Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (34 page)

A hundred problems now rushed to Jameson’s mind – supplies, route-planning, ammo, all the things he would need to deal with to have a chance at surviving another day here. He would have to go ashore once he got clear of the city, and then he would need a vehicle, and soon after that a safe place to sleep. He had made this journey before, two years ago, but that had been with the entire troop around him. Alone, he didn’t know if he could do it, but he was damn well going to try.

“Oh, I don’t think you need to swim that far, mate,”
said Charlotte, her voice whimsical.
“Just down to the big open break of water about half a mile from here, near the bridge.”

Jameson frowned. “I’m not with you there,
mate
,” he said.

“I’m flying solo today – which means I have a nice comfy spare seat up front.”

Jameson’s heart nearly missed a beat. This development was unexpected. He had presumed the Apache was crewed by two people, a pilot and a gunner, as was usually the case. And with the Pumas now miles away and not coming back, he had resigned himself to getting home under his own power. Or at least surviving long enough for them to send a rescue flight out, which with the military fully engaged in southeast England, wasn’t highly likely.

“Are you as good at climbing into a helo that’s hovering over the water as you are at swimming under it?”

Jameson laughed loudly, as he drifted along the canal.

“Too damn right,” he said. “After today, I’ll try anything. Twice.”

Night Falls

JFK
- Officers Quarters

Handon’s head hit one end of the thin pillow within a second of Sarah’s hitting the other.

“Well, that was a hell of a day,” he said.

She shrugged, as well as she could from her horizontal position. Handon turned to watch, her bare shoulders suddenly becoming objects of intense interest to him. “I’ve had worse,” she said quietly. She pulled her arms out from under the blanket. Her right hand was wrapped in a white bandage, with a small dot of bright red at its center.

“Let me take a look at that,” Handon said.

“Yeah – like I’m going to unwrap it and expose it to infection, just to satisfy your morbid curiosity.” When he didn’t answer, she made her tone more serious and said, “It was just three pellets – one in the base of the index finger, two in the top of the hand. They’re out now. It’s healing. It’s fine.”

Handon was thinking,
Not her trigger finger at least…

Sarah exhaled contentedly, and rolled on her side to look back at him. They held each other’s gaze from a few inches away, and just held that pose. They both already sensed that there would be no frantic, urgent, we’re-alive-for-just-this-moment lovemaking tonight.

When the two of them had been reunited, in this safe place, far from the dead, and suddenly free for a moment from all the crushing burdens of their responsibilities, they had torn each other’s clothes off like they were on fire. It was a passion frightening in its intensity, and they both felt as if it had been kindling for a very long time.

But tonight they were both pummeled from the week’s work, their nerves frayed by the day’s catastrophes, and near-catastrophes. And so they lay there, enjoying the delicious sensations of being together, and alone, and not in danger or in frantic motion.

“Do you have a name?” she asked. “A first name, I mean. Your mother must have given you one.”

He smoothed some hair off her forehead and back into formation. “I don’t think anyone’s used it in a long time.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

He shook his head, then pressed it against hers, kissing the crown of her head. “Shane,” he said, finally.

She looked up into his steely ice-blue eyes with her dramatically black-flecked green ones. “Okay,” she said. “Command Sergeant Major
Shane
Handon. That’ll do.”

But as she addressed him by rank, Handon’s expression darkened, and he tried to decide whether to bring up what Henno had said earlier – his terrible crack in the mess. Whether he should try to apologize to her for it. But before he could decide, it somehow became clear they were both thinking about the same thing. It was hanging there between them, like a ghostly elephant in the tiny room.

Finally she said it. “Do you think I got my husband killed? And… my son?”

Handon hesitated and considered his response very carefully. Finally he said, “I think Mark got Mark killed.”

“But the boy? Surely he couldn’t have been responsible.”

Handon thought long on this, too. It was true the boy had been a minor. But he was near enough to being of age in the modern world. Hell, for the majority of human history, he wouldn’t even have been considered a child.

And maybe there wasn’t room for childhood in the ZA.

“I think if you made a mistake, it was in not making him grow up sooner.” She looked down, and he hastened to add, “But if parents could control how their kids turned out, we’d live in a very different world.”

When she looked up at him again, her face was neutral. He could tell her mind was running a hundred miles an hour, behind the mask. But she didn’t say anything.

What Sarah was actually thinking was that there were many things Handon didn’t know. A big part of her wanted to tell him – the part of her that wanted to tell him everything. But what she absolutely did
not
want to do, didn’t
have
to do, was justify herself, or her actions.

Not to him, and definitely not to Henno.

The decisions she’d made, the actions she took, back at that cabin, which had resulted in the deaths of both her husband and her only son… they had been necessary. And she had done them purely for tactical and strategic reasons: to get the Alpha operators out of there alive – and to get the scientist and his research to safety.

Everything was secondary to that – had to be. And Mark and the boy had, by their actions, made it impossible for her both to do that, and to save the two of them.

It had been horrible how things had played out. But most of life on Earth was horrible at this point – and even before the ZA, the necessary was rarely easy. She doubted her family could have been saved. And she hadn’t been about to throw away all their lives, and humanity’s best hopes, trying.

No, she wasn’t second-guessing her decision now.

And neither, she knew, was Handon. But there was more to the backstory, and she was terribly torn about whether to tell him. In any case, she couldn’t stop reciting it in her head. Justifying herself to some invisible jury that sat in judgment of her. Pleading her case.

Because the fact was that her husband had tried very diligently to get
her
killed, many times before.

Starting the very day of the fall.

When it all came down, she had been on duty, in uniform, on patrol downtown. And Toronto fell early – it was the massive inflows of air travelers, many of them migrants, from all over the world. As a first responder, it had been her job to try to deal with the chaos – before it became clear that the chaos was terminal.

She’d watched many of her colleagues go down. And saw some of them come back up again.

While this was all happening, her family was at home, holed up in their house in the Whitby suburb of Toronto. She had managed to get them on the phone and told them to stay put, that she would come to them. And then they would all make their way to the cabin – the one she had carefully prepped for something like this, deep in the Manistee National Forest, close to the shores of Lake Michigan.

But Mark and her son saw on TV the rapidly deteriorating situation, the city falling into a vortex and devouring itself. And they panicked. Mark decided Sarah couldn’t possibly still be alive – or, if she were, that she would never make it out of the city.

So they left without her.

Sarah did get out alive, barely, helping herself to a police vehicle and then driving to the cabin alone – which was a risky enough proposition in itself. She had ditched the vehicle a couple of miles out, then hiked in – unlike Mark and the boy, who had driven right up to the door, which they shouldn’t have.

They were pretty ashen-faced when she walked in that front door, alive and unhurt. And that initial episode set the tone for the rest of the apocalypse. Not only was Mark useless in a survival situation, but he wasn’t even particularly loyal.

Sarah didn’t tell any of this to Handon now. She just looked at him from a few inches, and a thousand miles, away.

And she felt that, somehow, he understood anyway.

* * *

After they had lain in silence for a while longer, starting to drift off to sleep, Sarah looked over and changed the subject. “Are you still worried about Homer?”

“What – about him not coming back to work? Or about him going AWOL in the first place?”

“Both.”

“Maybe. But there’s not much I can do about it.”

“Can’t you discipline him?”

“No. Out of the question.”

“But isn’t that part of your job? Part of command?”

Handon exhaled quietly. “Disciplinary matters don’t come up at our level. Everyone’s a pro, and everyone wants to be there – has sacrificed a lot to be there. Anyway, it would be unfair.”

“Why?”

“Because anyone would have done what he did, in his place. They’re his children. Mainly, it would just be pointless. I do need him back. But he knows what his duty is. He’s never forgotten. He’ll be back as soon as he can square it with his responsibilities to his family.”

That last phrase hung out there – and resonated with both of them, and not in a good way. There was that conflict again – between love and duty, between the people they cared for, and the mission they had to complete. Love was not only endangered in the ZA.

It was damned dangerous.

So Sarah had to tread carefully. But she couldn’t stop herself probing. “Will he and Ali be able to be together now – openly?”

Handon squinted at her. “You know about them?”

“Of course I do. I knew the minute Homer walked in my cabin door. Any woman within a hundred yards of those two could tell. Whoever they thought they were fooling, it wasn’t someone with an X chromosome.”

Handon smiled at this. “I guess they’re out of the closet now.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

Handon shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s better this way. But hooking up with your teammates isn’t really the done thing.”

“But the not-done things are done every day.”

Handon laughed. “Especially now. We keep trying to cling to our old rules and our structure. But the rules are off.”

“Not all of them,” Sarah said. “I’d say the really important ones are more important than ever. Anyway, I thought adaptability was a central tenet of special operations.”

“Touché.”

Her look grew more serious, and Handon knew what she was going to raise next – the question of the two of them, the other couple. So he changed the subject himself first. He nodded at her gunbelt, which hung very near to her head, and said, “That’s an adaptation I can get behind.”

The first thing Sarah had done after getting Park and herself medical treatment, and briefing Drake about the situation down below, was to rearm herself. And she knew she would never, ever again be going unarmed – anywhere.

“They can have my gun,” she said, “when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.”

Handon smiled. He knew everyone thought Americans were gun nuts. But in the ZA the gun nuts were suddenly looking pretty smart. He let his smile dissipate, and said: “About what happened today… with you and Park…”

She looked away. “It’s okay.” Then she reconsidered. She didn’t want or need to be reassured that it was okay. But she was open to being reprimanded, or corrected. After all, she wasn’t just sleeping with Handon – she also worked for him now. “No, go ahead.”

“I think you’re going to have to do a bit of a gutcheck.”

Sarah absorbed that. She knew she had screwed up her one, essential task – and screwed it up terribly. She had been assigned to protect the most important man in the world. And instead she got him shot – in two places. Then she nearly got him eaten. And, finally, she’d left him to fight one zombie, and elude another, totally on his own.

What the hell was that performance?
she asked herself. It caused her to radically question her own competence. She’d protected a lot of important people in her career as a cop. But never anyone so important, not even the PM, not even the Queen when she came to visit. And she’d certainly never screwed up so royally.

When she spoke now, her voice was calm but fragile. “I messed up. I let you down.” She knew that being in a new environment, facing a novel situation, couldn’t explain it away.

Handon looked her in the eye. “The SEALs have a saying. ‘You have a bad day in the pool, you get back in the pool.’”

She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. “It was more than a bad day. It was almost terminal – for humanity.”

“Okay. You fucked up. Now – how are you going to respond?”

She hesitated for a long time before answering. When she did, her voice was flat and dull. “Maybe you need to give this job to someone else.”

“Who?”

“Someone with more close-protection experience. Maybe a sailor, who knows the ship.”

Handon took that on board, then said, “No. I’m not going to do that. You got yourself into a shitty situation.
But then you got both him and you out of it
. Not many people could have done that. No, my judgment is that you are still the best person – now more than ever, after what happened.”

Sarah took his point. She’d looked into the abyss, and wouldn’t be taking anything for granted anymore. But that wasn’t everything there was to it.

“But… are you making that judgment for the wrong reason?”
Because of us?

“No.” Handon’s deep, resonant voice was steady and firm. “In fact, that’s the only thing that makes me question my judgment, even for a second. I’ve considered it, and I’ve discarded it. We both made one mistake – letting you go unarmed. Never again.”