Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Read online

  A world fallen – under a plague of 7 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…

  First published 2013 by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs

  London, UK

  Copyright © Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs

  The right of Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the authors. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  About the Authors

  GLYNN JAMES, born in Wellingborough, England in 1972, is a bestselling author of dark sci-fi novels. He has an obsession with anything to do with zombies, Cthulhu mythos, and post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and films, all of which began when he started reading HP Lovecraft and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend back when he was eight years old. In addition to co-authoring the bestselling ARISEN books, he is the author of the bestselling DIARY OF THE DISPLACED series. More info on his writing and projects can be found at www.glynnjames.co.uk.

  About the Authors

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS, in addition to co-authoring the ARISEN series with Glynn, wrote the bestselling prequel ARISEN : GENESIS. He is also author of the D-BOYS series of high-concept, high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include D-BOYS, COUNTER-ASSAULT, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming in 2014); as well as the acclaimed existential cyberthrillers THE MANUSCRIPT and PANDORA’S SISTERS, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation). He lives in London and at www.michaelstephenfuchs.com, and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge.

  Notes from the Authors

  Michael

  This is the ARISEN book that nearly beat me. Like all well structured stories, this epic project had a “dark night of the soul” – followed by an “all is lost” moment. And in that moment, I genuinely thought this book was too big, too hard, too complex, too daunting – and that my powers to make it happen were inadequate to the job. I’d seriously lost faith that I could make this story work – every chapter I’d written looked horrifying, and every new one I had yet to write looked impossible. I told Glynn I thought I was going to have to put the whole thing aside, and work on something else for a while, just to try to clear my head. He wondered aloud if we might be zombied out – and perhaps should wind up the series more quickly than we’d intended. For my part, I seriously wondered if we’d simply built a story both too intricate and too sprawling to manage anymore.

  But, somehow, over the next twenty-four hours, instead of walking away from it… I made a decision. I decided that ARISEN was (by far) the best story we had to tell; and, much more importantly, I decided I was going to write this book if I had to do it five words at a time – i.e. even if the magic never came back, and the whole thing remained a complete soul-crushing struggle, fought inch by inch. But, somehow, as soon as I had made that commitment… the magic came back. All those myriad interlocking plot elements started to slot into place… the story problems all became tractable – or even started to look like opportunities… and the writing became fun and thrilling again. (Okay, there were actually about 100 subsequent occasions when it got hard as hell again, and completing the climax made me physically ill and wretchedly exhausted, but that’s not important – the main thing is it never again seemed fatally impossible.)

  In retrospect, I think it was necessary that I pass through this crucible-type stage of the writer’s journey. But to get there, I had to embrace, in my weak and tiny way, the one quality that all special operators have burnt into their souls: RESOLVE. I had to be committed to achieving the mission – no matter what I had to do, no matter what it cost me. Or, as perfectly described by former Navy SEAL and sniper instructor Brandon Webb as the only answer to adversity: “Tough. Deal with it. Adapt and overcome.” With those last three words, you almost can’t lose at life.

  There’s no question in my mind that each of these books has been harder to write than the last. But I’m equally sure that each one has turned out bigger, better, and more thrilling than those that came before. Long may it last. Thanks for sharing the adventure with us. Viva ARISEN.

  ARISEN

  BOOK FIVE

  EXODUS

  GLYNN JAMES &

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

  “But I will kindle a fire in the wall of Rabbah, and it shall devour the palaces thereof, with shouting in the day of battle, with a tempest in the day of the whirlwind.”

  – Amos 1:14

  “And the Egyptians were urgent upon the people, that they might send them out of the land in haste; for they said, We be all dead men.”

  – Exodus, 12.33

  Like A Bad Dream

  Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick gripped his pistol in one increasingly bloodless hand, while he did a magazine count by touch with the other. There still weren’t any more than he’d started out with. And the ones there were didn’t look like lasting, not in any kind of extended engagement.

  He couldn’t even remember what had happened to his primary weapon.

  And then – movement, just a dark shadow-blur, sliding laterally between the trees, maybe a hundred yards out and to the left. He could hardly make it out, except for the fact that it wasn’t human. Something about the way it moved; there could be no mistaking it for a living thing. Even those few frames of smudged outline made that chillingly obvious.

  As Fick squinted into the jumbled, menacing forest, trying to piece together what the hell had happened, and work out where exactly the ever-living fuck everyone was… he clocked more movement, this time at his three o’clock. But by the time he swung his head and pistol in that direction, it had gone again. It remained only as a few pale pixels painted on his peripheral vision, a lighter gray on the dark gray-green of the forest.

  The sun was up there somewhere – but a long way off, and on the other side of a hell of a lot of thick forest canopy.

  Fick pressed his sweat-drenched back up against the base of the thick white-oak tree he had leapt to as the closest decent cover. Then, drawing and exhaling three quick, sharp breaths, he popped his head and gunsight around the edge, and tried to generate some kind of situational or tactical awareness.

  The very first thing he saw settled his fraying nerves a great deal: it was Brady, thirty meters from his position, and doing the exact same thing – poking his head and weapon around from behind a tree. They locked eyes across the dimness of the forest. And then Brady flashed that enormous smile of his, the one that always seemed to say: Isn’t this shit just hilarious? Fick nearly smiled in response.

  Now at least he knew where one of his people was.

  Nobody had fired yet, thank fuck – the expanse of heavily forested glen, all of it in a slight depression, remained silent as the tomb. Or, wait – was that actually just his hearing all messed up? He didn’t dare make any noise to test his theory. But as Fick withdrew
back behind his tree, head on a swivel, breath still shallow and ragged, a rising and falling noise began to grow in volume, like a purring, or growling, but crescendoing indistinctly around him.

  Getting his weight up over his feet, holding his weapon ahead of him one-handed in an unfashionably old-style grip, Fick sidestepped out a few feet from cover, bending at the waist and craning his neck to try to spot the source of the noise. And there it was: one of the big radial engines of the B-17, stuck way up in the goddamned V of a tree – its propeller still spinning, but in some wacky parabolic arc. Fick couldn’t imagine how a disembodied engine could be growing louder, so that probably meant his hearing was still coming back. As he stared at the hypnotic wobble, the propeller validated his theory by coming loose from its mooring with a ferocious bang – and then whanging its way violently and terribly through the dim air.

  Fick’s neck whiplashed like an umpire at Wimbledon as the 12-foot-long, 400-pound, three-bladed propeller buried itself in the exact tree Brady was sheltering behind. Brady launched himself away from there like an electric cat, looking profoundly freaked out – but his posture also poised and ready for anything. The two free blades of the propeller continued to wave and sing for a good five seconds after impact.

  Like some fucked-up giant tuning fork.

  As Fick stood transfixed, Brady swivelled his head, saw Fick, and smiled again. This time, the smile said: Jesus Christ, was THAT close! Brady’s movie-star features were very expressive, and Fick had gotten good at reading his expressions. Everyone who served long together tended to develop high-bandwidth nonverbal comms.

  A voice called out behind him now, and Fick began to turn away – but as he did so, a dark shape, or maybe two of them, rocketed out of the forest, tackled Brady where he stood, still smiling and shaking his head, and carried him out of sight. Fick heard the Marine grunt once, but after that – silence. He crouched down and coiled his muscles to sprint to his aid…

  But then stopped dead, seemingly paralyzed. Somehow he couldn’t make his legs uncoil. At first Fick had the insane thought that it was fear. That somehow he was so terrified by whatever had gotten Brady that he couldn’t move. And there was fear there, sure, plenty of it; but when he looked down he also saw his right leg looked like it had been dipped in blood. He had some terrible gash in his right quadricep – so deep it had severed any nerves that might have told him of the injury. The slash also extended to his left leg, where it became a shallower, less serious wound.

  Fick’s hand moved to his blowout kit for a bandage – but then he heard thrashing from the vicinity where Brady had gone down, and instead he took off at a lopsided gallop. The injury could wait, and his Marine in contact couldn’t.

  He flicked the safety off his pistol and hauled the hammer back as he ran, then depressed the barrel toward the ground, and finally rounded a last tree… and there was nothing. No, not nothing – the leaves on the ground were scattered or crushed, and dark blood stained the forest floor in an uneven pattern. But no Brady. Fick looked up, trying to peer into the thick crush of hardwoods that stretched out beyond vision.

  There was just nothing.

  What in the fucking name of everything holy was that? he thought, swivelling jerkily left, then right, gun held stiffly forward one-handed. They didn’t… take you. They never TOOK you.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  He gave his head one violent shake, willing it to tell him something different. He had to find his people. And he seriously had to get his shit together.

  More noise behind him. Fick followed it along what turned into a trail of aircraft wreckage, strewn across the forest floor. There were twisted and torn aluminum panels and struts, great shredded swaths of fiberglass insulation, and obscure engine parts slick with clear fuel, black oil, or red hydraulic fluid. Fick picked his way through the detritus carefully, like an intruder, pistol held forward at just below horizontal.

  Jesus Christ, he thought to himself. All those death-defying miracles we pulled off to secure that goddamned airfield, and protect this plane. And now it’s all come to this… He was gripped with overwhelming sorrow and regret, despite his long training not to indulge such emotions.

  Whatever noise he had first heard continued to draw him on. He found himself trying very hard to think about anything but what it actually was. That fact alone meant it couldn’t be good.

  Movement, another blur to his right – he spun and snap-fired, two rounds in a quarter-second double-tap. He thought he saw his target go down. The two heavy reports echoed, scattering dozens or maybe hundreds of birds from the canopy of trees overhead, but then quickly faded out, absorbed by all the wood and foliage.

  Fick stayed where he was for a second, just trying to control his breathing.

  Movement to his left this time. He spun in the other direction, tightening his trigger finger – but then eased off. It had disappeared as quickly as he saw it – but that one was simply too big to be a Zulu. There was only thing it could be… and that was Predator. That huge, fearsome, hobbling ex-Delta son of a bitch.

  So Alpha, or some of it, was still out there, somewhere. Moving. Still alive.

  Fick wanted to call out. But somehow he couldn’t make his vocal cords engage.

  Instead he prodded his flesh, which was chilled now from the thorough coating of cold sweat, into movement again. Down along the wreckage trail he went, still following the chilling sounds coming from the end of it. Soon he came in sight of… the entire tail section of the bomber, including the tail-gunner turret. Fick couldn’t immediately see inside of it. He stepped around some more jumbled crash debris, over a tree that had been snapped off at its base, and through a thick covering of ground foliage.

  Now he saw the glass of the turret had been thoroughly spider-webbed, making it opaque. He continued to circle around, finally reaching the point where the tail section had been torn off the mighty B-17 Flying Fortress like a plastic model broken apart by a toddler.

  Pulling aside a heavy interior panel, Fick pushed his way inside the turret.

  And there he was. Reyes.

  If he’d been badly wounded before, he was a goddamned mess now. His right hand held his side arm. But his left was curled around his midsection – keeping his intestines from spilling out into his lap. Blood and viscera coated his lower half, as well as much of the interior of the turret. Fick’s face fell as he instantly assessed that this wasn’t a survivable injury. Reyes gave him a weak smile, somehow overcoming for a moment what must have been soul-scraping pain. Not to mention fear. The hard-ass Angeleno was staring down the barrel of a one-way journey to the other side.

  As the smile drained from his face, Reyes reached out to point his pistol at Fick, who edged away, brow lowering in alarm. But Reyes was only showing him the inside of his right forearm. A big chunk of it was missing. There could be no doubt it had been bitten out. The tooth marks were obvious.

  “Jesus, Reyes,” Fick muttered. “How?”

  Reyes just blinked twice, slowly, his breathing shallow and fluttery. “No idea, Gunny. It was there when I woke up.”

  Fick swallowed something huge and heavy in his throat, as it instantly became obvious what had to be done. Hell, there were two reasons, either sufficient, for taking care of Reyes, for not leaving him like this. The first was that he was dying. The second was that he wasn’t going to die, not properly. As Fick hesitated, a shriek erupted behind him and he spun, pistol already tracking and triggering off a half-dozen rapid-fire rounds. But his target was gone before he could tell if he’d hit it.

  It had flashed by perhaps twenty meters away – but also a full five meters off the fucking ground.

  Now Fick blinked twice himself, hard.

  Foxtrots – but flying? Flying fucking Foxtrots?! What the hell? They jump real high, but they don’t fly – it ain’t possible… This is a like a bad fucking dream.

  As Fick finally dared to turn his back to the forest, as well as to face his mortally wounded Marine, he
heard a new voice. And it sounded like it was in his head. I’m really losing it, he thought – but then realized it was only his radio. Christ, he’d forgotten about his radio. He should have already contacted Alpha and linked in with them, never mind with his own team. He reached up to touch his earpiece, and then the boxy radio in the long pouch on his vest. He twiddled the volume knob up, and started to speak, when the voice came again.

  “Fick, it’s Chesney. Come in, Gunny. Gunny, I need extraction. I need help…”

  Fear gripped the voice, but it was still recognizable. He knew it: the Kid was alive. “Chesney, Fick, just calm down. We’re gonna get you out of th—”

  But then the radio channel blasted with static, and a different voice cut in.

  “Break, break! JFK CIC to Mortem Two, how copy?”

  Holy shit. The voice was faint and staticky, but it was audible – and it sounded like Commander Drake himself. Fick could only figure they must have crashed in some kind of radio reflection zone. Contraction of the troposphere, maybe, something… Then Drake’s voice said something he couldn’t make out. Fick pressed his fingers to his earpiece and squinted off intently into the thicket of trees that surrounded them. “CIC, this is Mortem Two! Say again, you’re coming in broken and distorted. Repeat your last!”

  A burst of static, then something else. Fick pressed the earpiece harder, squinting even more intently off in concentration. “CIC, Mortem Two. REPEAT ALL AFTER ‘ESCAPE’!”

  Fick was desperate now to make out the transmission, to figure out what was happening, to gain some kind of control over his situation. But in doing so, he was getting badly distracted, and he knew it – his situational awareness flagging more with every second, his vision gone long and out of focus. And that’s when it landed on him, its half-rotted face right in his, centimeters away, jagged teeth snapping, mucus and gunk flecking on to him.