Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (3 page)

GLYNN JAMES &
MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

“’Tis but a Tent where takes his one day’s rest
  A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest;
  The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash
  Strikes, and prepares it for another Guest.”
– Omar Khayyam,
The Rubaiyat

“Defeat is never fatal. Victory is never final. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
– Sir Winston Churchill

I Beat You

The USS
John F. Kennedy

Commander Drake blinked heavily and shook his head, as he walked himself back through the dark and empty companionways to his quarters from the late watch on the Bridge. It hadn’t actually been his watch. But there also wasn’t any rule against him sitting in on any damned watch he liked, particularly with him nominally being in charge and all. This job had so many downsides, he didn’t feel bad taking advantage of its few perks. Even if some of his people, including the current officer of the watch, obviously wanted to tell him to take his old, tired ass to bed.

When the ensigns started ignoring his demands for coffee refills, that’s when he took the hint.

Looking around him now at 01 Deck, he found that it had gotten pretty spooky down below, particularly at this ungodly hour. With the number-two reactor back online, they once again had basically infinite power. But, as a matter of policy, lights were kept low in unused common areas during the midwatch (midnight to 0400) and the first half of the morning watch (until 0600). There were an estimated ten million feet of electrical cables running through this floating city, and nobody was in any big hurry to have to replace them.

Now the vibe down here was slightly creeping him out – as were all the vague hums, scrapes, belches, and whines that a gigantic warship makes while under way, seemingly at random times and from indeterminate locations. Drake looked over his shoulder again, at the empty steel corridor stretching back into darkness. He then felt for the comforting weight of his side arm on his belt, and patted it with his hand. Whether or not to wear a weapon on board was the personal decision of each officer. Drake had gone either way with it at various times. But, after the Battle of the
JFK
, something told him they were still at war.

And that he’d damn well better act like it.

He had also heard the scuttlebutt about lone Zulus wandering the lower decks, long after the ship had officially been declared clear. He also knew for a fact, as those subordinate to him and kicking the scuttlebutt around did not, that none of these rumors or reports had been substantiated. Not a single Zulu had been caught or destroyed since they made way from the Virginia Coast, leaving behind them the 10-million-Zulu march – and also leaving it down to probably seven or eight million, by the time they were done with it.

Doing that much damage to the horde was impressive enough. But sailing away afterward with a totally clean and healthy ship was nothing short of a damned miracle. The infection risk of a tide of dead that size breaking over their hull was impossible even to calculate. Though, doing some quick mental arithmetic, Drake figured they had been bum-rushed by something like a billion pounds of infected tissue and fluids.

The Marines running the fight had been extremely efficient, even brutal, in dispatching anyone bitten, scratched, splashed, or otherwise seeming to be at risk for infection. There had simply been no other way to survive. And the clean-up afterward had been immediate, vigorous, and as thorough as the officers overseeing it could manage.

But what were the odds, really, that no one amongst the approximately 2,500 survivors of the strike group had come away from that engagement infected?

Moreover, this was just an unfathomably big ship: twenty stories tall, over a kilometer long, 250 feet wide, and divided up into over 3,000 separate compartments – many of them long deserted, closed up, or just seldom visited anymore.

As Drake passed by the area he’d given over to Alpha team, he heard some strange, resonant rumbling, almost at a frequency below human perception. Was there a dog on board – or maybe a bear? Then it hit him. It was probably Predator, snoring. It didn’t sound like he was having a good night. His bunkmate certainly wouldn’t be.

The night before, Drake himself had this crazy-ass dream, in which he was back in that tense interval when the ship had been pulled off the Virginia sandbar, but before the engineers from their sub, the USS
Washington
, had gotten their reactor started again.

Probably when he was a kid, he forgot when really, Drake had seen some horror movie about a teenager-eating slime mold in a lake. At the end, the last surviving teen leapt off a raft in the middle of the lake and swam for it. After stroking for his life, and making it to shore alive, he rolled over, looked back, and screamed: “I beat you!” At which point the slime mold reared up ten feet out of the water and flopped over on him where he lay.

In Drake’s dream, the engineers couldn’t get the engines started – and the storm of the dead had regrouped and was coming back for them. They were already piling up against the hull again, and on the verge of flopping back onto the flight deck. And all Drake could think was: he
really
didn’t want to be the last teenager from that movie.

Now, as he finally reached the hatch to his own compartment, and numbly pushed it open, he already somehow knew he wasn’t going to get much sleep that night, despite the stupidly late hour, and despite his exhaustion.

His mind couldn’t really shut down anymore.

And his dreams didn’t seem to care what he’d already lived through.

If I Should Wake Before I Die (i)

The
JFK
- Officers Quarters

The Biblical Fall of Man is one of the oldest human memories. It was the origin tale at the heart of all three great Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Abraham was a herder and farmer in the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of human civilization, which stretches from Mesopotamia, across the Holy Land, and down to the Nile Valley and Delta.

All the way into Africa.

Handon woke up smoothly and slowly – despite the frantic action of his own dream. At first he assumed it was this that had woken him. But then he saw that Sarah, beside him on the small bed, was twisting, jerking, and making weak little noises. He reached over to wake her. But then he remembered two things: one, she needed the sleep. And, two: the world out here was a nightmare that might not be preferable to whatever it was that stalked her dreams. She might actually be happier there than waking and remembering where she really was.

So, instead, Handon rolled out of bed, dressed out, located his MP3 player by touch, and slipped through the hatch, pressing it closed behind him.

He’d had no time or occasion before to learn the location of the nearest gym on this deck. So he walked until he found somebody – two sleepy sailors performing maintenance on some exposed electronics in a cluttered cabin – and got directions. He found it and was warming up in two minutes. He was the only one there at this hour.

As he got into the music, and into some bench-pressing, he knew exactly why he was doing this – basically, he was sweating it out.
It
being the dreams. By sheer effort of will, he drove them out of his mind, refused to replay them – declined to rent them space in his head. Instead, he thought about what he wasn’t any longer worrying about: the dead.

In this long war, he had been haunted by thoughts of all the reanimated victims they had to put down – by their past lives, or the interior lives they might still have, even against all evidence. He had been criticized by one of his people, Henno, for being too concerned about them – not to mention being too slow on the trigger with living people who got in the way of their mission.

But the last few days of balls-out fighting may finally have cured him of all that. Having to shoot their way out of a whole city of the dead, an entire continent in fact, hadn’t left a lot of time for philosophical reflection. Getting ambushed by the pirates on the lake, after naively stopping and trying to help, had probably amputated whatever humanitarian impulses he had left. And seeing ten million Zulus coming straight toward the carrier, with the intention of infecting and devouring every living person aboard… well, let’s just say that had kind of a dehumanizing effect.

Maybe Handon was ready to regard the dead as dead.

Maybe he no longer had the luxury of anything else. Because there was also no getting around that they were, at some point, going to have to destroy nearly seven billion of them, virtually the entire world’s former population, before life could go on. But that was still a long way down the road.

He pushed out a last rep, and set the trembling bar on the rack behind and above him. And he just lay where he was on the bench and caught his breath.

But as he exhausted that line of reflection, he found creeping back into consciousness an idea of what had prompted his bad dreams. What the underlying theme of them was. And it was always the same.

It wasn’t the fear of losing his team, having Alpha go down around him.

It wasn’t even that he might not have the strength to spend his people’s lives, if it became necessary, and it came down to that.

No, his real fear, the one before which he stood naked and trembling, was this: that he would get them all killed for nothing. That he would have the necessary resolve; but insufficient wisdom. That he might spend the lives of these irreplaceable warriors – in the wrong place.

Combat leadership was always about making decisions, any one of which could result in somebody’s death.

But the stakes were now at an unprecedented level – on both sides of the equation. With Ainsley gone, Handon was now where all bucks stopped, and he had never before commanded missions with so much on the line. And he also had never led soldiers at quite this elite a level, or of this immeasurable value. There was simply no replacing them. Just as there could be no failing in their mission.

Handon hadn’t gotten where he was, Command Sergeant Major for all of Delta, by being easily unnerved.

But everyone had a breaking point.

And he knew it was possible that he may yet find his.

And he was afraid it might happen at a fatal moment. What the hell would be waiting for them in Somalia? Would it be better, or worse, than Chicago? Because worse was pretty hard to imagine. Then again, they were taking themselves right to the very source of the disease. It was the most hazardous terrain imaginable – like beaming straight into your enemy’s stronghold, naked before all the guns.

And how would the team hold on then? How would he?

He had a bad premonition about Africa. Their luck didn’t seem to be quite so bad the past few days, certainly not like it had been in North America, when everything and more had gone wrong, practically like clockwork. But things were still running far from smoothly. And it seemed the ZA still had plenty of nasty surprises for them.

As usual, he’d just have to deal with them as they came.

For now, he pushed the images of those dreams out of his head, just as he had pushed that overloaded bar back up to the rack. He took a deep breath, stood, and loaded another twenty pounds onto the bar.

He would just keep pushing.

* * *

Sarah Cameron looks on helpless as her son races home, trying to reach the outside wire, pursued by the mindless and implacable horde. As before, it is an open question whether he is going to make it. But if he does, as before, it is very unlikely he’s going to be able to get the gate closed again in time.

Sarah had woken up on this day like any other bright sunny morning in the post-apocalypse. Only today she knew something was different. This was the morning that Handon and Alpha team would arrive. She got up quietly, not disturbing Mark, who almost always slept in. Emerging into the main area of the cabin, the early slanting sunlight slashing across the hearth and the weapons rack by the door, she went to the kitchen and put the coffee on. As it brewed, she came back out and started to climb on the cross-trainer. But then she remembered today was a free-weight day.

As she did standing bench rows with 40lb barbells, starting to work up a sweat, her head cleared and her mood improved. Staying fit was a habit that being in the TPS, the Toronto Police Service, had instilled in her. She figured fitness was like everything else – hard to start if you’re not used to it, hard to stop if you are. She understood why most people hated exercise – they weren’t doing it enough, and were always on the steep part of the slope.

And fitness was that much more important in the ZA. You never knew when you were going to have to outrun somebody who wanted to eat you – nor for how long, or how far.

And that was when she heard the shouting from outside. It sounded like her husband – but when she opened the door, Mark wasn’t there. She remembered that he was still in bed. Instead, she saw her son running toward the gate, running in slow motion.

So there was plenty of time. Time for everything.

And this time, unlike the first, Sarah takes action. She doesn’t know where her rifle is, but she doesn’t think she needs it. She walks forward slowly, all the time in the world, steps up to that gate, and lowers the bar over it.

And then locks it with a heavy padlock.

Then she steps back, puts her hand to her chin – and watches her son being eaten alive. She doesn’t need her rifle. She’s got her son. Or, rather, the dead have him.

And as she looks on, she tries to remember what the status of that timing belt is, the one their truck needs. She’d have to go into town herself to get it later…

And then she woke in one heavy beat, sitting straight up in bed the dark. She patted the damp sheets on either side of her. Handon was gone again – for the second night in a row.