Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm (25 page)

But, in any case, Ali could see it all now, with perfect clarity.

Indulging in love was every bit as dangerous as she’d feared. It had just a minute ago nearly gotten her killed. And it simply could
not
be tolerated.

She had to keep her mind on her goddamned job.

Notes from Underground

Camp Lemonnier - PX

Henno was a long way from Yorkshire now, as he stepped carefully through the scattered debris on the floor of the base PX – which seemed to him more like a mall department store than any kind of military setting – peering into darkness that was just light enough to not call for NVGs.

Because it was cramped and tight quarters in here, he had his SIG P220 Combat out in a two-handed grip, his rifle hanging on its single-point sling to his side. Both weapons had long suppressors screwed on to their threaded barrels, the SIG previously riding in an open-bottom holster to accommodate it. And the handle of Henno’s cricket bat protruded from the top of his assault pack over his right shoulder – within easy drawing reach.

With each of his careful, quiet footfalls, his assault boots raised another little cloud of dust – two years’ worth of it coated the floor, as well as every horizontal surface. He sighed. But only in his head.

He knew they were close – really close – to finally completing their weeks-long mission. Two years long, really. It had been a cure they had been looking for since the very start.

But, as close as they were to success… they were even closer to failure. Britain was on the ropes. And every minute they were out here, across all the minutes since they set foot out of Hereford, everything was on the cusp of going spectacularly wrong. They could all be killed or infected in one bad heartbeat.

And if they went down, so would all of humanity.

And Henno had to keep that from happening.

He stole a glimpse over his shoulder at Handon – and slightly wondered what it meant that he’d paired them together. Probably nothing more than:
You’re not getting to me.
Henno knew how it was in elite units – and more so in the SAS than elsewhere. You stood tall, you did your job, you didn’t take shit from anyone – and any shit you did get you paid back double.

With the bad blood between the two of them, this was Handon refusing to bow to it. Acknowledging it, but refusing to let it affect him, or the mission. It was just Handon being who he was. He and Henno were two men with wills of tempered steel, both capable of extraordinary violence. And if they were now eyeing each other warily, that was just what happened with two alphas in one pack.

No, what Henno was much more worried about was what the fuck they were doing on this half-arsed Zulu rodeo in the first place. They had a crystal-clear mission objective. And if they couldn’t achieve it here, then they needed to push forward to where they could. His countrymen were falling every minute they messed around here on behalf of some American conventional forces muppet, who would probably shoot them as soon as help them, given half a chance.

But Henno couldn’t run off and complete the mission on his own – at least not yet – so the best thing to do was get this done as fast as possible.

He swept forward through the dark aisles, not really waiting for Handon to keep up. And, once again, he felt the man’s eyes on his back. It didn’t bother him, any more than did Handon’s nominal authority over him. He knew that many times, if not most, authority was to be mistrusted – and it was always to be questioned.

But he also had to be careful to judge things on their merits – and to allow Handon to be right when he was right. Henno couldn’t be fighting him just because they were in a fight, or because Handon had been wrong before.

He was self-aware enough to be wary of his early conditioning. To know that his own upbringing had left him very distrustful of authority – and nearly completely intolerant of bad decision-making.

And he had to make sure he wasn’t letting it own or control him. Especially not his decisions and actions now, when everything was on the line.

He let his mind range back.

* * *

The Selby Coalfields in North Yorkshire covered over a hundred square miles – and were said to hold a hundred million tons of untapped coal, enough to power Britain for a hundred years. Moreover, the Selby fields had opened at the end of the miners’ strikes of the mid-eighties, when Margaret Thatcher’s government tried to smash the miners’ unions and leave the communities that depended on them to rot. Henno had been born in one of those communities.

His father worked down the mines.

The opening of Selby spelled a long-term future, and his dad couldn’t move their family there fast enough. People came from all over the country. There was no housing at Selby, but the miners settled in Castleford, Barnsley, Doncaster – or, in the case of Henno’s family, the down-at-heel village of Kirby Mills, literally on the wrong side of the tracks from the more prosperous Kirkbymoorside – and commuted in to work.

But there was work – which meant life.

Though, just as in earlier times, a miner was never far from danger or death. When there was an accident, it was often catastrophic – because everything was so big and fast. Giant lorries pounded down the roads, the conveyer belts ran at top speed, and everyone was required to work flat out. Thatcher had crushed the power of the unions, so management could do anything they wanted – including putting the workers at risk.

But Henno was too young to be aware of any of that. He grew up tromping around the North York Moors – walking on his own many miles out in the wilds, even before he hit puberty. He was happy out there in the fields and dales, and the severe, dramatic, windswept moors.

But underground it was still a dog-eat-dog world. There was a lot of bravado among coal-workers, and a great sense of camaraderie. But it was all built on sand. The mine owners – greedy for quick profits – started using contractors to drive the headers, instead of their own men. This fired the greed of the men, many of whom went contract for the bonuses and overtime – selling their influence and long-term prospects.

When everyone else is selling out, it becomes costly not to.

Henno’s dad could have been a contractor and made tons – but he refused, maintaining his solidarity with the lads still in the union. It proved to be a very costly decision. Eventually privatization of the coal industry, loss of subsidy, and low prices made the pits unprofitable in 21st-century England.

Selby closed – and everyone was thrown out of work again.

Even young as he was, Henno knew his fool of a father should have left then. There was no longer anything for them there. But he was stubborn – he wouldn’t leave his mates he’d worked the coal face with. So they stayed, the family living off benefits, the father drinking away an increasing share of them. He became an angry, frustrated, domineering drunk – always making bad decisions and losing what little money they had. Soon he was sitting at home all day, with little to do, and growing more bitter, and more ridiculous, by the day.

It was bad decision after bad decision. By the man in authority, the one who was responsible for them, the one who was supposed to know what to do.

So Henno would tramp off into the moors to get away. He would sit alone and just watch the heather-covered hillsides. He discovered the isolated Blakey Ridge, nearly ten miles away, and the Red Lion Inn that sat atop it. He’d do odd jobs there, and they’d give him meals, and tip him out at the bar. That became his home.

But on the day of his sixteenth birthday, with the written permission of his mother, he enlisted in the British Army – as a boy soldier. Though controversial in later years, the army continued its practice since WW1 of recruiting sixteen- and seventeen-year old boys into the forces. It was like an apprenticeship, a form of social mobility for all strata of society. For Henno it was a way out, and it became a place to grow up. For years he sent his pay packet home for his mother and sisters – begging them to keep it and not to tell Dad.

And all the while he grew stronger, smarter, better skilled, and more self-reliant, training course by course, year by year – finally climbing to the elite ranks of the SAS, and becoming one of the best soldiers in the best unit in what had been, for centuries, the best army in the world.

But he’d already had hardwired into him a very low tolerance for bullshit and stupidity – and especially for bad decision-making. And that could be a great asset now. But it had also put him on a collision course with Handon.

And if they collided at full speed, the collateral damage could be spectacular.

* * *

Pred and Juice cleared together through a warren of smaller semi-rigid structures. There was zero tension with these two – and maybe only an inch open air between them. They were closer than brothers. As they methodically moved and cleared, covering their sectors and each other with practiced ease and skill, they talked quietly.

“How’s it feel to be back in the Horn of Africa?” Pred asked, covering a left-hand corner while Juice swept right.

“Eh. Not bad. I was once shot down in a plane that took off right over there.”

“Oh, yeah? How come you didn’t die?” Pred swung his rifle smoothly up and around, and led them down the next alley.

“Kindness of old friends, mainly.”

“CSAR kind of thing?”

“Yeah – but under fire. More a QRF kind of thing.”

Pred just grunted and spat in response. Then he nodded at a bigger office building they were actually going to need to take seriously while clearing. Pulling open the door and holding it for Juice, he said:

“Hope your old friends made it out of here before the end.”

Now Juice just grunted and spat in response.

Following him in, Pred instinctively reached for his sword – but then remembered he’d replaced it with his aluminum Louisville slugger, and pulled that out from his pack. In seconds the pair had cleared the handful of front rooms. That left only a corridor leading to the back. But they could already hear something stirring down there.

Juice squinted. “May as well let ’em come to us.”

“True.” Predator stood at the end of the hallway and rapped three times on the wall with the baseball bat – loud. Then he turned back to face Juice. His expression grew thoughtful, and he asked: “Don’t you ever let it get you down?”

Juice arched his eyebrows, and leaned his heavily-laden bulk up against a wall. “Let what get me down?”

“The fact that pretty much the whole world has turned into one giant monster trying to eat you. Trying to eat
us
.”

Juice shook his head. “You got a real cheery outlook, man.” He paused to spit tobacco juice on the floor. “Anyway, believe me, the whole world was trying to eat you before this. We just had good immune systems—” But then he cut himself off and pointed over Pred’s shoulder, where a dead guy was now stumbling down the hall straight toward his back.

Pred glanced behind him but said, “Finish your thought.”

“We just had good immune systems to keep the tiny critters out – and sharp sticks to keep the big ones off. That’s it. Nothing’s really changed. It ’s just gotten worse.”

Pred nodded and put his hand on his chin, looking like this was a pretty interesting thought.

“Uh—” Juice pointed again.

Predator turned as the Zulu got within ten feet of him and stuck his baseball bat into its chest, stopping its forward progress – though it pressed forward and reached around with both arms, hissing quietly. Pred then twisted back at the waist toward Juice and asked, “Hey – does my Zulu look Somali in this?”

Juice leaned in. “Nah, don’t think so. Another North African, I think.”

“Hmm.” Disappointed, Pred removed the bat from the creature’s chest and bopped it once on the head, one-handed – crushing its skull and dropping it to the floor. The only sound was that of quietly crunching skull bone and mushing brain matter. With Pred’s massive reach, extended by the bat, he’d been able to do all this before the thing got anywhere near scratching range of him.

As he leaned over and took another look at it on the ground, a second one appeared down the hall. It was identical in dress and skin pigment, so Pred gave it the same treatment. The skull-crushing with the bat was almost more of a wrist flick. It looked like he was expending no more arm strength than he would to pop the top off a beer bottle.

Pred looked down the hall. Nothing else emerged. “I think that’s it. C’mon.”

Juice followed him down to the single large room at the back.

And when they pushed the door open and stepped in… both just stood silent and still and in awe, gawking all around them.

Juice whistled once – then looked up at Pred.

And then he hit his radio button.

* * *

“Go ahead, Juice,” Handon said, stepping outside into the light, where Henno was already standing, scanning the area, and taking a swig of water from his Camel-bak.

“Yeah, we’ve found something you might want to see.”

“How about you just tell me what it is.”

“Sure. We’ve basically found some kind of trophy room or shrine.”

“Shrine to what?”

“The former garrison of the base, I think.”
Juice paused.
“It’s a whole room full of patches and ribbons and rank insignia – everything from single stripes to single stars.”
That meant buck private to brigadier general.
“There’s unit patches – 10th Mountain… 449th Air Expeditionary Group… 3rd ID… Texas Army National Guard… 3rd Marines out of Okinawa… There’s also a shitload of fruit salad: hundreds of meritorious service medals, combat action ribbons, Bronze stars… Iraq, Afghanistan, and Global War on Terror campaign medals, Presidential Unit Citations, sharpshooter badges… also Airborne and Ranger tabs, a couple of long tabs… I could go on.”

“Don’t,” Handon said. “I get the idea. Where’d all these come from?”

“My guess? From the former garrison – every soldier in every tenant command of this base. Everyone who served here. Everything that used to be Velcro’d or pinned onto their uniforms is now collected here.”