ARISEN, Book Fourteen - ENDGAME Read online

  Yeah, a big-ass armored column going 60mph will do that…

  On the other hand, the vehicles, and particularly their turret gunners, might not react real well to a mortar barrage.

  “Fick, Pred – check fire, check fire!”

  “Good copy, wilco.” No more mortar rounds fell after that. “Interrogative – what the hell is going on out there?”

  “Dude – I seriously have no idea.”

  But Pred put his weapon down on the dripping rampart and made himself comfortable. Because, whatever the hell it was, he was damned well going to enjoy the show.

  As he did so – and as the convoy parked itself and opened up with every weapon it had – for some reason he remembered one of those Internet memes from back in the day. It showed a couple of bad-ass Russian mounted-cavalry mothers in beards and fur caps with swords and automatic weapons, galloping ferociously into battle. The thing was, what they were mounted on was… huge grizzly bears.

  The caption on the image read:

  BEAR CAVALRY

  Yeah, you’re pretty much fucked.

  * * *

  Inside SHQ, up in the JOC, Miller stood open-mouthed before Jones’s station, where she had a direct video feed from the Apache orbiting overhead. From this aerial view, it quickly became clear what the drivers of the convoy had in mind. It was, far and away, the most completely mental military maneuver he had ever even heard about.

  “Complete fucking nutters,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Americans,” Jones said.

  “That, too. Put it on the big screen.” By this he meant the biggest screen they had left, after the carnage of the original outbreak. Now everyone in the JOC stood, craned their necks slightly, and stared open-mouthed.

  The entire ops staff watched speechless as the convoy completed its circuit of the complex, at which point it had virtually completely cleared the piles of dead from up against the walls. Then as the vehicles took up position in an arc out at 100m to the north, the massive Mastiff anchoring the center of the line, all hit their lights and horns – and started shooting.

  Miller squinted at the bottom of the screen, then back up, realizing there were actually only eleven vehicles in that arc – one of the Panthers had slipped out and taken up a position right beside their front gates. It had a minigun in its turret, which it was adding to the fire of the main convoy, except from a very different angle. It actually had a bigger job to do, covering its sector alone, and its minigun was firing nonstop. Miller knew it would burn through whatever ammo it had in there pretty quickly that way. In any case, all of the gunners in the convoy were evidently more than skilled enough to avoid hitting one another in the crossfire.

  They weren’t missing the dead much, either.

  There was a little uncharacteristic cheering from ops staff as the convoy methodically dropped all the remaining dead between them and the walls. But then everyone in the JOC went quiet again, watching what came next.

  And the geometry of it was much clearer, looking straight down from the Apache’s aerial view, than it was from the walls. While the careful shooting of the convoy gunners had made a modest ring of piled-up destroyed dead inside their perimeter, now they were making a much, much bigger one on the outside.

  With their lights still on, but the horns no longer honking, the dead were flocking in from the north faster than ever. And now every gun in the convoy was facing outward, and firing nearly nonstop. The dead dropped in droves – though they were also racing at them in even bigger droves. At first the battle swung back and forth – Miller saw a particularly fast, stealthy, or lucky pack of about a dozen runners break through the ring of fire, and leap up on three of the trucks in the center.

  The armored vehicles weren’t vulnerable, but the turret gunners were – the one on the left kept firing point blank at the runners leaping up the front of the truck until they were right in his face, then produced what looked like a short-barreled rifle, and pivoted and shot the last two, well inside the barrel of his machine gun. They tumbled off, and he went back to his mounted weapon. The turret gunner on the right made a different choice, dropping down and buttoning up, letting the gunners on the next truck over deal with the ones swarming on his.

  But then, in the center, Miller realized it wasn’t a turret on top of the Mastiff – just a hatch, and there was a single man sticking out of it. As the runners leapt up toward him, he was engaging them with a pistol. The optics on the Apache were simply remarkable – so much so that Miller thought he could make out that the weapon was a .45. The man fired it dry, reloaded, kept firing – and then the last two were on him, undeterred. And he actually bashed them in the sides of their heads with the empty pistol. Even more remarkably, this worked. Both collapsed, and tumbled ten feet to the dirt.

  And that was the end of that runner pack.

  But as this breakthrough was cleared up, the fight stabilized, and everyone resumed dropping the dead farther out. Moreover, it started to become clear what the strategy was: this time they were precisely putting them down a good fifty meters out, and as a ring of meat there grew, the dead had to climb over it – slowing them down, shifting the momentum to the defenders, and providing more logs for the woodpile. And as that pile kept growing, the fifty meters of open space left more room for its base to grow on. And as hundreds and then a thousand or more living dead climbed up on the piled bodies of the non-living dead, the convoy gunners dropped them, too.

  And the pile grew still higher.

  And then, in the same instant, every one of the vehicles doused their lights. But of course the dead still came – they didn’t forget that quickly. Sometimes it seemed like they never forgot. But in this instance, that seemed to be the intended outcome.

  Because the pile was still growing.

  Even better, unlike the ring of trucks, the pile of bodies was unbroken, with no gaps, and also stretched in a longer and wider arc than the convoy itself, curving around either flank. And it was an arc, a meat wall, now shielding the entire north side of CentCom.

  In a handful of minutes the wall of meat was the height of CentCom’s own walls – fully twenty feet high, though much thicker at its base. Miller figured the convoy gunners must be going through every round they had – and they would have to run out soon. This opinion was quickly validated.

  As one, the guns went silent – which is to say the loud ones, the turret gunners, ceased fire. But the dozens of soldiers sticking out and hanging off with their suppressed personal weapons kept firing – knocking down the smaller numbers of dead, and fewer all the time, those that were still locked on or just interested, and managed to make it all the way to the top of the twenty-foot ring-wall of meat. These also fell down, adding additional inches and feet to the barrier.

  And finally even those stopped coming.

  And out in the dark and falling rain, the convoy just sat.

  Unmoving, and in total silence.

  No one made a sound in the JOC either. You could hear a fart in there. In fact, Miller did hear somebody fart, and shot an annoyed look at the offender. When he looked back to the screen, the video view had gone to thermal, switched by the Apache pilot, now that the scene was dark again. From the heat signatures, Miller could easily make out the trucks, with big heat blobs in their engine blocks, smaller ones on the mounted weapons and the personnel sticking out – and thousands of hot shell casings on the ground. Pretty much everything around that was black. Then the pilot flipped from thermal back to night vision.

  And the view changed dramatically.

  Squinting up at it, Miller could see what lay out to the north of the convoy and the ring of destroyed dead, in the mile between them and the river. The walking dead were still marching toward them, coming in from London, still heading south. But they were no longer climbing over the pile.

  Instead they were going around it. Encountering a wall of nothing but twice-dead meat, which probably had a hell of a death smell to it, and no longer hearing or seeing
anything alive behind it – they were simply flowing around it.

  Which meant they were also flowing around CentCom.

  The base was now shielded by a wall of death, which was doing an absolutely stellar job of shunting the dead around them. Miller realized he was still on the American convoy channel when Jones shoved another headset at him, which he stuck to his free ear. “JOC, go ahead.”

  “JOC, this CentCom Actual, FRAGO follows, priority urgent.” It was Ali’s voice.

  “Send message.”

  “Rebroadcast on all nets: all personnel to cease fire – NOW. And nobody makes A SOUND. Total noise discipline, base-wide. How copy?”

  “Solid copy, wilco.” Miller didn’t think there was anyone still firing from the walls, or anywhere inside the base for that matter. But he moved his hand to transmit the order to everyone in CentCom with a radio. Before he could, though, Ali came back on with the rest of her op order.

  “And that industrial light control system?”

  “Roger.”

  “Kill it. Everything still lit inside the walls. Douse it all.”

  Miller instantly saw the wisdom in this. He completed both taskings at the same time. Within sixty seconds, all of CentCom had gone completely black. And totally silent.

  In the darkened JOC, he looked back up into the glow of the big display on the wall, just in time to see what must be everyone in all those vehicles slip out of doors and hatches, climb over the smaller inner ring of dead, and start moving through the black stillness of no-man’s land, slithering around piles of bodies, unperturbed by the rain falling on their heads and dripping down helmets, ball caps, and rifle barrels.

  The whole way back they were covered by that lone Panther parked outside the gates – its minigun silent now, but with at least four figures leaning out and firing suppressed rifles, taking down any last threats behind the men moving on the ground.

  The headset radio Miller was actually wearing chirped up again, still on the convoy channel, and still that same country-ass American accent. “Yeah, CentCom HQ, we’re out of ammo, pretty much out of fuel – and we’re comin’ in. You wanna open that gate for us now?”

  Miller hit his transmit button. “Roger, wilco.” Then he nudged Jones. “Do it.” He watched from above as the huge timber gate swung open just enough, and just in time, to admit the hundred-strong force of dismounts from the convoy, all of them slithering through in an efficient and fast-moving line – followed by that last vehicle, the Panther, which just had room to slip through.

  Then the gates shut again.

  And just like that – the enemy was destroyed or shunted, massive reinforcements had arrived, and the battle was over.

  The Siege of CentCom had been relieved.

  Cock Garage

  CentCom – JOC

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” Ali said, NVGs still flipped up on her head, rifle hanging by her side, and dripping rainwater on the floor of the JOC. “Where the hell did you guys come from?”

  “From going to and fro over the face of the earth,” the Colonel answered, sounding like the fifty-five-year-old Texan smoker he was. “And walking back and forth upon it.” He put out his hand and Ali took it. “First Sergeant.”

  “Colonel.”

  “You didn’t think we’d miss all the fun at the end of the world, didja?”

  “No. I didn’t suppose you would.”

  Ali had hit the JOC just a few seconds ahead of him, and looked around behind him now to see he had two other guys in tow. One she recognized as Master Sergeant Wheeler, the Charlie team leader. She nodded to him in the near dark. With all of CentCom having been completely blacked out, the only illumination in the JOC was from monitor glow. And right now, ops staff were improvising black-out curtains over the windows to keep even that from leaking out.

  But the blackout, based on Ali’s orders to implement total light and noise discipline, seemed to have worked, as she took the time to verify on her way here. Absolutely nothing was moving out in no-man’s land between CentCom and where the Colonel had parked his caravan of badass, not to mention built a giant meat wall, 150 meters out in an arc to the north.

  London was still being overrun, and hundreds of thousands of dead still migrating south like history’s biggest herd of the world’s dumbest, meanest, and hungriest wildebeests. But they were all simply flowing around CentCom, and passing it by. The dead had forgotten they were there. It was a not-so-minor miracle. Rock on, USOC, Ali thought, impressed with what they’d done, despite herself.

  But this feeling proved to be short-lived.

  Releasing the Colonel’s hand, Ali got her helmet off and rifle unclipped and set both on the nearest flat surface. When she looked back up, he had pulled himself up to his full height, was scanning the room, and speaking in his Colonel Badass voice.

  “Okay – so who the hell’s in charge of this goat rodeo?”

  Ali answered, in her normal speaking voice. “Aside from the fact that you guys have been doing all the rodeoing, you’re actually ranking now.”

  The Colonel looked back down at her. He was about a foot taller than Ali, which was obvious due to him standing right beside her. “Well, who was in charge until we got here?”

  “Me, actually.”

  “Really.” Even in the dim monitor glow, the Colonel’s expression visibly went from amazed to grudgingly impressed – then to having gotten over it and moved on. “You’re relieved. Report back to the USOC component command.”

  “Sir,” Ali said, reaching for her rifle.

  But as she turned, she saw 2Lt Miller standing beside both of them, leaning in toward Ali. “What in hell?” he asked. Both Ali and the Colonel paused to look at him.

  “Take it easy,” Ali said. “The senior officer commands.”

  But Miller looked up at the Colonel, who he had never seen before two minutes ago, and who he clearly didn’t know from Adam. Ali guessed maybe it was just one too many damned sudden and totally unexpected changes of command around this place – it really did keep happening. Maybe it was the total lack of control Miller was feeling. Or maybe it was just the accumulated stress of two years of ZA, and the long weeks of fighting the Battle of Britain, and it had finally got to him.

  But, whatever the cause, Miller lost his shit.

  “No,” he said, actually getting up in the Colonel’s face. “No. This is Ali’s command, and the JOC is her shop. She’s been the one saving all our backsides ever since she got here. I work for her – all of us do. I don’t know who the hell you are. Enough. Just enough.”

  “Miller,” Ali said, gripping his arm.

  The Colonel wasn’t so gentle as that. He jammed his finger in Miller’s chest and said, “You better sit that precious backside of yours the hell down, Lieutenant. Or it’s gonna need saving.”

  Miller didn’t move.

  So the Colonel gave him a vicious shove – and he tumbled backward and directly into Ali, the force of his fall knocking her into a station, hard, and then nearly to the floor.

  “Hey! What kind of dick-lips grab-ass is going on in here?”

  Ali looked up to see… Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick.

  He was already fast-stomping his way across the JOC, then pulling Ali to her feet – after which he instantly moved to take Miller’s place, getting right up in the Colonel’s face himself. Based on this, and on what he said next, Ali guessed he had entered the JOC only in time to see the Colonel deliver that shove, which had inadvertently knocked her down.

  “You touch her again,” Fick said, his voice exactly like Fick’s voice, “and I swear to God I will set you on fire and put you out with a fucking fork.”

  Ah shit, Ali thought, edging away.

  She honestly didn’t know whether Fick couldn’t see the full-bird insignia on the Colonel’s chest in the dim and reflected light. Or if he was just seeing red and didn’t give a shit. Maybe, like Miller, he just didn’t know who the hell this guy was. But Ali was afraid he was about to find out.

>   The Colonel closed four of the six inches between him and Fick, and stared lasers into his eyes. When he spoke, his voice held its own, even up against Fick’s. “You best get the fuck up out of my face – before I sit your ass down, too. Boy.”

  Fick ground his jaw so hard it looked like he was trying to eat his own teeth. “Boy?” he repeated, his voice somehow both a growl and a shout. It was a trick that could usually only be pulled off by drill instructors and drill sergeants. “Boy? Who the fuck are you calling boy? I’ve got a bucketful of balls, a yard of dick, and enough hair on my ass to weave ten Navajo blankets. I will take you to fucking man school.”

  Now the Colonel stuck his finger in Fick’s chest. Ali wasn’t sure how he got it in there. They were almost literally bumping chests. “I just told you to sit your ass down, Sergeant.”

  Fick looked down at the finger. And his voice changed again, this time to dangerously quiet and scary. “And I’m telling you, Colonel…”

  Ah shit, Ali thought. He does see his rank. He just doesn’t care.

  “…you better put that dirty dick-beater back in your pocket. And then shut your cock garage. Before I park my Lamborghini in that bitch.”

  Okay. This is getting out of control fast.

  Not for the first time, Ali gave thanks that knowledge of human anatomy and leverage trumped physical strength and male aggression. She grabbed Fick’s wrist from behind, locked it, then applied pressure to his elbow joint. After that, he had little choice in the matter when she wheeled him around and frog-marched him out of the JOC ahead of her.

  “Hey,” he sputtered. “Hey…”

  “Your command,” Ali called over her shoulder. “Sir.” She didn’t stop until she had Fick outside and fifty feet down the hallway, which was lit with emergency strip lighting. When he turned and looked at her, he didn’t say anything.

  He just rubbed his wrist.