Arisen, Book One - Fortress Britain Read online

  It had been his idea. And it had been done in a hurry. A dozen charges just fifty feet inside had collapsed the tunnel. It might stop the water, he’d thought, and then maybe they could check the maintenance tunnel for those survivors. But orders from above came that the maintenance entrance was to be collapsed, too. No one was to come out.

  But something had happened, and he had never found out what. Somehow the half of the tunnel on the English side hadn’t flooded completely.

  That had been nearly two years ago.

  “Andrew? You still there?”

  Grews snapped back to the present. “Yes, I’m here.”

  “Are you with me on this? You know that that tunnel needs clearing out.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “I’d get someone else on it, but you know how things are now. We’re short of officers and men both, with this damn call-up mystery that no one is telling us about.”

  “I know. And I need to do this. You know that.”

  Bob did know. He had been Grews’ direct superior then, even as he was now, and he’d been the one to decide that those refugees weren’t getting out. What Bob didn’t know was that Grews had seen occasional movements in the unflooded sections of tunnel at the English end even after many months, even after nearly a year, movements that were not always the lumbering and slow trudge of the dead. Sometimes there were even flickers of light down in the darkness. But Grews had never caught clear view of who they were. But he knew. They were his refugees. The heroic and trapped survivors of the tunnel.

  But they had vanished again after the first year, and Grews had presumed they had starved, or succumbed to the undead floating in the water.

  He wondered at what point he had become this very different man, when it had happened? He had spent so many years commanding peacekeeping forces and relief missions that his instinct had always been to help where he could. Those instincts had even garnered him a reputation as a soft touch, a weak commander, but back then he had been proud of that. This new Grews, somewhere along the way, had managed to become a man more interested in hiding what he had seen than in facing it.

  Why? He knew why. It had been the moment they bombed the tunnel and turned down the chance to help just a few more people get out. That had been the moment he had changed. There had been ample time to send a crew in. He could have saved them.

  And then the inexplicably fast zombie that had now emerged from the tunnel. Was it some mystical super-zombie, a claim that had been making the rounds of the rumor mill? Grews for one didn’t believe it for a second, even after the chaos of the night before. But whether or not that was real, all of this meant something new, and stunning. It meant that the refugees who had for a while managed to survive down there were now lost. But maybe now he would get the chance to at least put them to rest.

  “So you’ll get this done?” said the voice on the radio again.

  Grews blinked. His concentration was fading.

  “Yes, of course. I’ll get it done.”

  “And you’ll clean up, as well? No damn heroics. They’re all dead things now and you know it. We can’t risk bringing anything or anyone else out of that tunnel.”

  “Of course.”

  Time to face the ghosts, Grews thought.

  CLOSE! STAND CLOSE TO ME, STARBUCK

  Homer found it all too easy.

  Basically, he just made as if he were having a nice evening stroll around the outer edge of the flight deck. Most of that wasn’t a total no-go area, unless flight operations were actually going on right then. And with the aviation fuel situation, flight ops now happened only as often as needed, and not much more. He carried with him only a modest-sized duty bag. Then it was just a question of waiting until a couple of the flight deck crew in their brightly colored shirts passed, shielding him for two seconds from sight of the control tower, or “island.”

  That was all it took to tie off on the railing, hurl the rope bag over, clip onto his own D-ring, and leap overboard. A single bound, and he had rappelled himself down to the center of nowhere. The sweet spot for solitude on a Ford-class supercarrier turns out to be a little side-deck, two levels below the top, facing out to the sea, and nestled between the Sparrow missile launchers and the Phalanx Close-In Weapons System. Basically, unless there were maintenance issues with one of those two weapons bays, this deck was virtually guaranteed to be empty. It also sat out of view of everyone else onboard.

  The only problem was, of course, that the ship’s ID keycard they gave the Alpha men – for access into their team’s suite, the mess hall, a few common areas, and up top via direct ladders – didn’t allow Homer access to it. But never try to keep a SEAL out of someplace on a boat he wants to go. Or under the water, or across a desert, or up a mountain, for that matter… Pretty much their whole job is gaining access to places they aren’t supposed to be. And it’s popping up where they’re not remotely expected that allows them to wreak such havoc with such small numbers.

  But Homer found it all really funny. No sooner was he sitting around Hereford reminiscing about the solitary joys of shipboard life than here he was, in the blink of an eye, aboard the largest warship ever built by man – and almost certainly the most formidable. With literally about a billion individual parts, it was also probably the most complex machine ever built – or, on current trends, ever would be. But it seemed that anything could happen to you in this world, even in the ZA.

  Ma’shallah, Homer thought, and as he knew his Muslim brothers to say. What wonders God hath wrought…

  * * *

  As he sat watching the light fail over the North Atlantic, listening to the wind and the rush of water against the hull, he thought about all the changes that he’d seen in the last two years. Many mornings he’d still wake up and say his wife’s name – assuming it had all been a horrible, displacing dream. Then the reality would come back to him in a sickening rush.

  Homer supposed, in many ways, the ZA was a lot easier for warriors than for civilians. And he didn’t just mean their weapons and training and much greater ability to survive. To a great extent, the zombies were the least interesting thing about a zombie apocalypse. What was really gripping, and wrenching, and awful, was what it did to the survivors – what men do to each other, and to themselves, when the structure all around them, and upon which they’ve relied all their lives, catastrophically fails.

  But military personnel, especially SOF, had been operating in catastrophic vacuums of order and structure for most of their careers. Think Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq during its civil war. Being able to be effective in such wretched, menacing places was much of what it meant to be a special operator. Homer supposed the end of civilization really just supercharged what had always been the main human problem – working together to survive. The civilians had been shielded from that for a long time. But Homer and his brethren hadn’t.

  After the virus reached the tipping point, most people went down before they even knew what to be afraid of. It raged out of control that quickly. By the time the dead outnumbered the living, it only helped marginally to know what the hell was going on. It was too late then. And when the delicate latticework of civilization failed – the daily food deliveries to grocery store shelves, the constantly pulsing power grids, the free-flowing clean water, police and ambulances that came when you called – well, at that point, the other survivors started to become as dangerous as the dead. Survival became as much a matter of competing with the living for resources, as about battling the dead. And that’s where things got really tricky.

  That was the whole “working together” part.

  And that’s where Homer and others like him really had the advantage. The military brotherhood is well known, going back at least to Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech. But special operators – they were a breed apart. They operated in such severe and austere conditions, and against such appalling odds, that the only way to prevail was through the perfection of their training as a team. It was said tha
t the average officer in the special operations community had more formal education than the average university professor. And so should it be. The training was unending, and relentless, and exacting, because it had to be for them to succeed at the job. Even to survive it.

  So the brotherhood of special operators was definitely a family. And one thing that hadn’t changed, Homer figured, was that family was still the most important thing. The whole world had changed, but they hadn’t – not really. And having your brothers around you was how you knew you weren’t a zombie – that you were still one of God’s children, and still made in his image.

  Because the first thing you notice about zombies is… that they don’t notice each other. A dead guy could be surrounded by 5,000 others, and wouldn’t pay them any mind. Well, with the possible exception of that one on the cliffs, with his buddy on the cross… Homer thought maybe he’d call him Job from now on. Maybe God was testing him.

  Homer figured perhaps these thoughts about family had been prompted by this mission – by sailing, then flying, so close to where his wife and children were last known to be alive. He expected the ship was going to anchor only a few hundred miles, if that, from his home in Virginia Beach, where they’d moved after he joined Team Six. And that was a whole ocean closer than Homer thought he would ever again get to them. Some part of him always believed they were still alive. Some part of him thought he would see them again in this world.

  But he did know he would see them in the next.

  Also, a big part of him wrestled daily with his duty as a warrior. Every day he got up and thought of reasons why he shouldn’t leave, that second, just take off, to go look for them. What kind of father was he? What kind of husband? His children might be crying out for him now, lost, in pain, afraid. And even if they weren’t, even if Homer died in a futile search for the already departed… well, that would just hasten that day they would all be together again.

  Some of the other guys said it was only by sheer, dumb luck that they had all been deployed overseas when it happened. That they were in the one island nation that, also through sheer dumb luck, escaped the implacable armies of the walking dead. But was it luck? Handon would say that it’s an operational principle that Delta makes its own luck. But Homer knew that what looks to us like luck, and what looks to be skill, are all the same thing.

  God’s plan for every one of us.

  * * *

  And this plan had showed itself even today – in Homer’s recon of the ship areas leading to this isolated half-deck. Posted up in a common hallway was a bright yellow flyer for a daily shipboard chapel service. It didn’t mention the denomination, but he didn’t suppose it mattered all that much at this point. The timing was perfect. A half-hour for himself up there, another half-hour for the meeting whose name he dare not speak, then a half-hour for the sermon. And then back to work.

  It was always good to meet other believers. It was a shame that those the ZA didn’t kill outright – eaten by the dead, infected and turned, killed by the desperate living, or just starved out by the fall – had a strong tendency to lose their faith over the matter. So the faithful were pretty few and far between these days. But, as the man has said:

  Faith isn’t faith until it’s all you’re holding onto.

  BEST LAID PLANS

  Commander Drake sat across from Handon and Ainsley in the small briefing room. He said, “I’ve asked the MARSOC team leader to join us for this one. You’re going to want to be on good terms with this guy. As I mentioned, it’s him and his men who are going to be on standby to pull your bacon out of the fire when and as necessary.”

  “Or, more likely,” said Ainsley, a little dryly, “it’s his men who are going to inherit our mission if and when my team goes down.”

  “That, too. CentCom has made it very clear to me this one’s in the too-big-to-fail category.”

  “So you must have a C team lined up?” said Handon.

  Drake just nodded.

  Need to know, Handon figured. Since he wasn’t going to elaborate on that, and since they had a second here, Handon tried on a question that had been vexing him.

  “I understand your reactors can provide power for decades.”

  “That’s affirmative. Though, when we do need to refuel, that can take a couple of years. You might have seen we have only one support ship sailing with us, to save on fuel. But it’s a hell of a backup – one of the Arleigh-Burke destroyers, and the latest. The Michael Murphy.”

  Handon nodded. “And on top of unlimited power, you’ve got all the fresh water you can drink from your desalination plant… but last time I was on a supercarrier, I was told it could only store about 70 days worth of food. How has that worked?”

  Drake nodded. “Well, for starters, and as you’ll have already noticed, ship’s complement is massively under strength. We sailed with 4,660. As of today, we’re at 2,132.”

  “Killed or infected?” Ainsley asked. “Outbreaks?”

  Drake nodded. “We’ve lost people on land. But there have been zero outbreaks on the JFK. Every shore party is quarantined for a week on the Rainier, our oiler, ammo, and supply ship.”

  “But max gestation time is only 72 hours.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t know that in the early days. And we couldn’t afford even a single incident shipboard. So we’ve stuck with the policy.”

  Ainsley and Handon nodded and waited for him to continue.

  “No, our losses were different. Desertions were big, particularly in the first few months. A lot of people jumping ship, some of them too far out to realistically swim to land. They were trying to get home to their families. God preserve them.” Drake took a look off to the corner of the cabin. “And then there were the suicides. It’s a fact of life in any military outfit. But ours have ticked up over time.”

  “How do you sail the ship with so few?” Ainsley asked.

  “Well, we just picked up a few in Britain – donated by your own CentCom. Filled a few critical roles. But it’s a lesser known fact that most of the crew on a supercarrier is actually in support of the air wing. And we haven’t been flying much. So little fuel, so little point. More on which in a second. Anyway, obviously it wasn’t just air wing people we lost. So we’ve had to do retraining. But, hell, this ship is so automated, in many ways it sails itself. To a great extent, the people are here to look after the other people, and the aircraft.”

  Drake seemed now to come out of his dark reverie. “Anyway, half the mouths to feed solved half the food problem. But for much of the first year, we spent most of our time raiding ports and coastlines for supplies. We’d hope to find someplace quiet and abandoned. More often it was a matter of fighting our way in, then holding a perimeter while food was onloaded. The MARSOC guys were invaluable there. Fight like bulldogs on meth.”

  Handon well knew. Also, he’d known and worked with enough marines to know that they’re not just ferocious – but they actually tended to be disconcertingly smart and cagey, as well. God knows how the myth of the knuckle-dragging, Neanderthal jarhead hangs on, he thought to himself. Hmm – maybe it’s because they want it to. Now THAT’s smart…

  Drake went on. “Anyway, the shore parties were our biggest risk of infection, of course, and some of our junior officers were already looking ahead. A few months in, we planted huge potato and wheat beds, under sunlamps, down in the hangar. Three levels of them, actually. We’re now about 50% self-sufficient on food, at least as far as calories goes. Since then, shore parties focus on canned fruits and vegetables, spices, and yeast to make bread. That and multivitamins. Meat’s pretty few and far – the frozen stuff went when the power failed, and the fresh stuff you have to hunt and slaughter, all of which burns time on shore. And dairy’s a memory, aside from tinned milk and powdered eggs, when we get lucky.” Drake laughed mirthlessly to himself. “Something I never thought I’d see – a bunch of vegans on a U.S. Navy warship…”

  He laughed again, easier. “Anyway, we’ve been a bit like the Battl
estar Galactica – guarding our dwindling fleet, wandering the galaxy looking for a new home. Instead of being hounded by the Cylons, it was the dead.”

  “And so what did you do with the air wing?” Handon asked. The flight deck couldn’t hold more than a couple dozen aircraft at a time – ordinarily, most of them lived belowdecks in the cavernous – three-story high, 700 feet long – hangar bay.

  “We pushed quite a few of them into the ocean.”

  “That’s a bit of a shame,” Ainsley said.

  “Starving to death’s a shame.” Drake, Ainsley, and Handon turned to see that this was spoken by a newcomer, who’d slipped into the doorway without anyone noticing. He wore a khaki utility uniform, boots, and a sidearm. Two deep furrows of scar tissue ran down the left side of his face. “And in zombie warfare, air superiority is about as useful as nuts on a nun.”

  “Captain Ainsley, Sergeant Major Handon,” Drake said, “this is Gunnery Sergeant Fick, who commands the MARSOC team, since their LT went down.” It was the same guy who had escorted them onboard.

  “We met,” said Handon.

  Fick nodded. “Wanted to check out the new hotshots myself. Find your comfy racks okay? Pillows nice and fluffed for you?”

  Ainsley looked disconcerted, in that British way of abhorring a scene. Handon just smiled. God love the Marines… Hell, he thought, they’re probably loving life in the ZA.

  Another thing about the Marines: used to very austere living conditions.

  * * *

  Gunnery Sergeant Fick took a seat and put his thick arms on the table.

  Commander Drake said, “Truth is, we do have several dozen security personnel, Navy MPs and shore patrolmen. But Fick asked to bring you onboard himself.”

  The stocky marine nodded. “Being as the fate of the world evidently rests in your no-doubt capable hands.” Left unsaid, but pretty obvious to Ainsley and Handon, was that Fick figured his own guys were more than up to the job.