Arisen, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead Read online

  It was, as the builder of the Titanic had said to its captain: “a mathematical certainty.”

  Aliyev snorted, congratulating himself on a nearly perfect metaphor, and briefly considered getting into another bottle of Scotch. But he couldn’t quite be bothered to walk to the bar, plus he was still hungover from his last lecture-time bender.

  Finally, as he listened to the broadcast, it became clear the Brits still weren’t going to cop to the outbreak, even now – and Aliyev got sick of listening to the stream of pabulum. He powered off the set, trudged back over to the leather couch, and dropped himself down. As he lay still, breathing, with his fingers steepled on his chest, he regarded the radio across the room – and considered tuning in to some civilian channels for more info. But there was little point – he knew which way the wind was blowing.

  Huh, he thought, snorting once. Maybe I’ll just ring them up to say goodbye.

  There was something appealing about the idea of speaking to a living person, just one last time. His radio included an extremely powerful transmitter, which also used the big aerial on the roof. He had just never used it. Before the end of the world, transmitting anything out of there would have been tantamount to suicide – it would have been the quickest way to draw the attentions of CIA, DIA, JSOC, those lovely and deadly all-American boys in the SEAL teams…

  Oh, and particularly the NSA. Those guys had 100,000 world-class experts sitting around doing nothing all day long but capturing and decoding the communications of guys like Aliyev. No, screw all that.

  Instead, what Aliyev had done was rather cleverly mount a transmitter on a small hand-held drone – really just a high-end civilian RC quad copter, one with especially long range and endurance. And, periodically, he would send that out about 100 kilometers, where it would connect to a remote server, fetch all his email for him, send anything he had to send, request web pages he wanted to see, etc.

  Of course that was back when the Internet was still running, and so he hadn’t had any reason to send it up, not for a long time now. Of course, nobody emailed any more. Though funnily enough, last time he had been able to check, he was still getting spam. Probably a few data centers with extremely long-lived uninterruptible power supplies. Cockroaches and spammers, that was who survived the end of the world, both totally unkillable. Them and the dead.

  Though, with his meningitis Z, it now looked like the dead were not as immortal as they had once appeared…

  Anyway, with America and its security services and special operations forces also closed for the duration, Aliyev could now safely radio out if he wanted to. He’d just never wanted to. He hadn’t really seen the point.

  He sighed and looked to his volume of Marcus Aurelius, where it sat on the radio. Then he let his eye wander over to the big, inset, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves – and the first spine that jumped out at him was Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. In that book, the great mythologist had posited something he called the “monomyth” – his theory that all mythic narratives in human history were really just variations of a single great story.

  It went like this: In the beginning, the innocent homeland and tribe are threatened – and so the Hero, presented with a challenge, sets out on a quest into the dark forest, where he has to overcome many lethal challenges, slay the dreaded monster, and finally return with a magic Elixir – the cure to what had gone wrong, and which would be a blessing to the tribe forever. Osiris, Prometheus, Moses, Odysseus, The Wizard of Oz… fucking Star Wars – all were just variations on this same universal story.

  For his part, Aliyev had always kind of thought that what the monomyth was really about was: the triumph of life in the face of mortality – and the otherwise inevitable encroachment of death. The Elixir represented the secret to eternal life – or at least the secret to making this short, doomed one meaningful. And the hero was the one who brought it back – who gave the people life, and who finally conquered death.

  The Kazakh snorted again, and took a look up at the expensive ceiling he lay beneath, which he had done in classical Roman frescoes. If he was right, and the archetypal hero was the bringer of life and the conqueror of death… then what that made him was: the nearly perfect anti-hero. Instead of bringing life, he had brought death.

  He’d embraced it, improved it, massively expanded its domain. And he’d brought it down upon everyone.

  And now, because of him, it looked like death was actually going to conquer life, in the end. There would be no happy ending to the story of humanity. No homecoming for Odysseus, no victory for Beowulf over Grendel, no redemption for Macbeth.

  No destroying the Death Star for Luke.

  And the best Oleg Aliyev could do now would be to kill all the already dead. He could, as the final face of the anti-hero, and the last man to take his leave of this planet, turn out the lights.

  It would be little enough.

  * * *

  No – fuck all that, Aliyev thought, very suddenly – and even more unexpectedly.

  He was tired, but he wasn’t quite ready to pack it in. Not yet. His long and hard-fought victory with MZ, the zombie-killing disease, had fired his hope, which had long lain dormant, if not actually dead.

  Now he sat bolt upright and went back to the radio. He had no more inspired idea than to scan some of the military channels, and see what was happening. He fired the radio set back to life, and started flipping digital frequencies.

  Generally, he got a kick out of just listening to those guys bumble around. For starters, there was the simple smugness of being able to listen in on their communications. Funnily enough, the military continued to encrypt their radio traffic after the fall – Aliyev wasn’t totally sure why. God knows the dead weren’t listening. Then again, there were no doubt any number of dodgy living people still skulking around out there. Those who survived tended to be sketchy – the tough, mean, selfish, and merciless generally died last.

  Aliyev considered himself exhibit A in that case.

  But, then again, the British and European militaries had never encrypted their comms terribly well – and, post-apocalypse, they’d stopped updating their encryption keys and protocols entirely. So it had been a pretty minor project for Aliyev to decrypt CentCom’s, simply by using open-source software tools.

  The other reason CentCom amused him was their habit of sending very elite special forces types off to get killed or infected on the Continent, scouring biopharma labs for a cure to the plague. What Aliyev could have told them, and in no uncertain terms, was that they weren’t going to find a cure.

  Because there wasn’t one.

  What he himself had created, and what had taken down humanity, was simply an absolute bastard of a virus. It was a chimera of smallpox and myelin toxin, which evidently had somehow further mutated in the wild when those asshats in al-Shabaab, the Somali jihadists, had let it loose – most likely when it entered a chicken coop, or pig farm, or best of all, some dump that subsistence-farmed both…

  In any case, this motherfucker of a virus was absolutely not going to be cured in a day – or a year, or probably a decade. And almost definitely not without knowing how it had been designed, plus having a very early-stage sample of the virus – which could only be got in East Africa, which good luck traveling there. No… if a vaccine for HIV had not been developed after nearly four decades of worldwide research, what were the odds that someone had come up with one for the zombie virus, in the handful of weeks between when it had been discovered – and the complete collapse of civilization?

  If someone had pulled that off, against all possible odds… it would be a one-in-a-million shot. The scientist responsible for it would be a savant, a supergenius, a once-in-a-generation talent – a comet streaking by at ground level. And Aliyev didn’t really believe in that kind of genius. If humans were that smart, they wouldn’t have pissed it all away like this in the first place.

  But nonetheless, on a total lark, Aliyev now switched to the first of the common m
ilitary frequencies. With the troposphere shrinking down tight with the storm, he might get some interesting radio bounces from far afield. Sure enough, there was some traffic, very hard to make out, not because it was broken and distorted – but because it was so frantic.

  He was listening to the desperate battle for the south of England. Which did not sound as if it was going well.

  He’d never before heard messages that sounded so, well, tactical. He could actually hear the firing, and the screams of men in pain or fear. Thinking about it, he realized the reason he’d never heard that before was: the personal and team radios of the men doing the actual fighting had very low power, and their signals would never travel so far. It was always the command frequencies Aliyev heard: colonels and generals in the field, but in the rear, talking to headquarters.

  But now… even those senior officers were engaged in combat. They were all deep in the shit.

  Jesus, Aliyev thought. It was a hell of a thing to hear men fighting, being overrun, and dying – at that very moment. For the first time, he was very glad to be here and not there. When a man stopped in the middle of his status report, and started screaming in a blood-curdling fashion – and didn’t fucking stop – Aliyev tremblingly changed the channel.

  Now he was on one of the internal CentCom channels. And the man and woman on this transmission sounded utterly relaxed. They were either unaware of, or unconcerned about, the horrors that were happening elsewhere on their little island – and were seemingly ignorant that these horrors were almost certainly lying in wait, in their near future.

  And, somehow, listening to the rear-echelon people cooly chatting, while soldiers died horribly, was even creepier. Aliyev switched channels again.

  This time he hopped onto one of three long-range military frequencies. This was where he’d sometimes pick up traffic with units inserted onto the Continent. Also, he already knew CentCom had sent some type of warship across the Atlantic – the first time they’d ever ventured nearly so far afield. They were either onto something good; or, much more likely, they were very, very desperate.

  He gave it a few seconds, but heard nothing at all on the first channel. Maybe they needed everyone at home – for the final defense. Not that it would avail them much.

  He flipped to the second long-range channel. Nothing there either – only broken static. He moved the pad of his finger to the tuning button, and started to apply pressure to flip to the third and last channel… but then hesitated. Was that some faint whisper, or vague shape to the static? Sunspots? Just encroaching madness?

  Still totally acting on whim, Aliyev switched from digital tuning to analog, and began twiddling the large dial with his fingertips, trying to zero in on he knew not what. He started to imagine he could hear something like human voices… though it was probably just evocative static… ghosts in the planetary machine… That notwithstanding, he finessed the big, sensitive, circular knob with two fingers.

  Suddenly, the channel cleared, and the transmission resolved – for exactly five seconds, completely clear and audible, and nearly static-free. And what Aliyev heard was this:

  “…firmative. I say again, we have successfully recovered the Biacore 4000. Interrogative: will this definitely allow Dr. Park to complete his vaccine for Hargeisa? Over.”

  “Central, Seven-Nine Actual. Yes, yes – that is affirmative. We believe so. We are proceeding as per briefed mission plan to Gulf of Aden to insert Al—”

  And then it went back to unintelligible static again.

  And then nothing.

  HOLY FUCKING SHIT, Aliyev thought.

  He felt as if the requirements of drama meant he should stagger away from the radio, maybe clutching his chest. But he simply couldn’t will his muscles into action, and merely sat there, hunched over – with his jaw open, slack, and hanging halfway into his lap.

  HOLY FUCKING SHIT, he repeated to himself.

  I’ve got to get to London…

  On Home Ground

  CentCom HQ, Formerly Wandsworth Common

  First Lieutenant Jameson – Officer Commanding, One Troop, 42 Royal Marine Commando – could feel his heart pounding as he ran across the road, feet thudding on the pavement, then the crushed grass of what used to be Wandsworth Common. Now this field was used as a maintenance ground for helos, two of which he and his men had just disembarked from, having miraculously survived, and successfully completed, their mission to retrieve the Biacore 4000 from Dusseldorf.

  Now, as he sprinted away from the aircraft, aware of his troop sergeant Eli and the other men running alongside, Jameson felt sweat begin to pour from his face. They were all reacting to the gunfire and explosions that had erupted from the CentCom Strategic Operations Command building, unable to believe that something like this could possibly be happening here – but instantly running toward the sound of the guns.

  In his peripheral vision, Jameson saw others heading across the grounds in the direction of the former Wandsworth Prison, which had been annexed and repurposed by CentCom. They were armed soldiers, also making a beeline for the chaos that was now erupting in the old prison building, and what was the very center of command for CentCom – the heart of everything.

  Jameson saw a truck racing across the common a hundred yards away, spewing dirt and gravel behind it as it sped away from the Biosciences Complex toward the main complex, four other soldiers hanging on in the back and being rocked about as the vehicle bumped over uneven ground.

  As they passed the helo pilots who had been their chauffeurs for the Dusseldorf mission, including Captain Charlotte Maidstone, Jameson shouted, “Secure the Biosciences Complex!” and didn’t stop to see if they complied. Maidstone outranked him, and he wondered if she’d harangue him later on, but she’d already shown she wasn’t fussy about rank or chain of command. He carried on running flat-out, checking only briefly that the rest of his troop was still with him, as they rapidly approached the gate.

  The truck carrying the soldiers got there first, zipping past him closer than he liked and rushing through the open gate just ahead of the Marines, then screeching to a halt. The occupants, all Royal Military Police (RMPs), jumped out the back, pulling out weapons and instantly firing into the main entrance. Jameson was just wondering who the hell they were shooting at, when half a dozen more human figures burst into view, slamming into the RMP detail from its flank, totally surprising the soldiers. The first two went down, kicking and punching, but the second pair back-pedaled toward the truck, firing to cover their retreat.

  Jameson ran on, closing the gap, then aimed his rifle and fired on three of the dead – and as much as he didn’t want to believe it, the view of the pale and bloodied figures through his rifle sight confirmed that what he was seeing was an outbreak. The trio lurched at runner speed toward the truck and the soldiers, but then fell to the ground as his burst of fire cut them down. They weren’t dead, but they also weren’t running any more. Good enough.

  “Everybody on channel?” he said into his chin mic, and was relieved when he heard a volley of replies from his squad and fire team leaders.

  A second trio of runners came out of the building and cleared the edge of the wall, giving him an open shot, and he took it, letting rip with another burst of full-auto fire and not even trying to get a bead on the ravening heads. Instead he hit them in the legs, ploughing all three to the ground, where they still crawled and scratched their way forward.

  The two remaining soldiers, their compatriots now dying on the ground at their feet, opened fire again and took out the closest of the undead killers.

  As Jameson hit the tunnel and ran through the gate, closely followed by Eli and more of the Marines, a dozen other security personnel and RMPs converged on the entrance just behind them. Jameson ran into the open ground beyond the gates, took stock of the half-dozen frantic lurching figures running out of the building toward them, and opened fire.

  He knew seconds was all he had. The roar of gunfire on the upper floor – and now, as he
listened closely, more gunfire further inside the building and off in other wings – told him this was no small outbreak.

  All of CentCom Strategic Command was now in play – and the whole garrison was fighting a pitched battle against the dead.

  * * *

  Jameson waited for the rest of his men to clear the gate and form up, then started shouting orders.

  “Four-man fire teams, everyone on me,” he snapped, and headed for the main entrance. He tried to do the math. He had five fire teams, not enough to cover the entire building, so he would have to prioritize and hope the security teams would follow his lead, or at least have the initiative to spread out and try to cover other areas.

  Jameson burst through the main entrance, his assault rifle raised and ready. He had just three magazines left for the dead man’s rifle he had inherited, having lost his in Dusseldorf – and where he had also ditched most of his favorite gear just to run a little faster. He knew his men were little better off ammo-wise.

  As he moved into the big open area that was main reception, he clocked six… no, seven figures moving around. To his right, over near the stairs, was a mess of a melee. At least two soldiers were fighting the dead hand-to-hand, but it was difficult to see who was dead and who was living. Eli rushed past him, heading for the fight, followed by two other Marines, all of them with bayonets fixed and ready to take the battle to the undead, up close and personal if necessary.

  Jameson spun and took aim at the other fight going on nearer the main stairs. One man, dressed in what Jameson thought might be a medical uniform, fought furiously against two undead that had already latched on to him. He felt a stab of sorrow as he saw one of the dead bite down on the man’s arm. The medic screamed and tried to punch back, but the other zombie already had hold of his other arm.