by Glynn James
He wouldn’t hear it. They all knew it already. And nobody had to say anything.
“JFK Combat Control to Mortem One. Mortem One, how copy?”
Handon could hardly hear – the others had started shooting at the advancing horde, which was also moaning and shrieking. He pressed his finger to his earpiece and squinted in concentration.
* * *
Commander Drake sat in one of the swivel chairs in the combat control center, leaning back, radio headset on. It felt good to have taken back their bridge, the whole island in fact. And it had felt particularly nice to kill or capture what had to be most of the rest of the living Zealots. But he quickly realized he had little time for feeling self-satisfied. He had critically urgent things to do. He pressed the transmit button and hailed again – hoping against hope.
“JFK Combat Control to Mortem One. Mortem One, how copy?”
He released the transmit bar. Tapped his finger.
“Mortem One Actual copies, five by five.” Drake sat bolt upright.
“Holy shit! Outstanding. Mortem One, what is your status? Do you have the mission objective? Have you been extracted?”
“That’s affirmative on the objective. But negative on extraction. Grey Goose has splashed down. Repeat, Grey Goose is down. Total loss. Over.”
Drake boggled. They got the vaccine? But our plane has crashed? How? He pressed the transmit button. “What is your intent, Mortem?” There was no answer for a second. Drake thought he could hear resignation in the silence. Not surrender, and not quite defeat. But definitely resignation – to approaching death. Drake began punching at a bank of touch screens, calling up a map, and sliding the display over across North America. “Mortem, how copy?”
“We’re here,” Handon’s distant voice answered. There was firing, explosions, and moaning behind it. “But probably for only another minute or two. Over.”
Drake pulled at the map and zoomed with two fingers, then zoomed out again.
“Handon, listen. You and your people need to get on a boat, and you need to get out onto Lake Michigan. How copy?”
“Copy that. You know where we might find a boat?”
Drake leaned forward, intense. “Handon, the whole leeward side of that island is one big yacht club. Can’t you see it?”
More silence. But this one had a totally different flavor.
* * *
Handon stood up to his full height. The others blazed away around him. Ali had gone dry, and was out front with her wakizashi, spinning and slashing. Homer was down to his SIG 226. Park cowered behind them all, beyond terror. Handon went up on his toes. Sure enough. Just over the hill. Fucking masts.
“Displace!” he hollered. “Everyone on me! Go, go, go!”
Predator didn’t look like he wanted to get up, so Handon joined Juice in hauling him up by his elbows. In seconds, the whole group was tumbling east, over the hill, and toward the edge of the island that faced back toward the city. In seconds they saw it: row after row of smart wooden slat piers stretched out over the water, branching into individual berths for small boats. Most were empty. But at least a dozen vessels were still tied up.
“Which one?!” Ali yelled. “Cabin cruiser?” She held her black blade and sprinted ahead.
“No!” yelled Homer. “The engine will never start! No time to get it running…” That they had no time was obvious from Homer firing over his own shoulder at the nightmarish pursuers who clawed at their heels. “Sailboat!” Homer scanned ahead, assessed the vessels in an instant – then holstered his weapon, put his shoulder down and sprinted ahead in a primal burst of speed, toward his chosen ride. By the time the others were all out on the pier, he had cut (not cast off) one of the two lines, leapt aboard, and was now cutting away the sail cover from the main mast.
Ali leapt aboard to help him. Handon shoved the scientist aboard, then joined the others in pushing out a perimeter to defend the dock. Sprinting corpses streamed down it, reaching them in seconds. They were shot or decapitated, and went in the water to either side, or piled up in front. Handon pulled his .45 and started firing, while he pressed his radio earpiece to hear over the moaning and gunfire.
“This is what you’ve got to do!” Drake was yelling, too – he could hear how frantic it was on the other end. “You need to chart a course and sail north to Beaver Island. It’s nearly at the top end of Lake Michigan. How copy?”
“Copy that!” Handon dropped his mag out, slapped another one in, and resumed firing quickly but evenly. The Foxtrots kept coming. They climbed over the growing pile of those destroyed. They would never stop coming. Handon thought, On any other day, sailing the length of Lake Michigan might sound like a bad idea... “What do we do then?!”
“There’s a small airport on the island. There can’t be too many dead there. By the time you reach it, I hope I’ll have worked out some way to extract you. A helo full of fuel, mid-air refueling then ditch the refueler. Something.”
“C’mon! Board!” This was Homer and Ali, hailing the defenders. While Handon watched, Ali slashed through the last mooring line. The boat began to drift out. Homer was running up the mainsail. The wind of the lake was still blowing hard. They’d have to tack. But there was wind.
“Roger that!” Handon said, walking backward, reloading, and continuing to fire. The others were behind him, climbing aboard. Handon holstered his empty .45 and drew his own short sword. “Top!” Predator bellowed. “Fucking c’mon!”
Handon could sense his radio battery beginning to fade. They’d need that later.
“This is Mortem One Actual,” he said, turning, running for the boat, then jumping five feet of open water onto the moving wooden deck. “Signing off for now…”
* * *
Commander Drake pushed away from the desk. He could hardly believe it, and whistled aloud. He heard steps, and Gunny Fick appeared in the doorway. The two Brits stood behind him. Fick saluted. “Commander. Captain Martin here requests permission to join the damage party onshore. Thinks just because he knows to shut down a nuclear reactor, he can help refloat a beached carrier.”
Drake nodded. Instead of answering, he just stood and walked past the men out onto the forward-facing balcony. Craning his neck, he could see the security perimeter the marines had set up – but not the work parties underneath the overhang of the flight deck, who were assessing damage to the hull – as well as trying to formulate a plan that might get the supercarrier off the sandbar, and back out to sea. Frankly, at this point, Drake wasn’t at all sure it would be possible.
Then again, he thought, I used to think it wasn’t possible for the dead to walk the Earth.
He also never thought this mission would succeed, or that any of the insertion team would survive it. For that matter, he’d never really believed the Kennedy strike group would last this long into the ZA – never mind discover a whole nation of other survivors.
Hope had been beaten to within an inch of its life.
But it wasn’t dead yet.
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Alpha team will return in January 2013 in
ARISEN, BOOK THREE
THREE PARTS DEAD
A world fallen – under a plague of seven billion walking dead
A tiny island nation – the last refuge of the living
One team – of the world's most elite special operators
The dead, these heroes, humanity's last hope, all have...
When the Zombie Apocalypse came, one country had shut down its borders in response to a major terrorist attack. Now Fortress Britain is the last bastion of the living - with 50 million beleaguered survivors facing down a world of 7 billion animated corpses.
And when civilization fell, one international team of supremely elite special operators was being assembled for a nearly impossible mission, deployed out of the SAS barracks at Hereford
. Supremely trained and armed, always the most skilled, resolved, and unstoppable amongst us, now the commandos of Alpha team are humanity's last best hope for survival. Searching through the detritus of fallen Europe, scavenging pharmaceutical labs for clues to a vaccine that might bring humanity back from the brink, now they are tasked with one last desperate operation.
Meanwhile, the Channel Tunnel to France, long ago sealed by demolition, has been breached by a new super-fast mutation of the zombie virus. And one corporal in the UK Security Services, thrown together with a lone Captain in the Royal Corps of Engineers, are all that stand between the settler families of Folkestone and certain undeath. At the same time, an entire tooled-up SEAL team disappears into the dark labyrinth on the other side of the Channel. And as the world's last floating carrier strike group steams into Portsmouth to transport Alpha team to their most lethal mission yet, time is running out for Fortress Britain…
Available now, exclusively from: Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk.
