Arisen, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead Read online

  The way these two Spetsnaz divers fought, though… Homer had the impression they made a point of training for it.

  He parried a slashing strike with his right-hand blade. It worked, but it exacted a cost – his right forearm was still all messed up from being stabbed through, and the jarring impact made it worse. The grip strength of the forearm was failing. Soon, he wouldn’t even be able to hold that knife, never mind wield it effectively.

  Anyway, it was nearly impossible to take on two skilled opponents in a melee at once, even in the best of circumstances. And these circumstances weren’t good: Homer was thrice wounded, he was without a diving mask. His breathing was in trouble, and his strength flagging, from all the paddling and twisting he had to do to keep from being circled, enveloped, taken from behind, and gutted.

  There was probably only one way this could end, and it looked like it was heading that way fast.

  Homer wasn’t sure whether these guys were toying with him or just being cautious, making sure to take him out without undue risk of being killed or wounded themselves. But Homer didn’t think caution was a big watchword with this particular unit.

  Anyway, his long list of problems and handicaps was of absolutely no consequence. The maximum effective range of an excuse was always zero yards. And SEALs are never out of the fight.

  But he was going to have to gamble again.

  He waited until the two of them spread to their widest interval, to come in and attack him from two sides. Then he waited some more, for them to start closing in. And now he turned and blasted forward for all he was worth, straight at the one on the right, an instant burst of explosive speed, kicking and stroking like Michael Phelps on meth.

  His target hesitated, torn between trying to retreat and getting set to defend himself, and was finally forced to defend. And Homer, like the rabbit running from the fox, had the advantage of better motivation. Desperation, really.

  He also had twice as many knives.

  He whirled, feinted, slashed, and stabbed. In two seconds – which he figured was about all the time he had before the other guy arrived to perforate his liver – the Spetsnaz diver was cut in two places. This didn’t seem to faze him, and he went down fighting, scoring his blade across Homer’s shoulder and cheek. But he only did it at the same time that Homer buried a Kasatka in his throat.

  One down. Now he had a fighting chance.

  Homer pulled the knife free and whirled to face the second threat, who he knew would be right on him.

  A bright blur flashed by his face as he spun.

  And then he saw the second guy kicking and stroking away. For a second, Homer didn’t know what had happened.

  Then the salt water hit the top of his windpipe.

  His gaze darted down – to the cleanly cut end of his own airline, floating free in the water.

  Damn, he thought.

  How did I not see that coming?

  Love in All Directions

  SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse

  Juice moved at a quick jog along the outside wall of the building, the corrugated steel wall off his left elbow violently rattling and banging, with Sergeant Vorster ranging just behind him.

  Occasionally, they had to swerve further toward the interior, when pallets were stacked up against the outside wall. But, so far, they’d found no additional external entrances – or even internal ones that led to external entrances. They continued threading through this maze, sticking as close to the outside wall as possible.

  Juice’s radio went again. The voice on the other end sounded a lot more stressed than last time. “Biltong, CIC. Be advised – you need to exfil that position and get to your extraction point. You need to leave NOW and RTB. Over.”

  Juice sighed again. “Roger that. We’ll be out of here in a minute. There’s just one thing we’ve gotta do first. Wait out.”

  “Biltong, CIC. You do not understand. There is a real possibility that, in the very near future, the USS John F. Kennedy is going to be FUCKING LEAVING.”

  Juice’s eyebrow went up, but he said only, “Copy that.”

  Belatedly, he remembered his direct video feed from their Fire Scout, which was still orbiting overhead outside. That made him want to slap his forehead, but then again he’d had a lot on his mind. He flipped down his video monocle and changed channels on that transceiver to the UAV. And then he saw what was waiting for them outside.

  And very quickly, he really wished he hadn’t. Hundreds or maybe thousands of dead were converging on the warehouse, from all directions.

  SAS Saldanha was rocking like the Vans Warped Tour.

  * * *

  Ali realized she was letting herself get swamped with tactical details – with staying alive, and somehow countering this death-dealing uber-sniper in the other helo. But what she really needed to be thinking about was the strategic picture: namely, how they were going to accomplish their mission and get their goddamned pilot back. Which was the whole point of coming out here in the first place.

  It was just hard to be strategic when you were having your ass kicked, and staying alive one breath at a time.

  She hadn’t been able to see whether the Russians had got the CAG out of the water and on board yet. But she assumed not – or else they wouldn’t still be hovering there, acting like a target. They’d be hauling ass for home.

  Thinking about this, Ali realized this meant her tactical objective, and her strategic one, were actually the same. Kill that fucking sniper, and drive the Orca off this rescue site – basically, get it the hell out of their CSAR mission.

  And with both miniguns down now, the helo that was going to fly away from this fight would be the one with the best sniper on it.

  As she hunkered down and prepared to pop and shoot again, Ali found herself having to work to get her breathing under control, so she could make her shots. Ordinarily, she was superhumanly good at this – perfect control of both mind and body was a major secret of her success. In fact, she normally did it unconsciously, purely as second nature.

  On the other hand, there was a lot of shit going on around her right now. Zoning all of that out was also part of the training, and experience. But until you’ve tried to make a shot at 250 yards, riding the equivalent of a roller coaster, with people bleeding and screaming all around you – and with another totally lethal sniper trying to turn your head into a canoe… well, don’t judge.

  Ali knew she was out of time. She was, somehow, going to have to win this thing. Or else this guy was eventually going to just shoot them out of the ai—

  This thought was amputated by Ali’s stomach climbing up into her throat as the aircraft fell out of the sky around her – nearly simultaneously banking, dropping, and going into an uncontrolled flat spin. The airframe also began to shriek, as if it was dying, which it was, and the shrieking quickly grew in volume and intensity.

  Out of long habit, and also because she had little choice, Ali quickly put herself down on the deck, flat on her back – getting horizontal fast. This was the standard routine to keep her vertebrae from being compressed and permanently destroyed in a hard landing, or crash landing, of a rotary-wing aircraft. She knew it was pointless on this occasion – this thing was almost certainly going to come apart on impact with the water, killing her instantly.

  She was about to become something like the four hundredth American special operator to buy it in a helo crash.

  At least it wouldn’t be the stupid zombies that got her.

  She mentally shrugged. There were now too many G-forces gripping her to move at all. As time dilated and spun out as it does at such times, and Ali lay prone at the center of this horrible, frozen, car-crash moment, the world whirling around her with outrageous force, the noises growing louder and more violent, she was actually amazed the Spetsnaz sniper had let them stay in the air this long. The MH-60 was a tough old bird, very survivable.

  But this guy was good enough to find the seams.

  And now he must have shot something the Sea
hawk couldn’t stay in the air without.

  As their spin picked up speed, sending her brain careening in loops around her skull, Ali remembered that she was sharing this cabin with two other warriors – the dead crew chief, and the terribly wounded rescue swimmer. The swimmer slid into her shoulder from the centrifugal forces, still clutching his face. He was also still writhing and kicking from the pain, but he’d stopped hollering and cursing. Now he just whimpered and cried.

  Mustering her strength, Ali put her arm around and under him, getting his head on her shoulder, cradling him. They’d go out this way – together. Not alone.

  That was something. Being alone sucked.

  Dying alone would be even worse.

  And with this, Ali realized that her very last thought in this world was going to be of… Homer. No surprise there.

  Dying out here over the empty ocean, so far away from him, was okay – she could live with that.

  Much worse was the thought of him having to live on without her. And what she really couldn’t bear was: the thought of how she had left things. His last memory of her was going to be of her unceremoniously dumping him, out on that flight deck, minutes before the missile attack.

  She’d done this, broken things off, to try and dodge the peril of their love for each other – of that love making each unwilling to sacrifice the other to the mission, if required. And leaving them both unable to fulfill their duty. Okay, and also maybe to try to dodge the unbearable pain of perhaps ultimately having to watch him die. Now it looked like maybe there was really no way of dodging any of that. The only safe way out would be to stop caring.

  And there was no way she could do that.

  This woman who had accomplished every impossible task she’d ever set herself had now been stopped cold by this insoluble problem. She knew it now. She could never stop loving him. She didn’t even want to any more.

  But she knew she at least didn’t have to worry about Homer’s safety, in her last seconds on this Earth. She knew where he’d been headed with his scuba gear, and what he had in mind. But it didn’t scare her. Because he was back in the water, his true home, and where he’d be just fine.

  As Ali would be, too – down in the water, all her problems ended – after just a few more spins, and the small number of heartbeats that were left to her. She would die with love in her heart. That would be her little victory over the hatred manifested by the Spetsnaz sniper.

  It would have to be enough.

  And in her very last seconds, she amended her view about why soldiers fought, why she herself fought. She’d been wrong. It actually was because of love for what was behind her – as well as love for those to either side.

  It was love in all directions.

  She stroked the swimmer’s blood-matted hair.

  There, there.

  Calling Him Home

  Open Water, Beneath the JFK

  Homer didn’t even have a full breath to work with, to tide him over. He’d only had about a half a lungful when catastrophe struck, and he got his own airline cut. He was almost instantly in a bad oxygen deficit. Hell, he’d already been breathing hard from the fight.

  But there was a certain poetic justice to it. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” saith the Lord, Homer thought mordantly. Romans 12:19.

  Nor, did it turn out, was this guy as cautious as Homer had been with his buddy earlier. He didn’t want to just sit back and watch Homer drown.

  He wanted to gut him like a mackerel.

  The big Russian diver waded back in swinging, forcing Homer to back-pedal and dig down deep just to counter his attacks. Homer had the immediate and unmistakable impression this guy was looking for instant payback – for his dive buddy, who had just got stabbed through the throat. In seconds, Homer was on his back foot, with two additional small slash wounds from strikes he hadn’t been able to stop. It probably wasn’t going to be the proverbial death by a thousand cuts.

  Probably one big one would get him first.

  And if that didn’t, drowning would. He had only a few seconds of oxygen left.

  A few seconds to somehow finish this.

  Because if he tried to run for it now, to swim for the surface, as had his first opponent, the exact same thing would happen: this guy would be right behind him, and would either cut him to ribbons from beneath, or else just drag him down while he drowned.

  To run was death.

  But so was to stay and fight.

  There was no way out.

  The overwhelming urge to inhale that first fatal breath of liquid gripped him. But Homer knew from the drownproofing training that he could exhale a tiny bit of air – he didn’t have much to spare – and that would dampen down his autonomic nervous system’s impulse to inhale. It would basically fool the body, for a very short time, into thinking it was on the verge of getting air.

  He blocked an incoming stab with his right-hand blade – and the collision knocked that knife out of his hand. It spun glitteringly away into the darkness below. His right-hand grip was shot now, anyway. Most of that arm was numb and buzzing.

  He blocked the follow-up attack with his left-hand knife, still kicking steadily backward.

  He could feel the physical effects of the hypoxia, or oxygen deficiency, taking him now. First, the muscles went weak, biggest ones first – glutes, lats, quadriceps, deltoids. And those were exactly the ones he needed in this fight, for staying upright and stable, for kicking and paddling, striking and blocking…

  And just as with the CAG on take-off in his F-35, Homer’s vision started to constrict to pinholes, hazy black enveloping the periphery, from the lack of oxygen to his corneas. All he could see was a wormhole view of this implacable, vengeful killer, lunging at him ceaselessly…

  The lactic acid was also building up in his bloodstream and tissues, causing a special kind of fatigue, acidosis, that was acutely painful. The hypoxia also made him grow dizzy, and his mental clarity and judgment began to fail… coordination suffered… lips and extremities started turning blue. As he approached the final point of blacking out, the will to not give up, to keep fighting, got harder and harder to find.

  Only those who have repeatedly been forced to battle to the outside edge of exhaustion – and, in the case of SEALs, to the edge of asphyxia and drowning – can know how they will react, much less find a way to continue to fight, in these circumstances. But, even with those advantages…

  Homer was just about finished.

  All he could see now was the swelling blackness – and that diver and knife which kept coming after him, lunge after lunge, strike after strike… and the misty brown clouds of his own blood floating in the water around him.

  Heading for the surface was totally out now – even if the Russian didn’t kill him, Homer didn’t have the strength to cover the distance. And he definitely didn’t have enough oxygen to make it that far.

  Any second now, he would black out.

  And then he would either drown, or be stabbed to death. And he wouldn’t even know which.

  Somehow his limbs still moved, seemingly on their own, both to paddle weakly away and to defend against the incoming attacks. It was only decades of training and experience that kept him going at all. But it couldn’t last.

  He looked up now, toward the lighter water up above him. It seemed to turn heavenly now – and in that golden glow there slowly resolved the face of… his wife. She called to him, to come home, to come and join her there. And now he also saw the faces of their children, Ben and Isabel, who were somehow right there beside her.

  Now all he wanted was to go to them.

  He parried one more attack…

  …but lost his grip on the second knife as he did…

  …and then, out of weapons, totally out of options, he turned and kicked out and stroked with the last flickers of his evaporating strength. He kicked and swam for the light, with everything he had left in him.

  He knew he could never make it to the surface. He knew he’d never ou
trace the killer and blade behind him.

  But those golden faces drew him on.

  God was calling him home.

  * * *

  Emily had somehow found – in an abandoned storage closet full of Christmas decorations – a string of white fairy lights, which she had strung up in the kids’ corner of the compartment they shared with their father, over their little cots. The pale gray bulkheads there had also been hung with their colorful drawings, on bright white paper.

  So Ben and Isabel’s faces were in fact at that moment bathed in a lovely golden glow. The whole stateroom, with Emily holding court as babysitter, and the two children waiting for the return of their father, was warm and awash with a glowing light.

  Also glowing was the digital face of Emily’s little MP3 player. When Isabel first found this in Emily’s bag, she’d asked what it was.

  “It’s my MP3 player… my music player.”

  Isabel had merely given her a blank look. And when Emily placed the earbuds in the girl’s tiny ears, then carefully selected some songs with lyrics that wouldn’t be too traumatizing… and then finally saw her eyes go wide and light up… Emily realized with a start that the girl might actually never have heard music before. Or at least had not heard any since before she was too little to remember it.

  Isabel had lived almost her whole life in the twilight at the end of the world.

  With this crushing thought, but also with such a lovely and delighted vision before her, Emily couldn’t decide whether to laugh out loud or to sob. She felt like doing both at the same time. But she fought back the tears, maintaining her composure for the two little ones. The last thing they needed was another adult guardian folding on them.

  Ben grabbed her sleeve. “Can I listen next, Emily?”

  “Yes, you can. And you can call me Em if you want.”

  Ben laughed, his smile bright and beautiful. “We’ll call you Auntie Em! Like in The Wizard of Oz!”

  Isabel took one of the earbuds out and said, “I want to play this for Daddy.”

  Emily squeezed her arm and said, “He’ll like that.”