Arisen, Book Five - EXODUS Read online

  They were out of time.

  Drake returned a salute and, as he marched off again, let his eye wander over the front rank of these “militiamen.” Of course, they were mostly familiar faces – with the winnowing of the crew over the two years of the ZA, down to not much more than half of their original complement of 4,300, there were no real strangers anymore. Not even on this enormous floating city. Drake scanned them as he passed.

  Even to him, it was obvious these people were nothing like infantry, or ground combatants. Some of them would have originally been joiners, barbers, plumbers. But if anyone could whip them into some kind of viable fighting force, it was the MARSOC Marines – whom Drake knew to be tough, exquisitely trained, and fearless to the point of absurdity. It was also these Marines who would be leading the recruits in combat – who in fact would be leading the defense of the whole ship.

  They, at least, were something Drake could have faith in.

  * * *

  Next stop, as he marched relentlessly up the flight deck, was the port-side Phalanx Close-In Weapon System (or CIWS – usually pronounced “see-whiz”). This was a 20mm electric Gatling gun mounted on a swiveling base underneath a giant radar-guidance system, the whole apparatus standing nearly 15 feet high. Because of its bulbous, trashcan-shaped radome, and also because it usually aimed and fired itself without an operator, the sailors affectionately referred to it as “R2-D2.” Which, Drake figured, as he climbed down a ladder to the platform on which it sat at just below deck level, captured it pretty well.

  And today R2-D2, God willing, was going to be a critical player in their last-ditch, close-in defense of the boat.

  Sure, it was actually designed to shoot down incoming anti-ship missiles in flight. But its six-barreled Gatling cannon traversed 150 degrees to either side, elevated 80 degrees up or down, and put out 4,500 armor-piercing tungsten-penetrator rounds per minute – or 75 every second – each one moving almost 2,500mph. So Drake figured their big pet robot could do some hellacious damage to a lot of half-rotted dead bodies, not to mention cut through hundreds of them at a time before its sabot-discarding four-inch-long autocannon shells even began to slow down.

  But that was only if the damned thing fired.

  “How we doing, Chief?” he said crisply, as he hopped the last few rungs down to the platform.

  “Sir,” replied the thickset, forty-something Chief Petty Officer who ran this gun crew. “Very good, sir. We’ve disassembled, cleaned, and oiled everything on the remaining weapon system.” There had previously been a matching droid on the starboard side, but it had gotten slightly blown to smithereens during the mutiny – and Drake wouldn’t have had time to visit it even if it did still exist. The Chief paused and frowned slightly before going on. “But this gun hasn’t been discharged in over a year. Between you and me, I’m worried about the firing pins, I’m worried about the structural integrity of the barrels, and I’m a little worried about the actuating gears and motors in the platform.”

  What Drake was mainly worried about was ammunition.

  In their long months of scavenging, they had regularly stocked up on small-arms ammo, as well as grenades and rockets, all of which the Marines burned through rapidly on their shore excursions. But, frankly, Drake had never imagined they’d ever again be defending the carrier itself – never mind from this large a threat. They certainly weren’t ever again going to be shooting down anti-ship missiles or incoming aircraft.

  So, basically, they weren’t drowning in ammo for this weapon system. The gun itself had a 1,550 round magazine. And they had a total of 60,000 belted rounds stored on the boat – all of which had now been brought up to this station. The immediate problem was that, given the gun’s absurdly high rate of fire, the limited ammo made test-firing it painful.

  Then again, if the gun didn’t go bang when they pulled the trigger, they could have all the ammo they liked and it wouldn’t matter.

  “Clear your guns, Chief,” Drake ordered.

  The Chief only hesitated fractionally. “Aye aye, sir. But I’m going to suggest we all get under hard cover first. If there’s a stoppage or misfire, at the muzzle velocity these things go, it might result in a… very kinetic event.”

  Drake knew that by this he meant one or more of the barrels might explode – pretty much like Elmer Fudd’s hunting rifle when Bugs Bunny stuck his finger in the end. But scaled up – way up. He followed the members of the gun crew around behind a steel bulkhead.

  The Chief issued the order to his gunner. “One-second burst. Manual aim, zero degrees on the horizon. Fire when ready.”

  The six-barrelled electric Gatling gun rapidly and jerkily moved to level with the deck, making a Terminator-like screeching sound as it did, and ended facing straight out. And then it made a very different sound as it started to fire – something like Paul Bunyan’s buzz saw in hell, speeded up ten times. It took a fraction of a second to spin up to full speed and volume, and a fraction to fall off when it was done. While it fired, clouds of light gray smoke billowed straight out of the six barrels, as if it were some kind of industrial fumigating device.

  Before anyone could duck or flinch, it was over. Nothing had blown up.

  Emerging back out onto the platform, Drake allowed himself a relieved exhalation. Finally – one damned thing, going exactly as it should. Maybe that would set the tone for the rest of the day. Then again, it was going to be one hell of a long day. And it hadn’t even really started yet.

  “Very good, Chief,” Drake said as he mounted the ladder and started the climb back up to the deck. “Carry on.” His next and final stop was going to be the fortifications under construction on the prow.

  The pointy end of the spear.

  Or rather, he thought as he climbed, the business end of the anvil…

  Ghosts in the Machine

  On Board Chuckie, 10,000 Feet Over North America

  The interior of the B-17 Flying Fortress, during their long, rattling, windblown flight back across half of undead North America, was nothing like a pleasure cruise, and not much like business class, either. In addition to being perilously crowded, the bomber was a hive of activity – some of it frantic, some quiet and methodical, some of it even solemn and contemplative.

  Because everyone on this plane had just dodged death – and not by a wide margin.

  Emily, the civilian girl rescued from the pirate ship Diablo by Alpha team, looked over her shoulder just once as she walked away from where Gunny Fick still lay on the deck, as she returned to the safety of Ali’s side, of sitting in her shadow. Emily wasn’t totally sure what had made her go over there and try to minister to the Marine leader in the first place. The poor man had just looked so piteous, so vulnerable and fearful, as he twisted around in his troubled sleep, trying to get away from whatever stalked his dreams.

  Maybe she’d just thought someone should watch over him.

  Also, even aside from his childlike night terrors, Emily thought there was something strangely innocent about the old warrior. On the surface, he seemed so gruff, and intimidating, and battle-scarred. But she felt sure she could see something more tender and human underneath. Maybe it had come from months of living with Logan and William and the other guys on board the Diablo. Maybe she had developed some ability to see through the masks and posturing of rough men, to the humanity hidden underneath.

  Then again, maybe I’ve had enough of all that, she thought, as she passed by one of the soldiers standing and relieving himself out the smashed-out window at the left-side waist of the plane. Urine splatter blew back in on the slipstream, and she cut as wide a berth around it as she could manage in the cramped interior of the ancient bomber.

  When Ali looked up from where she sat on the deck, and locked eyes with her, both of them seemed to sigh with relief – Emily because Ali had turned into her protector in this very strange world she’d been abruptly thrust into. And Ali because… well, Emily didn’t know why. She only knew the woman commando seemed to see somethin
g in her – something that may or may not even be there.

  She crouched down onto the deck and curled up beside the only other girl on this heavy bomber full of death and destruction – and grunting and farting. Ali had seen what had happened with Fick. She said, “Don’t read too much into it. These guys are expected to be emotionless badasses. I think you scared him by making him feel something.” She reached across to brush Emily’s hair out of her eyes. “It was a kind thing you did.”

  Emily just shrugged.

  Ali also wanted to tell her that she never had to worry about anyone here treating her like her previous group had. But she couldn’t quite find the words.

  Ever since the shootout on Lake Michigan, and Emily’s exodus with Alpha, Ali’d had it in her head that Emily and her sister were helpless victims of the pirates on the Diablo. And that they had been subject to horrors and abuses that didn’t bear thinking about. Even when the older sister went all Reservoir Dogs on them on the lakeshore, Ali held to this narrative about the younger one. Looking over at her now, she continued to think about the parallels between Emily and her own little sister, whom she hadn’t been able to rescue from a life of servitude in Somalia – and had no choice but to leave behind, in the care of another violent man. Now, Ali found she could hardly even remember what her sister Amina looked like.

  Whatever the similarity between them, though, it certainly lay beneath the skin.

  And, anyway, Ali was self-aware enough to know she had been clinging to her rescue of Emily as perhaps the only decent thing to come out of that terrible, brutal, and bloody interlude on the lake. For the first time in a long time, the job had become personal for her. She didn’t yet know whether this would prove to be a good thing, or a total disaster.

  But now, seeming to read Ali’s mind, Emily said, “Do you know who they were? The guys on the Diablo? I mean, before all this.”

  Ali shook her head no.

  “They were all members of the same auto-workers union. They worked on the same plant production line in Detroit. They were just these working-class guys.”

  Ali shook her head. Terrific, trade-unionist pirates.

  “And, actually, they never really did anything to us. They never hurt us. Not after… after the initial thing.”

  Ali realized she probably needed to hear the backstory. “What exactly happened?”

  Emily looked down at the deck before speaking quietly. “Courtney and I grew up in a tiny town you’ve never even heard of, in upstate Wisconsin. When the world fell apart, two years ago, our parents tried to get away with the two of us. Our uncle had a boat on Lake Michigan, so we fled out onto the water. It worked for a while. But then we ran out of fuel, and were running out of food and water. And that was when we ran into the Diablo.”

  She took a deep breath and sighed it out. “The guys had gotten hold of it in Detroit, then followed the canals up and around into the Great Lakes. When our two boats crossed paths, there was a confrontation, then a fight… Courtney and I survived. And they took us with them.”

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” Ali said. “For whatever it’s worth.”

  “Half-sister. And to be honest, I never liked her that much – and I hated her father. He was a bastard. At least my dad hung around for a while and tried to take care of us. Hers only only came by when he needed money, or wanted to screw our mother.”

  Ali hesitated. “And after you went with them?”

  “It was terrifying at first. We didn’t know what was going to happen to us. But we had no choice. And, in the end, believe it or not, they really did protect us – from everything, and for a long time. It was weird. There was like this huge disconnect between how they treated us, and the things they did to other people we came across.”

  Ali tried to listen without too much judgment. She also didn’t probe any further about the death of the girl’s parents, which was glaring by its omission. She could only think Emily had blocked it out, or was unable to deal with it yet. But she also wondered: was the girl suffering from some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where the captives grew to love their kidnappers? Or did Ali really have the wrong idea about what things had been like on that boat? Or maybe – and the wiser part of her knew that this was most likely – it was just that things were a lot more complex than they appeared at first glance.

  Emily went on, speaking quietly, her voice just audible over the wind, the unvarying roar of the three surviving engines, and the rising and falling of the airframe rattling around them. “I don’t know. It was like we were part of some primitive tribe that we weren’t all that proud to be part of. But we were also terrified of being kicked out. Because it was the only place we were safe. Outside was certain death.”

  Ali still had some bad images stuck in her head. And she figured she needed either to confirm them or dispel them. “But with, what, fifteen men… and the two of you girls…”

  Emily monitored her feet. “You mean sexually. Courtney slept with them. I think she did it with half the crew at one point or another – and she led the other half to believe they were next, or at least had a chance.”

  “But not you.”

  “No. They left me alone.”

  Starkly relieved at this, Ali wondered if it was possible the older sister had done this on purpose – sacrificed her own virtue to safeguard her younger sister. Or maybe she just liked it. Perhaps a bit of both.

  “And yet, you left your own sister, to go off with us, a group of total strangers.”

  Emily looked up. “Well, first of all, I think Courtney was starting to pick up the worst traits of the guys. By the end, I hardly felt like I knew her at all. Her pulling that stunt on the beach was just the last and worst thing.”

  Ali nodded. She had gotten seriously bashed on the head in that incident. And she’d come within about one second, and a few pounds of trigger pressure, of blowing the older girl’s brainstem out the back of her head, to bring it to an end.

  “Second,” Emily went on, “I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense… but I felt like you weren’t total strangers. Like I knew something about you. If not all of you, then at least you.”

  Ali looked across at the much younger woman. She was glad the connection didn’t only go one way. If Emily was some kind of stand-in for Amina, the little sister Ali hadn’t been able to protect… maybe Ali represented the protective older sister Emily had never quite had.

  “And, anyway, I knew you weren’t like them. That you weren’t capable of inflicting the same kind of cruelty on other people. That was obvious.”

  “Even after we killed most of them?”

  Emily shrugged. “This is the end of the world. People have to defend themselves. That’s all you did. They attacked you, like they did everybody. They just picked the wrong target this time. I think they liked the look of your guns and equipment, and got greedy. And it all went wrong for them. Also, I heard what you said about the scientist and his laptop, so what you’re doing must be important.”

  “You still took a gamble, coming with us.”

  “There was no going back to my old world. You put an end to it. Maybe it’s better this way. Maybe there’s no going back for any of us.”

  Ali’s gaze grew long and she recited, “‘The best way out is always through.’”

  “Who said that?”

  “Robert Frost.” Then Ali thought of the possible vaccine that was riding with them up there in that dinged-up, but still defiant, WWII bomber. “Don’t give up on the world. Not yet.”

  Emily blinked her big eyes and nodded. After a long pause, she said, “They weren’t bad people, you know. Not really. Not at first. They had some bad experiences trying to survive. At first their ruthlessness was necessary. But after a while I think they started to like it. They lost track of themselves somewhere along the way, lost sight of something – let some part of themselves die.”

  Ali stared off into her own mind’s eye now. Was this what Handon had been trying to save the operators of Alpha fr
om? From letting the human part of themselves wither and die? Maybe those dead men back on the water were a warning to them, of what waited – if Handon failed, if they spent their humanity, or abandoned it, in order to stay alive, and to complete the missions. Maybe that was the abyss that lay beneath the narrow wire they all were walking.

  “Hear anything from Homer, love?”

  Ali looked up, her fist autonomously balling up. Nearly anybody else would get slugged for using a term of address like that with her…

  * * *

  Henno had heard Predator’s rumbling basso call to him more than halfway down the length of the noisy-as-hell bomber. It penetrated all the way into his sleep. As had long been his principle and practice, he’d laid down and racked out on the deck the minute they left the ground, ready to sleep through the long flight. But now he was needed, so up he got.

  He clambered around the riot of people and equipment that filled the cramped space. How in hell were they planning on fitting us in here if five guys HADN’T snuffed it? he thought to himself. When he almost stepped on Ali, he paused to ask her for news of Homer.

  After easing open her fist, she said, “I tried to radio him, of course. I worked out we might be passing nearly directly over him at a certain point in the flight.”

  “And? You get him?”

  Ali paused strangely long before answering. “I don’t know.”

  Henno cocked his big head. “Wait – how can you not know?”

  Ali shook her small one. “There was something. Some trace of signal in the noise. It sounded like a voice. And the voice sounded like his. But it was incredibly broken up. And it all might have just been my imagination. Ghosts. Spirits in the radio static.”

  Henno grunted once, but his eyes shone with a flinty kindness and concern for her. “Well, no worries if we go ahead and believe it was him. That bloke’s unkillable. We’ll see him again, all right.”

  Ali smiled tiredly in response. Good ole Henno, with his rugged faith that things would work out. She understood that Yorkshire, where he was from, was like England’s version of the American south, or maybe their Texas: independent, fierce regional identity, largely but not entirely agricultural. And, mainly, they embraced traditional values like hard work, keeping your head down, being honest about who you were – and apologizing to no one for it. And a belief that things would work out if you did all that.