Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (29 page)

And that was when the silence of the city of Dusseldorf hit them. Every man in One Troop crouched low, hidden from view and motionless, none making a sound. This was as planned. They were to hit the deck, make all the racket they had to in less than a minute, then go low and quiet, and wait.

The CentCom expert on behavior of the undead, and on covertly avoiding them, had been confident that a short burst of noise wouldn’t be enough to rouse the whole population. Some would get riled up and seek out the source. But all the reports and studies so far suggested the noise of the helos, as they left the city, would draw off those few that did wake up.

And Jameson was beginning to think well of that little guy in the suit, who had looked as if he didn’t even need to shave. Maybe he was right. Of course, the Marines already knew from long experience on the ground that if you kept your noise and movement to a minimum, you could sneak past an awful lot of dead without detection. It was the small matter of flying directly to the center of a huge population of them, amidst the deafening noise of three rotary-wing aircraft, that was the novelty. Jameson only hoped to hell that they hadn’t just awoken a whole city.

But if they had, there was always that lone Apache out there, waiting for the call if needed.

Now the helos had gone, and the silence was broken only by the heavy rush of the wind. As he knelt there, looking out over the top of the catatonic city, Jameson found his stomach churning with nerves. Below, scattered all along the street, and standing nearly motionless, were hundreds of the dead. None of those nearby seemed to move, aside from the occasional twitch or collapse.

There was one knot of a few dozen, farther down the street, which stumbled in the direction the helos had travelled. But he couldn’t hear any of them moaning – none of that eerie, sickening siren call that would draw others to them. These few just stumbled along the road, slowly drifting farther away.

And the ones in the street below stayed blessedly dormant. Jameson peered among them, wondering how long they had been just standing around, doing nothing.

Long may it last
, he thought.

It was actually something that had always puzzled him about the dead. They were completely unaware of each other, alone in the world, without the slightest consciousness of the existence of other ones. Yet the sounds they made attracted others like a dinner bell. How could they home in on the sounds made by others, and in that way all end up converging on one location, usually that of some poor sap trying his best to get away or hide – yet then shove forward as though there was nothing in their way, let alone a dozen others trying to get to the victim at the same time?

Jameson snapped out of these idle thoughts, aware now that Eli was watching him. A quick hand-signal and Eli was up, along with two other Marines, the three of them fast-walking across the roof to the stairwell, weapons panning, moving smoothly and silently, heel-toe. In comparison to the racket of a few minutes ago, the noise discipline they displayed now seemed almost comical to him.

Jameson alternated his attention between the ground below, where the teeming dead milled, and Eli crouched by the door, working on the lock. A few seconds later, the double doors swung slowly open, and rifles were pointed into the darkness inside, thin light falling across walls that hadn’t been exposed to movement or light of any kind for two years. Jameson could feel it, somewhere deep inside him – this building was as dead as the rest of the landscape around them, a shell bereft of life.

He rose, signaling the others to follow, and made his way across the open roof. As he approached the doors, he pulled down his head-mounted night-vision goggles (NVGs), and stepped into the open maw of the strange building.

First in, last out
, he thought.

The stairwell ahead was empty and silent, and a barely perceptible cold breeze drifted up from somewhere down in the belly of the building. As he made his way carefully down the first flight of stairs, stepping over the cardboard boxes and rotting litter that covered the metal stairs like a skin, Jameson’s vision began to adjust. At first the thin autumnal sunlight, filtering down the entrance to the stairwell, had made it difficult to see.

But slowly the darkness resolved, the goggles illuminating what would normally be near blackness. There was very little ambient light down here, even the windows out at the edges of the floor crusted or covered, but it was enough for the NVGs to pick up and amplify. Above and behind Jameson, the rest of One Troop crept quietly after him. Only a two-man crew remained to guard the exit and provide overwatch of the surrounding streets.

Jameson stepped out onto the first landing and stopped to scan the area. Eli appeared at his shoulder with two other Marines, all of them covering their assigned sectors. The corridor went in two directions from here – one lined with closed doors, leading further into the building and past an open elevator shaft; the other, terminating in a dead end, also lined with doors. Only two were open.

This place hadn’t been occupied by the living for over two years, and the shattered glass and broken furniture piled up near the elevator spoke volumes. Someone had tried to barricade themselves in up here, that much was obvious. But the barricade had collapsed, and now black stains were smeared across the floor, leading into two of the rooms.

Jameson was wondering how many of the dead had rushed this floor, and how many of the living had tried to defend it… when the first victims stumbled out of one of the open rooms, lumpy green shapes against black backgrounds in the NVGs. They were slow-moving ones, and seemed barely to register the Marines at the foot of the stairwell, before the snap of suppressed gunfire cut the air. Considering his previous worries about Eli’s state of mind, back in quarantine, his troop sergeant was on form, dropping both of them before anyone else could even target them. Both bodies fell to the ground before Jameson could react. The entire squad then crouched there, low to the ground, unmoving, waiting to see if more would come.

But all that came was silence. There was no more movement, no more dead stumbling out to meet them, and that meant they would have to go in looking for them. The Marines’ occasional tactic of making noise and waiting for the dead to come to them was a no-go today. With thousands of them potentially within earshot, noise was the last thing they needed.

The intel they had been provided with, by whoever requested the mission, was vague and confusing at best. The machine would probably be in a lab on the upper or middle floors, but which one was unclear. The Marines would have to scour each level one at a time, clearing out the dead and searching for their mission objective, before descending to the next floor.

And they had to pull all this off while doing nothing to rouse the endless hordes that stood right outside the front door.

The Gathering

Dusseldorf - Target Building

Jameson stepped over the first body, carefully avoiding the splatter of black blood that had sprayed across the floor behind it, and made his way along the corridor toward the dead end. As he did so, other Marines followed him down from the stairwell and spread out, quietly opening the doors that lined the corridor and scanning the rooms inside. As Jameson reached the final door, while Eli and another man checked the adjacent ones, he heard a short, sharp snap of silenced gunfire from the other end of the corridor. And then it went quiet again.

He stepped forward and tentatively pushed open the last door, revealing a once plush office with a large desk, as well as three bodies, all now dried-up husks, upon the floor. No machine, no lab equipment. There was only a copier, and a table with some sort of broken apparatus scattered across it, but nothing resembling their objective.

As he backed out again and pressed the door closed behind him, he heard more gunfire from the far end of the corridor, again followed by silence.

The squad gathered back near the stairwell, while three Marines covered the darkness below with their rifles. From somewhere down there came the sound of dripping water, a noise that was rare in these fallen places, this long after civilization had shut down. Hand-signals from returning Marines confirmed they had cleared the other half of this floor, and Jameson started down to the next one. As he made his way further down, trying to step silently on the metal stairwell, he heard the sound of water growing. This wasn’t a drip, but a gush of some kind, maybe a burst pipe. How it was still pouring water, he didn’t know. The water supply should have cut out long ago.

The next level was laid out identically to the first, except that the doors were all open wide, and at least a dozen dried husks of bodies littered the corridor. The remains of a headless man leaned against the wall opposite, and Jameson could see no sign of the rest of him. He tried not to think about it, and moved along the corridor more swiftly.

But there were no zombies on this floor, only the dried-up remains of another dozen victims in the rooms they checked. And still no machine.

They were moving to the seventh floor when Jameson froze halfway down the stairs and looked out over a mass of standing, not-quite-motionless figures. He could see now that the stairwell opened directly onto a large open area in the center of the building, with a dozen overturned sofas scattered around the outside. There were tables in among the stupefied crowd below, and a large projector hung from the ceiling, pointing at a white screen that had long since collapsed onto the floor.

A chill ran down Jameson’s spine – was it the thrill of a rapidly approaching fight, or the eerie silence in the crowded room? Even with all of the dead standing around almost motionless, he couldn’t be sure. This was clearly some kind of meeting space, surrounded by a number of small offices. And now, Jameson thought, two years later, it was still a meeting place of sorts – one for the crowd of dead, some three dozen at least, all standing stupidly and staring into space.

So this is where everyone is
, he thought as he lifted his rifle, squinting as he took aim through his illuminated telescopic sight. All of the figures standing in the room wore office attire, their everyday work clothes, no doubt immaculate previously, but now torn and filthy. The people these shells once were had died two years ago, and the whites had turned to brown with black stains.

“Engage targets when I initiate,” he said into the radio, his voice low.

It wasn’t until the first half-dozen dead fell, as the room lit up with flickers of gunfire, that he noticed the splashes from the ground where the bodies hit the floor. But by then, the whole crowd was waking, stirring, and turning to investigate the new arrivals. Jameson continued to fire steadily, worried about the evident flooding, but aware they had no choice but to deal with the dead now. It was too late for finesse. Their hand had been dealt.

He saw now that the burst pipe was in the ceiling above the conference room, and must have been slowly trickling down onto the floors below for two years. It wasn’t a large volume of water, though still a mystery – the pump system had long ago shut down, and what remained must have come from some kind of upper-floor storage tank. Still, it had seeped through, not only pooling on the floor around the feet of the three dozen dead employees, but also drenching the carpets and leaking into the supports underneath – so the weight and pressure must have been substantial by now.

In reality, the only thing that had thus far stopped the floor from collapsing was the lack of movement from the zombies in the room. And now the survivors of that first volley of rifle fire began to lurch toward the stairwell. Jameson, Eli, and the others continued to fire, dropping another dozen within seconds, but the others stumbled forward, clumsily splashing through the pooled water. Some went down without even being hit, while others clambered on, staggering toward the stairwell and shifting their weight across the floor – passing directly over the weakest spot, right in the center.

It was then that the floor beneath them shook, support girders creaking and straining to hold the weight, but the constant erosion of water over two years had left it all rotted, weak, and ready to fail… and to collapse. One moment, two dozen dead were staggering across the room toward the Marines, and the next, the floor opened up and swallowed them. The still-moving corpses fell into the void that appeared beneath them, as collapsing masonry, carpeting, and rotten furniture plummeted fifteen feet and hit the floor below with a deafening crash.

Jameson leaned back and waited, heart thumping, for more of the building to fall down around him, memories of the building collapse in Canterbury flashing through his mind… but it didn’t happen. He looked down and found he now had a perfect view of the level below the collapsed one – another large room, this one mostly white, and filled with benches and various machines that actually did look like lab equipment.

Nice one
, he thought.

On the other hand, many of the dead that had dropped down there were already clambering to their feet and glaring and hissing upward.

And they began to moan.

Jameson hurriedly lifted his rifle, and snapped off three, four, five shots, taking down the dead as they rose, as quickly as he could, while to his right other Marines also aimed and fired rapidly. But even through the gaping hole, they didn’t have angles on all the ones down there. And the loud bastards were continuing to make that horrific wheezing noise, which could very quickly be lethal for the entire team.

Eli spun around, running to the next flight of stairs. He took them two at a time, running down into the darkness below, his feet thudding on the metal. Jameson rose and followed, leaving the hole to the men behind him. As he turned the corner of the stairwell, his rifle still held high, he saw Eli crouching at the bottom, unleashing a stream of fire into the lab.

“Cease fire, hold position,” Jameson snapped into the radio as the last moaning figure in the room finally fell, hitting the floor with a splash, and all movement and sound in the big white room ceased completely. He scanned the floor and the doors of the dozen or so offices lining the corridor that led from the lab.