Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (33 page)

“Jameson,” she said, her voice cutting through the silence that had descended over the channel. “This is Wyvern Two Zero, an Apache with standard armament and, oh, at least two or three minutes’ playtime. I am inbound your position. And I’m going to clear the way for you to get the hell out of there.”

There was hesitation on the other end of the line.
“Negative, Wyvern Two Zero,”
replied Jameson.
“You’re the armed escort for the air mission. You have to see them home.”

“I am and I will,” said Charlotte, grinning inside her helmet as she watched the three Pumas approaching in the distance. They would reach her in less than a minute. “But, oddly enough, they haven’t reached our RVP yet, so I seem to have a bit of time. And anyway it’s also my job to provide CAS to troops in contact. That seems to be you right now.”

Jameson smiled and shook his head, then looked over at the corpse in the corner opposite him.

Looks like I won’t be joining you, at least not today.

“Wyvern Two Zero, what do you have in mind?”

Open Up and Say Argh

Target Building - Elevator Shaft

It occurred to Jameson that if the thunder of bombs landing a hundred yards away during the Canterbury air strikes hadn’t completely screwed up his hearing, then sitting at the bottom of an elevator shaft as an Apache blasted the hell out of the building and pulverized the entire ground floor with rockets and auto-cannon fire certainly would. These thoughts kept him company as he crouched, huddled over the hatch that when opened would allow him to drop down into the elevator car below – and, from there, out into the foyer of the building.

This was nothing like the cracking of a small-arms infantry engagement. No, this was a dozen or more zipping and thunderously exploding rockets, punctuated by hundreds of high-explosive 30mm rounds from her auto-cannon, all impacting around the entrance to the building, and in some cases, from the sound of it, actually exploding in the lobby. The thunderous roar of breaking glass and disintegrating masonry was deafening, as Wyvern Two Zero, whoever she was, created a massive dead-free zone out in front of the building – and, with luck, maybe even enough of a clear path for Jameson to make a run for it. Unless, he considered as the walls shook around him, she first collapsed the whole structure down on top of him.

Either way he was getting a fast route out.

And he wished to hell that he’d asked her to make sure and stop shooting when he ran, because he didn’t think much of his chances of not being hit out in that crashing storm of very expensive steel.

He heard shrieks as the dead went down in the their dozens, first those outside, scattered around the street and the open grass clearing between the building and the river, and then the ones in the pile-up against the windows, and finally those jammed inside on the ground floor. He wished now that the plan had been to have the Apache out there from the beginning, or at least come on station when the dead had begun to storm the building. Even with the additional noise, surely that would have changed things. But he
had barely been consulted in the mission planning.

The lashing storm outside suddenly abated, but the noise of the explosions rang in his ears for a good few seconds afterward, before the silence itself became deafening.

“Go – now!”
snapped the woman’s voice in his ear. He didn’t know who this pilot was, but right now he knew he had no choice but to trust her. She was all he had.

He took a deep breath, said a quick prayer to any god that might be listening, and took a regretful glance at all the gear he had just stripped off and dumped in a pile to cut his weight – including the body armor that might have helped protect him from the sea of riled-up dead that he was now about to dive into headfirst. But speed was going to be everything. He pulled the hatch up, glanced down to make sure it was clear below, and dropped down into the elevator.

As he hit the ground, he drew both of his pistols, one in each hand, and took off instantly, shifting and glancing in all directions as he moved into the destroyed lobby. To his right, one that had survived the holocaust of his fellows by being up above it stumbled down the stairwell, but got no further. Jameson was ready for this, had been psyching himself for the last three minutes as he waited in his dark hole, staring at the long-dead man and swearing,
Not me, not me.

Now the zombie, a fast one by its movement, hit the floor of the lobby and coiled itself to spring, but instead tumbled backward as Jameson’s first round took it in the forehead. This was a shot that would have made him proud under other circumstances, but he didn’t have time to consider it, and was already moving away before his victim hit the floor. He scarcely paused to check the area ahead of him, knowing he had very little time – to exit the building, and get moving across the open space outside. There, he thought, he would stand some chance, if he could stay on his feet. He just had to keep running.

He crossed the open space between the lift and the main doors, spinning to his left as a zombie that had been hit but not destroyed by Charlotte’s bombardment now reached out with its one remaining arm, from its protected spot behind the reception desk. With all the debris piled around him, transforming the once plush foyer into a complete mess, Jameson wondered how the hell anything had stayed in one piece. He whipped the other handgun around and fired twice at a dead run, the creature falling back into a pile of other shredded bodies. It wasn’t a headshot, but it put his target down, and he wasn’t planning on being around long enough to care if it got back up again.

Not a pane of glass in the main doors or lobby walls remained. Now all that stood around the entire bottom floor was metal frames with small shards of glass protruding from the edges. As Jameson blasted out the front door, he felt the crunch of broken glass under his feet, but ignored it, his assault boots being one of the few bits of protective kit he hadn’t ditched.

On the steps out front, three zombies crawled along the ground toward him, with amputated arms and legs and gaping wounds, but he didn’t stop to gawk, taking only one quick glance back. He could hear the shrieking and growling on the stairs growing in volume as the dead on the upper floors rushed down to pursue him, and he took off at a sprint, dodging or leaping the crawling corpses in his path.

This wasn’t a tactical displacement, or fighting retreat – it was a flat-out sprint, a hair-breadth escape. As Jameson hit the street, boots thudding on the tarmac, he heard a rasping cry from far above, but he didn’t stop to look, even at the thud of a body hitting the ground just feet away, then more on his other side. Nothing distracted him from his objective, which was the river, four hundred endless yards out, but coming up fast.

He heard the sound of smashing glass behind and above him as more of the nightmare creatures leapt from the upper-floor windows, plummeting down toward him. But all they found was hard pavement, and these desperate and dangerous things would not rise to chase him like the ones now pouring down the stairs and into the lobby. The impact with the ground broke every bone and left them as animated bags of meat, writhing on the ground in frustration – if, Jameson considered, they even felt such a thing.

* * *

“Get moving!”
yelled Charlotte, willing him to run faster. From her elevated position, hovering over the river, she could see the dead converging from all directions. Many of them were slow-moving, but among them were the runners, and worse – the Foxtrots, moving much faster and more manically than the rest. And this entire zone of the city was now very much awake. She estimated at least five thousand were now stumbling toward the building and the plaza in front of it. She could clearly see, in the next street over, the dead struggling to push their way through the alleyway between buildings.

There were so many that if the Marine officer running for his life below didn’t get a move on, he soon wouldn’t have the space to move, let alone fight. She pushed her cyclic to the right, spinning the bird to face the alleyway from which the runners were now spilling into the grass clearing. With a flick of her eye, she put her target reticule on the mouth of the alley, and let rip with the auto-cannon again. Her video view of it whited out with rolling explosions, and showers of body parts.

On open ground now, Jameson forced his body into overdrive, still aiming both handguns as he tore across the grass. Just ahead, several slow-moving ones, which had risen again even after the devastation of the Apache, turned to face him, and began staggering forward. The way ahead was mostly clear, but as Jameson ran, he saw what the pilot was firing at, and realized that this thin strip of open ground to the river wouldn’t be open for very long. Instinctively, he slowed, but then accelerated again. The only way out of here was the river. He was the only living thing on the ground in a city of millions, and they were all waking up and coming after him.

“Run, you muppet!”
came the pilot’s voice in his ear.

Jameson hurtled on, slowing only slightly to take down the ones converging on his path, quick-firing left then right, then barreling forward once more across the open grass toward the river. Hovering there, directly over the water, was his angel of mercy, the Apache and its pilot, who as far as he knew had just disobeyed direct orders to come back and save him. He focused on the sleek helo, using it as a beacon, and tried to pump his exhausted and trembling legs as fast as they would still carry him.

Halfway across the lawn, with the river now just two hundred yards away, Jameson risked a glance over his shoulder – and immediately wished he hadn’t. There was practically a carpet of bodies littering the ground around him, taken down by the attack helo, many of them still active, though not a threat if he kept moving. But behind him were also at least forty runners and Foxtrots, gaining on him, limbs pistoning and with malignant hatred in their eyes.

“Do NOT look back,”
shouted Charlotte.
“Just RUN!”

Jameson obeyed, not needing to do much calculation to work out that he didn’t have the ammunition to take them all, however quickly he reloaded. His last and only hope was to reach the water before they reached him.

A hundred yards from the water’s edge, the pilot’s voice sang out again. At that moment, he imagined he could actually feel the coldness of death behind him, and he could definitely hear the rasping, growling voices as they closed in to take him down. As he staggered forward, his last strength beginning to fail, the Apache’s engines revved and it unexpectedly climbed, faster than Jameson thought even it could. One moment it was directly in his path, the next it was a hundred feet off the deck.

“Go! Go! Go!”
Charlotte shouted into her chin mic, and squeezed the trigger that would unleash another fusillade of 30 mil, desperately willing Jameson not to slow down. At the steep angle she was now at, she could fire over his head and into the pursuing crowd just meters behind him. But if he slowed even a little, or her aim was off by fractions of degrees, the exploding shells would end his run, very messily, and very quickly.

Jameson ran on, covering his head as the thunder of the Apache’s cannon was unleashed. Feeling the scalding heat and overpressure of high-explosive rounds going off
right
behind him, for one dreadful moment he knew in his bones that he was about to become a friendly-fire casualty. She was cutting it too fine – and he was about to be barbecued, just in time to be eaten.

Charlotte squeezed the trigger gently, willing herself to hold her nerve. Any misjudgment at that moment and the Marine, now so close to the water, would be just more mess on the lawn. She’d laid down a great deal of danger-close fire support for her lads on the ground in Afghanistan.

But never anything like this.

Jameson didn’t slow or look back, but galloped forward, leg muscles and lungs shrieking in protest, having stumbled and nearly fallen when the cannon started up. But now he felt hope surge as he kept his feet, and the edge of the water loomed. His hearing had come back long enough to hear the exhortations of the pilot. But now it was gone again, drowned in the roar of the guns.

Finally he reached the edge of the canal, not even slowing a fraction, but diving straight forward and out, arms in front, then hitting the frigid water and vanishing below the surface.

Charlotte eased off the trigger, and pulled both her cyclic and the helicopter back, scanning the river below and trying to ignore the remaining frenzied dead as they plunged into the water after him. They couldn’t swim, and would just sink, that she knew, but what about the man? Did he have enough strength left in him? She knew that not many would, perhaps not even the famously fit hard-men of the Royal Marines.

“Jameson!” she shouted into her chin mic, but it wasn’t Jameson who responded to her hail.

“Did he make it?”
called Eli, who had been listening in the entire time. His voice was urgent.
“Did he get out?”

“He made it to the water,” replied Charlotte. “But he hasn’t come back up yet, I can’t see—”

A splash erupted on the river’s surface, thirty meters downstream, and nearer to the middle than Charlotte had expected. It was a shockingly impressive underwater swim. She guessed he had been highly motivated.

“He’s on the surface and clear,” she said, barely able to suppress her delight as she heard whoops and cries at the other end. “Jameson, talk to me,” she said.

A tired, gasping voice finally replied.
“I’m here.”

“Glad to see you’re still with us, mate.”

“Yeah, me too. It’s been a while since I swam like that.”

“Impressive.”

“Impressive? Like a fucking dolphin, more like
,” he replied, laughing and coughing water as he spoke. “
Now all I have to do is swim back to England…
”

The current of the river slowly pulled him further away from the undead singularity now pouring into the water after him. He scanned the banks on both sides as he drifted. They were everywhere, lining the canal, and still pouring in from the streets nearby, all following the commotion and chasing him tirelessly even now. Those closest to the banks tumbled into the water and vanished below the surface.