Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon Read online

  “We’re being recalled. CentCom have something else for us.”

  Eli raised his eyebrows. “And that is?”

  “No idea, mate,” said Jameson, shaking his head. “They didn’t say what, or where, but we’re expected to be half a mile from here in ten minutes. Then up and out.”

  Eli grinned, the first smile that Jameson had seen on the man’s face for a while.

  “Nice,” said Eli. “Out of the rain and mud… and the dead.”

  “For now.”

  Jameson turned to his men, most of whom were still seated or lying on the ground. Some worked at checking their gear, but most were just getting their breath back and taking a well-earned break. He hated to cut it short. His men had been through pretty much every bad situation possible in the last day or so, and then some, but at least this time he had some good news for them.

  “Okay. Everybody ruck up! We’re moving out,” he shouted, and grinned when his order was met by moans.

  “We’ve gotta be one klick north of here in ten minutes for extraction. So, unless you really want to stay here and fight zombies in the mud with the boys in the maroon berets, rather than taking a nice ride back to quarantine…”

  The response was as he expected, and his grin widened as every man leapt to his feet and started bundling up their gear. A minute later, One Troop was pounding dirt across the field. They dodged through the mustering paratroopers, and jogged through the wooden gate at the north end of the field, past a copse of trees and into the open ground beyond. More Chinooks were landing in the next field, half a dozen of them settling carefully before spilling troops into the mud. A few hours before, this field had been filled with refugees being checked for infection, those who had escaped the terrible outbreak in their town, and as One Troop ran along the narrow ditch at the edge of the field, they came across the grisly evidence that remained.

  They stumbled upon the ditch about halfway across the field. A number of times squad members slipped and were pulled to their feet by those behind them, but when they saw the four-foot furrow, they all slowed, almost stopping dead. Jameson wondered what the ditch was for, but then caught his first glimpse of the body bags. Dozens of them were lying along the edge of the field, from where they normally would have been collected and disposed of, but the camp had been evacuated in a hurry, the convoy of CentCom vehicles hurrying away along the road, followed by masses of running or walking uninfected survivors. Here, lying in lines along the ground, were the unfortunate ones, those who had been cut or bitten. And there had simply been no other humane way to deal with them.

  Jameson shook his head and tried to concentrate on the way ahead, pushing his men to follow at a quickening pace. He had fired upon hundreds of the dead in the years after the fall, probably thousands, but killing civilians who were still alive, but definitely or even probably infected, was a job he was glad someone else had to do.

  As the Marines reached the end of the field, Jameson wondered if the people in those bags, the newly deceased, would ever be given proper burials. He saw Eli looking back, a thoughtful, sad expression on his face, and as he turned back again, Jameson nodded, understanding.

  They reached another fence, and seeing no easy way around, climbed over the barbed wire that topped it and sprinted toward the fat, twin-bladed helicopter waiting in the middle of the barley field beyond.

  As they rose into the sky a minute later, with all of his remaining Marines on board and accounted for, Jameson looked back across the battlefield, to see the lines of Paras facing off against the first mass tide of dead that had ever walked on British soil. There were no words to be said, so most of the men sat in silence, listening to the thrum of the rotors as they sped across the sky, away from the battle. Jameson was pretty sure it wouldn’t be long before they were sent back to this very place, or somewhere else along the line, but he was damn well glad to be out of it for at least a few hours.

  A few feet away, Eli was writing into his notebook – a dirty, scruffy old thing he had kept with him the entire time they had been crossing Europe to reach Britain. He thought it must be a diary of sorts, but had never asked. He just accepted that everybody needed their place to go to get away.

  Quarantine

  Britain - London

  No matter how many times he’d seen it, Jameson was still in awe of the battlements of London. From the window of the Chinook, he watched as the wall came into view some thirty miles out. It certainly wasn’t the most beautiful thing created by man. But he doubted there had ever been anything quite as imposing. Not, he thought with a smile, that any zombie would appreciate that.

  Rising to fifty feet in most places and then up to a hundred if you happened to be standing in one of the gun emplacement towers, and built entirely of concrete and steel, the wall looked like something from a sci-fi novel. They called it the ZPW, the Zombie-Proof Wall, and Jameson often wondered if, even considering how impressive the defenses appeared, it had ever been tested live to deserve such a claim.

  The Army and a swarm of civilian engineers and builders had been working on it for the entire time since the truth of the disease was discovered, and it had slowly changed over that time. The concrete cubes that made up the first sections, just ten feet high and placed in a line right down the middle of the M25 motorway, had been added to constantly over two years. More concrete blocks, then steel girders, platforms, watchtowers, barbed fencing, ditches, gun emplacements, and yet more ditches. To reach the wall on foot from the outside meant traversing no fewer than six deep trenches across two hundred feet of rough ground. It was a fixed defensive position, and ground-war nightmare, of proportions rarely seen in human history, comparable only to some of the great fortresses of the medieval period. And it was these details that made Jameson shake his head in wonder for the hundredth time.

  Built entirely upon the M25, the ring-road which defined the outer border of London, and stretching the entire circumference – over a hundred and eighty miles – it was, Jameson truly believed, the eighth wonder. The Great Wall of China was much longer, and had taken far longer to construct, but it was built only of stone, and topped out at twenty-five feet. Jameson recalled trips into London during the different phases of construction of the ZPW, and how each time a different metal high-rise would be missing from the skyline. Quite a few had gone by the time it occurred to him to ask Eli what he thought was happening.

  “Recycling and reusing,” Eli had answered, also obviously awestruck by the huge undertaking. He’d gone on to explain how they weren’t building the wall from new steel, or that already produced and stored, because there wasn’t any left. The huge fixed position that the PM believed would prove to be the final line of defense against the dead, should the rest of the island fall, had been built by tearing down metal buildings, as well as melting down entire fleets of unused vehicles. Prefab warehouses in their hundreds, north of London and across the country, had vanished overnight – dismantled for their new use. Those massive sheets of metal that made the walls of such buildings now lined the bottom of the ZPW, gouged and cut to provide a lower barrier that could shred anything trying to climb up them.

  As their Chinook passed over it, Jameson looked down toward the battlements behind. Even after just three weeks away, there had been changes on this stretch of the wall. A new tower was rising from the concrete rampart just to the north, and the walkways and fighting positions had been extended in places. Most worrying, though, were the gaps. The wall was fifty feet high in most places, but it wouldn’t provide much protection if a hundred yards away there was an empty hole, thirty feet across, where the wall had been torn down and was being rebuilt. It was another detail Eli had been happy to fill him in on. Bad planning. If the wall was going higher, the bottom had to be sturdier, and they hadn’t always checked the road foundations. Sometimes sections started to collapse.

  The passover point for military traffic was always within half a mile of this same section, and it always passed over the refugee quar
antine camp. A display of power, Eli claimed. Show those held inside that there was no point in trying to break out, even if most of the aircraft going by had nothing to do with quarantine.

  The big ungainly helo left the camp behind and headed across several miles of open ground before reaching Biggin Hill – the military-only quarantine. They banked left and made for the helipads at the north end of the huge complex. There were enough parking spots for thirty or forty birds there, most already taken. They dropped down and landed at the far side of the blacktop, settling gently on the deck without so much as a jolt.

  Seconds later the doors opened, allowing the Marines to exit onto the grass beyond. Jameson took stock of his men, most of them covered in dirt and dried blood, their uniforms disheveled and torn, and felt sure that, to a man, they would have happily collapsed onto this much cleaner grass. Even with the short respite in the air, they were utterly exhausted, run down to the last of their energy.

  But collapse wasn’t allowed here and every one of them knew it. You didn’t hang around in the arrivals area of quarantine unless you wanted extra attention. Jameson knew that once they landed, One Troop had five minutes to reach the compound a few hundred yards away before the tower gunners surrounding the high-fenced area turned their heavy machine guns and binoculars toward the troop and started watching them intently.

  There were no chances taken inside the walls of London. It was shoot first and ask questions later, and no messing. Jameson had seen it happen a number of times.

  They reached the compound in record time, two dozen men on the edge of collapse, pounding across the blacktop as though heading into battle. But this was a different thing entirely. Once inside, they would be tested and then quarantined in cells, and that meant forty-eight hours in lock-up with a bed and food, some books or the newspapers, and very little else. For most this would mean utter boredom, but for combat troops it was a chance to rest, some time to relax and do nothing. Best of all, it was time to sleep.

  They stood, huddled together in the sparse brick building that had once been a crop barn before the ZA, but was now one of the testing areas for the largest military quarantine area on the planet. Jameson glanced over to Eli, who was looking out the window, toward the high fences that marked the boundary and the inner section of the camp. Beyond that, rows of squat, flat-topped buildings lined cramped alleyways. Eli had a faraway expression, and looked lost, or confused.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Jameson, frowning when the thick-chested man jerked his head up, snapping out of the daze.

  “I was wondering if they had enough of those concrete boxes for all the refugees on their way,” he said. Jameson nodded, but in the back of his mind he wondered if that had really been what his troop sergeant was thinking about. He was normally chatty, and quick to comment, but since they had fought their way out of Canterbury, Eli had gone quiet.

  “Okay, now what’s really bothering you?”

  Eli looked down at the floor, then back out the window, and was quiet for a few seconds.

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  But Jameson wasn’t having any of that.

  “No. Really. Get it out. We’ve got hours to kill soon, locked away in isolation. Don’t stew on something for all that time. Especially if it’s something that—”

  “They’re on the doorstep,” interrupted Eli, keeping his voice quiet, so not to attract the attention of the other Marines. “They’re here.”

  Jameson sighed.

  “That wall out there. That’s not going to keep them out forever, you know,” continued Eli, turning to face his lieutenant. “There are millions of people in the south. Millions. And the dead have finally landed on the island. Soon they will be piling up against that wall. Or just walking right through the holes in it.”

  “We’re fighting them, though,” said Jameson.

  “Sure,” said Eli. “Every country in the world fought, mate. Every one of them. They all fell. You know, I always thought we’d be okay here, safe on our island, and since we already managed to hold out, but in truth, it was inevitable, wasn’t it?”

  Now Jameson was shaking his head. “This place lasted, though. For a reason. If we trap it and stop it, it can’t get bigger.”

  Eli smiled, but it wasn’t a cheerful one. “That’s what the Japanese said. And they were the last to go, remember? Just like us, they walled themselves in, cut off contact with the outside world. They got it right, just like we did, and then one small fuck-up screwed them. They lasted a while and then one idiot dragged one up from the sea bed while they were fishing. Just one. And you know the rest. We’re well past one. And the wall doesn’t mean shit anyway, you should check the small print in the papers, mate. They have outbreaks inside the wall all the time. It only takes one of those little outbreaks to be of this new type of deader, and we’re screwed.”

  “You’re just shaken from Canterbury,” said Jameson. “We all are. It will be stopped. We’re a lot more prepared for this than everywhere else was. You saw the Paras going in.”

  “Yeah, we all did, but they weren’t pushing forwards, they were going backwards. Retreating, because we can’t get into hand-to-hand with the damn things. They’ll retreat right back to the wall and then we’re in deep.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You saw the state of that wall. It may have looked grand for a while, but it’s two years old and now the faults are beginning to show. It’s collapsing in places already, in just two years.”

  “They’ll fix it,” said Jameson. “You need to have a bit more faith in people, mate.”

  But Eli was rolling. “And do you know what I heard? One of the Paras was yabbering to me and a few of the others before we left, and he said that it’s nearly down to Portsmouth already. They’re evacuating Portsmouth, mate. The south is lost and it’s been less than a week since they got ashore.”

  “True,” said Jameson, and that stopped Eli, who looked taken aback. He hadn’t expected him to back down. But Jameson wasn’t intending to.

  “Look. We have a severe problem with it at the moment. It’s spreading, but they’re evacuating. You weren’t the only one talking to the Paras. I was talking to a company sergeant major, and right now there are a hundred thousand troopers sweeping into the Midlands and the South. CentCom has everyone coming in from all directions. They’re evacuating every town between the outbreak and London, plus a few up to the north.”

  Eli was quiet for a moment.

  “That still means we could have close to a million or more dead in the South.”

  Jameson nodded. “Yes. We could, but they’re drawing a line just south of London and reinforcing it with everything we’ve got. Those Paras are in there to help delay the tide while others are readying. And what’s more, that Para CSM says he’s seen dozens of flights going in all directions, like they must be dropping teams all over the place. He said there were a couple of minor outbreaks outside of the catchment area, but they were jumping on them.”

  Eli looked down at his boots and coughed. “Well I guess we’ll find out forty-eight hours from now,” he said. “When most of it is either all over, or we’re in just the right spot to jump up on the wall and try to stop a million dead from piling over it. Last men standing.”

  “Twelve hours,” said a voice from a few feet away. Both Marines turned to see an orderly, a Security Services corporal by his insignia, approaching. Jameson and Eli winced – if he had heard the conversation just coming into their corner of the big room, then the other Marines might have as well.

  Jameson frowned. “What do you mean, twelve hours?”

  The orderly walked up to them. “We don’t wait forty-eight hours anymore. Changed that just last week. The virus incubates and kills a lot quicker, and it’s speeding up. We’ve had no infected people last any longer than about eight hours for at least a month. Chances are you blokes are all clear anyway or you’d be showing signs.”

  Eli stood up, and rubbed the top of hi
s head, which would normally be shaven clean, but was now showing a thick fuzz of growth. “So we’re only in for the night then?”

  “Yes. Just long enough for you to get some sleep. Or if you’re infected, time enough to die.”

  As One Troop exited the big barn and traversed the alleyways between the labyrinth of concrete holding cells, the Lieutenant regarded his normally unshakable troop sergeant. It was obvious to Jameson that Eli’s confidence – for so long unyielding and unbreakable – had taken a jolt, and as much as he wanted to fix it, he knew there was little he could do. In actuality, his friend was perhaps more intelligent and calculating than he was, characteristics that had proven priceless in the past. Jameson knew that Eli held the rank he chose to hold, and had been offered a spot in the officer selection process a number of times in the past, but had turned them down. The man was better officer material than any officer Jameson had ever met, and his resolve was often what held the troop together, more than any judgment or skill on Jameson’s part.

  But how was Eli going to fare with twelve hours to just sit and think?

  “You know what?” said Jameson. “I’d love to get my hands on the idiot that let the things out in the first place.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Eli, smiling for the first time.

  “That damn security guard,” said Elson, who was walking just behind the pair.

  Eli turned, shaking his head. “Not the security service. They did what they could to alert everyone, and most of them died trying. The calls were made, apparently.”

  “Who, then?” asked Elson.

  “Whoever didn’t do a thorough job of closing the tunnel in the first place,” said Jameson.