Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm (18 page)

Rebecca looked from his young steely face, to Amarie’s young gentle one – and then down to her boys, who were both looking up at her in fear and expectancy.

“Please,” Amarie said, starting to cry.

“Have a fucking heart, man,” one of the Tunnelers said from behind.

The soldier’s colleagues were yelling at him from the other side of the door. He clenched his teeth – then put his hands out. “The little girl only. That’s it.” He looked to Rebecca. “You swear she’s yours, you take care of her, and it’s on your head.”

Rebecca looked over to Amarie, whose face had gone sheet white. The reality of it hit her in an instant: to get her daughter to safety she was going to have to abandon her. They would be separated. It was the worst choice she could possibly face. And she had to choose in the next second.

“Take her!” she cried – squeezing Josie to her breast a last time, kissing her on the head, and wetting her hair with her tears.

“Give her to me,” Rebecca cried, bundling up the little girl and herding her sons ahead of her through the gate, which was already swinging closed. It clanged shut with a crash and a shudder.

They were in.

Ahead of her, Rebecca could see men running – almost all of them toward what she could just make out as a terrible fire in the distance, pouring thick gouts of oily black smoke into the blue sky. Over the chaos swirling around inside the compound, she heard shouting behind her.

When she spun in place and looked back out through the gate… she could see Amarie still standing there with her fingers through the steel latticework, and tears streaming down her cheeks.

“I’ll take care of her!” Rebecca shouted back. “I promise!”

Amarie nodded, but looked as if her heart had just been pulled out.

“You’ll be okay!” Rebecca added.

But behind the young woman, Rebecca could now see the Tunnelers swarming the truck in the road – pulling the soldiers out of the cab, and climbing over the tailgate into the back. Their movements bespoke their growing desperation – and their resolve to survive.

The rules of civilization were falling away, one by one.

Worth Staying Alive For

Kent - Four Miles South of the ZPW

Private Elliott Walker of the Parachute Regiment took aim once again. But it felt very different this time. As the sharpshooter for his platoon, a role bridging the gap between infantry soldier and long-range sniper, Elliott had been given a flash new L129A1 rifle – right out of the crate and gorgeous, with a jet-black receiver and barrel, tan pistol-grip and extensible stock, and a big ACOG 6x sight mounted on top. It was a beautiful weapon.

But it, and the training, had been given to Elliott for a reason:

To protect his brothers.

He was supposed to provide overwatch, and suppress targets too far out for his teammates to hit, up to 800 meters – and to do so before they became a threat to the team.

But today that gorgeous rifle was smeared in dirt and mud – and Elliott didn’t like to think what else – and even had a few stalks of grass sticking out of the accessory rail on the barrel. And Elliott was too exhausted and numb to pamper the weapon as he usually did. Moreover, now he was about to start shooting to protect one person only: himself.

And this was a damned unfamiliar and lonely feeling.

He had originally been sent out as part of a six-man patrol to recover an errant ammo drop. And now he was the only one coming back. The lone survivor.

Among those who hadn’t made it was Private Ahmit Patel – Elliott’s best friend of four years. He and Elliott had walked into the same Army recruiting office on the same day. They’d gone through Para selection and training together, been assigned to the same platoon, and over the years become closer than brothers.

Until today. When Elliott had shot Ahmit in the face in the back of a dirty SUV mired in the mud behind enemy lines in overrun Kent.

Now his brother was gone.

And now he had to somehow get back through to friendly lines – and back to the only brothers he had left. The other lads in 1 Platoon, D Company, 2nd Parachute Battalion (2 Para) – which was also much of what was left of the thin red line standing between London and its destruction. To have any chance of making it back, Elliott was going to have to try and clear himself a hole in the inexorably advancing horde of dead, from behind.

And then run like hell through it.

Because it would be collapsing on him from the instant he started.

Crouching in the grass beside the remains of a wooden fence, he took aim on the back of a head in the distance. He took a breath, exhaled half, and settled the illuminated red dot of his sight on the brainstem. He gently squeezed the trigger. The weapon barely chugged through its suppressor and the head dropped out of view. Then he acquired another target and did the same. He was aiming to clear a path maybe twenty-five meters wide – and as deep as possible, maybe even out to the 800-meter range of the weapon. He wasn’t sure how deep the enemy went.

The only thing Elliott had going for him was that the dead didn’t notice when the ones next to them dropped.

The dead had no brothers.

* * *

Then again, the dead wouldn’t accidentally shoot each other, either. The batteries for Elliott’s personal role radio (PRR) had gone dead. He never remembered to carry spares, because Ahmit always had a pocketful. They’d become like an old married couple, dividing up tasks and forgetting about them.

But even if he had remembered, he wouldn’t have had it in him to go through his dead best friend’s pockets before he left him. But now that reticence might actually get him killed. Coming back into friendly lines was a dicey maneuver at the best of times, particularly from the direction of the enemy – and was much aided by radioing ahead, alerting the defenders, and imploring them not to light you up.

Now Elliott would have to rely on some well-timed shouting, plus not having the profile of a Zulu. The combat helmet helped. Very few of the dead had those. Infected soldiers tended to be put down by their units before rising up again. Or else put themselves down if they had to.

But even as he brought his rifle up and stood up in the tall grass, Elliott felt his motivation flagging. Everything seemed so pointless now. The pain he felt over Amit’s death was the rawest he’d ever experienced. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been face-to-face with him when he died. But the pain was scorching and felt like it would never subside. If he had to guess, he would have said it might take the rest of his life to stop hurting.

Part of him actually hoped that his life wouldn’t go on much longer – because that would be an end to the pain. Maybe that made him a coward, maybe it meant he wasn’t cut out to be a soldier, never mind a paratrooper. He had absolutely no problem dying to defend his Para brothers – if he could save even one, just one life in the Regiment, he’d be happy to spend his life doing so.

And, finally, that thought provided him with his motivation, his one inspiring purpose. If he could get back to his platoon, he could help protect the others there, as they protected him. And maybe everything would be okay – even if they all went down together. He hadn’t been able to save Ahmit. But maybe he could save someone else.

And that was worth staying alive for.

No time like the present
, he thought, taking a series of deep breaths.
Particularly when the present might be all I’ve got.
And it was slipping away fast. The hole he’d just painstakingly shot through the Zulu lines was already shrinking.

He took off.

Running in full combat kit was harder than it looked, and always a draining task. Now, totally on his own, Elliott was also going to have to shoot to defend himself. He had no one covering his six, nor his flanks. He had no base of fire support. He didn’t have a platoon or section to maneuver with.

He immediately switched to a two-eyed aiming technique – keeping the illuminated part of the sight in focus with his dominant eye while his other viewed the field to acquire targets. There was no way he was going to have time to line up shots peering through the pinhole of his scope, and it would destroy his situational awareness if he tried.

But his training on this had been minimal, so he just had to hope it worked.

For the first couple hundred meters, his initial sharpshooting stood him in good stead. There were no dead ahead of him – only destroyed bodies he had to hurdle or go around. The terrain was easy – mixed sections of crops, grass-covered pasture, and small sections of forest. The “wild spaces” of England were the result of millennia of agriculture, so were now laid out in very ordered plots. Elliott made a straight line through them all, not slowed by the fences and gates that normally sectioned them off.

All of those had been pulled down by the advancing army of the dead.

He cleared the first section of field, then the next of pasture. Then he entered a forested stretch. There was no underbrush – that had been cleared away decades ago – so the going was still easy, aside from some tree-dodging. But there were also a handful of Zulus lost and stumbling around in here, and they made for Elliott as soon as they heard him.

Too slow. He ignored them and ran on.

Another section of pasture. Now he could feel the pinhole of his escape collapsing. As he ran by dead on either side, they saw or heard him, and moved to follow. But as long as he kept moving fast…

More crop land. The oilseed rape stalks, like thick cabbage, threatened to tangle up his feet. He kept running. Another forest section. Now they were on him for real – including some runners, who took off as soon as they got the scent of prey. Instantly, Elliott was having to shoot on the run, taking frantic shots, just to stay alive and on his feet.

Out of the forest, into another pasture. There were a number of them in his path here, but most were slow ones, so he just ran and dodged, like a footballer breaking away for the goal. There were runners in his peripheral vision, but it was so damned hard to hit them while running himself. He had to keep moving and hope he could outrun them.

He was getting close to friendly lines. He had to be.

By the end of this field, they were pulling and pawing at him – he shoved them away with his rifle and carried on into the trees, where he had to start shooting again. If he could just get through this last stretch of forest, he figured he was home free.

He was snap-firing now, having to react more quickly than ever before. As a sharpshooter, he was usually able to take his time with a shot – and was virtually always static while shooting.

Now if he went static he was dead.

But he was getting the hang of it, leaping over ditches and brambles, dodging around trees, taking shots on any that got too close. Developing a rhythm. Making headshots on the fly. His twenty-round magazine went dry. He tried to keep his head up while changing it but both his pouches and his weapon were bouncing around, so he had to look down. When he’d reloaded and looked up again, there was one stepping into his path twenty yards away.

Chug
. Down it went.

A runner piled into him from the side, but it couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds, so Elliott bounced off it, shoved it with his rifle stock, twisted at the waist and fired –
chug
, headshot – then faced forward, never really slowing down. The edge of the trees and the next field appeared ahead, with some kind of gully or ditch right at the border. Elliott got ready to leap it – being fully kitted out for combat was like being on a heavy-gravity planet – when a shadowed figure rose up out of the ditch, facing away.

Chug
, headshot, and it dropped back down.

Elliott leapt over the gully, landing awkwardly on the other side.

And he skidded to a halt.

Oh, my God.
He couldn’t have seen what he just saw. He’d only caught a flash in peripheral as he went over the ditch. But he thought he’d seen two things – the camouflage pattern of the clothing. And a stark white cylinder in its hand.

Loo roll
.

He’d just killed another Para.

Oh, dear God.
Why wasn’t he wearing his helmet!? This couldn’t be happening. Elliott tried to will his legs to step back to the rim of the gully, but he felt mired in cement. And in that instant, three or four dead stumbled out of the woods, hot on his heels, and now literally fell into the ditch.

And began gorging on the fresh body that lay at its bottom.

This couldn’t have just happened. It was the exact
opposite
of what Elliott wanted, of what he was staying alive for. Oh, God, how he would have preferred to have died and this man lived instead. Now he could hear the horrible wet ripping and gnawing sounds as the body was torn apart and devoured, only feet away.

Within seconds, though, one and then another of the Zulus in the ditch started climbing out the other side, vaguely aware of more prey ahead. And Elliott had no choice but to run, unless he wanted to join them.

For a few seconds, standing stock-still and frozen with horror, he was tempted. Maybe that would be best. It would be so easy to just fall down into that dark ditch – to stop running, stop fighting, stop being afraid. And, mainly, stop being sad about the loss of his friend. To shield himself from any more terrible pain or regret. It seemed like it just kept adding up, the ZA piling in on him while he was weakest.

Now the first pair were out of the ditch, lurching toward him with arms outstretched. Elliott looked into their quasi-human faces, their rheumy eyes and mottled skin, blood-slick chins and hands. And one thought obtruded into his brain: right now, he was the only thing that stood between them and the rest of his regiment behind him.

It felt like willing dead wood into action, but he managed to bring his rifle to his shoulder. And, looking over the top of his sight, as they were only five feet away, he took them down. And something prodded him back into motion and action – almost as if he were watching himself from above. He turned and headed out at a jog into that next field, and then into the next treeline.