Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (28 page)

“Exactly.”

Close paused again. “That might be a problem.”

“Why?”

“Because the Biacore is a damned rare and expensive piece of kit. And generally the only people who have one are biotechs doing serious drug design. Or research universities with specialist labs.”

Park didn’t look panicked – yet. “Surely there’s got to be one somewhere in the UK?”

Close nodded. His rectangular, steel-framed glasses reflected the overhead fluorescent lights and partially obscured his pale-blue eyes. “As a matter of fact, we brought one with us. It was on the damned plane.” He just let that hang there.

Park exhaled. “There have got to be others. With your university and research infrastructure…”

The professor’s face was inscrutable. “There were exactly three in Britain that I know of.”

“Great. So that means there are two others.”

“Yes and no. One, at Edinburgh, suffered a short across its electronics from a bad power surge. Dodgy electric grid. We couldn’t figure out how to repair it, and we had another, so we just put it aside to scavenge for parts.”

“And the third?”

“At an academic biomedical science facility. That one’s totally intact. As far as I know.”

“Great. Which university?”

“Kent.”

“University of Kent… that’s in the southeast of England…”

“Yes – bang in the center of Canterbury.”

“Fuck.” Park had heard the stories about Canterbury. They all had by now.

Close leaned back tiredly. “I haven’t looked at a map recently. But I’d guess Canterbury is at least fifty miles inside the infected zone. More, now, probably. It’s overrun.”

“Fuck.” Park’s newfound coolness under fire threatened to desert him. “Nothing at Oxford? Cambridge? Imperial in London?”

Close shook his head. “None that I know of. I can send a message back, and get people calling around. But you can’t just Google for things anymore. It’s a pain in the arse.”

Park sighed. “I miss Google.”

“I miss the Internet. It was designed for academic research. You never know what you have ’til it’s gone.”

“I don’t miss Facebook.” The two turned to see Sarah Cameron standing in the open hatch. Having fulfilled her duties to Drake and Fick, she was back on station.

“Good point,” Close said. “A bright side to everything, I suppose.”

“Yes. Even the apocalypse.”

Park stood up. “We’ve got a little problem.”

Sarah nodded. “Okay. Whatever it is, we’ll fix it. Right?”

“Yes,” Park said, his expression resolute. “You’re right.”

* * *

“Go for Drake.”

Drake was working now while lying on a cot they’d set up for him in a corner of the Bridge. He had a laptop on his lap, and a little table to his side with his cell phone, a hard-line phone, a tablet, some loose papers, and a huge orange bottle of prescription painkillers – with the lid off.

He was still ignoring doctor’s orders. But he’d at least agreed to semi-recline on the cot – after he began to have trouble sitting up, and kept feeling like he might pass out. He’d also agreed to an IV to get some more fluids in him – later. Right now he needed his arms free.

“Commander, this is Sarah Cameron, down in the lab with Doctors Park and Close.”

“And?” Drake’s longstanding brusquerie was growing more extreme.

“We’ve got an issue with Park’s vaccine – one that I think is going to have to get resolved at higher levels. Between you and the military in Britain, I think.”

“Go on.”

“There’s a type of high-end specialist lab equipment Park needs. Got a pen?”

“Go.”

“It’s called a Biacore 4000. Bravo India Alpha Charlie Oscar Romeo Echo, Four Treble-Zero.”

“Got it. We need to get it shipped here from the UK?”

“Negative. We need the Brits to send out a mission to recover it – from what we’re pretty sure is inside their outbreak zone. The only one going is at the University of Kent.”

Drake jotted that down as well. “I’ll ring up CentCom. But I doubt they’re going to be thrilled. We absolutely have to have this?”

“Wait one.”

There was a beat of silence, then Park came on the line.

“Yes, we have to have it. It’s essential. We can’t start giving out a live vaccine, in tens of millions of doses, without the type of interaction testing this device does. Believe it or not, we could actually create more problems than we solve.”

When Drake didn’t immediately respond, Park added,
“At least those fifty million people in Britain are healthy now. An insufficiently tested live zombie virus could change all that.”

“Put Cameron back on.”

“Go ahead.”

“Okay. What you need to get this in motion is someone who can get the right person on the horn at CentCom. And believe it or not, that’s probably not me right now.”

“Who, then?”

“Handon. He’s the ranking officer here from… whatever fucked-up military structure it is they’ve got there. He’ll know who to call, and because he’s USOC, they’ll take the call.”

“Roger that.”

“Get in a room with Handon, Park, and Close. The four of you get all the mission-critical details and parameters down, everything you know that might help them find this thing. And then get it sent over. You hit any roadblocks, ring me back up.”

“All received.”

Drake hung up.

* * *

“Well?” Park asked. He and the gray-haired scientist were looking up at Sarah in expectation. She was pretty clearly the go-to person on the team now.

“Pack up your notes,” she said. “We’re going upstairs.”

Park hesitated. “There’s something else.”

“Yeah?”

“I actually do know where there’s another one of these machines. I don’t think it’s much use where it is. But maybe just in case the one in Kent is damaged or impossible to get to.”

“Okay. Where?”

“Germany. In Dusseldorf, at the biotech where I had my first private-sector job. I can all but guarantee they’ll still have theirs.”

Back Into the Fire

Germany - Dusseldorf

Eli’s gaze drifted from the view out the window to the girl across the table. He was still chewing on his mouthful of sandwich, but she just sat and looked at him, those big eyes showing the signs of concern only he could recognize. Even in these eight short months, the two had grown so close they could read each other’s body language.

“It’s just for three months, you know,” she said, looking back down at her own half-eaten lunch. “And it’s a huge opportunity for me.”

He nodded.

“I know,” he said. “It’s just that I’m on leave during that time, and, well I kinda hoped…” He looked back out the window. The view from the Rhine Tower restaurant, hundreds of meters above the streets of Dusseldorf, had always amazed him. But today it held none of its usual charm, and the notion of watching the huge world below him go by, totally unaware he was watching it, held no allure.

“I’ll be back with plenty of time. You’ll still have half of your leave to go,” she said. “Maybe we could even go away somewhere. You know, a holiday, or something?”

He nodded again.

“Sounds good. And we’re cool. You know you need to do it,” he said, not really meaning every word. “Anyway. You put up with enough waiting around for me.”

She reached over and touched his wrist, smiling again.

“Just three months…” she had said as he turned back to look out the window.

But it hadn’t been just three months
, Eli thought, as he sat in the doorway of the hurtling helicopter, the wind brushing his face and bringing water to his eyes, and he watched the shape of the huge tower looming in the distance. That had been the last he’d seen of her, at the bottom of the tower as they said goodbye, just before everything went to hell. He would have seen Annika a week later, when he was to return to the city from the British military garrison out near the airport, and visit her just before her internship started, but he never made it.

And now, over two years later, he felt a pang of sickness in his stomach as that building came into view. Was she in the city below them, somewhere? Lolling about and rotting like all the other walking corpses? Was she even now standing, mindless and drooling, at one of the windows in the Rhine Tower restaurant, waiting an eternity for nothing, to no purpose?

“ETA five minutes,”
came a voice across the radio – their pilot, or one of them. Three Puma helicopters were thundering across the motionless cityscape of Dusseldorf, two carrying the remaining combined squads of One Troop, and the other empty aside from four crew chiefs manning a heavy winch and mass of lines, ready to whisk away their mission objective.

Next to Eli, Jameson was sitting and flipping through a scruffy sheath of diagrams and photographs, given to him during their mission briefing just four hours before. The photographs and specs, which Eli had studied in detail before handing them over, had obviously been pulled from a lab supplies catalogue, and an old one at that. The black-and-white photos were worn and smudged, but the basic shape of the thing they had to retrieve was clear enough. Eli only hoped there weren’t a hundred other machines that looked similar. They had raided a few labs in the last couple of years, but that had been for computer equipment and other gear that was more easily identified. This was different.

“You going to be able to recognize this… contraption?” Jameson shouted, over the noise of the rotors and engines. After the endless roar of battle over the last few days, he worried he might have gone deaf, but instead everything was amplified.

“Yes, mate. No problem. I think,” said Eli. “The thing’s pretty distinct, and… well, it looks pretty big as well.”

“And we’ve got to get it up to the roof.” Jameson’s mind drifted back to the short conversation he’d had with what appeared to be his new direct line of command – Colonel Robert Mayes, the man himself. Mayes had said, “Don’t come back without it, end of. If you can’t get it, don’t come back.” Those were probably the most unnerving orders Jameson had ever been given, and the cold glare the Colonel gave him made him think the part about not returning ought to be taken at face value.

The whole troop had walked out of the mission briefing a slightly paler shade. This was the big one, the mission that could not go wrong. Two hours of being drilled on the current state of the target city and building, taken from drone flyovers made just hours earlier, gave them little to work with. The takeaway seemed to be that Dusseldorf was extremely crowded, and one hundred per cent dead. The only good news was that the six hundred thousand former residents had all gone dormant, and now stood around staring at nothing, due to there being not a single living person left in the entire city to infect or devour.

Enter One Troop.

Who would be hitting the ground in about another three minutes from now. And then all bets were off.

Jameson shook his head. Aside from the absurd danger of this mission, he could hardly believe they were back again – only a few miles from the barracks they’d lived in for nearly a year as part of British Forces Germany, in what seemed like a long-vanished age. Why back to Dusseldorf? Because it had a big biotech industry – and a certain lab there was the only place known to possess a piece of high-tech equipment that evidently was now vitally important to the research effort.

As the Marines had sat in their mission briefing, Eli almost smiled with the irony of the situation. Because they were told in passing that there was actually a much closer one of these machines – right in the center of Canterbury, in fact. And if they had only been asked two weeks earlier, One Troop could have strolled right in and fetched it, no drama. The trouble of course was that Canterbury had been bombed nearly flat, in a doomed attempt to cauterize the outbreak. And the University of Kent lab building in question could clearly be seen, in aerial imagery, to be nothing but rubble.

So now here they
were, hundreds of miles inside Dead Europe, about to fast-rope down onto a building surrounded by over a half a million flesh-eating freaks. And if it weren’t for fate’s extremely capricious sense of humor, Eli would not have seen that tower in the middle of Dusseldorf ever again.

“Target structure in sight,”
came the pilot’s voice over the headset.
“Two minutes to insertion.”

“Right,” snapped Jameson, looking at the dozen men in his helo. The other squad would be readying in the other bird at that moment, but his team was first down onto the roof, and had to clear out fast to make way for the others.

“We’ve been through this drill enough. Hit the ground, move to the outside edge of the roof, and stay low. Then we wait until the noise has gone.”

He stood by the open door, feeling the wind buffeting him, and watched the rooftop of the lab complex coming in fast. A few seconds more and they flared in to a low hover, the pilot shouting,
“Good to go!”
Jameson was first out, sliding down the thick fast-rope in less than two seconds before hitting the hard surface of the roof. As he landed and let go, he ducked his head and raised his assault rifle to his shoulder, scanning all sectors of the rooftop. Most of his attention was on the closed doorway behind which was the stairwell down into the building.

It was a big structure, maybe ten stories and hundreds of feet across. As Jameson moved to the roof’s edge, and the metal piping that ran along it, he tried to listen for anything that wasn’t the boots of his men, or the loud thrum of the rotors. They were drawing a lot of attention to themselves, and all knew they had to get down and grounded so the helos could get out as quickly as possible. Twenty seconds later and Second squad was dropping onto the roof and also running for cover.

So far, so good,
Jameson thought, as the second bird lifted away and rose up into the sky, its engine noise dissipating as it went. Half a minute later, the three helos were only dark splotches in the sky, still shrinking, and inaudible from the rooftop.