Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm (23 page)

Because he couldn’t see a damned thing.

Yes, the ground was racing at his face – but there had been nothing like a lightbulb burning on this continent for the better part of two years. There
was
a sliver of moon up there behind him somewhere, but it was tucked in behind thick clouds, napping.

Which was exactly what Oleg Aliyev had been doing until two seconds ago.

And it was falling asleep while flying that – in a development which ought to be surprising to no one – had caused this unbidden and unwelcome dive, roll, and vortex. Specifically, he was pretty sure his hands had fallen off the cyclic, and then his slumping torso had pushed it forward.

Obviously, on a trip this long, the helicopter ought to have been on autopilot. But the damned GPS satellites falling out of the sky had scuppered that. Every time he tried to turn on the autopilot, the display read “GDOP Error” and wouldn’t engage. Aliyev vaguely seemed to recall this meant the GPS fix didn’t meet the error threshold. But it sure as hell didn’t matter now.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” he repeated, as he battled to regain control of the shuddering aircraft as it fell so enthusiastically out of the sky, with him in it.

Righting a plummeting and out-of-control helicopter had not been, to the best of his recollection, a major component of his hasty pilot training. But he figured he now had the rest of his life to figure it out. As he tried this, tried that, tried this again, he also realized exactly what his initial mistake had been – the flawed thinking that had got him into this aerial shit-show in the first place.

Where he’d gone wrong was in focusing on
fuel
, when he should have been thinking about
flight time
– specifically, how long he’d actually have to pilot the damned aircraft by himself. He’d done all his planning based on range, not endurance. Not the helicopter’s endurance, and definitely not his own. He had known it was 3,655.52 miles from the helipad behind his former home – which sat nearly atop the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility – across much of Asia and all of Europe to Charing Cross, the very center of London.

And he knew his beautiful Eurocopter, which might only be beautiful for a few more seconds now, unless you thought fireballs were beautiful, had a cruising speed just a hair over 177mph – and could thus theoretically deliver him to his destination in twenty hours and change. Though that was before adding in the all-important refueling stops.

And there had been Aliyev’s error.

He’d been worried about the refueling issue. Because even with his auxiliary tanks, he could only stretch to 750 miles (on a trip of, again, over 3,600) before having to set down and try to find more fuel. And every single one of those stops was destined to be a no-shit breath-stealing dice with death. Every stop put him at massive risk.

So far he had survived two such refueling stops. In both cases, he’d taken off again with seconds to spare before legions of the local former population fell on his ass. And, perhaps relatedly, both stops had taken longer than anticipated.

And so now, as he realized when it was pretty much too late, he had been either flying or refueling for fifteen hours straight. And prior to that he had been caught up in his pathogen research, then vaccine research, then the adrenaline-washed horror show that had been him bugging the fuck out of his exploding and overrun dacha… and so now he realized – again, too late – that he hadn’t actually slept, by his count, in thirty-five fucking hours.

And the lack of sleep, and just trying to bull through and stay awake, was now right on the verge of killing him – killing him dead.

But as he hauled on the cyclic for all he was worth, and the helo simultaneously and miraculously came out of both its dive and its spin, and even the tail started to settle down and behave itself, Aliyev exhaled in blessed relief – because he had just saved his own life.

But he had perhaps only saved it for a few minutes.

Because he knew he was now going to have to try to land somewhere, park this thing up – and get some goddamned sleep. There was simply no way around it. He couldn’t just pull over, grab a 64-ounce coffee, and keep on truckin’.

And he
definitely
couldn’t risk falling asleep again.

Because, as he’d just learned, the only thing worse than falling asleep at the wheel – and it was much, much, much, much worse – was falling asleep at the stick.

And not only would falling asleep again probably send him off to his last, eternal, dirt-covered nap. But it would also probably mean the destruction or at least disappearance of the super-duper zombie-killing pathogen he had in a coldbox in back – and thus result in the whole world going to sleep right along with him.

And neither would ever wake up.

* * *

Luckily, through the night-vision goggles Aliyev managed to dig out of his bug-out bag without sending the helo into another dive, it looked like the ass end of nowhere down there below him. Just a whole hell of a lot of nothing.

Aliyev knew he was somewhere over western Russia – which was a goddamned vast place to start with. But not only couldn’t he see any structures anywhere down there – he couldn’t even see any roads. No telephone or power lines. Not a damned thing made by the hand of man. That was a pretty hopeful sign.

Even better… he could now just see a nice little glen in the middle of those millions of hectares of forest. This glen was clear of trees, looked fairly level – though that was tricky to work out with the crappy depth perception of the NVGs – and with nothing in it but a lovely little trickling stream passing peacefully through.

If Aliyev could survive a night on the ground anywhere, it had to be here.

He brought the helo down quickly but reasonably lightly on its four fat tires, then shut down the engines as quickly as he knew how. He clambered into the back, grabbed his bug-out bag and Benelli Tactical shotgun, pulled open the side door, leapt out to the ground, and ran like hell – the bag bouncing on his back, the shotgun pointing around crazily in all directions – until he was a hundred yards away from the aircraft, in whatever direction.

Then he stopped, turned around, squatted in the knee-high grass…

And he watched. And waited.

To see who or what would come.

* * *

Nothing did.

Vaguely reassured, Aliyev tiptoed back to the helo, climbed in, pulled the door shut, and got his head down – resting on a crate of grenades – then took a long look down the length of his body to just beyond it.

His last waking sight was the self-powered clinical coldbox by his feet.

It was this that held the whole purpose of this insane-ass, dangerous-as-fuck, multiple-cross-continental journey. The coldbox held his latest, greatest, and almost certainly last designer pathogen – Meningitis Z, or MZ – which killed the dead with outstanding reliability, and was also communicable as a son of a bitch. Unleashed among the dense masses of dead swarming Britain, it might reasonably be hoped to spell the beginning of the end for the world’s seven billion undead bastards.

At the very least, it would take the pressure off London, and maybe even save Britain. God knew – as did Aliyev, from radio traffic – CentCom wasn’t going to.

The same coldbox also held his MZ
vaccine
, which might just keep this pathogen, once it started rampaging around the globe, from taking out the few remaining living people along with it. And Aliyev was glad to be reminded of why he was doing all this. And it was good.

And then he lost consciousness, in absolute record time.

He only woke again, with a terrible start, not having the vaguest idea how much later – it could have been five seconds, could have been five hours –
when the side cargo door fucking opened up
.

From the outside.

That meant one thing: at least it wasn’t the dead. They couldn’t open doors.

Mentally, Aliyev was still seventy-five percent in his dream – he’d been dreaming of flying around the world like Superman, except with his arms spread out to his sides like a bird, and crop-dusting poisons out of his ass, which settled across the face of the Earth killing everything they touched – but when he woke up enough to work out what was happening, and saw faces sticking into his helicopter cabin…

He was too scared to speak.

But he was screaming inside his head:

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck – FUCK!

Cossacks

Somewhere in the Forests of Western Russia

“We are simple Russian peasants,
tovarisch
. We mean no one any harm.”

Yeah, right
, Aliyev thought.
It was simple Russian peasants who rose up with the Cossacks and opened up a giant can of whoop-ass on the Tsars.
But he just smiled and nodded and warmed his hands around his tin cup.

He’d finally gotten that cup of coffee.

Now he sat before a small fire, a few meters from the parked helo, in the company of four strapping young Russian farm boys – the same ones who had so brazenly intruded on his sleep, and his helicopter. They hadn’t killed and eaten him yet. But they’d survived the Apocalypse this long somehow, out here in the ass end of nowhere, so there could be little question they were capable of it.

All of them wore dirty, frayed, earth-toned country-ass clothes and work boots. All had unkempt hair and various lengths of non-designer stubble. All were between big and very big, and all were variously armed. They could have been brothers; and, in any case, Aliyev couldn’t even really tell them apart.

He paused now to curse fate. Only he could have such utterly shit luck as to land in what looked like the absolute middle of the Russian nowhere, and somehow end up in the clutches of a host of Russian peasants – or Cossacks, as he fancied them. Then again, he very belatedly considered, sound does carry. So maybe they’d been some distance away when they heard the unfamiliar sound of a helicopter landing, and then tracked him down.

Which, as Aliyev scanned out past the firelight to the ring of utter darkness that surrounded them in this forest glen, made him wonder what the hell else was out there, tracking them down even now.

He looked longingly over to the side of the helo where, reflected in the flickering firelight, his Benelli Tactical shotgun was propped up against the airframe. That was where the farm boys had put it. Now it might as well be a hundred miles away up in a tree. Oh, how Aliyev ached for it. How he cursed himself for having let these four get the drop on him so completely.

Have I never heard of fucking door locks?!
He cursed himself in his head. This was actually a ridiculous mistake he had made twice in a row now. But it was one he definitely wouldn’t be making again.

One way or another.

Sitting on the ground beside the Benelli Tactical was his bug-out bag. The farm boy in charge had taken a quick rummage around inside. But so far they hadn’t taken anything from him.

Except the medical cold box.

Which now sat at the feet of the one speaking, and calling Aliyev
comrade
.

“We hunt. We fish. We are okay.” His dark eyes, glinting in the firelight, darted down to the box at his feet. “The only thing we worry about is infection when we go into the town. One bite, one scratch…” He shrugged his massive shoulders, as if no more need be said.

Another one of them, sitting to Aliyev’s side and slightly behind him, said, “What is it inside the box,
tovarisch
?” The two of them had already opened it up and seen the vials and syringes within. “It’s a cure for the plague – isn’t it?
Pravda?
”

The last word meant:
the truth.

Aliyev shook his head. He had to give the dumb country crackers credit – it wasn’t a terrible guess. Crazy lone scientist flying across Asia with vials of drugs in his expensive helicopter… what other explanation could there be?

Now he looked around and spoke carefully – using Russian he had not spoken in a long time, but which had been the sole language of his long career with Biopreparat, the Soviet Union’s giant and super-secret bioweapons program.

“No, my friends, it is not. There is no cure for the plague.” Now he just had to quickly figure out some plausible lie to tell them about it instead. They’d seen the vials, so there was little point telling them the box contained a packed lunch.

If he told them the truth, that it was a bioengineered pathogen designed to be super-lethal to the dead, they might just fancy the idea of wielding an anti-zombie bioweapon themselves. But releasing it out here in the sticks on a couple of random dead guys was a virtual guarantee that it would just burn itself out.

No, Aliyev had to get this shit to southern England – where there was stratospheric undead population density. And if he couldn’t convince these crackers that it wasn’t what they thought it was, namely a cure, they might inject themselves just to see. They’d be dead in hours, but that would be small consolation and little use to Aliyev.

He absolutely couldn’t let this bunch of yokels steal or expend his MZ.

“Your accent,” the farm boy in charge said. “You speak Russian, but you aren’t Russian.”

Oh, God
, thought Aliyev.
Now, on top of everything else, these shitheads are going to kill me for not being local.
Russians had always made themselves out as superior to Kazakhs. He remembered that sinister clown Putin proclaiming that there was actually no such country as Kazakhstan – and that Kazakhs had better be on their best behavior while serving Russian interests.

At least that ass-clown is dead
, he thought.
One upside to the Apocalypse.

But you could play that game all day. All the ass-clowns were dead. Except the four here encircling Aliyev. Which made him realize he was getting fatally distracted. What he really needed was to figure out how to get the ever-living fuck out of here, and away from these provincials. Because the level of tension in this social circle, which had been pretty high to begin with, was going nowhere but up.