Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  The body was withered and thin, its skin cracked and dry, and long wispy strands of gray hair stuck out from underneath a cap pulled down tight over the dead man’s head. He wore overalls that had once been blue, but were now covered in dirt and grime, and as Jameson scanned the area around him, he saw signs that this poor soul had been here for a long time.

  In another corner, a pile of empty cans lay rusting, and close by was a sleeping bag, or maybe just a blanket, bundled up. Flies buzzed around the rotted cloth, and jutting out of the man’s right hand was a bread knife with a black stain upon it, while his other hand lay across his stomach. There was a gaping wound in his wrist, long dried up and rotted away. Jameson stared at the man for a few seconds, wondering if that was to be his fate – to bleed to death in this pit, like its previous occupant. It would certainly guarantee that he didn’t come back as one of the dead, if he ended it right here.

  But that wasn’t his way, and never could be. He had survived the apocalypse this far, even though it had been with the help of some of the greatest men he’d ever known, some of whom had just lost their lives in the building above him. He tried to take stock of his situation, to figure out what best to do next. Getting out of there was going to be difficult, perhaps impossible, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to die hiding on top of a lift.

  But up above him, and through the very walls, he could hear banging and moaning. The dead were searching for him, he knew, and he looked up, wondering if at any moment one of them would come plunging down out of the darkness, having jumped into the shaft after him. Surely the fall would cripple anything that did, but if one of them landed on him? Well, if that happened he wouldn’t have to worry about escape plans.

  He looked up again, to the single sliver of light up there, 150 or more feet above. They must have seen him jump, he thought, they must have. But maybe not. The damned things weren’t exactly worried about the consequences of falling, even down an elevator shaft. So, if they had seen him jump, they would have come tumbling after him in their dozens. But they hadn’t. He knew they were mindless, and driven only by instinct, so maybe the minute he had disappeared from sight, they had looked for a different target. Now that the helos were away, he was the only one that remained.

  And then, unexpectedly, he heard radio traffic – and realized it had been there all along, but he hadn’t been listening. A knockback from the battle noise in Canterbury, maybe. He tried to focus on the voices, and finally Eli’s resolved. He attempted to follow the conversation, but it was muffled, and broken with static. The building itself was blocking the transmission – that had to be it. But he did hear Eli attempting to argue with another voice – was it the pilot? Jameson realized his radio was still on the air-mission net. And he could hear Eli shouting across it – demanding that the helos go back.

  “Eli, Jameson, how copy?” he said, his voice weak.

  “Jameson!” came Eli’s response immediately. “Where the fuck are you? And Rotte, Johnson? We saw Elson go down.” His friend’s voice grew quieter, as though he was covering the mic to speak to someone else. “I told you they were still alive!”

  “Johnson and Rotte went down on the stairwell,” replied Jameson, keeping his voice low. The last thing he wanted was to bring the horde down upon himself.

  “This fucking pilot won’t let me come back for you,” said Eli.

  Another voice cut in. “I told you we can’t risk the mission, or risk losing anyone else – or an entire aircraft.”

  “Understood,” replied Jameson.

  “What the hell?” shouted Eli. “You’re just going to let them leave you behind?”

  Jameson sighed. “You can’t get me out of here, buddy. This place is crawling with them.”

  “But…”

  “No. No fucking buts, mate. There’s hundreds in here. Thousands more outside.”

  “Make a run for it, at least.”

  “Yes. I’m going to, but—”

  “We can at least wait around and pick you up if you manage to get out.”

  “No,” came the pilot’s voice. “I’m sorry. But we’re nearly at bingo fuel now. If I turn back and wait while he attempts a break-out, we won’t make it back to the UK.”

  “Then drop me off,” said Eli. “I’ll go back and help him get out, and get back. We’ve done this before.”

  “No,” said Jameson. “You’re not coming back for me. I’ll try and make it out of here, hopefully reach the river, but I’m not risking you or the men, never mind the mission.”

  “And you’re going to get from here to the UK on your own? On foot?”

  “If I have to. We did it once before.”

  “WE. We did it before. But alone?” Left unspoken were Eli’s thoughts on Jameson’s chances of survival on a solo trek across Europe. And his voice was already fading out, as the last helo winged it steadily away toward the English Channel.

  Finally, there was only silence on the channel. Jameson could almost hear the cogs of his friend’s mind spinning, and he wondered now if he should have just kept quiet, and not spoken at all. It would have made it a lot easier.

  * * *

  Just a mile from the building, at the rendezvous point (RVP) pre-agreed with the air mission commander, Captain Charlotte Maidstone, call sign Wyvern Two Zero, listened in on the radio chatter. Her Apache hummed around her, like a protective suit of armor, which is basically what it had been since the first day she sat down in it. She was safe there, and knew it one was thing that would always be there for her. But now, in the drama that was playing out as she listened in, yet another soul was being left behind – abandoned, and left to die alone.

  This mission had been thrown together in a hurry, that much she knew. When she had finally landed at Wattisham Airfield, after the surreal shock of finding Hereford deserted, she’d gone straight to see the duty officer there.

  Barely looking up, he said, “What, you back already?”

  “I’ve been gone eighteen months!”

  “And yet it seems like only yesterday… Anyway, not a moment too soon. Got a mission for you.”

  “What? Where?”

  “Over the water this time. Tool up, and top your tanks. This one’s going to be right at the edge of your combat radius.”

  She’d been half-tempted to tell him that she’d only slept four hours in the last 48, and only in half-hour chunks. But, with no other flight-ready birds out on the deck, it was pretty obvious there was no one else to fly this mission. Everyone else was off fighting the outbreak. And, anyway, she wasn’t in the business of saying no.

  Not when her boys needed her.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve got a gunner for my front seat?”

  “Ha!” The duty officer was already doing something else, before Charlotte finally turned around herself and got to it.

  Within a couple of hours of that conversation, she was back in the air and watching the mad Royal Marines dropped on the roof in the middle of a city of the dead, wondering if they were brave or just suicidal. And now, as the three Pumas headed back in her direction, leaving behind the commanding officer of the Marines, she wondered what was so important about the equipment they had retrieved. This hadn’t been a standard salvage, she guessed that much, but for the damned equipment to suddenly be more important than the men doing the job of getting it rubbed her the wrong way. They were leaving a man behind, to die alone.

  Not on my watch, she thought. Not if I can help it.

  “Jameson,” she said, her voice cutting through the silence that had descended over the channel. “This is Wyvern Two Zero, an Apache with standard armament and, oh, at least two or three minutes’ playtime. I am inbound your position. And I’m going to clear the way for you to get the hell out of there.”

  There was hesitation on the other end of the line. “Negative, Wyvern Two Zero,” replied Jameson. “You’re the armed escort for the air mission. You have to see them home.”

  “I am and I will,” said Charlotte, grinning inside
her helmet as she watched the three Pumas approaching in the distance. They would reach her in less than a minute. “But, oddly enough, they haven’t reached our RVP yet, so I seem to have a bit of time. And anyway it’s also my job to provide CAS to troops in contact. That seems to be you right now.”

  Jameson smiled and shook his head, then looked over at the corpse in the corner opposite him.

  Looks like I won’t be joining you, at least not today.

  “Wyvern Two Zero, what do you have in mind?”

  Open Up and Say Argh

  Target Building - Elevator Shaft

  It occurred to Jameson that if the thunder of bombs landing a hundred yards away during the Canterbury air strikes hadn’t completely screwed up his hearing, then sitting at the bottom of an elevator shaft as an Apache blasted the hell out of the building and pulverized the entire ground floor with rockets and auto-cannon fire certainly would. These thoughts kept him company as he crouched, huddled over the hatch that when opened would allow him to drop down into the elevator car below – and, from there, out into the foyer of the building.

  This was nothing like the cracking of a small-arms infantry engagement. No, this was a dozen or more zipping and thunderously exploding rockets, punctuated by hundreds of high-explosive 30mm rounds from her auto-cannon, all impacting around the entrance to the building, and in some cases, from the sound of it, actually exploding in the lobby. The thunderous roar of breaking glass and disintegrating masonry was deafening, as Wyvern Two Zero, whoever she was, created a massive dead-free zone out in front of the building – and, with luck, maybe even enough of a clear path for Jameson to make a run for it. Unless, he considered as the walls shook around him, she first collapsed the whole structure down on top of him.

  Either way he was getting a fast route out.

  And he wished to hell that he’d asked her to make sure and stop shooting when he ran, because he didn’t think much of his chances of not being hit out in that crashing storm of very expensive steel.

  He heard shrieks as the dead went down in the their dozens, first those outside, scattered around the street and the open grass clearing between the building and the river, and then the ones in the pile-up against the windows, and finally those jammed inside on the ground floor. He wished now that the plan had been to have the Apache out there from the beginning, or at least come on station when the dead had begun to storm the building. Even with the additional noise, surely that would have changed things. But he had barely been consulted in the mission planning.

  The lashing storm outside suddenly abated, but the noise of the explosions rang in his ears for a good few seconds afterward, before the silence itself became deafening.

  “Go – now!” snapped the woman’s voice in his ear. He didn’t know who this pilot was, but right now he knew he had no choice but to trust her. She was all he had.

  He took a deep breath, said a quick prayer to any god that might be listening, and took a regretful glance at all the gear he had just stripped off and dumped in a pile to cut his weight – including the body armor that might have helped protect him from the sea of riled-up dead that he was now about to dive into headfirst. But speed was going to be everything. He pulled the hatch up, glanced down to make sure it was clear below, and dropped down into the elevator.

  As he hit the ground, he drew both of his pistols, one in each hand, and took off instantly, shifting and glancing in all directions as he moved into the destroyed lobby. To his right, one that had survived the holocaust of his fellows by being up above it stumbled down the stairwell, but got no further. Jameson was ready for this, had been psyching himself for the last three minutes as he waited in his dark hole, staring at the long-dead man and swearing, Not me, not me.

  Now the zombie, a fast one by its movement, hit the floor of the lobby and coiled itself to spring, but instead tumbled backward as Jameson’s first round took it in the forehead. This was a shot that would have made him proud under other circumstances, but he didn’t have time to consider it, and was already moving away before his victim hit the floor. He scarcely paused to check the area ahead of him, knowing he had very little time – to exit the building, and get moving across the open space outside. There, he thought, he would stand some chance, if he could stay on his feet. He just had to keep running.

  He crossed the open space between the lift and the main doors, spinning to his left as a zombie that had been hit but not destroyed by Charlotte’s bombardment now reached out with its one remaining arm, from its protected spot behind the reception desk. With all the debris piled around him, transforming the once plush foyer into a complete mess, Jameson wondered how the hell anything had stayed in one piece. He whipped the other handgun around and fired twice at a dead run, the creature falling back into a pile of other shredded bodies. It wasn’t a headshot, but it put his target down, and he wasn’t planning on being around long enough to care if it got back up again.

  Not a pane of glass in the main doors or lobby walls remained. Now all that stood around the entire bottom floor was metal frames with small shards of glass protruding from the edges. As Jameson blasted out the front door, he felt the crunch of broken glass under his feet, but ignored it, his assault boots being one of the few bits of protective kit he hadn’t ditched.

  On the steps out front, three zombies crawled along the ground toward him, with amputated arms and legs and gaping wounds, but he didn’t stop to gawk, taking only one quick glance back. He could hear the shrieking and growling on the stairs growing in volume as the dead on the upper floors rushed down to pursue him, and he took off at a sprint, dodging or leaping the crawling corpses in his path.

  This wasn’t a tactical displacement, or fighting retreat – it was a flat-out sprint, a hair-breadth escape. As Jameson hit the street, boots thudding on the tarmac, he heard a rasping cry from far above, but he didn’t stop to look, even at the thud of a body hitting the ground just feet away, then more on his other side. Nothing distracted him from his objective, which was the river, four hundred endless yards out, but coming up fast.

  He heard the sound of smashing glass behind and above him as more of the nightmare creatures leapt from the upper-floor windows, plummeting down toward him. But all they found was hard pavement, and these desperate and dangerous things would not rise to chase him like the ones now pouring down the stairs and into the lobby. The impact with the ground broke every bone and left them as animated bags of meat, writhing on the ground in frustration – if, Jameson considered, they even felt such a thing.

  * * *

  “Get moving!” yelled Charlotte, willing him to run faster. From her elevated position, hovering over the river, she could see the dead converging from all directions. Many of them were slow-moving, but among them were the runners, and worse – the Foxtrots, moving much faster and more manically than the rest. And this entire zone of the city was now very much awake. She estimated at least five thousand were now stumbling toward the building and the plaza in front of it. She could clearly see, in the next street over, the dead struggling to push their way through the alleyway between buildings.

  There were so many that if the Marine officer running for his life below didn’t get a move on, he soon wouldn’t have the space to move, let alone fight. She pushed her cyclic to the right, spinning the bird to face the alleyway from which the runners were now spilling into the grass clearing. With a flick of her eye, she put her target reticule on the mouth of the alley, and let rip with the auto-cannon again. Her video view of it whited out with rolling explosions, and showers of body parts.

  On open ground now, Jameson forced his body into overdrive, still aiming both handguns as he tore across the grass. Just ahead, several slow-moving ones, which had risen again even after the devastation of the Apache, turned to face him, and began staggering forward. The way ahead was mostly clear, but as Jameson ran, he saw what the pilot was firing at, and realized that this thin strip of open ground to the river wouldn’t be open for very long. Instin
ctively, he slowed, but then accelerated again. The only way out of here was the river. He was the only living thing on the ground in a city of millions, and they were all waking up and coming after him.

  “Run, you muppet!” came the pilot’s voice in his ear.

  Jameson hurtled on, slowing only slightly to take down the ones converging on his path, quick-firing left then right, then barreling forward once more across the open grass toward the river. Hovering there, directly over the water, was his angel of mercy, the Apache and its pilot, who as far as he knew had just disobeyed direct orders to come back and save him. He focused on the sleek helo, using it as a beacon, and tried to pump his exhausted and trembling legs as fast as they would still carry him.

  Halfway across the lawn, with the river now just two hundred yards away, Jameson risked a glance over his shoulder – and immediately wished he hadn’t. There was practically a carpet of bodies littering the ground around him, taken down by the attack helo, many of them still active, though not a threat if he kept moving. But behind him were also at least forty runners and Foxtrots, gaining on him, limbs pistoning and with malignant hatred in their eyes.

  “Do NOT look back,” shouted Charlotte. “Just RUN!”

  Jameson obeyed, not needing to do much calculation to work out that he didn’t have the ammunition to take them all, however quickly he reloaded. His last and only hope was to reach the water before they reached him.

  A hundred yards from the water’s edge, the pilot’s voice sang out again. At that moment, he imagined he could actually feel the coldness of death behind him, and he could definitely hear the rasping, growling voices as they closed in to take him down. As he staggered forward, his last strength beginning to fail, the Apache’s engines revved and it unexpectedly climbed, faster than Jameson thought even it could. One moment it was directly in his path, the next it was a hundred feet off the deck.