Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon Read online

Please, he thought, his stomach complaining. Please let the damn toilets be usable, at least.

  This time he was in luck. The door to the toilet block was unceremoniously laying out in the corridor, flat on the deck where it had fallen, and the lighting inside was buzzing and flickering, but no big holes or fallen ceiling in there.

  Wesley dumped his wash bag on the sink and headed for the nearest stall. He heard a noise farther down, and glanced over, squinting to make out a jacket hanging over the cubicle at the end of the row. Another noise followed, someone moving around inside. He chuckled. Someone else out this way with the same idea of dodging the crowds.

  Sitting on the toilet, staring at the scuffed-up door in front of him, his thoughts drifted and eventually landed in England. He had been thinking of Amarie almost constantly since seeing her on the big screen in the mess hall, couldn’t take his mind off her, if he were honest. He had presumed her lost, along with the rest of France, hell, with the rest of Europe, and had even, after two years, ceased to think about her quite so often, to accept that she was gone. There had been nothing he could do. She hadn’t answered her phone, hadn’t been at her apartment or workplace, and he had never thought to ask, in the few short months they were dating, where her parents lived. He knew it was the south of France somewhere. Wine country. But that was it.

  And he had presumed that when the riots worsened she had taken off back home to her folks’ place. He chose to believe she had gone home and escaped the danger.

  But now, there she was, alive, in England, and with a child. The little girl was the other thought that wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t have been older than two years, could she? Maybe less. Wesley had very little experience with kids, and now that he thought about it, he couldn’t really have any idea how old the child was. But if she was less than two… that meant she must have been born around the time he last saw Amarie, or maybe just after. Was the child hers? It couldn’t be. Some baby she’d grabbed to save the poor thing’s life, he thought.

  There was a loud bang at the other end of the toilet block, and it snapped Wesley from his thoughts, so violently that he jumped up and froze, both hands braced on the sides of the stall. He pulled his trousers up, thankful that he hadn’t even gotten started, and stood there for a moment, listening.

  Another bang. This one loud enough that whoever was in the cubicle, or outside of it, had to be hitting the door with some force.

  “Hey. Everything all right over there?”

  No reply.

  Wesley placed a boot on the toilet behind him and peered over the top of the door, into the open space near the sinks. He could see along the row, and no one was outside the far cubicle. He grabbed his gunbelt from its hook on the door, rushed to buckle it on, and then slowly, quietly as he could, drew his handgun, flicked the safety off, unlocked the door, and stepped outside.

  But the weapon swung toward only a blank wall as he rounded on the room. There was no one outside the cubicles, and that meant…

  He stepped slowly along the row, pushing open each door as he went, until he finally stood outside the last door, the one with the jacket hanging over it.

  “You okay in there?” he asked again.

  A gurgling sound came from inside, followed by a low, deep, rasping moan. Wesley went down on all fours and peered under the door, carefully staying a yard away. And he was glad he did, because the moment the thing in the cubicle clocked his face, it lunged, stretching its arms as far as it could. It was only inches from him.

  For ten seconds, Wesley stayed on the ground, staring into the eyes of the dead man, and Melvin’s hateful glare came back to him, jumping from the dream he had already half-forgotten. He blinked, pushing the image away. Melvin hadn’t died in the battle, and his own jaw was still firmly attached to his face. Then he saw that this was someone he didn’t recognize, just another crew member, someone who had probably been bitten, panicked, and hidden himself away to avoid a bullet in their head.

  Oh boy, he thought. What an absolutely shitty way to die. Sitting on the toilet.

  Wesley aimed the gun at the creature’s head.

  Just Another Day at the Office

  Britain, Oxfordshire - CentCom

  Colonel Robert Mayes was a troubled man. Standing on the balcony that overlooked the huge room that was the CentCom Joint Operations Center – his JOC – and looking out over the heads of dozens of busy ops-desk personnel, he was beginning to see a pattern that didn’t bode well for anyone.

  Directly across from him, nearly a hundred feet away, was the massive, digital Area of Operations (AO) map, and it displayed the entirety of the south of England. Near the top was London, and down on the far right, amidst a jarring tangle of red blips, was Canterbury and then Folkestone – where he had just deployed a significant portion of the world’s remaining combat troops and heavy firepower. Each deployment was marked with its own flashing star, and they were distributed almost evenly across the bottom of the map. All engaged. All in a slow, controlled, tactical retreat.

  The problem, he figured, wasn’t the net that had been cast to trap the outbreak. Everything had been in order there. That was, until fifteen minutes ago, when three new blips appeared on the screen. Down in the rows of desks below, ops officers relayed instructions and controlled communications across his defense network. They would take SITREPs from the front, issue commands, and update the tactical map so that he and his staff could make the right moves in this game of breathtakingly high-stakes chess. Fifteen minutes ago they had learned they were facing more opposing pieces on the board, represented by new markers on the map – red ones. Outbreaks.

  And the new blips were outside of his entrapment circle. Appledore, Wittersham, New Romney, all of them reporting small-scale contact, and all of them southwest of Folkestone.

  Mayes looked to his left, to the tall, lanky figure of Lieutenant Colonel Broads, his J2, or theater intelligence officer.

  “What are we looking at here, John?”

  The man looked uncomfortable. “Sir, we have teams inbound, ETA twenty mikes, on all of those new brushfires, but basically it’s spreading faster than we can track. Somehow, overnight, something must have gotten through the lines.”

  “Runners?” asked Mayes, rubbing his chin. Three days solid under the glare of the JOC and he was badly in need of a shave, and that didn’t even touch on the discomfort of the headache pounding in his temples. There was only so much caffeine you could load a body with before it stopped being effective.

  “Maybe,” said Broads. “It’s too early to confirm until we have some eyes on. We know these outbreaks are small, but after the type-three – supposed type-three – got out and hit Canterbury, we’re concerned there may have been more of them.”

  Mayes sighed, and wondered where the hell Grews was. The Major had reported that everything was getting under control, just before he went off comms and somehow vanished from the map. But Mayes was skeptical about the Major’s view of the situation. He had presided over a cancelled bombardment, then a general call to evacuate, which could have ended in a free-for-all, if the Parachute Regiment hadn’t gotten boots on the ground when it did. Grews was becoming too much of a wildcard in Mayes’ opinion, and a possible liability. He hated relieving an officer of his command. But when the stakes were this high, he was willing to drop anyone, at any time.

  “John, I need to know if we have more of these damn type-threes out there, and where they are, and what they are up to. Screw it, we know what they are up to, but if we don’t get some sort of visibility on this new spread in the south, it’s going to get pretty shitty, and pretty damn fast.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I need to know more about what we’re facing. The only real intel we’re getting on these things are reports from that carrier, and the bloody Americans don’t seem to consider intelligence sharing a big priority.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And we only went and sent our most accurate witnesses of Folkestone to joi
n them.”

  Mayes frowned, and glared at the blips on the map.

  “I need some options here. We’ve had plenty of people in contact. Someone must be able to tell us more. We don’t have Grews at the moment, wherever that screwball is. So I can’t pull him in for a briefing. Who else is there?”

  Broads pursed his lips. “The Folkestone Garrison have men still operational who were in contact on the night of the breakout. But they’re inbound on the new outbreaks, along with those spec-ops teams from USOC. And I don’t know that they had direct contact with the type-three, only the resulting rush afterward.”

  “Okay,” said Mayes. “So scratch them. Who else?”

  “The civilians from the tunnel.”

  “No. Not civilians. I need military intel. They don’t know shit.”

  Broads looked thoughtful for a moment, but then clicked his fingers.

  “The Marines who went into the tunnel at Folkestone also were engaged at Canterbury. They tagged and confirmed the original type-three, which was the original vector of this whole shit-show. They’re back behind the lines now, I believe. At least we have confirmation that the rescue op for the Channel Tunnel survivors was successful, so I’m going to presume we have the Marines back in the lines.”

  “Who is that? What unit?”

  “One Troop Royal Marines. They were the ones that busted out of Germany.”

  Grews’ pet Bootnecks, Mayes thought. Well, he’s had them on his leash for long enough.

  “That’s our men,” said Mayes. “I need their commander in quarantine and ready for debrief.”

  “Roger that, sir,” said Broads.

  “Hell, pull his whole team from the front. The Paras have the retreat under control, and a handful of men won’t make a difference. Have them sent to Biggin Hill and quarantined for refit. And get me their officer on the blower ASAP.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Broads.”

  “Sir?”

  “Make absolutely sure they are under strict quarantine. The last thing we want is one of them carrying the damn plague inside the M25.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mayes turned back to the screen.

  “Now, we have how many refugees on the way to the south gates?”

  “Roughly thirty thousand, from the reports in so far. And that’s just from Canterbury and the Folkestone area. Other areas north of there are already starting evacuation into the safe zone, and I can confirm that we have that under control.”

  “How long before most of them reach the wall?”

  “About eight hours. They’re mostly on foot, and have been traveling overnight, so progress is slow.”

  “Do we even have somewhere to put all these people? What’s the capacity of the quarantine zones?”

  Broads looked puzzled for a moment as he made some calculations. “We can fit them, but we’d have to use the prisons as well. We’ve got room for maybe half that number in the facilities at Epsom and Gravesend, but we don’t have the logistics support right now to handle those kind of numbers. Food, water, blankets, medical supplies – all stretched thin.”

  “If we have the space to quarantine them all, then do it, and alert the Royal Logistics Corps to find the support for it. There’s a reason they’re the largest corps in the Army. Anyway, I’m not fucking around with shifting refugees across London when we’ve got the outbreaks to worry about. Whose job is that anyway?”

  “Erm… Major Hallings, sir. He’s OC of the quarantine camps.”

  “Good. Get someone to ring him up and tell him he has thirty thousand refugees to cope with in the next few hours.”

  Battlefield

  Britain - Kent Downs

  Lieutenant Jameson watched as the third helo rose rapidly from the ground, leaned to its left and then shot up into the darkening sky. With it, the last of the Channel Tunnel survivors were safely away, and on their way to London, where at least they would be far from the front line. For now.

  For his men, after what seemed like an age of unrelenting combat, there was no such reprieve. In the distance, thunderclouds rumbled and sporadic flashes of lightning flickered like tendrils across the sky. He turned and scanned his unit, One Troop Royal Marines, and did a headcount. Two more of his men had gone down in the fight to break through to the friendly line of Paras holding the dead at bay along this section of the front. Even as he scanned the weary faces of his men, he found it difficult to identify who had fallen, which of those faces he saw every day was now missing. He knew all these men very well, like each was his brother, but somehow he couldn’t focus his thoughts and recall those that had gone.

  They had been lucky, he thought. Even with two more men down, he was surprised they hadn’t lost a lot more. During the push through the waves of dead that were even now, inexplicably, coming from seemingly every direction, they had been surrounded more than once. At those times, the Marines had formed a tight circle around the civilians and gone into all-around defense, keeping the dead away with a torrent of gunfire, the civilians joining in with hand-held weapons when things got too close and the dead were too many. It had been a while since he had ordered his men to fix bayonets, but they had needed it this time.

  The relief of reaching the rear was immediate. The group had pushed through the lines of paratroopers and collapsed onto the grassy field, not caring if they got covered in the mud kicked up by hundreds of boots. It was the first moment in nearly twenty-four hours that they hadn’t been fighting almost constantly, and they were all close to collapse.

  Standing there, watching the last of the helicopters speed away, Jameson wondered where they would take the refugees next. London, sure, but where in London? What would they do with them? It wasn’t like they had homes to go to. Some of them, he thought, were British, and might have friends or relatives in London, but the majority were French. He guessed they would just have to go wherever there was space. It had been managed before, during the Blitz.

  As he turned back to Eli, who was standing nearby watching the front, he hoped the tunnelers would be safe, and for the first time in two years. Initially, they’d been trapped in the Channel Tunnel – and he’d seen firsthand what that had been like, when his team cleared the place out – and then Folkestone, and on to Canterbury, both overrun and evacuated. And, in the case of the latter, bombed nearly to rubble, with them still in it. It was about time they caught a break.

  “The line’s falling back,” said Eli, nodding toward the distant rank of troops. For the first time that morning Jameson noticed the dried blood on his friend’s forehead – from his concussion, he hoped, when that out-of-control 4x4 had knocked a stone wall onto him in Canterbury. The other possibilities weren’t as good.

  Jameson frowned, wiped the dirt and sweat away from his eyes, and watched. Sure enough, the Para lines weren’t moving forward, as he would have expected, but backward, toward them. But they weren’t fleeing. This was a tactical retreat. He was wondering what the hell was going on when his radio crackled in his ear.

  “One Troop, this is CentCom, message over.”

  His frown deepened.

  “CentCom, One Troop Actual, send message,” he tried to say, and was surprised to find all that came out was a feeble croak. His mouth and throat had clammed up, completely dry. He coughed, spat, and repeated the words more clearly this time.

  “We’re unable to locate Major Grews,” said the female voice, quiet and slightly broken by static hiss. “Do you have a visual on him or have had contact recently?”

  Jameson hadn’t heard from Grews since… when had he heard from his OC? Was it after the crashed ambulance, or before? He tried to focus on his last memory of Grews, but it just wouldn’t resolve.

  “Negative. We’ve had no recent contact or visual on Major Grews.”

  “Acknowledged. Report if you do locate him. Break. We have a new op order for you, over.”

  Eli looked at him quizzically, and Jameson noted that his troop sergeant’s headset was m
issing, probably lost in combat – he couldn’t hear a word of the transmission.

  “CentCom are looking for Grews, and we have new orders,” Jameson told him. Pressing his PTT button, he said, “Send orders, over.”

  The radio crackled even louder, making it hard for Jameson to hear the words clearly. “Head just to the north of the refugee camp, half a mile. There is a Chinook vectoring in to extract you, ETA ten minutes. Call sign is Lead Duck Zero One.”

  “Roger that, but where are we going?”

  “Quarantine,” replied the operator. “Your ride will have further details. Over.”

  “All received,” he said, and as he did so his memory cleared, and his last conversation with Grews returned. “CentCom, be advised: I last saw Grews about an hour ago, in an airborne helo. He was overflying the battle as we pulled out of the city, but I haven’t seen him since.” He scanned the air across the battlefield, but after doing a full three-sixty and then panning back once more to be sure he hadn’t missed something, he still couldn’t see the tiny command helo among the dozens of big Chinooks. But he knew it had to be up there somewhere.

  “That’s received. CentCom out.” And the radio fell silent.

  Jameson stopped scanning and turned to Eli, who had moved further away, and was standing with his back to him, looking up at the clouds. He was shading his eyes from the glare of the sun and peering toward the west, where dark storm clouds were rolling in, threatening to make their day even worse that it had already been.

  “Crazy weather,” Eli said, turning to face his Lieutenant. “I reckon this bloody plague has screwed up more than people. This field’s gonna be a quagmire in a few hours. Shit, fighting deaders in the damn mud, again, just like in Belgium.”

  Jameson coughed, then shook his head. “Not for us, at least not today.” His throat was drying up again, and he wondered if he had an internal injury, or maybe just a slight cut. I hope that’s all it is, he thought.

  Eli looked surprised. “What’s up, boss?”

  Jameson looked to the north across the field that an hour ago had been teeming with refugees. Now it was filled with paratroopers, and dozens of Chinooks emptying even more of them out onto the muddy ground. Just yards away, a new line was forming to bolster the effort to keep the dead at bay, and in the distance Jameson could make out another black dot zooming in over the trees – their ride, inbound.