Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (25 page)

They locked eyes through the two portholes, two dogged hatches, and the length of companionway – and over the head of the frenzied, hissing, scratching runner inside. Which was now safely trapped there.

Sarah mastered what breath she had left and shouted, “There’s your new virus sample for you!”

She could just see his eyes and mouth go wide in response. She gave him a thumbs-up – meaning all of
good job
,
we’re okay now
, and
get your ass up top.

Then she collapsed to the deck, as hot tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.

Damage Control

JFK
, Flight Deck - Casualty Collection Point

Commander Drake physically pushed away the paramedic who was trying to examine him.

“I just got creased,” he said. “It’s nothing. See to them.”

But medics were used to being forceful when necessary, and this blue-jumpsuited dude with the big med ruck also knew that medical necessity always trumped rank. “You also just got blown up,” he said. “Now lie the hell down
.
Sir
.”

Drake sighed and tried to master his temper. He was seriously pissed off, about a wide variety of things now. But, as always, the thing about things was that they needed more than emotional reactions. They had to be dealt with.

As his anger and the adrenaline both slowly bled away, the pain from his wounds started to dial up. And Drake suddenly experienced a wave of nausea, as well as a massive headrush, and immediately felt strong hands easing him down to the deck. And that was of course exactly why the medic wanted him to lie down.

Because you can’t fall off the goddamned floor.

* * *

Sarah mustered her own strength, and levered herself up off the deck, her back sliding along the closed hatch. It was a long hard push. It wasn’t because of the blood loss, which had been minor. It was the blasted adrenaline. The stuff was great for powering you through a crisis.

But damned if it didn’t leave you weak as a kitten.

Shakily regaining her feet, she idly wondered if she was even going to be able to manage to climb the stairs up out of there. Then, somewhat less idly, she wondered what the hell she was going to do if she encountered another one of these things. Because one still usually meant more. And they still hadn’t had the courtesy to count off.

Well
, she figured,
I’ve earned at least a little reprieve after all we just suffered and survived.

But she figured wrong.

She heard it only in the single second before she saw it.

And when it exploded from the maze of crates, it was already hurtling flat out, at a speed that crushed rational thought.

In the split second she had left, Sarah realized two things.

One, she could now tell a Foxtrot from a Romeo.

And, two, this was definitely the one that ate Dietz.

It looked as if it had been
dunked
in the man’s blood.

* * *

Propping himself up on his elbows while the medic worked on him, Drake looked around at the recovery effort going on around him. He was lying at the edge of what had been designated the CCP (casualty collection point) for this critical incident. A lot of frenzied activity was happening on all sides, most of it within range of hearing, if he could pick it out from the general tumult.

Over near where the plane used to be, he could see two medics working on one of the scientists – the one who was prone and unmoving. The first medic performed chest compressions while another slapped gaffer tape over bullet holes, an old combat medic trick to stop bleeding quickly. A running figure drew Drake’s eye – it was someone sprinting over with a defib kit. But somehow Drake knew it was too late.

For some reason, human bodies had an unmistakable cast to them when the soul had left.

You just knew.

* * *

Sarah exhaustedly started to let her eyes close.

The last act left to her would at least be to choose not to watch this.

But then her eyes fluttered open again, almost as soon as she’d shut them. Luckily, time was dilating out in her mind again. As a result, she could watch the flying, blood-dripping nightmare cross the last ten meters of deck between her and it at leisure, despite it taking a fraction of a second to happen in real time.

But, however quickly her mind was running, the same wasn’t true of her body. She honestly didn’t know if she could muster the strength to prod it into motion.

But… finally, she decided she was damn well going to try.

Now she just had to choose whether to dive left or right.
Just like a goalie at a penalty kick
, she thought. Then she remembered something one of her soccer-obsessed friends had explained to her once: that the goalie can’t possibly react in time to see which side the ball is heading toward. He just tries to guess, beforehand – and then dives before the ball has even been kicked.

So that, left or right, would be Sarah’s last choice.

Moreover, that be would be her last act.

Defiance.

Let them say: she never gave up.

* * *

Drake could see the one healthy scientist standing off to the side, and arguing with one of the red-shirts, one of their crash-and-salvage guys. The black-bearded pilot was trying to keep the two of them apart. He was clearly strong enough to do so, though his big smile beneath his even bigger beard never wavered.

“You plonker!” the scientist said. “You people are all muppets of the first rank! Don’t you have any idea what was on that plane?”

“Yeah, man – fucking accelerants! Enormously flammable avgas, not to mention oil, and possibly explosive ordnance.”

The scientist’s face contorted up even more. As Drake watched, he somehow knew the man wasn’t really angry. He was simply terrified, and this was how it was coming out. “There was little or no fuel. The aircraft was sucking fumes!”

“I didn’t know that! Anyway, our protocols are clear, and we do not second-guess them: damaged aircraft in the presence of fire or EOD hazards, anything that represents a threat to this vessel,
shit that’s fucking ON FIRE
… it goes over the goddamned side. Anyway, how did I know the tanks were empty?”

“It just flew to the south Atlantic – from fucking Britain!”

The salvage guy just shook his head and walked away. He had much better and more important shit to do right that second. Drake considered the fact that they had also exhausted their entire stores of fire suppression foam in the battle. Not least for that reason, ditching the plane had been the right call.

He let his head fall back as the morphine kicked in.

* * *

Left, then
, thought Sarah.
Why the hell not.

She figured a Foxtrot was more than fast and dexterous enough to track her movement and adjust its path.

But, despite her thinking this was basically hopeless, just a gesture really, it turned out that diving to the side worked out extremely well for her.

Because, while she was doing so, an entire volley of booming and incredibly rapid gunshots rent the air, during what was supposed to be the last half-second of Sarah’s life. One of the last rounds caught the Foxtrot in the temple and splashed much of the contents of its cranial cavity across the hatch – which was, fractions of a second earlier, exactly where Sarah’s own healthy head had been.

Dodging hadn’t been sufficient to save Sarah. But it had been necessary.

And with that, the entire, horrible, wet, sticky remainder of the Foxtrot crashed into the hatch right behind its brains. All of it rebounded slightly, then fell to the deck, tumbling down into a lumpy pile of limbs, viscera, black bile, and red blood.

At the same time, Sarah was hitting the deck on her left side, not doing a great job of breaking her fall. As she came to rest with a painful knock, she looked over the top of the destroyed zombie, which had come to rest a few feet from her. And what she saw above and behind it was:

Lieutenant Commander Walker, flight surgeon and CO of the entire goddamned hospital, walking down off the ladder and out of the stairwell – the one near to the hatch Sarah had only just gotten closed. The flap of her drop-leg holster was open, and the slide of her service pistol, which she held stiffly forward with her right hand, was now locked back, the weapon empty. She was still walking smoothly forward, while dropping the empty mag out with a press of her right thumb, retrieving a new one by touch with her left, slapping it in, and then dropping her slide forward again – all without taking her eyes off the scene in front of her.

Behind her, emerging a second later, was a single Naval Security guy. He was carrying an M4 on a tactical sling. But, as far as Sarah could tell, he had been blocked by Walker in the stairwell and had never gotten a shot off.

“What are you doing here?” Sarah managed, as the imposing doctor, and warrior, approached and stood over her. Walker put out her left hand to help Sarah up.

“You took too long,” she said. “Where’s Dr. Park?”

* * *

Now Drake could see, although through something of a fog, Handon and Homer meeting over the body of the slain assassin. Drake thought he remembered Homer’s young children being out there with them. He assumed, or at any rate hoped, they’d been hustled off someplace safe, somewhere very far away from there.

Drake watched Handon reach down and roll the dead and bullet-riddled man over. He flopped on his back awkwardly, due to his hands being flex-cuffed behind him. Drake nodded in approval. He hadn’t seen it happen, but assumed one of his NSF guys had secured the assailant once arriving on the scene. Only doctors were authorized to say whether someone was dead or not. And terribly wounded men could still represent a threat.

Particularly when they were zealots.

Homer looked down into the man’s face, then back up at Handon, who was giving him a
What the hell?
look. But Homer said, “I recognize this man. From down in the Chapel.”

Handon’s face changed with understanding.

Homer went on. “He was one of the original Zealots. He must have survived when the mutiny was put down.”

Handon said, “And then faded away and blended back in.”

Homer nodded. “And then just bided his time.”

The goddamned son of a bitch
, Drake thought.

And then he passed out.

* * *

The two women, Sarah Cameron and LCDR Walker, stormed into the hospital side by side, the NSF guy pulling rear security behind them.

“Where’s Dr. Park?”

When Walker barked this out, her staff snapped to. From their looks, none of them knew what she was talking about. They also knew their CO just
loved
it when they had no idea what she was talking about.

In any case, the entry area of the hospital was obviously Park-free. A quick dash through the adjacent rooms brought home the fact that he simply wasn’t there.

Walker looked sharply at Sarah.

“He was supposed to meet me right here – nowhere else.” She paused. “Unless something went wrong.”

Without another word, Walker unclipped the NSF guy’s M4, hefted it, and headed for the exit.

But before she got there, Simon Park staggered in. Looking clear-eyed and alert, and much less dazed than when Sarah last saw him, though still bloody and shirtless, he moved purposefully toward a countertop on the far side of the room.

Handing the rifle back to the sailor, Walker crisply instructed Park, “Stop. Get on the damned gurney.”

“Just a second,” he said over his shoulder. He sounded a little winded – but still strangely calm and resolved. Reaching the counter, he efficiently pulled out two blue disposable gloves from a cardboard box, snapped them onto one hand and then the other, then walked over to a biohazard disposal box with a bright red plastic bag in it. He leaned over, unlaced his boots, and put them in the box.

Both Sarah and Walker could now see they were flecked with black gunk.

He then pulled off his pants, which seemed to be suspect as well, and stuffed them in. Now wearing nothing but socks, underwear, a running shirt tied around his waist, and his own shirt wrapped around his forearm, he lay down on the nearest gurney and just stared up at the lights.

Sarah had rarely seen anyone look so serene and dignified. As the hospital staff got to work on him, and somebody else started taking a look at her own hand wound, she tortured her brain, trying to remember when the hell Park might have gotten splashed down there.

As far as she could recall, he had never been that close, either to the Foxtrot, or the runner that had chased them both. She stole a glance at her watch.

Jesus, I only left him seven minutes ago…

Voices of the Operators

JFK
, Outside of Stores [Seven Minutes Earlier]

Park realized he hadn’t really started breathing again. Not completely, certainly not normally. And he was still looking through the porthole, down the short length of companionway, and out the porthole in the hatch at the other end. He was still staring, even though Sarah had disappeared from view.

The frenzied runner trapped in the sealed corridor was still scraping and scrabbling at the inside of the far hatch, though it had now stopped making noise. Or it was making too little to penetrate the seals.

Park finally turned himself around, still trying to regulate his breathing, and braced himself for the climb out of there. Back to the light, back to safety. Back to something like normality.
If there is even any such thing anymore…

But then it suddenly occurred to him, and not for the first time lately, that he had just completely dodged death. And he exhaled with blessed relief, his expression going slack. But almost as soon as it relaxed, it tightened up again.

Because he then also remembered that, as on all the previous occasions, his survival had almost totally come down to being saved by others – people stronger than him, braver, more skilled, less prone to panic. Once again, he’d been a bystander in his own life-or-death drama. Merely an object, a dingus, a MacGuffin, something the protagonists, the real heroes of this production, shoved around the stage.