Arisen: Death of Empires

by Glynn James

  Garbage and debris littered the mile-long stretch of road that cut through the small and rural French town – the remnants of a place that had been left to fight the elements alone. Cars were covered in dirt, their windows cracked and grimy. Litter blew along the street, and empty trash cans rattled along the pavement, tossed by the wind. Considering there were no living creatures on the ground for miles around, the place was strangely unquiet.

  But the lone figure still stood there, unmoving.

  It had once been a he, and he’d worn skinny jeans and a t-shirt with Iron Maiden scrawled across the front, above the creepy face of the band’s mascot, grinning wickedly out at anyone left alive to see it. Now the image was faded and stained, and the jeans barely clung to the creature’s thin and withered frame. Weirdest of all, the creature in the shirt now bore a significant resemblance to the creature on the shirt.

  And then, for the first time in a year, that creature shuddered and stirred, the neck and shoulders twisting and turning toward the east, as it focused on an approaching sound. The bones and gristle that still held the long-dead limbs together cracked and popped as the body, almost entirely seized up by now, was prodded into motion.

  With a single clumsy slide of one leg, it turned and craned its neck up to the sky, as the thrum of three mechanical birds roared above it and then soared away. The creature twisted, tracking the machines as they headed off into the distance and then were gone. It took a single stumbling step after them, but then stopped again.

  And it began waiting once more.

  * * *

  In the cockpit of the Apache overhead, Captain Charlotte Maidstone shifted uncomfortably.

  “Origin Six, this is Wyvern Two Zero, how copy?”

  Behind her, the two Puma helos followed in formation. Aboard one of them was the precious medical equipment that CentCom had sent them out here for, and a badly banged-up and under-strength troop of Royal Marines rode in the other. Up front in the gunner’s seat of Charlotte’s Apache was Captain Jameson, commander of One Troop. And he was now snoring quite loudly.

  At least one of us is getting some sleep, thought Charlotte.

  And with that, her radio perked up, CentCom finally responding to her hails. “Wyvern Two Zero, Origin Six, solid copy. Send mission status.”

  “Origin, air mission is in formation and inbound. Ground team is aboard – and mission objective has been recovered and is secure. We are now approx five klicks from the Channel, just seeing the coast coming up now. ETA approx forty mikes.”

  “Great news, and great work, Wyvern Two Zero. Proceed to the southern landing zone, section five. You will be met by a crew to disembark the cargo. Over.”

  Disembark, thought Charlotte. Sounds like they’re pretty damned anxious to take that thing off us and get it into a locked lab. Wonder if they’ve made space for a bunch of knackered pilots and Marines, some of whom lost friends out here…

  But she only said, “Roger that, Origin. Wyvern Out.”

  Charlotte cut the radio and glanced forward and down at her passenger. Jameson had thanked her at least twice before falling asleep, thirty seconds after climbing up into the cockpit, and now he sat with his head tipped to one side, making a noise that almost competed with the thrum of the engine and rotor noise. Charlotte smiled and left him to it. He might later be embarrassed at having dropped off, but he’d be better for the couple hours nod.

  For her part, Charlotte was looking forward to landing, and taking a much-needed break herself. But she suspected she would be given another mission straightaway, even though she was way over her safe quota of flight hours without rest. She’d probably be re-tasked before her engines even cooled down.

  He is a curious one, she thought, this Jameson. He’d come so close to getting taken down, during his run across open ground outside the target building in Dusseldorf, that there had been moments when Charlotte was convinced he wouldn’t make it. But somehow he had stayed on his feet, ahead of the dead, and out of Charlotte’s high-explosive fire lanes.

  The way he was lying now, with his head tilted to the side and back, she could just see the triple line of scars that ran down the side of his face, and she wondered how he’d gotten them. These Marines, from what she heard, had hiked all the way to England from Dusseldorf after the fall – crossing half of Europe on foot, surviving the implosion of France and Belgium, and getting themselves across the Channel in row boats. She would wager the LT had more than his share of harrowing tales to tell. But what she really wanted to know about was the scars.

  As the flight of three helos rocketed away from undead Europe, and soared over the English Channel and toward home, Charlotte heaved a quiet sigh of relief. Even if she ran out of fuel and went down now, at least she’d be near home ground. That was, of course, if home ground hadn’t already been overrun in the last day.

  Nope, not the case, she thought. CentCom is still online, so they must be getting control over the outbreak.

  At least she hoped they were. They had to.

  Forty minutes later, the three birds were roaring over the southern expanses of London. Ahead of them, in the distance, Charlotte could just make out the glinting surface of the River Thames – and, on its opposite shore, the imposing neo-Gothic facade of the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. These stood proudly amidst all the other majestic marble structures and solemn war memorials of Whitehall, all of it seemingly eternal and undying.

  Charlotte shook her head. More than two thousand years ago, this city, then called Londinium, had been one of the most important outposts of the Roman Empire – which, at the time, was the largest empire the world had ever known.

  But, centuries later, a few hundred administrators down there in Whitehall would rule over what, at its height, was the single largest empire in all of human history. Encompassing a quarter of the world’s land mass, and a quarter of its population, the British Empire was the pre-eminent global power for over a hundred years.

  But most of that empire had dissolved or broken away during World War Two. Essentially, Churchill had spent the British Empire defeating Hitler and Nazism.

  And now what remained of that empire was down to one flickering candle – the Capital, London. And, after 2,000 years, it looked possible that it too might actually fall.

  Charlotte could hardly believe it. She refused to believe it.

  But, luckily, distraction soon arrived in the form of CentCom’s Strategic Command Center, coming into view below them, just south of the river. The sprawling complex had been built out of the buildings and stone walls of the former Wandsworth Prison, and still looked exactly like what it once was.

  But at least it was secure.

  Charlotte flipped her radio to ICS, but then remembered Jameson had ditched the helmet she’d stuck on him. So instead she just raised her voice and shouted forward. “Lieutenant!” she said. “This is your wake-up call!”

  Jameson stirred, sat up straight, and rubbed his eyes. Then he located his helmet where he’d dropped it, and put it back on, so they could speak without shouting.

  “Sorry,” he said. “How long was I out?” But then he saw the sprawl of London, stretching out for miles below them in every direction, and cursed. “Damn. I’ve slept through the whole journey?”

  Charlotte laughed. “You have indeed, Lieutenant. And for the record, you snore.”

  “Huh? No I don’t… errr… ma’am”

  “Hah. Whatever you say.”

  As the aircraft approached the prison – its huge, dark and weathered buildings growing larger and grimmer – Jameson noticed plumes of smoke in the distance, way out across London. He tried to work out where they were coming from, but wasn’t used to judging that kind of distance from the air.

  “Can you see that?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I clocked it a while ago. Seems to be near the center of the city. Maybe Soho, or over toward Covent Garden. Can’t tell.”

  The three birds finally slowed as they approached t
he walls of the prison, then banked north, flying over another cluster of old buildings, heading toward the landing zones. Jameson frowned at the riot of containers and mobile office buildings cluttering the landscape of Wandsworth Common. This had once been a beautiful park with open grass and trees, but was now a dirt- and gravel-covered eyesore.

  Two runways cut through the former park, and surrounding that were dozens of parking bays for planes and helos, as well as a large area for armored vehicles and tanks. Much of it was now empty, those vehicles and aircraft having been shoved out and into action in the south, and their absence made the large area of barren land appear even more bleak.

  Near the center of the park, where there had once been a tennis and bowls center, now was a new development that Jameson hadn’t seen the last time he was here. Tall white prefab buildings rose up where the tennis courts used to be, and several rows of stark white mobile offices had been placed in a row next to them.

  “What the hell is all that?” he asked.

  “That would be the new Biosciences Complex,” replied Charlotte. “And the manufacturing plant. They put it all up in the last few weeks.”

  Jameson squinted down, trying to work out its significance. Did it mean good news on the vaccine front? Or were they just prepping for a last stand here – in what was probably the most heavily defended and best protected place left in the world?

  “And what was the old club building is now the quarantine facility,” Charlotte continued. “Which we will get very acquainted with over the next twenty-four hours…”

  “Ah, hell. More quarantine,” said Jameson. “I forgot all about that.”

  Charlotte laughed again.

  “Welcome to the new post-engagement rules,” she said. “Same as the old post-engagement rules…”

  Yet Another Day at the Office

  CentCom Strategic Command, London

  Colonel Robert Mayes sat at the desk in his small office out on the periphery of the main complex, and stared into the empty mug he had filled a moment before. He was overtired, and the nasty excuse for coffee they had been reduced to drinking didn’t even touch the exhaustion, not on any level.

  They used to drink the good stuff, but as with everything, they had finally run out. Now he thought he should probably be grateful they had provisions of any kind. That certainly wasn’t the case for much of the surviving population of London, and as far as he knew there was nowhere in the UK that could grow coffee beans, so whatever was in the stores was it. Of all the things from life before the ZA, Mayes knew he would miss coffee the most.

  His small office was scantily furnished, with a single desk, two chairs facing each other on either side of it, and half a dozen filing cabinets full of reports and ignored notices, most of which were about deployments of units that no longer existed. He doubted he would ever find the time to go through it all, and should probably assign a junior officer to check and clear it, just in case there was something important that could actually still be actioned. But he doubted that would ever happen.

  There were far too many other matters pressing in on him and his staff, and with the war spreading in the south, it was getting worse by the moment. Something had to give, and many tasks that had been a part of daily routine at CentCom now gathered dust, ignored. Somehow a vending-machine inventory was of little importance when faced with ravenous hordes of man-eating zombies beating at your door.

  And that wasn’t the worst of it, though it should have been. At that moment, Colonel Mayes had somewhere in the region of 200,000 military personnel deployed in southern and eastern England, fighting to contain the biggest outbreak in over two years – and the first large incursion from Europe ever to breach Fortress Britain. It was spiraling out of control faster than it could be quelled, and Mayes knew this was because they just couldn’t keep pace with it.

  The new super-fast, infection-spreading zombies were a nightmare that couldn’t be stopped, he was coming to believe. Even with all the UK’s remaining armed forces on the ground, some were still getting through, and striking at vulnerable spots. Refugee camps, sprawling shanty towns, and even the military themselves, all were falling more rapidly than they could react to.

  Damn fast Zs, Mayes thought. If the outbreak had been comprised of the slower, more common walkers then it would have been put down before even a hundred people had been infected. But the things were evolving somehow, and even 200 scientific personnel in the complex nearby couldn’t figure out why the hell it had happened, much less how to stop it.

  This latest version was beyond anything they could have foreseen, or prepared for. These dead killed, but they didn’t stop to enjoy their meal, instead moving on at nightmare speed to the next victim. Worse even than that, they seemed to seek the next nearby concentration of uninfected people, just to spread themselves into the very last corners of the living. A more lethal and dangerous threat couldn’t have been designed.

  Though Mayes guessed this one had been – by evolution.

  He had come into his office to take a call that didn’t come, and then just sat down in exhaustion, and didn’t get back up for ten minutes. It was a great relief just to grab a short time away from the tumult that he could see on the other side of his window across the room. All was chaos there, out in the Joint Operations Center (JOC), and there was little he could do about it. All he could manage to deal with now was the most critical tasks – ones that might save lives, or expend them judiciously in defense of the country, and the last remaining bastion of humanity.

  Mayes knew it wouldn’t be long before he had to go back into the fray, but he was determined to stay for a few more minutes. Just for a little silence. A few minutes to breathe.

  And to rack his brain for possible solutions to the terrible situation they were all in.

  Basically, the outbreaks were moving faster than the troops in the field could maneuver to stop them. Airborne units were landing in towns hit by Romeos or Foxtrots only to find most of the population gone, already stumbling or racing off toward the next village. Incubation time for the disease was dropping, too. And to make it all even worse, many of the dead seemed no longer to be going through the slow phase at all, instead reanimating directly into runners or even more Foxtrot Novembers (FNs).

  For most of his military career, Colonel Mayes had believed the might of Britain would be enough to defend their island home – that they could triumph over anything. But now, in the blink of an eye, it wasn’t working out that way. They had the troops, and certainly had the firepower. But they were getting them where they were needed too slowly, arriving only when the fight was already over.

  They were being run ragged, getting murdered by logistics.

  Mayes sighed out loud, and thought: Maybe what I need to do is move everyone out, and stick them in one damned formation right the way across the country – a single giant skirmish line. It would be a gamble, a last-ditch maneuver. But something had to change.

  Or they would all soon be dead.

  The door to the office opened, and Mayes looked up to see Colonel John Broads, his longtime second-in-command.

  “Didn’t imagine I’d be able to hide in here for very long,” Mayes said.

  Broads smiled and stepped inside. “Sorry, Bob, but you asked to be alerted if and when Grews turned up.”

  Mayes put his cup on the table and sat back in the chair. “And?” He felt pretty sure this would be bad news.

  “He’s in the complex,” Broads said, putting himself down in the other chair. “Down in the short-term billets. He wanted to come straight here, but the medic who examined him said he was exhausted and likely to collapse if he didn’t sleep first.”

  Mayes laughed at that. Everyone was verging on collapse.

  “Medic also said Grews refused quarantine.”

  Mayes frowned at this. “Was he injured?”

  Broad shook his head. “He’s a bit banged up from the helo crash, but the medic found no sign of infection, and his blood test was
clear. They still tried to quarantine him, but apparently the Major ordered them to stand down – said he’s got too much life-or-death work to spend two days in a box.”

  “Don’t we all,” Mayes said, and let it pass. “Give him a couple of hours of rack, but then I want him up here. I need a full debrief from him.” Mayes paused and shifted gears. “What’s the situation with that drug discovery device? The one we had to stretch out into Europe to get.”

  “The Biacore,” Broads said. “Should be hitting the ground now. Bioscience is geared up to get it set up and working, alongside their other lab infrastructure. It’s like an ant nest over there at the moment.”

  “Some good news for once.”

  Finally, Mayes rose from his chair, and the two senior officers went together back into the JOC. The sheer wall of noise hit Mayes as he stepped out toward the raised platform that was his usual spot. He looked up at the massive screens that ringed the room, searching for anything critical that might have changed in the few minutes he had been offline.

  He looked back to Broads. “I think we’re going to have to pull back and make some kind of a stand along a line further north. We’re losing this thing with the current strategy. They keep getting past us.”

  Broads nodded. “There’s no question about that. But if we shift the line north, won’t we hit the same problems? Just closer to London?”

  Mayes considered. “Maybe, but we currently have a lot of deployments along the northern line anyway. If we move all engaged units from the front – fast – the enemy may slow its approach, having nothing right in their faces to follow.”

  “Or they may just head north anyway,” said Broads.

  “Well, that’s inevitable, I think. They’re going to reach the wall at some point, and then we can use the defenses there to wipe them out. I’d hoped infantry and artillery would be enough. But they’re not. And I can’t stop thinking about how every other country in the world fell because the damned things just kept coming.”

  Broads shook his head.