Arisen, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead Read online

  But it wasn’t – because their own helo was careening all over the damned sky, making it nearly impossible to shoot from. This hadn’t come about because the Russians had fired first – but because the Americans had flinched first.

  Something had to change.

  “Be advised!” Ali shouted over ICS to the pilots. “I need you to get this aircraft into a racetrack pattern, flying clockwise around the target, with our starboard side facing in!” In theory, this should solve both problems – keeping the Seahawk moving and a hard target, but making the Orca easy pickings.

  “Negative – that’s a no-go! The instant we assume a predictable pattern, they’re going to smoke us. We won’t survive one pass in front of that minigun. He’ll lead us by a few inches, and it’s lights out.”

  Ali realized the man had a point.

  This mission was rapidly turning into a complete soup sandwich. Maybe there was no way out of the death sentence they had all haplessly flown into – or at least no way to complete the mission without getting everyone on board killed. And, as if to finalize this verdict with a banging gavel, now the Russian minigun started up again – good and hard.

  They had obviously gotten their second-stringer in the game. And he wasn’t as bad as Ali had hoped. Slashes of sunlight once again tore through the interior of the aircraft as its skin erupted with dozens of new ragged holes. It was seemingly on every side at once, though that was just the Seahawk rotating and careening randomly through the sky.

  The violent motion of the evasive maneuvers, the rushing wind and engine noise, the screaming of wounded and the blood – and the fact that the cabin was the business end of a shooting gallery – all made the chaos intense, and made it a challenge to function even at the most basic level.

  “Now YOU be advised!” came that more-pissed-than-panicked voice from the flight deck. “I say again: take out that fucking minigun, or we CANNOT stay here!”

  Ali clenched her teeth. If she thought shit had gotten real earlier, she’d been seriously jumping the gun. She ransacked her brain. “Have you called this in to the carrier? Can they get some more air out to reinforce us?”

  “Negative, negative, comms are DOWN! I think that goddamned fucking minigunner severed the line to the antenna. Or maybe shot it off entirely…”

  Ali took a breath. Okay, fuck it, she thought, giving up on the prospect of the pilot working with her here, much less anyone coming to bail them out. She’d just make it happen on her own. She’d be wherever she needed to be.

  As she started to move to the opposite side, the rescue swimmer grabbed her and put his head up against hers. He nodded at the minigun and said, “Next pass, I’m going to put those motherfuckers in the drink!”

  Ali shook her head. “You can’t do that!”

  “Why the fuck not?”

  The answer was: because Ali had seen something else, in addition to her sniper nemesis, on that last pass – a taut white line, stretching from the door of the Orca down to the surface of the water. At the end of that line was a rescue strop. And most likely a swimmer – or possibly two.

  And Ali knew that by now their CAG was either suspended on that line, or else actually inside the Russian helo. Best case, he was still in the water directly beneath it. And that meant they couldn’t take down the Orca – not without also killing the man who was the whole objective of their mission. She explained this to the swimmer in as few syllables as possible.

  “What kind of bullshit is that?” he boggled. “They can shoot us down, but we can’t shoot them down?!”

  “Yeah – ain’t life a bitch?”

  Rounds continued to rip through the aircraft, though presumably their evasive maneuvers were reducing the number of hits.

  “I FUCKING REPEAT—”

  “Yeah, yeah, roger that!” Ali cut in. “We’re on it!”

  She suddenly realized they’d been going about this the wrong way – taking out a replaceable part, the gunner. Getting down on her belly now and low crawling through blood, she reached up and slid the left-side hatch open eighteen inches, then poked her barrel out and lay flat behind it. Unfortunately, nothing greeted her but sea and sky, both a spinning blur.

  She clenched her jaw in frustration. This was like a gunfight on a goddamned carousel – round and round…

  But she was now ticking over on every physical and cognitive cylinder, wired tight and totally switched on. She could adapt. She could wait.

  Finally the Orca spun by – and Ali made her shot, in the quarter-second she had a sight picture. She put a round straight through the stiff plastic feed chute coming out the side of the Russian minigun.

  Its six barrels kept on spinning, but it stopped discharging, and the effect on the American end was obvious and instantaneous – no more incoming rounds, no more systematic shredding of the aircraft around them. No more being shot out of the sky in slow motion.

  Nice.

  As the Orca spun out of view again, she heard their own minigun start back up behind them. The swimmer was back on it.

  No, no, no…

  Ali flipped onto her back and clenched her abs, intending to roll over them and up to her feet in a single motion. But something exploded at the minigun mount, and two things happened at once.

  One, their own minigun also stopped firing.

  And two, the swimmer clutched his face, staggered back, stumbled over Ali’s prone form – and for a horrible, frozen instant, looked like he was actually going to go straight out the eighteen-inch gap in the port-side door. Instead, he bounced off its edge and hit the deck, hard. He lay there rolling around, making wounded animal noises, and holding both hands to his face.

  Ali somehow instinctively knew what the Spetsnaz sniper had just done. He had put a single round into the feeder/delinker on their own minigun – she could see the ragged hole in the side of it from where she lay – and sent either fragments of that, or perhaps the ricocheting bullet itself, into the swimmer who was manning it.

  It was a like a split-shot in pool – sinking two balls in one go. Minigun out; gunner down. He’d also very nearly put the eight-ball in the side pocket by sending the swimmer right out the fucking door.

  Two, obviously, could play at all kinds of games.

  And Ali was being badly outplayed.

  * * *

  Homer spun around in place, remembering two things. One, it really was damned dark and murky down here. And, two, it was pretty hard to tell one black wetsuit, or one rebreather rig, from another – especially when you were expecting to find them both on your own dive buddy.

  Homer looked into the eyes of this second Spetsnaz combat diver from twenty-four inches away. He figured the dude had swum up from underneath the keel, crossing over from the other side of the ship. And he’d only seen the back of Homer, which led to this madcap case of mistaken identity.

  The man’s eyes inside his mask went wide.

  And then they narrowed to very mean slits.

  And he instantly started to paddle away – and also to bring around, and bring to bear, something very big and black from behind him. Whatever it was, Homer moved instantly to get inside its attack radius, kicking hard and closing tight, latching on and grappling.

  It looked like this fight was going to happen in even closer quarters than the last one.

  But perhaps God would still be with him.

  * * *

  Drake now considered that maybe everything going to hell simultaneously wasn’t a coincidence or Murphy’s law this time… We are facing, he thought, for the first time in a long time, adversaries who can actually use their damned brai—

  But he swallowed this inner monologue in his throat as, for nothing like the first time, he had to shield his eyes from a strange and unexpected glare coming in through the screens.

  What the FUCK…?

  At first he wondered if Fick was out on deck shooting off Stinger missiles again. This was really turning into a dodgy work environment for a guy suffering the light and no
ise sensitivity of TBI. He should be down in CIC where it was always dark and usually quiet…

  Goddammit. Once again, he had to drag his mind back on topic. He had to try and focus.

  And now, as he and Abrams both found themselves drawn toward the front screens, they could see the source of the glare was some kind of missile streaking across the sky, originating from the coast, and climbing steeply and fantastically quickly up over their heads. It then split into three smaller streaks, all of them moving on almost the same trajectory.

  Just as the two commanders rushed out onto the observation deck, something exploded high above their heads – way up in the sky above the carrier, a bit to the north, and too far up to make out any detail, or debris.

  Drake looked at Abrams. Before either could speak, they could hear Campbell’s voice leaking out of the room speakers inside: “Bridge, CIC. Predator UAV is DOWN. Repeat, we have lost the Predator ISR platform.”

  Drake froze dead.

  Abrams turned to face him.

  He said: “Commander. We’re now totally blind.”

  End of the World for Real

  The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains, Southeast Asia

  Oleg Aliyev – former bioscientist and bioweaponeer, first for the Soviets and then the Islamists, now world-class survivalist and developer of a designer pathogen completely fatal to the dead – snored heavily, taking a long, deep, and probably much needed Scotch nap. He lay draped across his fur-covered couch, one arm hanging down to the dark hardwood floor. Outside the great bay windows at the front of the room, and behind the big short-wave radio set, heavy snow continued to blanket this remotest spot in Asia – only thirty miles from the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility.

  But Aliyev was perfectly cozy – surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, by a fucking fantastic home-theater system… by his entire secure, comfortable, and fully stocked mountain fortress, which he had paid for with earnings from his freelance bioweapons work, and which had allowed him to ride out two years of zombie apocalypse in accustomed and near-perfect comfort.

  Though not in peace. His haunted mind and plagued conscience made it impossible for him to experience that. Because it had been his creation, his chimera virus, developed for the Islamists and then somehow escaped out into the wild where it mutated and went completely out of control, that had led to the end of the world.

  But there was still some hope of redemption.

  Because next door to the living area of the Dacha there was also Aliyev’s completely stocked and state-of-the-art bioweapons laboratory. In addition to every piece of hardware and equipment the discriminating bioweaponeer might ever need, it also contained the Fridge of Death. This innocuous-looking white box contained samples of virtually every microbial and pathogenic serial killer that had made the life of man hellish since the dawn of time.

  And that included meningitis – which, after a little clever biohacking, Aliyev had discovered was not only a reliable killer of the dead… but was also contagious among and between them. While swilling the Scotch that had put him into this coma, he had borne witness as his meningitis Z bug (MZ) had spread from one dead test subject to two others, and then finally made an end of all three.

  It worked. And it worked well.

  And, now, as he slowly dredged himself up toward consciousness, scratching his reddish van Dyke beard and rubbing his dark spiky hair, then sat up on the couch and found his clunky black glasses… Oleg Aliyev realized two things.

  One, he now had in his possession a designer pathogen that would kill the dead with great reliability – plus would spread through their population, from walking corpse to walking corpse, more or less like wildfire.

  And, two, if he ever actually released this thing… that would be the end of the world – for real.

  Because while quite a lot of people globally had been vaccinated against meningitis A, and a few against B and C… absolutely none of the handful of survivors on this blighted, diseased rock had been inoculated against meningitis Z. No vaccine existed. And even if it did, Aliyev had no way to get it to them.

  Thinking of the topic of survivors caused him to look unsteadily across the large stylish living room to the radio set that hulked on the ledge, in the bay windows, beyond which the great white storm was still blowing. Then he shot a quick glance over at the wall clock. It was just about time for the daily Survivors Broadcast from London.

  He snorted and shook his head. So this is what has become of the once-mighty BBC World Service.

  How completely everything had gone to shit.

  But it was something, some human contact.

  And, moreover, if he did release his new creation, his latest and probably last pathogenic abomination, his meningitis Z… then soon even those weak and occasional transmissions would come to an end.

  Everything would.

  * * *

  Then again, the broadcasts were sure to stop soon anyway. And it was probably pointless to worry about killing survivors with MZ, when the zombies who might spread it to them were already going to kill them – either the old-fashioned way, with teeth and claws, or else with Hargeisa, the zombie virus itself. And there was no such thing as being twice as dead.

  But then Aliyev glanced over his shoulder, thinking of the three dead zombies in his lab enclosures. Okay, maybe there is such a thing as twice as dead.

  Still. The prospect of personally, and permanently, hitting the Off switch for all of humanity and for the entire world as it had existed throughout 10,000 years of human civilization, and the 200,000 years we’d existed as a species… well, it was just a bit much to bear. Maybe Aliyev just couldn’t stand the idea of being the actual, literal Last Man on Earth. It would be too crushingly lonely. God knew it was lonely enough now. But, at the moment, at least he knew there was someone left, bloody-mindedly hanging around out there somewhere.

  And, in any case, he definitely couldn’t face the weight of such a momentous decision right now.

  So he basically decided not to think about it.

  Instead, he powered up the radio set, remembering how amazed he was every time he did so and transmissions continued to come in. There was the daily official update from London – spouting its feel-good platitudes about how the borders of Fortress Britain were secure, and how the search for a vaccine was progressing. And then there was also the random civilian radio traffic he could often pick up – from Britain, and from a few tiny outposts of survivors elsewhere around the globe, all of which tended to tell a different story.

  Aliyev sighed as he turned the volume up, heard the peaceful audio beacon chiming, and waited for the broadcast to start. Really, he liked to listen to this just because it was other human voices. It was great that the Brits were still there, putting up a valiant resistance – or, rather, a last stand.

  But Aliyev knew it was only a matter of time.

  In fact, he had every expectation that he himself would last longer than Britain did. With the dead wandering up on their 360 degrees of coastline… with their scavenging parties venturing out into undead Europe, then coming right back in again… it was only a matter of time before they suffered a bad outbreak and fell, as every other nation had. They had too high a population density, and the disease would spread too fast, too uncontrollably.

  It was inevitable.

  * * *

  And that was why Aliyev had been completely unsurprised when he first heard fleeting reports – on private civilian channels, as well as military ones – of the outbreak that had started at the Channel Tunnel. He couldn’t really work out how bad it was.

  But it definitely wasn’t good.

  And after Britain finally did fall, the only survivors would be small groups or lone individuals, the vast majority of them in extremely isolated areas. But even their days were numbered – at least Aliyev knew his were. When the supplies finally ran out, it would be death by starvation, or else death by scavenging, when he eventually got cornered by the dead, venturing out into pop
ulated areas to find food.

  Hell, he’d likely perish on the bloody mountain, just trying to get somewhere to scavenge. And when and if he got there, to those tiny Mongol and Uyghur villages that dotted the vast wilderness that surrounded him, the scavenging would be damned thin.

  Not that he was likely to bother.

  If he wanted to, Aliyev could actually do the math on his supplies, and work out how long he had left. But he didn’t want to. Lately, he tried not even to look around, when he went out to the supply building to top up the kitchen pantry.

  And now here came the stately chimes of Big Ben through the big home stereo speakers he had wired to the equally expensive and high-tech radio set. The chimes had been brought back from the old BBC World Service broadcasts, and were presumably meant to convey some theme of enduringness. Aliyev twizzled the volume knob down slightly – and then back up when the chirpy, cheery, female announcer, with her unmistakable BBC accent and Queen’s English, came on to greet what was left of the world.

  She proceeded with her usual propagandist rundown of babies born in the UK… new pockets of survivors contacted out in the world’s great remote shitholes (for some reason they never mentioned the survivors they’d lost contact with, who had to outnumber new ones), new vaccine candidates and how promising they looked…

  Aliyev was interested to learn if they were finally going to officially admit the outbreak, even if they downplayed it. But so far, not a peep. You’d never guess the barbarians were right outside their gates. Fortress Britain had been breached, as Aliyev had learned from the unofficial radio traffic. And the noose was starting to close on the very last world capital – London.

  It was the beginning of the end.

  The Hero With a Thousand Faces

  The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains

  Aliyev also knew about the so-called Zombie-Proof Wall they had constructed around the capital, along the M25 ring-road. He knew its general specs. And he definitely had done the math on that one: as soon as the rest of Britain went black, and its former population turned and converged on London… when over 40 million of its inhabitants became desperate besiegers, mindlessly pushing forward and climbing on top of one another to get in… well, the wall could not long stand.