned the head-mounted light around behind him – a long-dead man whose grisly face stared back at him from the opposite side of the enclosed space.