Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (5 page)

“Oh man…” he said, out loud and to no one in particular.

Except that he got an answer, a quiet whine from the corner, where the German Shepherd sat looking at him from its new makeshift bed of blankets.

Wesley slowly relaxed and smiled as he looked over at the scraggy dog, sitting there with its head cocked to one side, as it had a number of times before. It was almost a questioning look, as though it were asking him something. He would have loved to know what it was thinking – to somehow read, telepathically, what was on the dog’s mind. He was sure there was a lot of story behind those eyes.

How did you survive for so long out there?
he wondered, eyeing the faint line of scars that ran across the dog’s head. It had to have been another dog, or maybe even a croc or a grizzly, or something. The dog would be dead if it was a zombie that injured her.

“How did you do it?” he asked aloud, and yet again the dog’s head went up, and tilted to one side as she gave a quiet sniff.

Two years, or at least the majority of that time, the dog, who had no name tag, had survived in Virginia Beach. Where almost every living human had fallen to the dead, this dog had somehow managed to make it through. Wesley wondered if she had spent most of her time hidden away on the boat they’d escaped on, only venturing out into the city to scavenge for food. There had been plenty of signs of that scavenging when he’d gone down below, even for the brief moment he was there. Empty packets of food were strewn across the floor, all of them torn open rather than opened carefully.

The dog had certainly been there a while.

“Did your owner live on the boat?” he asked, watching her eyes for any sign of understanding, but those piercing brown orbs gave little away, and she merely sniffed again and laid her head on her paws, peering back at him in return.

“Right,” he said. “Well, I suppose we ought to give you a name, don’t you think?”

The dog sat up at that, and licked her lips.

“Oh, yeah, maybe breakfast before that. Look, you stay here. I need to go and take a shower, scrub away some more of the nastiness from the battle.”

He stood up, stretched, then nearly sat down again. Every muscle in his body complained, even in places he didn’t know he had them. But his legs were the worst, across the thighs. Hours of holding that hose down, crouching to push the weight forward, must have stretched his thigh muscles beyond their limits. He moaned.

“God, I’m like an old man,” he said with a laugh. How many other people were feeling like this, still? Most of them, he guessed. Then his mind drifted to the hundreds who didn’t feel a thing, the ones lost in the battle, and this forced him to stand, stretch, and start moving toward the desk in the corner, where he had unceremoniously dumped most of his clothes before stumbling into bed.

After the battle, and after all the celebrations were over, which in themselves had gone on for some time, a lot of people had drifted off to find somewhere to sleep, but the ship still had to be run. And now that the crew had yet again dropped in number, that meant no rest for some, not yet. Wesley had spent four more hours, along with nearly everyone from the Captain’s in-extremis force, clearing the deck. Mostly that had meant more hose work, this time with water instead of the foam, which was by then completely depleted. God help them if they had a fire.

By the time Wesley fell into bed, he was sick of the sight of the damned foam, and zombie body parts. The stink on the flight deck hadn’t hit him until they were cleaning it. He hadn’t noticed the funk of thousands of dead, and the acid reek of the foam during the battle, but afterward, when his heart rate slowed, and his senses started to get back to normal, the smell hit him.

He had taken a shower before going to bed, and more since, but after the dream, or nightmare, he had an urge to wash again, and to keep washing. He threw on his clothes and headed for the door, worked the latch, and took one last glance back at the dog before heading out into the passageway.

“No noise now,” he instructed her, and was answered by another quiet whine. “I’ll be right back, and then we can go get breakfast.”

The companionway was busy as hell, and several times Wesley had stop and let hurrying crew members past. He shook his head, puzzled, thinking it must have been only him that felt like an old crone, with weak muscles and a massive headache.
That’s what you get for spending most of your time on your arse in an office, while all these military types were running around
, he thought.

Eventually, he made it to the nearest shower block, but stopped twenty yards away as he saw the queue stretching down the hall. He sighed, turned, and resigned himself to the longer walk, out toward the stern, where his old quarters were. He knew there was another shower block out that way, and toilets.

It was quieter, too quiet, as he walked into the showers, and he immediately saw why. Some time during the battle, while the ship was being pulled off the sandbar at Virginia Beach, several sections of internal structure had broken under the strain. Wesley stood in the middle of the room and watched water pouring down from above, where a massive metal girder had broken through and was pointing down at a dangerous angle. He did contemplate just standing in that torrent, which thankfully was pouring away into the drains meant to eliminate shower water. But he decided that, after all the luck he’d used up the previous day, chancing that thing coming down on his head was exactly what fate would have been waiting for.

Please,
he thought, his stomach complaining.
Please let the damn toilets be usable, at least.

This time he was in luck. The door to the toilet block was unceremoniously laying out in the corridor, flat on the deck where it had fallen, and the lighting inside was buzzing and flickering, but no big holes or fallen ceiling in there.

Wesley dumped his wash bag on the sink and headed for the nearest stall. He heard a noise farther down, and glanced over, squinting to make out a jacket hanging over the cubicle at the end of the row. Another noise followed, someone moving around inside. He chuckled. Someone else out this way with the same idea of dodging the crowds.

Sitting on the toilet, staring at the scuffed-up door in front of him, his thoughts drifted and eventually landed in England. He had been thinking of Amarie almost constantly since seeing her on the big screen in the mess hall, couldn’t take his mind off her, if he were honest. He had presumed her lost, along with the rest of France, hell, with the rest of Europe, and had even, after two years, ceased to think about her quite so often, to accept that she was gone. There had been nothing he could do. She hadn’t answered her phone, hadn’t been at her apartment or workplace, and he had never thought to ask, in the few short months they were dating, where her parents lived. He knew it was the south of France somewhere. Wine country. But that was it.

And he had presumed that when the riots worsened she had taken off back home to her folks’ place. He chose to believe she had gone home and escaped the danger.

But now, there she was, alive, in England, and with a child. The little girl was the other thought that wouldn’t go away. She couldn’t have been older than two years, could she? Maybe less. Wesley had very little experience with kids, and now that he thought about it, he couldn’t really have any idea how old the child was. But if she was less than two… that meant she must have been born around the time he last saw Amarie, or maybe just after. Was the child hers? It couldn’t be. Some baby she’d grabbed to save the poor thing’s life, he thought.

There was a loud bang at the other end of the toilet block, and it snapped Wesley from his thoughts, so violently that he jumped up and froze, both hands braced on the sides of the stall. He pulled his trousers up, thankful that he hadn’t even gotten started, and stood there for a moment, listening.

Another bang. This one loud enough that whoever was in the cubicle, or outside of it, had to be hitting the door with some force.

“Hey. Everything all right over there?”

No reply.

Wesley placed a boot on the toilet behind him and peered over the top of the door, into the open space near the sinks. He could see along the row, and no one was outside the far cubicle. He grabbed his gunbelt from its hook on the door, rushed to buckle it on, and then slowly, quietly as he could, drew his handgun, flicked the safety off, unlocked the door, and stepped outside.

But the weapon swung toward only a blank wall as he rounded on the room. There was no one outside the cubicles, and that meant…

He stepped slowly along the row, pushing open each door as he went, until he finally stood outside the last door, the one with the jacket hanging over it.

“You okay in there?” he asked again.

A gurgling sound came from inside, followed by a low, deep, rasping moan. Wesley went down on all fours and peered under the door, carefully staying a yard away. And he was glad he did, because the moment the thing in the cubicle clocked his face, it lunged, stretching its arms as far as it could. It was only inches from him.

For ten seconds, Wesley stayed on the ground, staring into the eyes of the dead man, and Melvin’s hateful glare came back to him, jumping from the dream he had already half-forgotten. He blinked, pushing the image away. Melvin hadn’t died in the battle, and his own jaw was still firmly attached to his face. Then he saw that this was someone he didn’t recognize, just another crew member, someone who had probably been bitten, panicked, and hidden himself away to avoid a bullet in their head.

Oh boy,
he thought.
What an absolutely shitty way to die. Sitting on the toilet.

Wesley aimed the gun at the creature’s head.

Just Another Day at the Office

Britain, Oxfordshire - CentCom

Colonel Robert Mayes was a troubled man. Standing on the balcony that overlooked the huge room that was the CentCom Joint Operations Center –
his
JOC – and looking out over the heads of dozens of busy ops-desk personnel, he was beginning to see a pattern that didn’t bode well for anyone.

Directly across from him, nearly a hundred feet away, was the massive, digital Area of Operations (AO) map, and it displayed the entirety of the south of England. Near the top was London, and down on the far right, amidst a jarring tangle of red blips, was Canterbury and then Folkestone – where he had just deployed a significant portion of the world’s remaining combat troops and heavy firepower. Each deployment was marked with its own flashing star, and they were distributed almost evenly across the bottom of the map. All engaged. All in a slow, controlled, tactical retreat.

The problem, he figured, wasn’t the net that had been cast to trap the outbreak. Everything had been in order there. That was, until fifteen minutes ago, when three new blips appeared on the screen. Down in the rows of desks below, ops officers relayed instructions and controlled communications across his defense network. They would take SITREPs from the front, issue commands, and update the tactical map so that he and his staff could make the right moves in this game of breathtakingly high-stakes chess. Fifteen minutes ago they had learned they were facing more opposing pieces on the board, represented by new markers on the map – red ones. Outbreaks.

And the new blips were outside of his entrapment circle. Appledore, Wittersham, New Romney, all of them reporting small-scale contact, and all of them southwest of Folkestone.

Mayes looked to his left, to the tall, lanky figure of Lieutenant Colonel Broads, his J2, or theater intelligence officer.

“What are we looking at here, John?”

The man looked uncomfortable. “Sir, we have teams inbound, ETA twenty mikes, on all of those new brushfires, but basically it’s spreading faster than we can track. Somehow, overnight, something must have gotten through the lines.”

“Runners?” asked Mayes, rubbing his chin. Three days solid under the glare of the JOC and he was badly in need of a shave, and that didn’t even touch on the discomfort of the headache pounding in his temples. There was only so much caffeine you could load a body with before it stopped being effective.

“Maybe,” said Broads. “It’s too early to confirm until we have some eyes on. We know these outbreaks are small, but after the type-three – supposed type-three – got out and hit Canterbury, we’re concerned there may have been more of them.”

Mayes sighed, and wondered where the hell Grews was. The Major had reported that everything was getting under control, just before he went off comms and somehow vanished from the map. But Mayes was skeptical about the Major’s view of the situation. He had presided over a cancelled bombardment, then a general call to evacuate, which could have ended in a free-for-all, if the Parachute Regiment hadn’t gotten boots on the ground when it did. Grews was becoming too much of a wildcard in Mayes’ opinion, and a possible liability. He hated relieving an officer of his command. But when the stakes were this high, he was willing to drop anyone, at any time.

“John, I need to know if we have more of these damn type-threes out there, and where they are, and what they are up to. Screw it, we know what they are up to, but if we don’t get some sort of visibility on this new spread in the south, it’s going to get pretty shitty, and pretty damn fast.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I need to know more about what we’re facing. The only real intel we’re getting on these things are reports from that carrier, and the bloody Americans don’t seem to consider intelligence sharing a big priority.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And we only went and sent our most accurate witnesses of Folkestone to join them.”

Mayes frowned, and glared at the blips on the map.

“I need some options here. We’ve had plenty of people in contact. Someone must be able to tell us more. We don’t have Grews at the moment, wherever that screwball is. So I can’t pull him in for a briefing. Who else is there?”

Broads pursed his lips. “The Folkestone Garrison have men still operational who were in contact on the night of the breakout. But they’re inbound on the new outbreaks, along with those spec-ops teams from USOC. And I don’t know that they had direct contact with the type-three, only the resulting rush afterward.”