Arisen : Nemesis Read online

  She looked over for the chain that raised and lowered it, and started to make a lunge. But gunfire to her left drew her attention. It was muted, but audible, and was actually coming from the cockpit of the Black Hawk, which was now half in and half out of the garage, and practically on top of her. Squinting in disbelief, Kate saw the co-pilot twisted around in his seat, leaning into the crawlspace that led to the main compartment.

  And he was firing his service pistol, non-stop – unloading it.

  Holy. Fucking. Shit.

  The handgun went dry, its slide locked back, and something crashed through the narrow space leading to the cockpit, falling on the co-pilot and pushing him back into his seat. There was struggle and frantic motion and a spray of blood misted the right-side cockpit glass, as if squirted from a ketchup bottle.

  In the other seat, on the left, the pilot still had one hand on the cyclic, the other overhead trying to pull the engines offline. But that got abandoned fast, in favor of scrabbling for a side arm in its shoulder holster.

  And Kate, mouth swinging free on her jaw, staring through the cockpit glass like she was watching unreality television… belatedly realized the pilot was a woman. And time dilated out and her mind went stupid on her – and she pictured the drop-ship pilot in the mirrored Ray-Bans who bought it in Aliens.

  But this woman at least managed to get her weapon clear – only to have a second figure dive on her from the back. This one was visibly bandaged up. And now Kate could see a distinctively big and bulky med ruck on the back of the first figure, the one currently savaging the co-pilot. That was either a 68-Whiskey, a combat medic, or a member of one of the Medical Expeditionary Teams.

  And Kate thought to herself: Well, fuck me…

  It WAS a medevac flight.

  * * *

  “Get in there – go, go, go! Help the aircrew!”

  This was Triple Nickel springing into action from the rear. The team members – Kate couldn’t even tell them apart in the swirling dust and shrieking chaos – were low-crawling forward, making for the side cockpit hatches.

  “No!” she shouted, trying to wave them off. “The crew’s gone! They’re gone!”

  She shook her head, suddenly wondering how she knew this – or what it even meant. The pilot and co-pilot weren’t in a good way, but they were still alive in there. It must have been a lingering genetic memory of some zombie movie she had or hadn’t seen once.

  They were bitten, which meant they were done for.

  No, that was crazy. But, then again, they’d surely be infected now, right? With whatever the hell it was. And whatever it was, Kate knew in her bones that, once again, they absolutely didn’t want any.

  But either no one heard her in the first place or else her warning became irrelevant, because now the wobbling of the rotor blades was increasing faster than their spin was slowing. And they reached low enough to clip one of the fuel barrels stacked into the door barricade – simultaneously tearing it open and sending it slinging across the garage, both effects vicious and violent.

  The acrid smell of gasoline filled the air. It was not only rushing out over the concrete floor and rising to the tops of their boot soles – it had also been sent spraying around and over the area. Kate felt droplets on her face and hands, burning, and she frantically tried to wipe it away.

  “Go, go! We gotta go now!” She couldn’t tell who was shouting.

  But the only response she heard to this was gunfire, close and loud and intimate, and her head snapped over to see Kwon in an upright shooting stance behind the back truck, firing his rifle around the nose of the Black Hawk. Her head snapped to the right now – and she saw dark figures clambering in around the airframe of the downed bird. They were forcing their way in through the gaping hole the crashing helo had torn out of the garage.

  Her head snapped back a third time as the popping single shots turned into heavier full-auto fire. Kwan’s SCAR now lay on its sling parallel to his body, and he stood behind one of the M240s on its pivot arm, firing long bursts to one side of the Black Hawk and then the other. Perfectly in control – and extremely effective. She even caught him stealing a quick annoyed look at the upended fuel barrel, then read his lips as he mouthed:

  Told you, motherfuckers.

  And he never stopped firing. Bodies continued rushing the gaps to either side of the helo – but he kept pounding them back out, like whack-a-mole. Kate counted four, then six, then eight, before she heard more shouting – “Load up! Get the vehicles up, go go g—” – which was immediately eclipsed by a throaty diesel engine firing up, then another, filling the small space with CO2 and noise and stench and vibration.

  Kate stood rooted to her spot, equally in terror of the spinning blades above, the liquid accelerant splashed over everything, the firing in close quarters, and the plague victims trying to force their way in. A blur passed her vision – the surfer dude, weapon cradled, leaping into the back of the front truck, grabbing the overhead roll-bar, and swinging himself into the driver’s seat. And then she heard that truck’s motor fire up, too.

  There was no one else in that vehicle, and it was closest to her. She looked back and saw Elijah was no longer down there with her – and heard the engines on the other two vehicles roaring. She somehow sensed the rest of the team had mounted up. Then more urgent shouting, some of it simply, “Go go GO!!”

  She grabbed the edge of the truck bed.

  Keeping her head low, she levered herself up and into it.

  Movement behind and to the left flashed in peripheral. She brought her weapon up, unsafetied it in a flash, and started triggering off. Whatever was rushing at her fell down, into the gap between helo and truck. There was still firing from the back, including Kwan’s M240 – but she sensed he couldn’t shoot around the right side of the helo’s nose from inside the truck.

  Holding this gap now, there was only Kate.

  She fired and fired and fired, triggering off thirty aimed single shots in five seconds. Changing mags with trembling hands, she belatedly realized something was terribly wrong.

  The trucks still weren’t fucking moving.

  She looked up toward the driver, to see what the fuck he was doing. He had dismounted and now hauled for everything he was worth, biceps bulging in the tight sleeves of his Crye shirt, on the chain that opened the roll-down door.

  But it stayed unmoving and serenely rolled-down – all the way to the floor.

  ZA

  Camp Lemonnier - 555 Garage

  “Todd! Mount the fuck up! Drive through it! Smash through!”

  This shout turned into a chorus, shouting against the lethal peril of the spinning blades, and the infectious nightmare of the figures trying to claw their way in, but still being knocked back by the enfilade from within. And not to mention the reek of the gas on everything.

  But shouting turned to near-panic when the fire started – set off, probably, by sparks rolling off the helo. At first it was only a patch of floor and the tool bench burning – and not the whole joint instantly combusting at once. But a second later a tongue of burning liquid reached the foot of one of the intact fuel barrels – and tendrils of flame began climbing it like demonic ivy.

  Very soon it was going to be the whole joint going up – possibly no more than one additional second from now.

  “GO, GO! We gotta get the fuck out!”

  Kate had just steeled herself to dive into the front and take the wheel, when the surfer dude, who she now gathered was named Todd, tumbled back in and revved the engine to chest-thrumming volume. He took exactly one second to build up a head of steam in the Humvee’s V8 6.5-liter turbo-charged engine. And when he popped the clutch, he had approximately one foot to accelerate and get up enough momentum to bust them all out of there.

  Kate said a prayer that the door was flimsier than it looked.

  It wasn’t.

  The six-ton truck bucked forward like a bronco in its pen, then struggled and grinded against the metal slats of the door. Th
ey bent terribly, twisting and crushing – but they wouldn’t break, and the door wouldn’t come loose. The crash of the helo had warped the whole structure, jamming the door in its grooves, and it didn’t want to come free. The truck had one cubic shitload of torque, but the lack of any running start was dooming them.

  Now Kate heard a voice that wasn’t shouting, but speaking almost at conversational volume, completely calm. And it was right in her ear. It was Kwon, over the squad net. He said:

  “Down in front.”

  Spinning to the rear, she saw he was now manning one of the M2s, out of the top hatch of the second vehicle. And she barely had time to think: I guess that’s why he’s the weapons sergeant.

  She dropped down into the truck bed and covered up her head as the throaty thunk-thunk-thunk of the .50-cal beat the air around them, and the roll-down door disintegrated in front of them like it was in an episode of MythBusters – .50-Cal Versus Garage Door. Thumb-sized slugs, fired from hand-sized shells, warped the air over her head like fat moths, and metal fragments shot off the steel slats and went zipping around the garage, some pinging off the chassis of trucks, others chipping and cracking the windshield that Todd huddled behind, still urging the truck forward.

  If anybody had engaged anything that close, in quarters that tight, with an M2, Kate had never remotely heard about it.

  And then her body went rolling and slamming into the back gate of the truck bed, inertia trying to keep her in place as the vehicle rocketed forward, like the bronco had finally been set loose from the pen, hurtling outside to throw its rider and stomp some rodeo clowns. The mangled garage door went tumbling away underneath the truck’s knobby wheels, and they were instantly blasting out into what was left of the American military presence in the Horn of Africa.

  What was left of Camp Lemonnier.

  * * *

  It was like a hundred years had passed overnight. Aside from the flames still burning, the camp looked like a ruin of itself. Tents were torn down, vehicles parked at odd angles or half sticking out of structures they’d crashed into, debris and shell casings carpeted the ground – and everywhere bodies lay face down or twisted at weird angles.

  And it was nearly morning now, so Kate could see everything. The sun was still below the treetops, but there was a yellowish-brown light blanketing the base. Or maybe, for all she knew, Djibouti was just naturally this grim color. She’d never seen it in the daytime before.

  She only had two seconds to regard the environment, because when they were not even fifty yards out of the garage, a gigantic white-hot explosion blossomed into the sky behind the convoy – as the Black Hawk, all its tanks of JP-5, plus the barrels of gasoline for the trucks, and the whole garage/helicopter hybrid went up together at once.

  Kate spun to the rear only to be assaulted by a rush of hot air and overpressure. Through slitted eyes she could see the breathtaking sight of fuel barrels arcing into the dun sky on pillars of brilliant fire, while thick waves of black smoke rolled out across the ground like tidal breakers, chasing off the gun trucks as if they were seagulls scuttling away up the beach.

  She ducked and covered up her head again.

  Bits of aircraft, rotors, rubber chunks of tires, sheet-metal sections of the garage, socket wrenches and lug nuts – and Kate really didn’t like to think what else, given that as far as she knew no one made it out that helo alive – arced hundreds of feet into the sky and started landing on and around her, and for hundreds of yards in every direction.

  The explosion hadn’t even settled before she heard small-arms and machine-gun fire ramp up behind her, and then Todd’s voice speaking in her ear: “Hey, you. In the back. Get the fifty up.”

  “What?”

  “The fifty. Ma Deuce.” He meant the M2.

  What the hell does he want me shooting at? Kate thought.

  But she uncoiled herself, straightened up, and took another look around. And she saw that the camp was indeed like a ruin of itself – except for the scattering and shambling hordes of… well, whatever the fuck they were now. Ghouls. Lost souls. The sick. The dying.

  Kate’s stomach turned, and she wanted very much not to think too closely about that, or what was about to happen.

  The warm, dirty, polluted air blasted around her in the open vehicle, and so instead she looked over the roll-bar beside her at the ground blurring by a few inches from her healthy, fleshy, and vulnerable body.

  Why the hell did I have to end up in the dune buggy?

  They were totally exposed to the elements, which might at this point include virtually anything. And it took only about another two seconds for her to work out where the lost brigade of Camp Lemonnier was going.

  They were converging on the three vehicles.

  They were heading straight toward them.

  Which meant they had to keep moving – or they were all dead.

  Kate stood up and yanked on the giant charging handle of the heavy machine gun. She was ready to rock and roll.

  And she thought:

  Well, goddamn.

  It IS the zombie apocalypse.

  * * *

  Up ahead of them, Kate could see the great, billowing, Pasha’s-caravan shape of Thunderdome. That was the name for Camp Lemonnier’s rubberized basketball court, volleyball pit, and assembly area – with its huge, semi-rigid, canvas roof stretched overhead, and supported by arcing steel ribs.

  As they rapidly closed the distance, she could see one side of it was collapsed, and also half torn-away. Inside she could make out hundreds of folding chairs, presumably left over from some recent assembly, and now mostly overturned.

  “So much for Bingo Day,” Todd muttered over the channel.

  “What?” Kate asked, not having the vaguest idea what he was talking about, or why.

  “Never mind. Fuck it.” He upshifted and accelerated.

  Around Thunderdome, Kate could see stumbling figures dotting the blighted landscape.

  But because they were the lead vehicle, the way ahead of them was relatively clear. Looking over her shoulder, she saw that it was taking the victims time to spill out into the road and converge – and they were much more of a threat to the other two trucks. Only their speed was keeping them clear of the tide of sick.

  So she traversed her weapon 180 degrees, circling around the mount, and looked for targets to the rear.

  But the first one she saw wasn’t even one of the sick. It was an American soldier, dashing out from inside a tent, hauling his arm back as if to throw. He didn’t look terrific, but he didn’t look like the others. He was still moving like a regular human. Albeit a desperate, half-panicked one.

  Unfortunately, the direction he was moving was right into the gap between the rear two trucks – and he was totally oblivious to them. No one could know what the hell this guy was trying to do, and there was no time to ponder it. The third gun truck swerved out of line and more than half out of the road to avoid him. But even as it went sliding left through the dust, the grenade detonated in the dumb son of a bitch’s hand, the explosion half-disintegrating him – and blasting into the right side of the hurtling truck.

  Instead of swerving right, back into the road, it carried straight on and plowed into one of the trailer-like CLUs, half disappearing inside the flimsy structure.

  And as Kate watched, open-mouthed, the second truck locked up its brakes and cranked its front wheels, spinning around in the dust and coming to a shuddering stop. Then its tires spun up again, spewing dust behind it, and it blasted off back where they’d come from.

  Right back toward the crashed vehicle. And if both those vehicles stopped back there, they’d be overrun – in minutes, if not seconds.

  And just like that, Kate and Todd were alone.

  She tried to breathe, and traversed the .50 around to the front again.

  Maybe she could still keep them from ending up like the others.

  Rocket Dance

  Camp Lemonnier - Out in the Open

  “We’re ok
ay, we’re okay!”

  Kate recognized Jake’s comic book superhero voice over the squad net. So now she knew who at least one of the men was in the crashed vehicle.

  And then she heard frantic non-stop firing – first through the open radio channel, and a second later live and fainter from back down the road. In her mind’s eye, she could imagine what would happen to a vehicle in this convoy that came to a stop.

  She pictured ants swarming over a carcass.

  Then, underneath that, she heard Brendan’s younger and reedier voice. But equally calm. “Yeah, Kwon and I are gonna set up security while Jake and Pete get their truck out of this building, over.”

  “We’re coming back around.” This was Todd, who she could see driving one-handed while he jammed his radio PTT button.

  “Negative, negative,” Brendan said. “Keep moving, do not get jammed up back here with us.”

  Kate stole a look over her shoulder. The crash site was fast receding. But the firing was still ramping up even more. And she could see, through the dust, a crowd of bodies converging. It looked like the end for everyone who was back there. For anybody who wasn’t moving at least 40mph…

  “Do NOT fucking stop, Todd.” This was Jake, and he sounded like the team sergeant now – laying down the law and cracking the whip. “Head for the main gates and blast a way out of here for us. Get that gate open.”

  “How?” Todd said.

  “Improvise. Out.”

  As the sound of firing redoubled, Todd cranked the wheel and took them in a skittering right-hand turn. Hanging onto the twin handles of the M2 for dear life, Kate tried to straighten up and focus. There were fucked-up figures in the middle of the road dead ahead of them now.

  She depressed the butterfly trigger of the M2 and held it down.

  The five-foot-long weapon came to life in her hands, jerking and thrumming with unrestrained power. Kate could see the rounds hitting all over – in the road, in the structures beside it… and in the bodies of people she was going to have to find some way to stop thinking of as people. It was the only possible chance of her doing what everyone else here had not: surviving.