Arisen, Book Eight - Empire of the Dead
Author: Michael Stephen Fuchs; Glynn James
Date: 2014-12-10 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: fast zombies; Increment; SOF; serial fiction; high-tech weapons; naval adventure; spec-ops; techno-thriller; SAS; dystopian fiction; Special Operations; Zombies; supercarrier; Delta Force; Hereford; M
Description: ALPHA TEAM BATTLES ITS GREATEST NEMESIS With Juice in heavy contact on the do-or-die shore mission, Ali in a blistering sniper duel over the south Atlantic, and Homer all alone and massively outnumbered deep beneath the keel of the JFK, the Alpha operators are in the fight of their lives – against tactically outstanding, pain-invulnerable, and utterly merciless Spetsnaz commandos – and with no guarantees about who will be left standing at the end… THE JFK CLINGS TO SURVIVAL Perilously low on ammo, fuel, planes, pilots, and options, and seemingly outmaneuvered at every turn, the beleaguered Joh
Publisher: Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs

ARISEN
Hope Never Dies.

First published 2014 by Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs
London, UK

Copyright © Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs

The right of Glynn James & Michael Stephen Fuchs to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the authors. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

About the Authors

GLYNN JAMES, born in Wellingborough, England in 1972, is a bestselling author of dark sci-fi novels. He has an obsession with anything to do with zombies, Cthulhu mythos, and post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and films, all of which began when he started reading HP Lovecraft and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend back when he was eight years old. In addition to co-authoring the bestselling ARISEN books (over 100,000 copies sold), he is the author of the bestselling DIARY OF THE DISPLACED series. More info on his writing and projects can be found at www.glynnjames.co.uk.

About the Authors

MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS, in addition to co-authoring the bestselling ARISEN series (over 100,000 copies sold), wrote the bestselling prequel ARISEN : GENESIS. He is also author of the D-BOYS series of high-concept, high-tech special-operations military adventure novels, which include D-BOYS, COUNTER-ASSAULT, and CLOSE QUARTERS BATTLE (coming in 2015); as well as the acclaimed existential cyberthrillers THE MANUSCRIPT and PANDORA’S SISTERS, both published worldwide by Macmillan in hardback, paperback and all e-book formats (and in translation). He lives in London and at www.michaelstephenfuchs.com, and blogs at www.michaelfuchs.org/razorsedge.

ARISEN

BOOK EIGHT

EMPIRE OF THE DEAD

GLYNN JAMES &
MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

“Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.”
– William Ernest Henley,
“Invictus”

“Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.”
– Sir Winston Churchill

Damn, Dude

SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse

Marines shouting and screaming – some panicked, others operating effectively, some wounded and hollering, rolling on the deck in pain and fear… the wicked snap of hundreds of incoming supersonic rounds, cutting the air over their heads, peppering the crates they sheltered behind like heavy hail, flecking off ceramic body armor plates… the smell of cordite, sulfur, and black powder, the metallic taste of blood in the air, and in the mouth… chaos and confusion, the impossibility of hearing bellowed orders, of understanding what was going on, of controlling the outcome of events, or even of positively impacting their situation… the terror of being enveloped, overrun, and wiped out – the imminence of approaching death… doom and defeat, terror and despair.

The death rattle of hope.

The MARSOC Marines, led by Juice, had been in this furious and wretchedly uneven firefight with the absurdly skilled and vicious Spetsnaz operators, in the South African naval depot warehouse, for what had seemed like a lifetime, but was in reality only a few minutes. In that time, the nine-man team had taken four casualties – the status of three of whom was unknown, because they were still lying out in the no-man’s land between the two sides. And, now, as the battle raged toward its bloody climax, it was looking very much like they were all soon going to be casualties.

But, then… Juice pressed the switch – the one on his rapidly and radically reconfigured FOFID transponder.

And all of this chaos and threat and peril stopped dead, all in the same fraction of an instant – as the entire world out beyond the Marines erupted in rippling orange fireballs, billowing black smoke, blasting columns of flame, spraying debris, violence, crushing force, and pummeling noise. It was as if the entire world was exploding.

And as the overpressure of multiple chained explosions threatened to rupture Juice’s eardrums (again)… and as the detonation of all those Spetsnaz-emplaced IEDs, all going up at once, sucked the very oxygen from his lungs… and as thousands of ball bearings and deadly bits of shrapnel – not to mention bits of Russians, and their weapons and gear – all scythed the air over his head like a detonating supernova…

Juice had himself a second to reflect here.

He thought about that long dark night of the soul he had experienced in his cabin two nights ago – when he’d wondered if he had the strength to keep going, to keep on not giving up all over again, even when not giving up had failed a thousand times over. And when it seemed he was just running out the clock – his own, and humanity’s, all of them simply waiting for death.

And what he realized now was…

He was feeling a hell of a lot better.

Maybe he’d had to stand with faith just one more time. Or maybe this would be when it all came together for them. Maybe the end of all this horror and struggle, some kind of actual victory, or even salvation, was really now possible – right around the next corner, or just out past the horizon.

And maybe if he reached down, just one more time, they would all break through, to the other side. To victory. To some kind of peace.

He had no idea if any of this was actually true.

But he decided he was going to choose to believe it.

Because he knew it was always what you chose to do right now that mattered.

And you always had a choice.

* * *

Somehow, Juice now heard a voice shouting at him. It was Marine Sergeant Lovell, still in the position to his immediate right. If Juice could hear a human voice, then the explosions must have finally died down.

What he thought he heard was: “DAMN, dude…!”

Juice merely nodded. Lovell had that about right.

He also belatedly noticed that the incoming fire from the Russians had completely ceased. There were still outgoing rounds, but even those were few in number and ticking down.

Five seconds earlier, when Juice had turned his Friend-or-Foe ID transponder back on, it had instantly flooded the local EM spectrum with radio waves – on the frequency he had picked up from the Russians’ last radio-triggered IED detonation, as well as on 10 kilohertz to either side of it, just to play it safe. And the transponder had sent a series of digital messages that were nearly identical to the one Juice had picked up on his scanner, differing only in a single index number – one for each IED.

These invisible signals had simultaneously detonated every radio-controlled device the Russians had emplaced – probably anywhere within a two-square-mile radius, actually.

It had definitely detonated the ones in and around the open central area of the warehouse. Which was also the exact area the Russians had advanced into, chasing the “retreating” Marines. Right where Juice had wanted them – and right where he had lured them.

One of Juice’s personal mantras had always been: Fight smarter, not harder. That was what had saved them today. It was all that had saved them.

Now he heard a little incoming fire ramping back up. It sounded like suppressing fire on the part of Spetsnaz. In fact, it sounded precisely like that PKP machine gun he’d spotted earlier, going cyclic now and laying down a base of fire, probably to cover the survivors and wounded as they withdrew.

Needless to say, Spetsnaz were deadly serious operators, highly trained and brutally experienced. Their unit cohesion and combat effectiveness weren’t going to fall apart just because most or all of them had been wounded or killed. No, they would still be operating.

And they would still be dangerous.

Faintly, under the noise of the machine gun, Juice could also make out traces of shouted Russian:

“Vytesnyat’! Idi, idi…!”

“Punkt sbora odin!”

Once again, his Russian was good enough to know they were doing what he’d been doing with the Marines a minute earlier: bailing, getting the fuck out, advancing to the rear…

He hadn’t really expected to get all of them. But he’d evidently gotten enough of them – enough to devastate their force, disrupt their assault, and avert the lethal danger to his own team.

And he’d take that.

* * *

Now Juice knew he’d be expected to go and get their fallen Marines back. Their brothers had waited long enough. He keyed his mic.

“Sweep forward, marching fire. On me.”

He moved out, not looking back to see if the others were following.

When they reached and secured that main center area, it was nothing more or less than a charnel house. Long streaks of black soot, charring, and blast damage radiated in all directions – across the floor, along the sides of crates and pallets, even way up on the high ceiling. These intermingled with even bigger streaks of dark red blood and viscera… unidentifiable bits of meat, bones sticking through skin… swatches of burnt and bloodied uniform, destroyed weapons and gear.

Total carnage.

And lying there in all that carnage was Corporal Raible, and beside him Lance Corporal Jenkins. Keeping an eye and a half on the room and the tactical situation, Juice knelt down and checked for pulses. Raible still had one, though it was weak, irregular, and fluttery.

He was still circling the drain.

But now they could at least try to reel him back.

Needing no direction, Lovell and another Marine started combat-lifesaver medicine on Raible – airway management, stopping the hemorrhaging, and getting a jab in his arm and a bag of plasma pumping into him. Other Marines produced a compact fold-out litter from their assault packs.

While they did this, Juice went and found Lawton – the one he had sacrificed to save the rest of them. The young man he had knowingly sent to his death. And it was as he had feared, had known in his bones: the kid was KIA.

And Juice knew this part was going to be very hard.

He raised his voice enough to be heard locally. “We’re not taking Jenkins or Lawton. Not now. We don’t have the numbers.”

This produced the exact looks he anticipated – mean ones. But the Marines were also professional enough to know he was right. It took four men to realistically carry a man in combat gear on a stretcher over any distance – and all four of them became combat ineffective for the duration. This eight-man team had already left one WIA back at the last rally point: O’Bannon, the Marine who’d been shot in the face, been quickly patched up, and was now doing self-care. In addition to him, they also had two KIAs and a litter-urgent WIA here.

That left a total of five men on their feet, including Juice.

But the Marines still weren’t thrilled about leaving other Marines behind, even dead ones.

So Juice played his last card. “We secure this warehouse… and we own this warehouse. We’ll be back for them.” The others didn’t like it, but they couldn’t deny that it wouldn’t matter to Jenkins and Lawton when they got out of there. Raible was a whole other matter, and seconds counted – because he didn’t have many left. Those who remained knew they had to focus on getting him out.

Juice pointed to the man squeezing plasma into Raible. “You stay. Try to consolidate a CCP here.” He looked up. “The rest of us go.” He got up and hefted his rifle.

Lovell grabbed him. “Hey, Sarge, you’re bleeding.” He had noticed the bullet wound in Juice’s upper arm. “Let me wrap that up.”

“Later,” Juice said, moving forward and out – and once again not looking back.

He knew the team would definitely be following him now.

* * *

As he rounded the next corner, Juice spotted a more or less intact Spetsnaz guy, lying face down on the deck, in a large and spreading pool of his own blood. Before he could stop him, one of the Marines came around the opposite corner and rolled the body over.

“Do not— ah, fuck,” Juice said, and instead just grabbed the Marine by the scruff of his neck (the collar of his plate-carrier) and heaved him away and down to the floor. In the same motion, he threw himself to the deck beside him, face down and boots up, while shouting, “Grenade!”

The grenade that rolled out from under the dead guy had a short fuze, but one just long enough. The blast assaulted Juice and the Marine with scorching heat and pummeling overpressure, but left them basically unhurt.

Only it turned out the dead guy wasn’t dead.

As Juice was dragging himself back to his feet, the Russian, having been helpfully rolled over, now shot him in the thigh with a handgun, which had also been concealed under his body. Even before reacting, Juice thought: Jesus fucking Christ – they stuck a live grenade under a WOUNDED guy…?

You really couldn’t make this shit up.

He fell onto his back and rapid-fired his rifle through his knees. The Russian’s blast-scorched head ruptured like a watermelon and he collapsed again. Juice could now see he had already been grievously wounded by an IED blast. Which was presumably why his buddies had left him behind – as a human IED.

Jesus Christ…

SGT Lovell appeared over Juice’s prone form, blocking out the overhead light. “Okay, I’m wrapping that up,” he said. “Don’t move.” Juice nodded and stayed put – for two reasons. One, he’d been shot in the thigh, way too close to his femoral artery. It may even have nicked it, which meant he had a big problem, and a ticking clock. Two, he had to brief his team.

He keyed his mic and spoke over the squad net.

“All Biltong elements, be fucking advised: these dudes are more dangerous dying or dead. Do not relax. Remain vigilant, maintain posture, and sweep forward…”

He paused to grunt in pain as Lovell worked on his leg, as well as to draw a breath, before concluding.

“…Everyone on me.”

Haunted by the Dead

USS John F. Kennedy - Bridge

Commander Drake, acting commander of the John F. Kennedy strike group, staggered back onto the bridge, feeling lucky to have survived his close encounter with Lieutenant Campbell down in their Combat Information Center (CIC). It had been a no-holds-barred death-match between the two of them, over whether they should send out a combat search and rescue mission (CSAR) to retrieve their shot-down F-35 pilot floating on the surface of the south Atlantic.

Drake actually felt lucky to still be on his feet at all. As he wobbled to his station, all eyes on him, he could actually hear his headache still pounding, and he felt both light-headed and vaguely nauseated. He’d been suffering from symptoms like these, and shrugging them off or fighting through them, ever since a grenade had exploded ten feet from his head, in the aborted attempt to assassinate the British scientists on the Kennedy’s flight deck.

Squinting now against the sunlight coming in the front and starboard screens – light sensitivity seemed to be another symptom – Drake found he could hear, and now see, the CSAR bird, an MH-60 Seahawk helicopter, lift off from the flight deck, put its nose down, and blast off across the sky, as if being called out to fight a three-alarm fire.

Truly a bat out of hell – or straight into it.

As the noise faded, Drake heard the outside hatch fly open and then slam shut. Looking up and over, he saw a stocky man walk in wearing MARPAT camo fatigues, a side arm, and a Marine Corps cap pulled low over his eyes.

When the man looked up, Drake instantly recognized him as… Gunny Blane.

Drake stopped in his tracks.

What in God’s name…

It couldn’t be. Gunny Blane had died in the flight deck battle, leading the Marines while Fick was still in the air, bringing Alpha home. Gunny Blane was gone. Everyone had told him so. Hell, they’d symbolically dumped him in the sea in that committal ceremony.

Drake’s mouth opened and started to work, but nothing came out. Finally, he managed, “Gunny…?”

“Yeah, what? Sir?” the Marine replied. More light hit his face as he looked up from under his hat.

It was Fick.

Drake shook his head and tried to erase the expression of bafflement from his face. “Nothing… Master Gunny. Nothing.” Jesus Christ, he thought. The dizziness and fogginess and nausea – all the physical symptoms he’d been trying to shrug off – those were one thing… but now did he have to worry that his mind was going on him?

My mind – or just my brain? he wondered, as he dropped himself down heavily at his station.

Drake knew the brain was essentially hardware, a physical system – and, in his case, one that had taken a hell of a knock in that grenade blast. Doc Walker wouldn’t let him forget that fact, even if he hadn’t had time for all the treatment and monitoring she’d tried to force on him.

But, on the other hand, the mind was essentially software, a very complex ghost in the machine, and subject to more abstract pressures – the kinds Freud had talked about. And the shock of their two F-35s and pilots being shot out of the air by the Russians’ unexpectedly long-range missiles – and the crushing weight of responsibility for that, the fact that it was Drake’s bad call that had caused it…

Had all that also given his psyche a terrible beating?

He looked up to see that Fick had gone. And Commander Abrams, his executive officer (XO), stood looking down at him.

“Sir, CIC reports they’ve completely lost comms with the shore team. And both their squad cameras are down now – as is the team leader’s micro-UAV. We’re getting absolutely nothing out of that warehouse.”

Drake’s eyes went wide. This seemed to be full-on disaster striking. “What the hell happened?”

“Unknown at this time. Clearly the team is in some kind of contact. But we’re not assuming the worst yet. It might just be a commo outage. Hell, it might be the Russians jamming our radio channels. But the whole team is indoors. So whatever’s going on, our drone can’t see it.”

Drake opened his mouth, but then closed it again.

After waiting a respectful beat, Abrams said, “We’re also prepping and cycling our last two F-35s.”

“What?”

“The Air Boss called down for instructions. I gave the order in your absence.”

Drake stood again. “We can’t risk those last two birds.”

“Sir?”

Drake looked around the bridge. No one was obviously listening to this exchange. But of course everyone was. “We need them for Africa, for the Somalia mission. For top cover. We can’t risk sending them up.”

Abrams paused fractionally, steadying himself to make sure he wasn’t reacting emotionally. And then he lowered his voice four notches. “Commander… this is Africa. Right here. Right now. If that shore team doesn’t come back with those supplies, there is no Somalia mission. And if this vessel goes down… then there’s nothing. And those two birds are the only defense we’ve got left.”

Drake seemed to be trying to process this.

Abrams tried to help him along. “Of course you’re right that we can’t afford to lose them. But if it becomes them or this ship… well, we’ve got to have them on deck and ready to go. Obviously, the final decision to launch will be yours.”

Drake nodded. Of course. Of course Abrams was right. They had to have the aircraft on deck and prepped. That Drake hadn’t thought of this himself was another massive blow to his self-belief – to his crumbling sense that he was still in command here.

Or that he still ought to be.

Standing up again and looking out the screens, he could see the first sleek aircraft coming up on the giant deck elevator, and flight deck crew backing up a tractor to tow it into position. At least it was getting done.

The strike group had lost a capable warship when the destroyer Michael Murphy went down. But Drake had gained an invaluable appendage – Abrams. Hell, he’d gained a brain.

And right now, it may be the only working one I’ve got…

* * *

Lieutenant Hailey Wells marched across the deck in her flight suit, side arm and other survival essentials packed tightly around her chest rig, helmet tucked under her arm… and she tried not to feel the eyes on her.

There were a hell of a lot of them.

There were the eyes of all the flight deck crew scurrying around her plane… those of the commanders staring down at her from up in the island… the remote video gaze of her fellow pilots watching live from down in the Ready Room. Basically, it was a lot of goddamned eyes. In a very real sense, everyone on the ship was watching her now. And the weight of it was tremendous – heavier even than the gaze of her father, who was always watching her, always judging her… and always finding her lacking.

As she saw her aircraft reach the level of the flight deck on its elevator, and watched the tractor starting to tow it into position, she adopted an intercept course, aiming at the base of the angle-deck runway. And she tried to keep her gait both straight and steady.

Hailey was, in truth, still reeling from the loss of Cole and Tomassetti, the carrier air group’s top two officers, who had been shot down less than thirty minutes ago. But this crushing and surreal news had flashed through the Kennedy’s lower decks like a fire – one that incinerated morale. There’d been plenty of death and loss over the last two years – but not in the goddamned air wing, and definitely not among the fighter jocks. They were supposed to be untouchable, up above it all. Gods looking down from their aeries.

Weren’t they? Hailey swallowed heavily.

Then again, the earlier deaths of two other fighter jocks, Delacey and O’Neill, in the flight deck battle, should have woken her up to their mortality. Jesus, her own mid-air collision and ejection over the ocean ought to have done that. But the CAG (Commander, Air Group) and Assistant CAG were like Zeus and Apollo. The two of them going down, falling off Olympus, was simply unthinkable.

But it had happened. Which was exactly why Hailey was here now, climbing into her cockpit again. That roster of F-35 pilots had gotten so short that she was actually almost at the top of it again. In fact, among those still breathing air, and not laid up in the hospital, it was down to her and one other – the one who would be her wingman today.

Or, rather, she would be his.

And the air wing was also down to its last two of these irreplaceable planes. The problem used to be too many pilots and not enough planes.

Now the problem was everything.

As soon as her ride was secured to the deck in its launch position, Hailey climbed the ladder, poured herself into the cockpit, and started going through her checks. She did all of this mechanically – like a zombie, staring dully down at the controls and the checklist. The weight of responsibility was compressing her into something like an emotional diamond – or perhaps a lump of coal.

She could hardly move in the claustrophobic cockpit. And she could barely breathe. She was being suffocated by her doubts that she was really up to this. If the two top pilots in the air wing had been blown out of the sky trying to attack the Russian ship… what the hell kind of chance did she have, a benchwarmer, a third-rate fighter jockey – and one who evidently couldn’t even obey simple orders?

Not a week earlier, she had somehow lost an entire $220M aircraft – while displaying gross insubordination, disobeying an urgent recall order, to provide close-air support to some random civilians on the ground. That they survived, and that some of them turned out to be Kennedy security forces, didn’t make her action any more defensible.

And for what she’d done, the CAG, the Air Boss, and Commander Drake himself had, at various times, all torn her various new ones. Hailey was pretty sure she would not be in this cockpit now, if command had any other options.

Hailey’s father, the Admiral, had long ago made it clear to her that she, and her career, were not up to standards. She just seemed to have some kind of cussed rebellious streak, one that always surfaced at exactly the wrong time, to get her in trouble.

Nonetheless, now here she sat.

And as soon as she was launch-ready, she would remain there, on cockpit standby, waiting for the order that would send her on the most important mission of her life. Now she and just one other pilot were all that stood between everyone on the JFK – and the Admiral Nakhimov, that weapons-bristling Russian battlecruiser, which probably had a hundred times the firepower needed to blow the carrier out of the water.

And, by proxy, that meant they would be all that stood between humanity and its final destruction.

Hailey exhaled slowly. Thank God it was the other guy who would be the senior pilot on the mission. At least this was a tiny bit of weight off her. If everything went to shit, the hammer would fall on him first.

She looked out her cockpit glass now toward that aft starboard aircraft elevator. It should really be bringing up the second bird by now. But it resolutely remained just a giant cut-out in the surface of the flight deck.

Where the hell was her wingman?

Blast Damage

JFK – Bridge

Drake heard a ringing phone – which was possible now that the bridge had settled down to be more like an office and less like a lunatic asylum – but realized it wasn’t his when Abrams picked up his own handset.

“Bridge, go. Yeah. Yeah? Jesus. All received. Keep us updated. Bridge out.”

Drake looked across and waited for his XO to brief him – trying not to wonder why he’d been bypassed.

“There’s a problem with one of the aircraft elevators,” Abrams said.

“Yeah? What?”

“It’s stuck.”

“You’re kidding.”

Abrams held his gaze. “After the pummeling this ship has taken, I’m amazed the stairs work.”

“Good point,” Drake admitted. “And good thing we’ve got three elevators. Trust the other two are in working order?”

Abrams’s expression darkened. “It’s not that simple.”

Drake just exhaled and waited for it. When Abrams explained the details of this latest debacle, Drake decided he’d better go down there and look at it himself.

Three minutes later, he was standing on the flight deck, staring down at the elevator platform, stopped about thirty feet below him. There was an F-35 sitting on it. There was also a small army of flight deck personnel, hangar deck guys, aircraft handlers, and engineers, all swarming over the various levels and trying to remedy the situation.

Drake had only been staring at all this for about ten seconds when Master Chief Shields came scuttling up to brief him.

“It’s wedged good, Commander.”

Drake blinked heavily. “What caused this?”

The Master Chief shrugged. “Better to ask what didn’t. We’ve had magazine explosions, construction disasters, incoming artillery fires from the destroyer, Hellfires targeting the flight deck – and that was before the two Russian missiles hit us.”

“Okay, I take your point.”

“Basically, it’s some kind of structural warping. From blast damage. It looks like the elevator shaft is totally fused.”

“Fine,” Drake said. “Get my plane off it, and onto one of the other ones.”

“Not that easy, sir. I’m afraid your plane weighs over 38,000 pounds. The only crane we had that could safely lift that kind of weight went over the side in that botched job trying to patch the hull.”

“Fuck. What about the self-driving cranes?”

“Out of the question. They’d just pull themselves over. Anyway, right now, I’m trying to safeguard the damned thing – make sure it doesn’t come crashing down to the hangar deck, and take out more irreplaceable ratings and equipment. We’ve absolutely got to do that first.”

Drake clenched his jaw. “I’m just about out of fighter/bomber aircraft, Chief. When do I get this one back?”

Shields took a breath. “I wish I could give you a good estimate. But it’s yet another job we’ve never done, and never imagined we’d have to. Once I’ve made the platform safe and stable, then it’s gonna be a matter of coring out the shaft. And that’s some serious industrial metalwork.”

“Chief.”

Shields sighed. “Between four and twelve hours. Sir.”

Drake’s phone went. It was Campbell in CIC. Drake took the call, stepping away from the construction melee, moving aft along the deck edge, where he could watch the action while he talked. He could also see the water way down beneath them, which was strangely soothing.

“Go ahead, LT.”

“Commander, we need to get that one prepped bird off the deck, and into the air – NOW.”

Drake bristled. “LT, I’m not sending our most junior pilot out, alone and unescorted. Hell, I’m not sending either of our last two attack aircraft out, except in the direst extremity.”

“It may be too late then. And let me tell you why.”

“I’m listening,” Drake said.

But the tumult around the elevator had swollen in volume, and he needed to back further away to hear. But as he started to move away, his eye was caught by one of the aircraft mechanics doing something to the one F-35 on deck. The man wore a grimy jumpsuit and stood in one-quarter profile, but when he turned to leave, he half faced Drake.

And Drake froze dead.

It was Stan – who was famously, and far and away, their best aircraft maintenance tech, always called in for thorny or urgent problems, on every type of aircraft they flew. He seemed to have a preternatural ability to keep them all flying.

He was also dead.

* * *

Drake reeled, staring, his chin slack on his chest.

It had been reported to him in no uncertain terms that Stan had been standing so close to a massive explosion in the airfield fight on Beaver Island that there had literally been nothing to bring home, or to bury. He’d been vaporized.

As Drake stared and blinked heavily at him now, waiting for this sick illusion to go away like the earlier one had, he was vaguely aware of Campbell talking in his ear: “…ffective range of the Shipwreck is two hundred kilometers. But those S-four—” But her voice faded out again, as the ringing Drake had been hearing on and off dialed back up again – good and loud. It drowned out everything.

As the figure beside the plane steadfastly refused to stop being a dead man, finally Drake tore his eyes away. His gaze went instead over the edge of the ship, down to the ocean surface below.

And he froze again – as he was able to make out two bodies floating in the water, just a few meters off their starboard side. His mouth opened, then closed. It was a long way down, but Drake somehow recognized them, one man and one woman. They were the two suicides that had been reported to him a few days earlier.

One of them, the woman, looked up and mouthed something inaudible. But Drake could read her lips. She said: I’m done here. Drake’s phone dropped out of his hand and fell to the deck with a clatter. It almost went over the side.

When he picked it up again, Campbell was saying, “—mander, I say again – DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

Drake finally remembered to take a breath. And then he spoke: “Yes, affirmative, all received.” In fact, he’d received very little of it. But he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. His facade of still being competent to command was thin enough.

So instead he turned off the phone, put it in his pocket with trembling fingers – and, without another word, marched back to the island and took the stairs back up, the Master Chief’s words echoing in his ears:

Blast damage.

He had to get out of there. Mainly, he had to get to somewhere he could be alone, even just for a few minutes – before someone worked out that he was losing his fucking mind. All he needed was just a few minutes to breathe, and to pull himself together.

And as he woodenly climbed the stairs, he took deep sucking breaths, telling himself over and over again:

I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.

He had to be fine. Because there was no one else who could do this job. Abrams was a great executive officer, but he’d been on board the Kennedy less than a week. And none of Drake’s other senior leaders knew everything that was going on now, much less all that had come before. It was Drake who had saved the ship, over and over again – from the mutiny, from the outbreak, from the storm of ten million dead.

And it was he who had to finish this.

He just had to hold it together a little longer.

Never Go South of the River

London - Waterloo Bridge

Rebecca Ainsley felt a rising wave of fear, nerves bubbling up from down in her stomach and trickling outward into her limbs, as she realized the sun was now just inches from the horizon. Night would be here soon, and she was out of doors and far from her flat – the only place she considered safe, if any place in this world could be. She had no illusions that the dingy lodgings had been impregnable, but at least she could lock the doors and pretend it would keep the dangers of the outside world away from her boys.

Now she was somewhere she would never have even considered going at this time of day, holding on tightly to the hands of her sons as they walked on either side of her.

Her only source of comfort was that she had somehow managed to join forces with the group of survivors from the Channel Tunnel – having promised them she would try to get them into CentCom headquarters, where they had agreed to escort her, across a London that was falling into utter chaos.

She looked around at the scruffy group of travelers in whose midst she now walked. Each of them had survived two years of darkness in the tunnel, scraping out a living eating tinned tuna fish left in an abandoned train carriage. And, trapped down in that half-flooded underworld, they’d had to fight off the dead every day.

And all in nearly complete darkness.

Rebecca spotted the young woman, Amarie, carrying her child against her, gripping the tiny and fragile girl, never putting her down even for a moment. This woman had not only survived those two years of darkness and filth – she had given birth there. And, after miraculously escaping the nightmare of their subterranean prison, this group had somehow gone on to survive more disasters in Canterbury, escaping from the very center of the outbreak there, followed by the carpet-bombing, finally walking out on foot.

Even though Rebecca didn’t know these people, she was warming to them. They weren’t as harsh or aggressive as she had imagined they might be – would have to be to survive as they had for so long. And they were organized to an extent that made some military units seem chaotic – always keeping together, guarding their flanks as they moved in a tight group through the hostile streets of London, in what might be its last days. The bigger, stronger, and better-armed ones stayed out front, or on the perimeter, eyeing up anyone who looked like a threat, or who came too close.

The group now stopped, twenty yards out onto Waterloo Bridge, and huddled along one side, many of them staring out across the River Thames, while the leaders – Hackworth, Colley, and a few others – conferred near the front, occasionally pointing across the bridge or down to the opposite bank.

Rebecca hadn’t been to this part of the city since the end of normal life, and she was amazed as well as shocked at what she saw. Once, this bridge had been a busy thoroughfare of briskly moving vehicles, zipping in both directions over the river, but now it was devoid of traffic. There was little fuel left for civilian vehicles, so cars had become nearly worthless, and many had been abandoned by the roadside. This even extended out onto the bridges that spanned the Thames.

And here, on Waterloo Bridge – which, because it sat right at the bend in the river, used to have perhaps the best views of London anywhere – a whole shanty town had sprung up, seemingly housing hundreds of people. Tiny shacks made of cardboard, wooden planks, or sheet metal lined both sides of the bridge. Even the abandoned cars had been turned into homes, their broken windows covered with filthy sheets of plastic. And every fifty feet or so, a large bin or barrel sat in the middle of the road, burning some kind of scavenged fuel, in an attempt to warm those lost souls huddled around it.

The Ainsleys and the Tunnelers finally began moving again, threading through the throngs of the destitute and desperate, with Hackworth and Colley in the lead once more. Rebecca made sure to keep up, shielding herself and her boys in the middle of the huddle, holding tightly to her sons’ hands, her thoughts returning constantly to the loaded gun in her bag. People only a few yards away eyed the group with a naked hunger that made Rebecca wonder if they were half zombie already. It was a ridiculous notion, she knew, but the people watching them obviously wanted something.

Many of the Tunnelers carried backpacks, which Rebecca presumed held supplies, food, tools, or weapons. Whatever they had hung on to, whatever had allowed them to survive this far into the end of the world. And that had to be what these people wanted, as they peered out from the dark interiors of ruined cars, or from underneath makeshift canopies, or just stood in the open in the middle of the road, watching them shamelessly.

These people had become feral, Rebecca realized – and she felt sure they would also do, or take, whatever would allow them to survive.

A few times, as they crossed the bridge, Colley or one of the others was forced to push aside someone blocking their way, and each time Rebecca wondered what would happen if a fight broke out. Would many of the others in this great mob of homeless join in? The thought terrified her, and she pulled her boys in closer, hunkered down, and just tried to concentrate on moving forward, and getting off this bridge of the damned, before the light faded completely.

As they passed the middle of the span, skirting countless shacks and tiny nooks used as living spaces, Rebecca glanced back and down along the edge of the water, and shook her head. The bridge wasn’t the only place where people had made makeshift homes. These had been obscured from view until now, but as the group moved further on, she could also see thick ranks of boats moored at the river’s edge.

There were hundreds of them.

She frowned, wondering where so many had come from. Then, as she stared, she finally realized the entire Embankment on both sides of the river was rammed with the things. Barges, canal boats, even luxury yachts – though even these were dirty and weathered now – all tethered to the granite edges of the ancient river. And from what she could see, they were mostly lashed together, creating a bizarre bankside flotilla.

And then there were the wrecks. Eventually, from the middle of the bridge, she could make out ghostlike shapes wavering in the water, grounded and sunk at the bottom of the Thames. Rebecca wondered if a vessel of any size could even navigate the river now without scraping against the hulks, or colliding with some other debris.

Her attention snapped back up to the bridge, and to the stretch that remained, when she heard a shout up ahead. A man staggered away from the leaders, swearing and spitting and holding the side of his head while he waved something in his other hand. A sliver of metal reflected the setting sun and she realized the man – an old guy, maybe in his sixties, dressed in layers of torn and scruffy rags – was waving a knife around. Nearby, and bearing down on him, was Colley. The huge man was pointing past the intruder, and telling him to back off, while lifting his axe with his other hand.

Evidently, this combination was compelling, because the knife-wielding man stumbled off, disappearing into the crowd in the failing light. Rebecca felt her sons move even closer to her, huddling against her side, as she lost sight of this threat.

She had a terrible feeling there would be plenty more.

* * *

Thirty minutes earlier, just before they set out, Hackworth had asked her: “Okay. So where is this CentCom headquarters?”

“It’s the old Wandsworth Prison,” Rebecca had answered. “And most of Wandsworth Common.”

“The park?” Hackworth asked, looking surprised.

“Damn, I used to love that park,” another of the group said – a short and stocky man in his fifties, with a gray beard that curled up at the ends. “Used to go there as a boy. Beautiful place.”

Rebecca shook her head. “Not anymore. It’s a military airfield now. My husband says the place is one big dirt patch.”

“Okay,” Hackworth said, “So we need the best route on foot.”

The bearded guy had said, “From here… probably head to Westminster, down Millbank, and then over Vauxhall Bridge.”

“We can’t go that way,” said Rebecca.

“Why not?”

“Because of the Government Zone. It’s all sealed off. From Charing Cross, Whitehall, Westminster – all the way down to the Tate and Vauxhall Bridge. It’s all walled off and guarded.”

“No shit? Then I guess we go over Waterloo Bridge and along the South Bank. We can pick up Wandsworth Road just past Vauxhall.”

No one had argued with this, and Rebecca hadn’t been able to think of any reason to question it at the time. But now, as the last light faded with the setting sun, and as they reached the other end of the bridge, finally emerging from the makeshift shanty town, she looked down along the Embankment – and she wondered if they had made a terrible mistake.

Not a single street light illuminated the path on the South Bank, and the whole area was littered with rubbish and debris. She could also hear voices below, arguing, and leaned out to look down over the edge. Farther along the path she could see a group of men standing near what might once have been a news-stand, but now was a bare and broken wreck, the panels torn away and revealing a rusted skeleton underneath. The half-dozen men there all carried sticks or bats, and stood watching either way along the Embankment.

To Rebecca, the men looked more dangerous than any of those on the bridge, even the knife wielder, and she hoped the size of the group she traveled with would discourage them. But that wasn’t what worried her most. Because lying not far from that group, motionless and sprawled out near a pile of rubbish bags, was a body.

“Be ready,” came the voice of Hackworth nearby, causing Rebecca to flinch.

She turned to face the leader of the Tunnelers, and saw he wasn’t talking to her, but to Colley and several others. Colley slapped the blunt side of his axe against his hand and grinned.

“We’re ready,” he said.

Hackworth glanced at Rebecca and nodded, and she thought she could see recognition of her fear in his eyes.

“Then let’s do this,” he said, turning to cross the street and starting off toward the steps that led down to the riverside.

Before climbing down off the bridge, Rebecca spared one last look back across the river, where she could just see the very last light glinting on Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.

And she wondered if this might truly be the sun finally setting on the British Empire.

Seriously - Never Go South of the River

London - The South Bank

Though he had worked hard not to show it, Waterloo Bridge had put fear into Hackworth’s heart – because of the sheer chaos, the sense of menace, and the number of desperate people crammed into the sprawling shanty town. Now, as the group started making its way down the steps and out onto the South Bank, his fear changed in character without going away.

They had seemed to see and hear peril coming from all directions as they crossed the bridge – but the South Bank was eerily quiet. Hackworth could still hear the bustle up above and behind them. But the noises dropped away rapidly as they made their way along the paved walkway that had once been so busy and rich with arts, culture, and richly divergent humanity. Now the streets running off the Embankment were quiet and empty, almost completely deserted, and Hackworth felt a rising unease about their situation.

Why wasn’t this area overcrowded? he wondered. What was down here that people were avoiding?

But it was right in front of him. Hackworth glanced at the gang of youths loitering near the wreck of the news-stand. Just six of them. That shouldn’t be enough to scare away all those folks on the bridge. But then there was the body. Whoever had done that was definitely to be avoided – and Hackworth wondered if this group of toughs were so bold that they could do such a thing and then just stick around.

But the young men left the Tunnelers alone as they moved past, and Hackworth was glad that he had the likes of Colley and the others up front, glaring at the youths as they walked by. Intimidation was the game being played here, and although his group of ragtag survivors included a number of smaller individuals, every one of them was ready to resort to violence if needed. They had to be, to have made it this far. Even Cherie, the kind and gentle retired lady from the north of Paris, who had initially struggled to get used to life in the ZA, had taken to carrying a baseball bat.

Now even she was someone not to be messed with.

The six young-looking men, dressed in jeans and hooded tops, eyed the group from their spot, but came no closer. And as the Tunnelers passed them by, Hackworth looked beyond the men, into the gloom of the undercroft of the huge building beyond. This place, he thought, had once been a skate park, a spot of vibrant artistry, the columns and walls covered everywhere with colorful graffiti, but now it was in ruins and filled with rubbish. He remembered visiting it several times in the past. But was that all that was in there? What else was lurking in the darkness out of sight?

As the group moved on, Hackworth held back, watching the gang. Two of them were leaning in close to each other, whispering, and then one of them nodded and ran off, disappearing into the tunnels near the bridge. Hackworth moved quickly back to the front of the group and caught up with Colley just as they passed the body on the pavement.

Hackworth grimaced as they walked by it. A pool of blood still spread slowly away from the unmoving figure, whose features none of them could see as it lay half covered by rubbish bags. His inherent decency surged up, telling him that he should at least try to help this person, but… there was so much blood. Whoever this was had to be dead. And Hackworth just couldn’t risk the entire group for the sake of a stranger who was almost certainly well beyond help.

But he hated this thought. It really had come to that, hadn’t it? Humanity had been pushed so far toward the brink that it was fast becoming every man for himself. At that moment, Hackworth wished they still had the troop of Marines with them – the ones who had helped them escape both the Channel Tunnel and Canterbury. Twenty or more armed men right now would have been very reassuring.

But they haven’t forgotten, he thought. Those Marines. They haven’t forgotten what’s important.

But then again, they were trained and armed, and here he was, in what was rapidly beginning to look like a no-go area, leading a bunch of civilians armed with bats and an axe. He made a mental note to help someone, at some point – anyone – just to try to counter the coarsening of the spirit caused by ignoring this poor soul who lay dead, or very close to death, on the ground behind them.

* * *

“We need to move faster,” Hackworth said, glancing back the way they had come.

“Because of those fools?” asked Colley.

Hackworth nodded. “I think they’ll come after us.”

“Not with just six of them, they won’t.”

“Maybe not. But one of them just ran off.”

Colley glanced behind, then picked up the pace a little, knowing the others would follow.

“You think they’ll be back with more?” he asked.

Hackworth shrugged, looking around at the empty stretch of pavement that led away along the South Bank. “I don’t know. But they look like trouble. And I would bet that they killed whoever that was back there. And if they have the balls or arrogance to stay there after doing that, I don’t want anything to do with them. I also don’t think many people come along this way – and we may have just become a target.”

Colley nodded.

“And look how quiet it is here. This is not a good place to be. I say we pick up the pace, fast march it for another ten minutes, maybe twenty. Then we try to spot somewhere to hole up and get out of sight.”

“You don’t want to just keep moving, push on out of here?”

Hackworth shook his head.

“My guts tell me that gang will follow us, and wait for whoever else they just sent for, and then try it on. If they can’t find us, then they can’t attack us. Also, it’s getting dark fast. Damn it. We should have waited until morning.”

“Wait where? We had nowhere to wait,” said Colley.

“We could have stayed on the other side of the bridge. This was a foolish mistake.”

Hackworth glanced back toward the bridge, and saw that the five remaining gang members hadn’t moved, but still stood watching them.

“I think they’ll wait until we round this bend up here,” said Colley. “And then they’ll start to follow. Leave us thinking they aren’t bothering. Then, if you’re right and they do have friends, they’ll stay out of sight until their buddies turn up – and they can go for us.”

Hackworth eyed his friend. “What makes you think that?”

Colley looked back at him, his expression grave. “Let’s just say I know how that all works. And I’m not proud of that.”

Hackworth nodded, then turned around to give instructions to the others. Directly behind him he now found the woman, Rebecca, and her two small sons. All three looked like they were fighting a battle with their own terror – even more so than they had on the bridge. There was also something in the face of the woman that seemed to indict him. It said: If my family is hurt or killed here, this is all your fault.

Hackworth struggled to keep his own expression confident. “It’s going to be okay,” he said to the three of them, touching the boys on their heads. “Pass the word back. When I start jogging, everyone keeps up. And get ready to run if we have to.”

Rebecca’s eyes went wide. “Is something wrong?”

Hackworth shook his head. “I don’t know, but we’re not taking chances. Just be ready.”

* * *

Five minutes later, moving at a fast jog and urging her boys along, Rebecca did her best to keep up with the rest of the group as they hustled along the South Bank. The path, lined with endless empty buildings, now opened up into a large open park that she recognized. At the other end of it was the monolithic shape of the London Eye – the giant riverside Ferris wheel that she had always thought a bit of an eyesore, but which had amazed her two boys on the day she and Connor took them there.

But the boys were silent now as the group ran along the side of the park, staying on the path next to the river, with the motionless attraction looming ever bigger. But then the group slowed, and for a moment Rebecca wondered why. Then she looked up to see what Hackworth and Colley did – and wished that she hadn’t.

About a quarter of the way up the huge metal construction, hanging from one of the cabins, was a body. It looked long dead, from what she could see, and for a moment her heart lurched as she saw the pale gray skin, the dark eyes, and the blood-soaked clothing.

A zombie, she thought. Hanging right here in the middle of London. It can’t be. No one would…

But then she saw the sign hanging around the figure’s neck – it read Not Fucking Funny – and she looked back up at the face. There was something not right, something she was missing. She stopped walking as she realized she was now at the front of the group, standing next to Hackworth.

“That can’t be,” said Hackworth. ”Surely not right in the middle of the city. No one would be so stupid, would they?”

“Looks like one to me,” said Colley, standing nearby and craning his neck to look up.

“It’s a costume,” Rebecca finally said, glancing down at her sons and now aware that she didn’t want them to see any more of this. First the bleeding body, and now someone hanged on the London Eye.

Hackworth turned to her. “A costume?”

“Yes,” she said looking back up at the dead figure, hanging from a six-foot rope tied to the pod. “This area was popular back… before, with street performers. That’s a mask. Look, can we move on?”

“A zombie mask?” Hackworth looked back up, considering this for a moment and ignoring Rebecca’s urgency. “Well, I guess that isn’t very funny.”

Then they were all ducking for cover as a distant gunshot rang out, ricocheting off the huge metal structure a few feet away from them.

* * *

Hackworth hit the ground and looked over the expanse of grass. Across the park, maybe two hundred yards away, was a large group of people, perhaps thirty or even forty, heading in their direction, and all riding bicycles – old BMXes, mountain bikes, and racing bikes. The lead figure was pointing at them… no, he was pointing a gun at them.

“Run!” Hackworth shouted, and got to his feet, pushing several others forward, urging them toward the cover of the nearby buildings. Everyone moved fast, hurrying down the path away from the London Eye, and picking up speed.

“We can’t outrun them,” shouted Colley, catching up with Hackworth. “They’re on bikes.”

“They have a fucking gun,” shouted Hackworth.

“I know,” said Colley, breathing heavily as they raced toward the foot of Westminster Bridge. Hackworth looked out over the bridge, and saw just what Rebecca had meant by locked down. At the other end of the bridge, before and beside the neo-Gothic Houses of Parliament, a wall that must have been fifteen feet high completely blocked the road.

“They’re coming,” shouted Colley, who now stood at the top of the steps, axe ready in his hands.

But Hackworth knew the axe wouldn’t count for much if the gang caught them. They outnumbered the Tunnelers two to one, and had at least one gun.

He glanced around, for the first time in two years on the verge of panic, but then he saw some large open gates in the side of a building just twenty yards away, and a broken sign hanging down from the wall that read Marriott Hotel. The choice was simple – into the hotel, or over the bridge.

There was nowhere else they could hide.

“This way!” he shouted, and ran for the entrance, hearing the sounds of the pursuers behind them as the group surged toward the arched gateway. Hackworth hadn’t a clue where he was leading them, but he had no choice.

The entrance to the hotel wasn’t what he’d expected, and in fact wasn’t an entrance at all. Instead, a long arched tunnel led into a courtyard, which was built around a circular, stepped landscape feature consisting entirely of dirt and dead grass. Hackworth presumed this had once been picturesque, but now it was just more evidence of decline and decay. He cast around frantically, trying to decide which way to go.

He eyed some nearby smashed windows, then looked past them and spotted the real entrance, across the courtyard and up a set of steps.

A shot rang out, echoing down the archway, and a surviving window a few feet away shattered. Hackworth spun around and looked back along the tunnel as several of his people moved away, ducking for cover. The man with the gun was outside the archway on the street, standing between the huge metal gates, the rest of his heavily reinforced gang gathered behind him. He lifted the weapon again and aimed, but Hackworth ducked aside and ran for the entrance up the stairs.

“Move it!” he shouted, and plunged through the open doors into the dim light of the hotel.

The Marriott, once one of the most plush hotels in the city, was clearly now terminally run-down. The expensive carpets were worn and dirty, and most of the furniture and wood wall paneling had been torn out for firewood.

Hackworth and the others entered the lobby to find a firepit in the center of what had once been the reception area. Bare walls surrounded scattered bits of burnt wood, which lay in a pile Hackworth guessed had once been a carved wooden reception desk. And that wasn’t nearly the worst of it.

Lying in the corner was another body. As Hackworth raced past, he saw the man had been dead a long time. The features were almost unrecognizable, emaciated and withered away.

They kept moving, fleeing deeper into the huge stone building, down a long corridor Hackworth hoped would lead them back outside and away from the river.

And maybe even closer to something like safety.

Cursed I Tell You!

London - The Marriott Hotel

The young boy watched them from behind the dirty window at the front of the hotel as they stood at the foot of the London Eye, staring up at the executed zombie clown. He sat there, in the darkness of his room, peering out and wondering who these strange and obviously stupid people were, that they would venture south of the river. And the way they looked up at that body – which the boy had watched being strung up there six months ago – told him much of what he needed to know. These were not people used to the streets of the South Bank, and they weren’t used to seeing dead bodies.

They didn’t belong here at all.

Oh well, the boy thought. They’ll either get run in by a gang, or they’ll leave.

Then he heard the shot from across the park.

Lewis and his crew, thought the boy, knowing that few of the local gangs had guns, but Lewis did. Didn’t think they’d take long to home in, but that was fast.

The people started running then, heading for the foot of the bridge. Go on, thought the boy. Go across the bridge. Get out of here. They might not even shoot you.

But he knew better. The soldiers on the wall at the other side of Westminster Bridge were never forgiving, and he had seen a few people killed trying to go across. Why folks didn’t just go along the bank and over a different bridge was beyond him. Some people were just stupid.

He continued to follow the newcomers from inside the hotel, moving from window to window and room to room, and he watched. He didn’t have a cruel heart like a lot of the other people living in the area – and he hoped this group of strangers would somehow escape, even if he doubted the likelihood of that.

The boy knew the only place these people could escape to was into the river, or maybe into his hotel. Everyone else left the hotel alone after the horrors it had been used for last year. They were all afraid to go near it, but he knew the cult was gone now – all dead. He’d been there that night, and seen them killed by the soldiers who came as he watched, hidden behind a pile of stacked-up furniture that had been put aside for firewood. There were none of them left, and the unholy mess they had created on the top floor had all been cleaned out or burned.

But even after the last of the cult was dead, no one went near the hotel, and that was why he used it sometimes, sneaking across the bridge and making his way through the tunnels and arches to the back of the building, where he could get in via a broken window. No one used the hotel because they were superstitious and stupid. More stupid people. But he wasn’t, so the huge place was all his.

Until now – because the group of people outside didn’t flee over the bridge, but instead turned and ran into the entrance, where he couldn’t see them, into the entrance of his hotel. They may have been naive to the dangers south of the river, but that also meant they weren’t aware that the hotel was “cursed.”

He watched as they appeared in the courtyard, and smiled as he saw the gang – that was definitely Lewis with the gun – stopping outside the arch. They wouldn’t follow them in here. Fools think the ghosts will get them.

The new crowd of people went inside and headed along the main corridor which led to the front of the building, where the boy knew the rest of Lewis’s gang would be, if they stayed where he’d seen them earlier.

Damn it, he thought. Why me? Can’t people just leave me alone?

He stood there, watching the group move further inside, and spotted, for the second time, the woman with the little girl pressed up against her. They hadn’t seen him, at least none of the adults had, but the little girl’s bright eyes stared out at him from over her mother’s shoulder, and the boy watched as a tiny hand poked out of the bundle of cloth and waved. She looked frightened, he thought, but her perfect innocence somehow allowed her to wave at a complete stranger.

Damn it, he thought again, and stepped out from his hiding place, taking off at a slow jog through the rotting labyrinth of the hotel, circling around the group and heading to the front. He knew every inch of the place, and was certain he could get to the entrance before they did.

* * *

“You don’t wanna go out that way,” said the voice.

Hackworth’s heart jolted in his chest. From Colley’s reaction, and that of a few of the others in the group, they were just as surprised as he.

They were alone. Hackworth had been sure of that, and they’d checked all the exits from this room, and the corridor, several times before crouching down in a huddle near the dirty but unbroken window that faced the street on the opposite side of the hotel, away from the river. The voice had come from just a few feet away, and yet he couldn’t see who had spoken. It was a young voice, not that of an adult, that much he could tell.

“They’ll be waiting out there for you,” said the voice. “I already saw some of them.”

Hackworth was silent for a moment, and looked around at the others, not knowing what to say. Colley just shrugged.

“Who are you?” Hackworth asked.

“No one,” came the reply. “At least no one who wants to kill you like them lot. Look out that window, over at the car just across the way. Near the bins. See ’em?”

Hackworth turned, crouched, and peered through the dirty glass and out to the street. He spotted the burnt-out car, and the bins piled up nearby, but couldn’t see what— there. Something had moved, and as he watched, the figure moved again. As he scanned the darkness, he finally made out three shapes crouched behind the bins.

Damn, he thought. I’d never have seen them.

“They’ll have the whole place surrounded by now,” said the voice.

Hackworth backed away from the window and stood up with his back against the wall.

“Who are you?” he asked again. “And… can you help us get out of here? We don’t want any trouble. We just need a place to rest up for a while and then to get the hell out.”

Silence for a moment.

“Where is it you’re going?”

“Wandsworth,” said Hackworth, thinking there was no point in trying to hide that much. “The old prison.”

“The new military place?”

“Yes,” said Hackworth. “We need to get there.”

There was a laugh. “Fat chance of you getting in there. It’s all locked up, like it is over the bridge.”

“We still need to get there,” said Hackworth.

“I figured you shouldn’t be here,” said the voice. And then a shadow moved above them, and Hackworth looked up to see a small, dirty face poking out from a hole in the ceiling, where a water leak had worn the plaster away.

The face grinned.

“Come on,” said the boy, dropping down into the room. “Follow me.”

Hackworth sighed – and then motioned the group to get up and move out. He knew he might really come to regret this. But, once again, he was out of good options, and simply had to pick from among bad ones. And maybe I need to try to have a little faith, he thought.

The boy led them all further into the building, and up a flight of stairs, and Hackworth wondered where the hell he was taking them. They turned down corridors, and stepped around piles of folding chairs and ruined furniture, and eventually reached a large room that Hackworth thought may once have been a meeting room, or a function room of sorts. There was a bar at one end, still intact, and littered around the room were stacks of cardboard boxes, tables, and piles of mold-stained bed sheets.

“You can stay here,” said the boy. “They won’t come into the place… stupid idiots believe it’s cursed.”

Hackworth stopped, frowning at the boy. “Cursed?”

“Yeah,” said the boy. “Because of some weird cult that used to live here. They used to make a lot of noise and stuff. But the soldiers killed them all in the end.”

“Jesus,” said Hackworth, not sure what to say, not even sure how to deal with the thought.

“That gang out there,” said Colley. “You think they won’t come in because of that?”

“Nope,” said the boy, as he hauled himself up onto the bar and sat watching the rest of the Tunnelers file into the room. “Too scared, they are. They keep away because it’s supposed to be cursed.”

Colley smiled at that. “Some people actually believe in curses around here?”

The boy grinned. “As much as they believe in zombies,” he said, and that took the smile from Colley’s face.

“And will you help us get out of here?” asked Hackworth.

The boy nodded. “No problem. You wanna go now? I figured since it’s dark you’d want to stay inside where it’s safe. Go in the morning, like. It’s not good anywhere out there at night.”

Hackworth nodded. He knew the group was exhausted from their escape, and if some crazy superstition was enough to keep them safe inside the building, that was good enough for him. But he was still concerned about the boy’s motives.

“Why help us?” he asked.

The boy shrugged. “Why not? Just don’t expect me to find you food or any other stuff.”

“Of course,” said Hackworth. “We’re okay for food.”

The boy’s eyes lit up at this. “You’ve got some grub?”

Hackworth took the pack from his back, opened it, and pulled out a packet of dry biscuits, then threw it to the boy, who caught it and had it open in seconds.

“’Course, it don’t matter when we go, day or night,” said the boy, through mouthfuls of biscuit. “It’s dark where we need to go anyway.”

Hackworth peered at the boy. “And where is that?”

The boy grinned. “Way down. Into the tunnels.”

Great, thought Hackworth. More damned tunnels.

Their Fate, Her Fate

London - The Marriott Hotel

The boy sat watching them sleep. Over in the corner of what had once been a lavish reception room, but now was a clutter of broken furniture and debris, the woman who held the little girl was asleep. But the little girl wasn’t. Instead, those tiny eyes watched him intently.

Only three others in the group remained awake – the big black guy, the fat man the boy thought was in charge, and the woman with the two small boys of her own, who sat protectively and watched over them as they slept with their heads in her lap – and her hand in her purse. But none of these had noticed him return.

He wasn’t sure if they had even seen him leave.

The two men were standing at the remains of the bar, talking in hushed tones about what had happened to them, and where they were headed next. But the boy soon tuned out the conversation. Instead, he sat there in the dark corner, looking at the tiny girl and trying to decide what to do.

“You bring them out the south entrance,” Lewis had said, just fifteen minutes before. “We’ll be waiting, and there’ll be something in it for you.” The gang leader had been leaning on the windowsill, smoking a cigarette and looking like he hadn’t a care. At his waist, in the holster, was the gun.

Of course, he knew Lewis would be waiting for him. Ever since he’d first sent the boy into the hotel to spy on the cultists, Lewis had always waited at that time, right in the alleyway, for the boy to arrive. The rest of Lewis’s gang wouldn’t go inside. No, they were all too scared, but not him. Lewis knew the truth – but used it to his advantage, spreading rumors about the place so that everyone would believe it was cursed.

As the boy sat in the big hall, watching the group of tired refugees sleeping off their exhaustion, he thought hard about what he was going to do.

It shouldn’t rest on his shoulders, not something like this. Lewis had always used him to spy on others, and the boy knew what the gang got up to out in the streets, but to expect him to deliver these people into their hands? That was more than he wanted to be involved with.

“You’ll let them go?” he had asked Lewis, as they stood opposite each other in the darkness at the back of the alleyway.

“I’ll try,” Lewis had said.

“You’ll just take their gear and let them go?”

Lewis glared at him. “You don’t make demands of me, boy.”

“You should let them go,” the boy had insisted, knowing that if he pushed it too far it would be his ass getting a beating. “They don’t want your territory. They just wanna go. They done nothing to you.”

“I’ll try not to get any of them killed,” Lewis had said. “But if they get rowdy, and the boys wanna fight…”

Now, sitting at the back of the big function room, unable to unlock eyes with the little girl, he somehow knew what he would have to do. He just couldn’t bring himself to make the decision. If he led them away, down into the cellars, he could take them through the old tunnels and out at the hospital. Lewis and his men might never find them.

But, no. That didn’t work. If he led them away, Lewis would not forget. He’d have double-crossed him, and wouldn’t ever be able to come back to the hotel again. And he didn’t have anyplace else safe to go, not unless you included the farmhouse, but that was miles outside London.

And yet he couldn’t hand them over. If they killed them, if they murdered everyone, then what about the little girl? Could they kill her too? A voice at the back of his mind said they wouldn’t, and that even Lewis’s men wouldn’t be that evil. But the bodies he’d seen in the alleyways and in buildings, left to rot, told him otherwise.

He couldn’t let it happen. He just had to accept that he was about to lose his older brother forever. Lewis would never forgive him. He took a deep breath, jumped down from his perch at the back of the room, and walked over to the two men standing at the bar. The fat man turned to him.

“I’ve got something I need to tell you,” said the boy.

Zulus in Battalion Strength

JFK - Bridge

Drake exited the Captain’s Ready Room, which let off the very rear of the bridge. He’d decided at the last second to go there instead of the briefing room upstairs. He knew it was the one place on the ship where he was guaranteed total privacy.

No one dared go in there – ever.

As far as Drake knew, no one had been in it since the Captain had last been in command of the boat. Maybe there’s something about this job, he thought to himself, that drives a man over the edge…

But what he hadn’t paused to consider was what kind of message him going in there was likely to send to the bridge crew. Or the rest of the crew, for that matter.

Now, as he threaded his way through the stations and officers on watch, he pretended not to be aware that half the men and women there were watching him out of the corners of their eyes.

Only half were watching him because the other half were involved in various high-stress activities. The Kennedy was now managing a lot of barely controlled chaos, most of it simultaneous. Luckily, a lot of the load – the shore mission, the CSAR mission, and much of the high-stakes lethal chess game with the Admiral Nakhimov – was the province of Campbell and her people down in CIC. Drake worked out that Abrams was on the phone with them now.

He took a seat, looked around, and waited for him to get off the line. Maybe this had been a damned poor moment for him to schedule his alone time – in the middle of at least three emergencies. On the other hand, they all seemed to be coping without him. But he believed in his heart that this was an illusion. He didn’t doubt that he was still needed to make the big calls. Moreover, he was the only person on this ship who knew how everything worked at this point. In order to stay alive, floating, and mission-capable, they’d had to implement an enormous number of hacks – to their procedures, their electronics and engineering, their aircraft and small boats, to the very body of the supercarrier itself. And Drake had been the single point of approval for all of them.

He knew this made him a single point of failure, as well. And that wasn’t good. But, at the time, the alternative had seemed to be the certainty of failure, right then, followed quickly by death. They’d done what they had to. And now Drake had to see it through. No one else could.

As he waited, he looked around the bridge, waiting and half-expecting the faces of more long-dead people to start appearing on the heads of the living. He wasn’t stupid, and even in his degraded condition he had enough self-awareness to know what was happening.

Everyone who had died under Drake’s command, all those he had sent to their graves, were now somehow coming back to haunt him. He could only conclude that the strain and guilt of the past two years had built up into some kind of towering psychological cliff. And the shootdown of their two pilots had sent him hurtling over the edge.

But he’d be damned if he’d shatter on the rocks below.

He knew he couldn’t quit simply because things had gotten hard, or because he’d gotten a little wounded. The Alpha operators never gave up, or packed it in. Neither did Fick and his Marines.

Drake could do no less.

* * *

“Sitrep,” Drake said, as Abrams got off the line with CIC.

The XO’s voice was mechanical when he answered. “Sir, the Admiral Nakhimov is still holding position at stand-off distance, 410km due south.”

Drake nodded. “Well, that’s some good luck, at least. But why?”

“Our working theory is that the one missile our planes got through their defenses was enough to force them to pull back and stop for a damage control effort.”

“And still nothing like a real BDA?”

“Negative,” Abrams said. “We’ve still just got this very fuzzy long-range video from the Predator.”

“Goddammit. We need a better look.” Abrams didn’t seem inclined to argue with him. “How the hell can we get an aircraft closer to that ship?”

Abrams considered for a moment. “The short answer is we can’t. They’ve got long-range SAMs, short-range SAMs, more short-range SAMs, eight of those damned Kashtan autocannons… We could maybe get an aircraft close, flying low to the ground clutter on shore, where it would be hidden from radar – but as soon as it popped out over water and showed itself, it would go down.” He didn’t make reference to their lost F-35s. He didn’t need to. “We might get a few seconds of video, but then we’d lose the aircraft.”

“So then we send something disposable,” Drake said.

“The Predator,” Abrams said, anticipating him.

“Exactly.”

“Yeah. But no.”

“Why not?”

“Because if the Predator is down on the deck flying there, it’s not sitting up at fifteen thousand feet serving as our radar relay. Also, it would take nearly two hours to get there – every minute of which we’d be blind.”

Drake shook his head, realizing that, basically, they didn’t have enough pieces left on this chessboard.

“Okay,” he said, sounding resigned. “What else is there?”

“Still no contact with the shore team. And CIC, via the Fire Scout drone, is starting to see increasing Zulu activity in the vicinity of the base. We’re waiting and hoping for a sitrep from the team.”

“And if it doesn’t come? What are our QRF options?”

Abrams just shook his head. There was basically no one left to go out and rescue Juice and the Marines. No one they could spare, and no one they could risk. And certainly no one who could fight through the dead that were now starting to be seen moving around on the base.

Anyway, for all they knew, the shore team was already gone.

And that was the moment Campbell picked to come back on the line: “Bridge, CIC. Be advised: that Zulu activity which was increasing around the naval base… is now an exponential increase. We’re seeing what looks like a big chunk of the population of the nearby town converging on our team’s last known position.”

And with that, Drake realized, a shitload more opposing pieces had just gotten dumped on the board – and some of them would now be running flat out, coming for their shore team.

If any of them were still alive.

* * *

Sergeant Lovell had just finished tightening a bandage around Juice’s thigh – the bullet had gone in and out, and the wounds on both sides were packed with gauze – and was going for his arm wound, but Juice shrugged him off.

As he regained his feet, Juice realized three things. One, the outside wall of the warehouse, which was a thick corrugated tin, was now fucking rattling. Two, if he listened closely, he could hear moaning out there as well. And three, using the squad net had caused him to recall that he had never turned his radio back onto the command net – which he’d turned off entirely in order to focus on the firefight, and keeping his team from getting wiped out to the last man. Since then, he hadn’t had the time, attention, or breathing space to deal with it.

He looked down at his radio and flipped the switch.

“—peat, Biltong Actual, be advised: your position IS BEING OVERRUN. You have Zulus inbound in battalion strength. How copy? How copy, Biltong?”

Juice sighed and pressed his PTT button. “CIC, Biltong Actual copies all. Will send mission status update. Wait out.”

Something was making noise closer now, just around the next intersection between pallets, to the right. Juice raised his rifle to high-ready, smoothly stepped forward heel-toe, then leaned way out to the left, covering every inch as the corridor opened up to his right.

BANG! He fired once.

“Thank goodness for that,” he said. It was only a living dead guy, not a half-dead Spetsnaz guy. But that also meant: they weren’t just being overrun from outside.

The dead were also in there with them now.

* * *

Looking energized, possibly even happy, Abrams put his phone down and turned to Drake.

“The shore team’s alive.”

Drake exhaled. “Thank Christ for that.”

Abrams’s smile went away. “Now the question is… how the hell do we get them out of there?”

“Yeah,” Drake said, his own short-lived smile fading. “Never mind with the supplies.” That team was in there fighting for their lives because, without those supplies, nobody else – not Alpha, not the Marines, not the carrier, not the rest of mankind – would be able to fight for theirs.

And Drake and Abrams both knew that the dead were now swarming their shore team like locusts – and that the Russians in that battlecruiser could still come back and destroy them, or drive them off, pretty much any damned time they felt like it.

Basically, being alive was a provisional and temporary thing.

For everyone.

Way Too High a Price

JFK - Rear Dock

Floating just beside the Kennedy’s rear dock, Predator put his hand on the crank for the outboard motor on their combat rubber raiding craft (CRRC). But Henno shook his head at him darkly and unclipped two fold-out paddles.

He handed one over and the two worked in tandem to straighten the raft up, then paddle it around the edge of the dock. Now they dug in and got it moving smoothly up the starboard side of the carrier, which rose up beside them like some kind of gray equatorial ice shelf.

With the African coast off to their right, they moved north toward the prow, which was over a kilometer distant. They were following the path they believed Homer had taken, after disappearing under the surface in his diving gear just a few minutes earlier – off on a one-man mission to search and clear the hull of any mines.

Not to mention confront any enemy divers down there laying them.

“Hey, man,” Pred said, speaking in hushed tones, for reasons he wasn’t totally clear on. “Is it just me, or is Homer being overly dramatic? Does he really think a Spetsnaz mini-sub is just going to rock up here and attack us?”

Henno shrugged. He wasn’t really an expert in naval Spetsnaz units. Then again, he used to have a buddy in the SBS, the Special Boat Service, with whom he had done a lot of cross-training – and that guy was. He cleared his throat and spat over the side before answering.

“Back in the Cold War, the main business of them bastards was infiltrating Western countries before a war with NATO. Destroying port facilities. Fuel and ammo depots. Ships at anchor.”

“Huh,” said Pred. “Yeah, I guess history is ignored at our own peril.”

“Aye. Just ask the Swedes. To the Soviets, with almost no warm-water access, Swedish ports were do-or-die targets in the event of war. Spetsnaz frogmen were like sightings of Nessie for years, all up and down the Swedish coast.”

“Still,” Pred said. “I presume Homer knows the Russian ship is still like 400 kilometers south of us.”

Henno shrugged. “It matters nought. These blokes always turn up where you think they aren’t. That’s the whole point of ’em. Masters of trickery, backstabbing, and sabotage. And they fight dirty – always.”

“Sound like you respect the dudes.”

Henno looked him in the eye. “You’d better respect your enemy. As soon as you don’t, you’re done.”

Pred realized the former SAS man was right.

Maybe he had just gotten out of the habit of fighting the living, never mind organized militaries. Part of him still wondered if they shouldn’t leave ship’s security to the Marines, or NSF. But he knew the former were badly degraded from past battles and fully tasked now – and the latter little more than glorified mall security guards, in his not-all-that-humble view.

He just had to trust that Homer knew what the hell he was doing. In any case, the SEAL was almost certainly the only man on the Kennedy trained for counter-mine warfare. So it was probably him or no one.

“Well,” Pred finally said, “I guess it’s a good thing he packed his suit, tank, and rebreather. All for a mission to Chicago – which is 1,500 miles inland.”

Henno nodded. “He’s a SEAL. I don’t reckon he goes for a shit without scuba gear.”

After this, Henno kept his own counsel, and just paddled. But he was worried, too. He’d never judge Homer for the time he’d taken out – first to rescue his family, then to put it back together. Everyone on the team knew he’d been pulled in two directions, faced with totally incompatible duties. But was he overcompensating now? Getting reckless, going into the water alone, chasing monsters?

And was he going to get himself killed doing it?

Henno didn’t like the thought of Homer getting slotted – and leaving those two moppets of his orphaned and alone again. But there wasn’t much he could do about it. Except keep paddling. And be ready to join the fight.

The gloom of the Kennedy’s shadow and the silence of the empty sea seemed to underscore their mood of foreboding. Somewhere down below them, in the much deeper shadows, their teammate was operating on his own. And all that could be done by these two hard men, one from each side of the Atlantic, was carry on paddling through it.

And stand ready.

* * *

Juice issued a terse warning to his team of Marines about Zulus in the warehouse, then motioned them forward again – they didn’t need specific instructions, but knew perfectly well how to do CQB and room-clearing.

Pretty soon, they had reached the very back of the warehouse, on what Juice had come to think of as the Russian side of it. They’d passed more blood, a bit more carnage, and one more dead body – making sure of that by shooting it repeatedly, then leaving it where it lay.

They’d also dropped several more stumbling Zulus – ones that weren’t in the South African naval uniform, but civilian clothes. These were undead from the town. They’d obviously been woken up by the furious firefight and multiple explosions in the warehouse.

And they were also getting in somehow.

Pretty soon Juice knew how: the retreating Spetsnaz force had left the back door open. This was how the survivors had made their escape. Juice knew because there was a blood trail leading out of it.

Which was also perhaps the scent the dead were following back in.

Juice changed mags, sighted in on the crowd of Zulus pushing through the open door, and started shooting rapidly and methodically, while moving smoothly forward. By the time he reached the door, he’d put down eight with precise headshots. Now he slammed the door in the face of two more, pulled it shut – and sealed it with a pair of plastic flexicuffs from his chest rig.

Turning around, he saw the remainder of his team converging on him. That was good – as they had one more thing to do before they could get out of there: they had to make sure that goddamned warehouse was sealed up tight, and its supplies secured.

Because they’d come too far, suffered too much, and paid way too high a price… not to get what they’d come for.

Big Bad

Jesus Two Zero - CSAR Mission, Over the South Atlantic

Approximately 75 kilometers southwest of the Kennedy, sitting serene and still in the whipping air of a streaking Seahawk helicopter, First Sergeant Aaliyah Khamsi watched the surface of the ocean spool out beneath her. The combat search-and-rescue (CSAR) mission she’d volunteered for, to go out and try to rescue their shot-down CAG, was under way. And they were zipping along way down close to the deck, at the aircraft’s very top speed.

Because they weren’t the only ones racing out there to try to find the CAG. Radar in CIC told them that the Russian transport helo, a Kamov Ka-60 Kasatka (or "Orca"), was moving directly toward the CAG’s transponder signal. Now it was a race – at high speed, and with higher stakes.

Ali wasn’t too fazed, in part because she had been on more helo insertions than she could even remember – most of them at high speed, all of them high-stakes, and many at such low altitude that the mountains and trees were as likely to kill her as ground fire on the way, or even the enemy when she got there.

Now, she ran her hand around the hatch edge of the MH-60 Seahawk and shook her head. The last time she’d interacted at all closely with one of these aircraft, it was during the Battle of the JFK – when one of them had tried to rescue her from open water, but instead came crashing down on her head, rotors first.

She just had to hope this one would do a better job of staying in the air. Though she knew that from the moment a helicopter comes off the assembly line, pretty much all it wants to do is kill you. And if this one went down, she would not be able to simply take a deep breath and dive.

Ali had actually been shot down twice before, once each in Afghanistan and Iraq. She’d been the pilot on both those occasions, and flying a significantly more complex aircraft. Two was a lot of helo crashes to walk away from. But she wasn’t even the record holder in Delta. She wasn’t even close.

And she had zero desire to pad her stats today.

The Seahawk kept winging its way toward destiny.

* * *

“Listen up,” Juice said as the remaining Marines circled round, close enough that he didn’t need the radio. “We’re getting out of here. But first we need to secure this structure.”

He got one or two slightly puzzled looks – from guys who could clearly hear the banging, rattling, and moaning all around them outside.

So Juice elaborated. “As long as that undead mob stays on the outside of this warehouse, then the carrier can send men and helos to the roof, cut in, and pull supplies out by sling-load. Got it?”

They got it. Heads nodded.

“I want a fast sweep around the perimeter. Patrick goes with Lovell, counter-clockwise. Vorster comes with me, the other way. You hit a door, you make sure it’s shut – good and tight – and secure it like this one. Everybody got flexicuffs? Okay. We meet when we meet, then recover the wounded and get the hell out of Dodge. Questions?”

Lovell looked from Juice to the blood trail in front of the door. “What about our Russian friends?”

Juice shrugged. “They’re wounded, they’re degraded, and they’re out in heavy weather now. They’ve got their own set of problems. I don’t think we’ll see ’em again.”

But even as he said this, Juice knew he didn’t believe it. He felt strangely sure about that.

He knew somehow that Misha, their terrifying leader, wasn’t dead. He’d be seeing him again.

And the man would not be in a good mood…

* * *

The first bubbles of air popped on the surface barely ten minutes after Homer went in, and Predator and Henno had set out behind him.

This was strange enough – the whole point of the SEALs’ Draeger rebreathers was that they were closed-loop systems, emitting no bubbles to betray the presence of the frogmen below. But when these bubbles quickly turned to big gouts of air, popping and exploding on the surface, Pred and Henno turned in and gave each other unmistakable Okay, what the fuck? looks.

They were still floating in the shadow of the carrier, its gigantic bulk blotting out the low early-morning sun – so they didn’t recognize the dark slicks of blood on the surface until they’d paddled right into them.

“Jesus Christ…” Pred muttered, as he worked out what he was seeing.

Henno leaned over alongside him. “Any idea what a SEAL’s blood looks like?”

Pred turned to look back at him. “What – as opposed to a Spetsnaz dude’s? I guess I’d expect the SEAL’s to be blue.”

Henno nodded contentedly. “Well, that’s all right, then. This shite’s red, so our lad’s fine, no doubt.”

And that was when the first body floated up – causing both Alpha men to startle, nearly swamping the small boat. Henno squinted at the corpse as it breached, and they regained their composure and started paddling up to it.

“No bubbles…” Pred said, putting down his paddle now and hefting his rifle, and scanning through squinted eyes in all directions around them. “But I guess now we can follow the blood trail.”

“Sodding body trail, more like,” Henno amended. He reached out with his own rifle, using it like a boat hook to drag the floating dead man in. “Bloke’s got a big swatch of his wetsuit cut away. What the hell is that about?”

“No idea,” Pred said, straining as he moved to help, reaching out over the water to grab the dead diver by a strap on his air tank. “What the hell is Homer doing down there? The Bible-thumping sumbitch only went in the water twelve minutes ago…”

Knife to a Knife Fight

Open Water, Beneath the JFK [Twelve Minutes Earlier]

Any SEAL will tell you the darkest place in the universe is beneath the hull of a large oceangoing ship in the middle of a moonless night.

Because every SEAL has been there.

It wasn’t nighttime now, but the Kennedy cast one hell of a deep shadow, and had a draft of nearly 40 feet. And Homer, after doing a sitting backflip into the water from the dock at its rear, was going to have to get way down underneath it to start checking and clearing the hull. So the sun was totally blotted out by the giant floating planet he now orbited, on its dark side. And he was also keeping his dive lamp off until he really needed it.

These facts, plus the murkiness of the water over the continental shelf, meant he was swimming in a dark place, shapeless forms of nothing looming at him out of the watery darkness, while the vague whale-like noises of the supercarrier rolled through the water at him in waves.

It was a whole different world down there.

But Homer minded none of this – because he was back in Mother Ocean, the balm and protector of every SEAL. He couldn’t even remember all the bad firefights he’d been in where his team’s whole objective had been to get back to the water alive. There, they could stay afloat any length of time, swim any distance – and the Navy had an awful lot of nice submarines that could come and scoop them up.

No, the ocean was much the best place for him.

He powered himself through the murky water, kicking smoothly and rhythmically, left then right, his pistol-grip light floating from a lanyard around his wrist. Down… and around… and down again…

He oriented himself quickly, following and tracing the shape of the keel. He needed to be thorough. But he also had to stay clear of the ship’s giant 30-ton propellers, each one 21 feet in diameter. They weren’t spinning now, but Homer hadn’t bothered to tell anyone in charge what he was doing, so there was no guarantee of them not starting up. Maybe he preferred to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

Maybe, as usual, there just wasn’t time.

On the upside, he happened to be in a position to know the perfect place to put a limpet mine on this type of vessel to do the most damage – to rip the hull open and send her straight to the bottom. He knew this because he’d been trained to do exactly that himself. And this knowledge allowed him to be efficient in his search.

And, sure enough, exactly where he expected it, he found the first charge, protruding from the smooth surface of the hull like a tumor. You sneaky Godless communists, Homer thought to himself, clucking his tongue.

He approached the device cautiously – then stopped, turned, and took a long, careful, 360-degree look around him. He scanned the water above and below, and to all sides, though visibility here probably extended to no more than 15 meters. Finally, he squared up to the mine and got his Gerber multi-tool out of its pouch on his diving belt.

After finding and disabling an anti-handling device, he carefully removed the eight screws on the outer housing, then simply unscrewed the fuze inside, which rendered the explosive safe. This was a standard Soviet SPM limpet mine, and Homer had disarmed any number of them in training exercises. This one had been attached with two 25-pound horseshoe magnets. He knew he could yank the whole thing free with his body strength alone – but just barely.

He chose to leave it where it was for now.

Because he had a lot of hull left to clear.

And, as strong a swimmer as he was, he didn’t relish doing it with 50-plus pounds of extra weight.

* * *

Ali finally removed herself from blasting air at the lip of the Seahawk’s door, and got settled in one of the flip-down troop seats at the rear of the cabin. Buckling in, she looked up at the crew chief on his minigun, farther up, just behind the flight deck on the right side.

The contoured noise-insulation padding overhead had come loose, and the crew chief kept swatting it off him, like a determined fly. Ali guessed he’d been doing that routine for a long time. It seemed unconscious at this point.

Also up at the front, in the center, was their Navy rescue swimmer. He was bent at the waist, leaning into the flight deck, conferring with the pilot and co-pilot/ATO (airborne tactical officer).

Soon, the swimmer would be jumping into open water, holding little more than a rescue strop and a length of rope. Ali could see where he wouldn’t want any miscommunication between him and the guys piloting the machine suspended over his head – a 64-foot, 18,000-pound beast, with 54-foot rotor blades spinning at 250rpm.

Ali reached up behind her, pulled an ICS headset from its hook, and seated it on her head. But whatever the crew had been discussing, she had just missed it.

The swimmer stalked back into the cabin and put himself in the seat facing Ali. He had no name tape on his wetsuit. She tried a friendly nod, but didn’t get much in return. She didn’t hold it against him. This dude had a very serious job, and the next few minutes might be the ones that defined his whole career. Their pilots presumably didn’t ditch in the ocean very often – never mind their CAG. Now, this guy looked totally focused, his game face glued on.

Finally, a voice cut through the rotor, wind, and engine noise, and directly into Ali’s brain via the headset. It was either the pilot or, slightly more likely, the co-pilot/ATO. “Three mikes! ETA three mikes to transponder signal!” This meant the downed CAG was still in the water. And they had almost reached him.

Ali thought this was interesting info to have, but not comprehensive. She shouted into her chin mic, “What’s the status of the inbound Russian helo?”

There was a pause on the other end. “Russian air contact is also on intercept with transponder signal.” Before Ali could lodge her follow-up question, which was going to feature another sort of question word, he came on again. “It’s close… it’s there… Russian helo is static, going into a hover. We’re coming into visual now…”

Ali exhaled mournfully. So they were already too late – they had been beaten to the prize. And now they would be facing some kind of reception party when they reached the site where their pilot had ditched.

As she undid the buckle on her seat, she flashed back to LT Campbell’s comment back in CIC: “They’ve already got a minigunner in the door.” Sure, Ali thought, clapping the man on the shoulder as she hefted her rifle and took up a position behind him, facing the other way. But he can only be on one side of the aircraft – and his weapon’s got a max effective range of 1,000 meters…

She took her left hand from her barrel rail, worked the latch on the port-side door, and hauled it open with one strong pull. The wind in the cabin doubled as Ali clipped herself into a crew safety harness, then leaned out into the blasting sea air, with only open sky (and that harness) between her and a long fall to the deep blue sea below.

With her ass hanging out in the wind, she could now make out the Russian Ka-60, or “Orca,” low on the horizon. A transport/utility helo, both its size and profile were similar to that of the Seahawk, but with a pointier nose and taller engine cowling. It was also painted the same neutral, naval gray.

And it was indeed static – holding hover less than ten meters above the ocean surface.

Godammit, Ali thought.

She had a pretty good idea of what the Russians were doing right now: “rescuing” the Kennedy’s CAG. Only she guessed he wasn’t going to be real enthusiastic about being rescued by these particular asshats. And if this happened, and they lost their man… it would happen on Ali’s watch.

Screw that, she thought, pulling in her rifle tight into her shoulder. We’ve been beaten to the prize when I SAY we’re beaten.

She had her own reception in mind for the Russians.

* * *

Homer found the second mine in precisely the second-most-likely place for it, about forty meters farther up the keel. Before disarming this one, he took another careful look around in the murky dimness…

…just not careful enough.

He realized this a few seconds later when a forearm clamped across his windpipe – it was rubberized wetsuit on the outside, hardwood-like flesh and bone underneath – causing an instant, panicked choking reaction.

He had to fight this reaction, and overcome it, because he knew the enemy diver’s other arm, the knife-wielding one, would be coming in right behind it. He just didn’t know whether it would be coming up, through his ribs and into his heart – or straight around into the side of his neck. It was pretty much a toss-up.

And he had about a quarter-second to place his bet.

He went with neck. Slipping a blade in through the ribs was precision work, and could easily go wrong.

He was right. In the same instant that he flipped his right fist and forearm up to guard the side of his neck, he felt the blade go in – straight into his arm, which was a hell of a lot better than his carotid – but it went in deep. In fact, he was lucky not to get the neck wound anyway, as the blade came out the other side.

A few seconds later, when his attacker didn’t try to withdraw the blade, but instead left it where it was, Homer knew he was dealing with a pro. But when the enemy diver produced a second, identical knife, Homer knew this guy was worse than a pro.

He was a seriously scary operator.

* * *

Ali pulled her Mk12 designated marksman rifle (DMR) in tight to her shoulder, dialed the magnification on the optic up to its maximum 10x, and sighted in… and the first thing she saw was the Russians’ minigunner in the Orca’s open side door. But what she was really interested in was the disposition of his weapon.

She couldn’t realistically expect him not to sight in on the incoming American helo. But she also couldn’t really afford to let him do so, either. With a rate of fire of 100 rounds per second, that minigun could take down the Seahawk in two heartbeats flat.

After all this was over, Ali knew some might take her to task for firing before she was fired upon, or say she’d been too aggressive. To that, she would say: maximum violence instantly. That’s how most fights are won. The dirty way.

The guy in her sights was manning a big-ass minigun. And he just really shouldn’t have pointed it at Ali and her team. Anyway, the Russians had already blindsided them once, with their anti-ship missiles. And that was all the goodwill they were going to get – from Ali, anyway.

They can count themselves lucky I’m letting them stay in the air, she thought. And she was only doing that because she didn’t know for sure that their CAG hadn’t already been loaded on board.

She put her target reticle on the gunner’s forehead, took the slack out of the trigger, then took a deep breath and released half. And as she began to squeeze out the rest of the trigger pull, timing it between heartbeats, she could see the gunner, magnified massively through her scope, cock his head – and adjust the angle of his weapon.

Ali squeezed the trigger and fired—

—at the same instant the Seahawk banked to the right, slamming her to the deck. They had gone evasive, probably because the pilot saw the same intent on the Russian gunner she had. The sudden and violent motion sent her sprawling onto her back on the steel deck, shooting waves of pain through the vertebrae and arm she had injured in Chicago, and knocking the wind out of her.

It also made her first shot go wild.

Fuck. Ali hated missing a first shot.

As she fought against the G-forces from the careening helo, and tried to lever herself up off the deck, she saw the left side of the cabin erupt with dozens of ragged holes, popping open the bird’s skin and admitting sunlight and more whistling air.

Fuck again. The Russian minigunner had found the range, and was lighting them up. They were losing this fight.

And Ali hadn’t even gotten her gun into it yet.

Sniper Rifle to a Minigun Fight

Open Water, Beneath the JFK

Homer used his good left hand to bend back and break the pinky at the end of the arm crushing his windpipe. Holding tight to the wrenched little finger, he brought his left elbow around and drove it into the face and diving mask behind his head. That, followed by a spin in place and a kick to the chest – powerful because his back was up against the hull – earned him a few feet of breathing room.

And a few more seconds of life.

He had to resist the impulse to yank out the knife sticking through his right forearm. That was a no-go, for two reasons. One was the first rule of battlefield medicine: Win the damned fight first. Second was that, until proper medical care is available, the best place for something you’ve been stabbed with was usually right where it was. The chief effect of removing it would be to cause the wound to bleed more, and faster. Right now, that knife was keeping a lot of Homer’s blood in his body.

Which was where he needed it.

He was going to need all his resources. Because he hadn’t been in a knife fight underwater in, oh, it must have been years. He felt a little sluggish. Oh, yeah – he was underwater, where everyone and everything moved sluggishly.

He got his own knife out and around in an overhand grip – just a bit too late to parry the incoming underhand stroke of the other guy with his second dive knife. The steel of the two blades clashed – but not before the Russian one had scored Homer across the chest. It wasn’t deep, but both his wetsuit and his skin had been laid open. And that salt water stung like a son of a bitch.

Moreover, they were about five seconds into this fight – and Homer was already bleeding in three places.

The clock was ticking for him now.

And the closest help was a whole world away – in the one up on the other side of the ocean surface, nearly forty feet above. No. Homer was going to have to fight his way out of this one – all on his own.

But maybe with a little help from God.

He was pretty sure he was going to need it.

* * *

As the bullet-riddled Seahawk continued to bank and scream and shake, and as Ali battled against the G-forces to climb back to her feet, she heard the sound of their own minigun spinning up, and triggering off like doomsday. It was a close-quarters, buzzsaw-in-hell kind of noise, and buckets of expended brass poured out the bottom of the weapon, cascading like shiny liquid metal into the sea below.

Well, Ali thought, two can play at miniguns…

Then again, she wasn’t sure she liked their odds in a minigun duel at two hundred yards. She feared there could be no winners – only the equivalent of coming in third in a two-man axe fight. The two helos might easily shoot each other out of the sky, which was no help. Not to them, and not to their pilot down on the water.

But she wasn’t flying this damned thing, she wasn’t commanding the mission, and – as so often – she didn’t get to design reality to suit her. Her job was to adapt to the circumstances, and overcome them.

To survive and prevail.

She lurched to her feet, then rocked up next to the door gunner, just as the Russian helo spun out of view.

“Bring us around, bring us around!” the crew chief shouted over ICS. He clearly had the scent of prey, and wanted another look. Ali considered going back to the left side to try for a shot on that go-round – but they were banking too quickly, and the Orca was coming around this side again already.

She could still hear rounds impacting and flecking off the airframe, she just couldn’t tell where. It was kind of everywhere. She kept her head down as they came around.

The co-pilot came on over ICS: “Take that fucking minigun out NOW – or we CANNOT stay here!”

The crew chief bunched up his shoulders and began triggering off well in advance of getting a sight picture. He simply walked his fire on as the target spun by in front of him. Ali could see hundreds of his 7.62 rounds plinking into and flecking around the Russian minigun emplacement – which was more exposed in its full-length doorway than was their own in its half-length window.

And she saw the Russian gunner drop out of view.

“Yeah, bitch!” the crew chief whooped in triumph. “Suck the fat one!”

The Seahawk’s rate of turn slowed now, and they started to level out, as they no longer had to desperately evade incoming minigun fire.

Ali knew the Russians would have someone else to put on that gun. But it would take them a few seconds to do it. They’d have to deal with their casualty. And the replacement wouldn’t be their first-stringer. The crew chief had done good. He’d bought them time.

She turned to face him as he whooped again, and returned his exuberant high five, way up in the air between them. At the very instant their palms smacked together…

… the chief’s arm came free.

It hit Ali in the chest, then fell to the deck.

Blood splashed across the front of her assault suit.

The chief looked down uncomprehendingly at the stump of his arm, which had been severed just below the elbow. Ali grabbed him by his safety harness and hauled him to the deck like an MMA takedown, then fell on top of him. She took one second to pull the tourniquet from its loop on the shoulder of her vest, and dropped it on his chest – she doubted he could get it on with one hand, as infantry guys were trained to, but she didn’t have time to do it herself right now – then climbed up and put just her eye and her scope over the lip of the gunner’s window.

And, just like that – there he was.

She already knew it wasn’t the Russian minigun that had disarmed their crew chief. And now Ali got her first look at who had actually done it. All she really saw was a yawning black muzzle and a glinting optic.

She pulled her eye from her scope, as her safety harness grabbed her and yanked – due to the Seahawk banking again, to the right this time. This caused Ali to lose visual contact with the Orca.

And in a split-second, just like that – he was gone.

Whoever he was, he had been well hunkered down and covered up. And now Ali knew beyond any doubt: she had a counterpart. A sniper in the Russian helo.

And he was fucking good.

End Him Now

JFK - Bridge

Drake clenched his jaw in frustration. Abrams had been able to convince him that sending their Predator drone to overfly the Admiral Nakhimov was a non-starter. But nothing had changed as far as the lines drawn on the game board. The Kennedy still absolutely had to stay at least 200km away from the battlecruiser – the range of its devastating Shipwreck anti-ship missiles. And to do that, they had to know where the damned thing was, at all times. Which meant they had to keep their Predator UAV where it was, acting as a radar station and high-altitude video relay.

Drake had an idea. “Can we send up the UCAV?” This was their bigger, much more modern stealth drone.

Abrams sighed. “Negative. No jet fuel.”

“What?” Drake sounded alarmed. He was. He knew they were desperately low. But out?

“We’re literally down to the bottom of the barrel. We topped the tanks on both the CAG’s and Tom-o’s birds before sending them up.” He didn’t have to belabor what had happened to the fuel in those tanks. It had flash combusted. “We’d actually have to siphon the tanks of the one F-35 on deck now to launch another jet aircraft.”

“Jesus Christ…” Drake muttered.

What a pass they had come to. And the one aircraft they really couldn’t steal fuel from was the only one they had left to defend them in the event the Admiral Nakhimov came back. “The Fire Scout, then,” he said, meaning their little helicopter UAV. “That toy runs on avgas.”

Abrams frowned. “It’s also the only air support for the shore mission. And their only eyes on their AO. We’re not even sure what their status is right now. At best, Campbell would be extremely displeased to lose her air coverage of that shore mission.”

Drake frowned. “At a certain point, we may not have any choice. Paul will be at our throats, and Peter will just have to pay up.”

Abrams didn’t argue with this.

* * *

More than 200 feet below the Kennedy’s bridge, a lone SEAL dodged and parried incoming knife strikes from an enemy combat diver. But none of these attacks were committed. The dude was just jabbing, like a boxer, keeping Homer from getting his feet under him – because he knew time was on his side. Soon, Homer would be running low on blood.

And then the Russian could dispatch him at leisure.

Homer got his first real look at his attacker now, though there wasn’t much to see. He looked pretty much like Homer did – black wetsuit with hood, mask, rebreather, and buoyancy compensator. A few pouches on his rig, some bigger than others.

But also a very mean, cold, dead look in his eyes, like a Gaboon viper.

He continued jabbing – fast, shallow stabs and slashes that Homer had to parry, but which didn’t give him any real opening to counter-punch. One of them cut the lanyard on his dive lamp, which fell away into the gloom below. Homer really hoped he wasn’t going to need that later. Then again, he had much bigger problems right now.

Such as living long enough to see later.

He knew perfectly well this guy’s strategy – waiting for him to weaken from blood loss. And this meant he had no choice but to gamble. He retreated, paddling backward, until his back was again up against the cold steel hull. Normally, backed up against a wall was a truly shitty place to be in a knife fight. But Homer had no choice. He had to pretend to be on the ropes. Even if he really was.

He let his eyelids droop, as a come-on. The Russian hesitated, then went for the bait, coming in with a more serious underhanded lunge.

Homer let his own knife go, dropping it into the depths below right behind his lamp, then pivoted out of the way of the attack – while at the same time reaching out with both hands for the incoming knife. If he was lucky, he’d latch on somewhere up past the blade. If he wasn’t, he’d get cut.

Either way, this might work.

He got hold of the wrist – and yanked like hell, adding to the Russian’s forward momentum, pulling him into his body. The incoming blade slid across his ribs on the left, slicing through wetsuit and flesh, then clanging on steel hull.

But by then Homer was nose to nose with the man, which was all he needed. Still clinging to that wrist with his left hand, he pivoted his right forearm up and around. The protruding blade of the guy’s own knife, still sticking out of his arm, flashed by the Russian’s dive mask.

His eyes went wide.

Then the arm and blade were gone.

Homer watched the man’s eyes go even wider as he got his first mouthful of seawater, and belatedly worked out what the hell had just happened.

His airline had been cut.

An old trick, and a dirty one. But effective.

Homer pressed his back up against the hull, brought his legs up into his stomach again – and gave a mighty two-fin shove. The Russian squirted out to a safer distance. His eyes were still saucer-wide, and he looked around frantically for his dive buddies. There still weren’t any.

And now Homer could take it easy and simply watch his attacker drown.

At leisure.

* * *

The next fat, hot, deadly, incoming .338 Lapua Magnum round impacted the Seahawk’s door frame twelve inches from Ali’s right cheek, shattering on impact – and sending bullet fragments into her face and neck. She flinched and ducked reflexively, then rolled her shoulder and ground her teeth.

Because now she was pissed.

She could already tell her wounds were superficial – or maybe they weren’t, and it was just the hot washes of adrenaline and cortisol flooding her system, making her insensible to the pain.

As long as the blood stays out of my right fucking eye, she thought.

She was fairly certain she could identify the opposing shooter’s weapon as a Russian SV-338 sniper rifle, chambered for the formidable .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge. That would validate her theory about the bullet that had almost just ended her, not to mention explain why it had taken the crew chief’s arm clean off. She also upgraded her assessment of this sniper: he wasn’t fucking good.

He was seriously fucking good.

The range between them wasn’t much, but with at least one helicopter moving erratically and fast as hell, the ballistic calculations were complex. They were both essentially having to do calculus in their heads, in real time.

On the other hand, the fucker had missed her. And Ali had no intention of giving him another go.

It had been a hell of a long time since she’d had a real sniping job – never mind a counter-sniping mission. She’d certainly been in sniper duels before. But she couldn’t remember actually conducting one while airborne, in two opposing helicopters. Never mind swooping around over the south Atlantic, on a CSAR mission in the middle of the goddamned zombie apocalypse.

She thought: Funny old thing, life.

She dropped to the deck to quickly check on their casualty, the crew chief who had previously been manning their own minigun. The floor was awash with his blood, rolling in little waves with each bank and spin of the helo. It had all come out of him in the last few seconds. The rescue swimmer had already jumped down there and gotten Ali’s tourniquet on his stump, and was now cinching it tight.

The crew chief was a critical casualty.

But he was going to make it.

That is – until he got shot in the top of the head. The divot that opened in his scalp was big and obvious, and his panicked breathing stopped instantly.

Oh, you sons of BITCHES…

Ali looked up. The shot had come in the left-side door, which still stood open, as they briefly showed that side of the airframe to the Russians.

Ali half rose, reached out, and hauled it shut. The thin skin of the door wouldn’t remotely stop those huge high-velocity .338 rounds. But if she couldn’t have cover, concealment would do. That Russian bastard couldn’t glass what he couldn’t see.

Adjusting the chin mic of her headset, Ali shouted at the pilot: “Bring us back around on the starboard side! And steady it the fuck out! I need another look!”

“Negative, negative! I cann—”

But the rest of this was drowned out as the rescue swimmer, having climbed to his feet, got on the minigun and spun it back up. Its roar and whine were now added to the shrieking of the helo’s rotors and engines, and the groaning of the airframe from the pilot’s wild evasive maneuvers.

Ali could sense revenge on the swimmer’s mind. He was clearly no expert on that weapon. But, equally obviously, he’d had enough of this shit.

Brave son of a bitch, Ali thought.

He was also about to be a dead one.

She reached up, put her left hand on his shoulder, and pressed hard. His feet, already unsteady in the rollicking blood bath below, went out from under him, and he dropped to the deck – a quarter-second before another .338 round cracked over his head. That one definitely had his name on it. They were taking seriously accurate fire from this sharpshooting motherfucker.

Ali had to end him – now.

Emergency Ascent

Open Water, Beneath the JFK

It turned out the Spetsnaz diver with the severed airline wasn’t all that enthusiastic about just floating there and drowning to death while Homer looked on. He knew he had another option. Homer knew it, too.

Visibly fighting panic – he probably already had some seawater in his lungs from that first breath after the line was cut – he dropped his weight belt with a one-handed twist of the buckle, hit the dump valve on his buoyancy compensator (BC), and kicked madly for the surface, in an emergency ascent. He was probably close enough to survive this. He even had the presence of mind to slip his second knife back in its leg sheath.

And Homer was happy to let him go.

He knew Pred and Henno would be waiting up top. They’d be a little nonplussed when a half-drowned Russian frogman burst into open air, but of course they’d adjust and react – and secure the enemy swimmer.

And then the Kennedy would also have a prisoner to interrogate. And maybe they’d be able to learn something about what the Russians had in mind – something that might keep them alive and afloat. This, a capture rather than a kill, was also less corrosive to Homer’s soul than simply topping the man. It seemed to be a good outcome.

But, then… as Homer watched the Russian sheath his knife, kick out, and start breaststroking with both hands…

Something tickled at the corner of his brain – something he’d seen, but not registered. He squinted, leaned forward, and zoomed in… and there it was: a radio pouch on the Russian’s rig, its rubberized antenna sticking out. And Homer knew that after the guy reached the surface, but before he allowed himself to be taken prisoner, he’d radio back to the Admiral Nakhimov – that their swimmer team and their sabotage op had been compromised.

And that would be the last Homer would see of these guys – until much later, probably when they weren’t expecting them again.

And he simply couldn’t let that happen. Because there was another fact he knew, that was permanently resident in his brain: his kids were on that ship up over their heads.

In a flash, he rapid-filled his own BC with air from his tank and, suddenly buoyant, took off after the Spetsnaz diver, kicking and stroking like the aquatic creature he was, albeit with a knife still sticking out of one arm.

The Russian had the advantage of a better incentive to reach the surface. But Homer had air, plus had reacted quickly, and also was an insanely strong swimmer, even wounded. In four strokes and two seconds, he had caught up and was able to reach out and grab the Russian around the ankles. He then evacuated the compensator, causing his own buoyancy to go negative – aided by the weights in the vest.

And now Homer had the presence of mind to reach up and draw that second knife back out of his leg sheath, before the Russian could go for it himself. Homer just had to pray the dude didn’t have a third one on him somewhere. He would by no means put it past him.

No longer rising toward the surface, still with no access to air, and facing full-on panic now, the Russian special operator flailed and kicked, twisting and battling against Homer’s death grip on his legs. But he stayed locked on tight. The pain in his right forearm – as the knife wiggled around on three axes – made his vision go bright white. The pain was spectacular, and he feared for a moment he might pass out.

But as long as that didn’t happen, all he had to do was hang on, and wait for the doomed man above him to stop kicking and go limp.

Whatever badass training these Naval Spetsnaz guys got… it evidently didn’t include the “drownproofing” that SEAL candidates were subjected to in BUD/S at Coronado.

Score one for United States Naval Special Warfare.

* * *

More than 200 feet above Homer’s head, Commander Drake was struggling to take all the current tactical information on board – never mind really process it. What he mainly needed to do was work it into some kind of strategic picture. And that was hardest of all.

“The CSAR mission,” he said. “What’s their status?”

Abrams said, “Last update we had was they were approaching the CAG’s transponder signal.”

Drake nodded. Things seemed to be in hand there at least. Until they weren’t. At almost that exact moment, LT Campbell spoke aloud into the air of the bridge. She usually only used an open channel when shit was serious.

“Bridge, CIC, be advised. We have now also lost comms with Jesus Two Zero. Repeat, comms with the CSAR mission are black.”

Abrams stood and spoke before Drake could react. “How long?”

“It’s been about two minutes.”

Drake jumped in, his voice a hard edge. “What does that mean? Did the Russian SAMs take them out?”

“Negative, negative. We still have contact with our aircraft on radar. But they’re flying erratically. And, while they’re still out of range of the battlecruiser, they are well within range of the guns on that Russian helo.”

Abrams and Drake looked at each other, their faces hanging. They were both starting to feel like the last two characters in an Agatha Christie novel, the others disappearing into the night all around them.

Maybe this would only end when everyone was dead.

* * *

With his attacker finally dispatched, Homer finally had time to bleed – to adapt another locally famous and very popular movie line. But, more to the point, he had time to stop bleeding. He just had to improvise a little to do it. He pulled in the floating body, and then with the man’s own knife started cutting away a long strip of wetsuit, from shoulder to knee.

He felt like he was skinning an animal, some exotic and impressive big game he had felled. But he didn’t much like it.

He hadn’t enjoyed killing this man. But, then again, the dude had swum up and said hi by trying to stab him in the neck – plus had succeeded in stabbing him in three other places. Killing people had always been a pretty significant part of a SEAL’s job description, which was awkward for a devout Christian.

But Homer dealt with it.

He knew God would reach his own conclusions, when his time came to be judged. As surely it would.

Finally getting the long strip of neoprene free, he let the body go. It floated peacefully toward the surface, rising up into the light. That man’s problems in this world were over now. And he would faithfully perform one last service, making an excellent buoy – a signal to Homer’s teammates that all was not well under the sea.

As wounded as Homer was, a case could be made for him surfacing himself. But this job wasn’t done. And, as usual, there was no one else to do it.

Now – this next bit was gonna hurt, not least because of the serrations on the back of the Russian knife. Homer tried putting the second one in his own leg sheath; it went in halfway, which was good enough. He then cast his eyes along the big blade of the one protruding from his arm.

He recognized it as a dive knife from Melita-K, a Russian manufacturer beloved by Spetsnaz. He even knew the model – the Kasatka (“whale killer”). Homer had actually always wanted one. Now that he had two, he rather wished he didn’t, given the circumstances.

Okay, he thought. No point putting this off.

He took a deep breath, spat out his regulator, stuck one end of the wetsuit strip in his mouth, and bit down hard. Finally, he gripped the hard textured plastic of the protruding knife handle.

And he yanked, just once, for all he was worth.

The murky dimness around him went bright white again – and then black, for a good few seconds. After looping this knife’s lanyard around his wrist – he didn’t want to give up either trophy, not least since he might yet need them – he used the cut-away strip of wetsuit to wrap up his skewered arm, tight, and then tied it off with one hand and his teeth, before finally putting his regulator back in.

He was already breathing raggedly from the pain.

Now he checked out the chest wound, and found that it was shallow, and had pretty much stopped bleeding on its own. Which was good, because he would have had the devil’s time wrapping that up.

He was good to go.

A hand touched his elbow from behind.

Soup Sandwich

Jesus Two Zero - CSAR Mission, Over the South Atlantic

There was a terrible and perilous asymmetry to the aerial gunnery contest taking place in the air above the CAG’s ditch site in the south Atlantic. Because the Russian Orca was static, holding hover, it made a much more stable firing platform for the shooters firing from it. But because it was static, it also should have been an easier target for the shooters on the Seahawk.

But it wasn’t – because their own helo was careening all over the damned sky, making it nearly impossible to shoot from. This hadn’t come about because the Russians had fired first – but because the Americans had flinched first.

Something had to change.

“Be advised!” Ali shouted over ICS to the pilots. “I need you to get this aircraft into a racetrack pattern, flying clockwise around the target, with our starboard side facing in!” In theory, this should solve both problems – keeping the Seahawk moving and a hard target, but making the Orca easy pickings.

“Negative – that’s a no-go! The instant we assume a predictable pattern, they’re going to smoke us. We won’t survive one pass in front of that minigun. He’ll lead us by a few inches, and it’s lights out.”

Ali realized the man had a point.

This mission was rapidly turning into a complete soup sandwich. Maybe there was no way out of the death sentence they had all haplessly flown into – or at least no way to complete the mission without getting everyone on board killed. And, as if to finalize this verdict with a banging gavel, now the Russian minigun started up again – good and hard.

They had obviously gotten their second-stringer in the game. And he wasn’t as bad as Ali had hoped. Slashes of sunlight once again tore through the interior of the aircraft as its skin erupted with dozens of new ragged holes. It was seemingly on every side at once, though that was just the Seahawk rotating and careening randomly through the sky.

The violent motion of the evasive maneuvers, the rushing wind and engine noise, the screaming of wounded and the blood – and the fact that the cabin was the business end of a shooting gallery – all made the chaos intense, and made it a challenge to function even at the most basic level.

“Now YOU be advised!” came that more-pissed-than-panicked voice from the flight deck. “I say again: take out that fucking minigun, or we CANNOT stay here!”

Ali clenched her teeth. If she thought shit had gotten real earlier, she’d been seriously jumping the gun. She ransacked her brain. “Have you called this in to the carrier? Can they get some more air out to reinforce us?”

“Negative, negative, comms are DOWN! I think that goddamned fucking minigunner severed the line to the antenna. Or maybe shot it off entirely…”

Ali took a breath. Okay, fuck it, she thought, giving up on the prospect of the pilot working with her here, much less anyone coming to bail them out. She’d just make it happen on her own. She’d be wherever she needed to be.

As she started to move to the opposite side, the rescue swimmer grabbed her and put his head up against hers. He nodded at the minigun and said, “Next pass, I’m going to put those motherfuckers in the drink!”

Ali shook her head. “You can’t do that!”

“Why the fuck not?”

The answer was: because Ali had seen something else, in addition to her sniper nemesis, on that last pass – a taut white line, stretching from the door of the Orca down to the surface of the water. At the end of that line was a rescue strop. And most likely a swimmer – or possibly two.

And Ali knew that by now their CAG was either suspended on that line, or else actually inside the Russian helo. Best case, he was still in the water directly beneath it. And that meant they couldn’t take down the Orca – not without also killing the man who was the whole objective of their mission. She explained this to the swimmer in as few syllables as possible.

“What kind of bullshit is that?” he boggled. “They can shoot us down, but we can’t shoot them down?!”

“Yeah – ain’t life a bitch?”

Rounds continued to rip through the aircraft, though presumably their evasive maneuvers were reducing the number of hits.

“I FUCKING REPEAT—”

“Yeah, yeah, roger that!” Ali cut in. “We’re on it!”

She suddenly realized they’d been going about this the wrong way – taking out a replaceable part, the gunner. Getting down on her belly now and low crawling through blood, she reached up and slid the left-side hatch open eighteen inches, then poked her barrel out and lay flat behind it. Unfortunately, nothing greeted her but sea and sky, both a spinning blur.

She clenched her jaw in frustration. This was like a gunfight on a goddamned carousel – round and round…

But she was now ticking over on every physical and cognitive cylinder, wired tight and totally switched on. She could adapt. She could wait.

Finally the Orca spun by – and Ali made her shot, in the quarter-second she had a sight picture. She put a round straight through the stiff plastic feed chute coming out the side of the Russian minigun.

Its six barrels kept on spinning, but it stopped discharging, and the effect on the American end was obvious and instantaneous – no more incoming rounds, no more systematic shredding of the aircraft around them. No more being shot out of the sky in slow motion.

Nice.

As the Orca spun out of view again, she heard their own minigun start back up behind them. The swimmer was back on it.

No, no, no…

Ali flipped onto her back and clenched her abs, intending to roll over them and up to her feet in a single motion. But something exploded at the minigun mount, and two things happened at once.

One, their own minigun also stopped firing.

And two, the swimmer clutched his face, staggered back, stumbled over Ali’s prone form – and for a horrible, frozen instant, looked like he was actually going to go straight out the eighteen-inch gap in the port-side door. Instead, he bounced off its edge and hit the deck, hard. He lay there rolling around, making wounded animal noises, and holding both hands to his face.

Ali somehow instinctively knew what the Spetsnaz sniper had just done. He had put a single round into the feeder/delinker on their own minigun – she could see the ragged hole in the side of it from where she lay – and sent either fragments of that, or perhaps the ricocheting bullet itself, into the swimmer who was manning it.

It was a like a split-shot in pool – sinking two balls in one go. Minigun out; gunner down. He’d also very nearly put the eight-ball in the side pocket by sending the swimmer right out the fucking door.

Two, obviously, could play at all kinds of games.

And Ali was being badly outplayed.

* * *

Homer spun around in place, remembering two things. One, it really was damned dark and murky down here. And, two, it was pretty hard to tell one black wetsuit, or one rebreather rig, from another – especially when you were expecting to find them both on your own dive buddy.

Homer looked into the eyes of this second Spetsnaz combat diver from twenty-four inches away. He figured the dude had swum up from underneath the keel, crossing over from the other side of the ship. And he’d only seen the back of Homer, which led to this madcap case of mistaken identity.

The man’s eyes inside his mask went wide.

And then they narrowed to very mean slits.

And he instantly started to paddle away – and also to bring around, and bring to bear, something very big and black from behind him. Whatever it was, Homer moved instantly to get inside its attack radius, kicking hard and closing tight, latching on and grappling.

It looked like this fight was going to happen in even closer quarters than the last one.

But perhaps God would still be with him.

* * *

Drake now considered that maybe everything going to hell simultaneously wasn’t a coincidence or Murphy’s law this time… We are facing, he thought, for the first time in a long time, adversaries who can actually use their damned brai—

But he swallowed this inner monologue in his throat as, for nothing like the first time, he had to shield his eyes from a strange and unexpected glare coming in through the screens.

What the FUCK…?

At first he wondered if Fick was out on deck shooting off Stinger missiles again. This was really turning into a dodgy work environment for a guy suffering the light and noise sensitivity of TBI. He should be down in CIC where it was always dark and usually quiet…

Goddammit. Once again, he had to drag his mind back on topic. He had to try and focus.

And now, as he and Abrams both found themselves drawn toward the front screens, they could see the source of the glare was some kind of missile streaking across the sky, originating from the coast, and climbing steeply and fantastically quickly up over their heads. It then split into three smaller streaks, all of them moving on almost the same trajectory.

Just as the two commanders rushed out onto the observation deck, something exploded high above their heads – way up in the sky above the carrier, a bit to the north, and too far up to make out any detail, or debris.

Drake looked at Abrams. Before either could speak, they could hear Campbell’s voice leaking out of the room speakers inside: “Bridge, CIC. Predator UAV is DOWN. Repeat, we have lost the Predator ISR platform.”

Drake froze dead.

Abrams turned to face him.

He said: “Commander. We’re now totally blind.”

End of the World for Real

The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains, Southeast Asia

Oleg Aliyev – former bioscientist and bioweaponeer, first for the Soviets and then the Islamists, now world-class survivalist and developer of a designer pathogen completely fatal to the dead – snored heavily, taking a long, deep, and probably much needed Scotch nap. He lay draped across his fur-covered couch, one arm hanging down to the dark hardwood floor. Outside the great bay windows at the front of the room, and behind the big short-wave radio set, heavy snow continued to blanket this remotest spot in Asia – only thirty miles from the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility.

But Aliyev was perfectly cozy – surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, by a fucking fantastic home-theater system… by his entire secure, comfortable, and fully stocked mountain fortress, which he had paid for with earnings from his freelance bioweapons work, and which had allowed him to ride out two years of zombie apocalypse in accustomed and near-perfect comfort.

Though not in peace. His haunted mind and plagued conscience made it impossible for him to experience that. Because it had been his creation, his chimera virus, developed for the Islamists and then somehow escaped out into the wild where it mutated and went completely out of control, that had led to the end of the world.

But there was still some hope of redemption.

Because next door to the living area of the Dacha there was also Aliyev’s completely stocked and state-of-the-art bioweapons laboratory. In addition to every piece of hardware and equipment the discriminating bioweaponeer might ever need, it also contained the Fridge of Death. This innocuous-looking white box contained samples of virtually every microbial and pathogenic serial killer that had made the life of man hellish since the dawn of time.

And that included meningitis – which, after a little clever biohacking, Aliyev had discovered was not only a reliable killer of the dead… but was also contagious among and between them. While swilling the Scotch that had put him into this coma, he had borne witness as his meningitis Z bug (MZ) had spread from one dead test subject to two others, and then finally made an end of all three.

It worked. And it worked well.

And, now, as he slowly dredged himself up toward consciousness, scratching his reddish van Dyke beard and rubbing his dark spiky hair, then sat up on the couch and found his clunky black glasses… Oleg Aliyev realized two things.

One, he now had in his possession a designer pathogen that would kill the dead with great reliability – plus would spread through their population, from walking corpse to walking corpse, more or less like wildfire.

And, two, if he ever actually released this thing… that would be the end of the world – for real.

Because while quite a lot of people globally had been vaccinated against meningitis A, and a few against B and C… absolutely none of the handful of survivors on this blighted, diseased rock had been inoculated against meningitis Z. No vaccine existed. And even if it did, Aliyev had no way to get it to them.

Thinking of the topic of survivors caused him to look unsteadily across the large stylish living room to the radio set that hulked on the ledge, in the bay windows, beyond which the great white storm was still blowing. Then he shot a quick glance over at the wall clock. It was just about time for the daily Survivors Broadcast from London.

He snorted and shook his head. So this is what has become of the once-mighty BBC World Service.

How completely everything had gone to shit.

But it was something, some human contact.

And, moreover, if he did release his new creation, his latest and probably last pathogenic abomination, his meningitis Z… then soon even those weak and occasional transmissions would come to an end.

Everything would.

* * *

Then again, the broadcasts were sure to stop soon anyway. And it was probably pointless to worry about killing survivors with MZ, when the zombies who might spread it to them were already going to kill them – either the old-fashioned way, with teeth and claws, or else with Hargeisa, the zombie virus itself. And there was no such thing as being twice as dead.

But then Aliyev glanced over his shoulder, thinking of the three dead zombies in his lab enclosures. Okay, maybe there is such a thing as twice as dead.

Still. The prospect of personally, and permanently, hitting the Off switch for all of humanity and for the entire world as it had existed throughout 10,000 years of human civilization, and the 200,000 years we’d existed as a species… well, it was just a bit much to bear. Maybe Aliyev just couldn’t stand the idea of being the actual, literal Last Man on Earth. It would be too crushingly lonely. God knew it was lonely enough now. But, at the moment, at least he knew there was someone left, bloody-mindedly hanging around out there somewhere.

And, in any case, he definitely couldn’t face the weight of such a momentous decision right now.

So he basically decided not to think about it.

Instead, he powered up the radio set, remembering how amazed he was every time he did so and transmissions continued to come in. There was the daily official update from London – spouting its feel-good platitudes about how the borders of Fortress Britain were secure, and how the search for a vaccine was progressing. And then there was also the random civilian radio traffic he could often pick up – from Britain, and from a few tiny outposts of survivors elsewhere around the globe, all of which tended to tell a different story.

Aliyev sighed as he turned the volume up, heard the peaceful audio beacon chiming, and waited for the broadcast to start. Really, he liked to listen to this just because it was other human voices. It was great that the Brits were still there, putting up a valiant resistance – or, rather, a last stand.

But Aliyev knew it was only a matter of time.

In fact, he had every expectation that he himself would last longer than Britain did. With the dead wandering up on their 360 degrees of coastline… with their scavenging parties venturing out into undead Europe, then coming right back in again… it was only a matter of time before they suffered a bad outbreak and fell, as every other nation had. They had too high a population density, and the disease would spread too fast, too uncontrollably.

It was inevitable.

* * *

And that was why Aliyev had been completely unsurprised when he first heard fleeting reports – on private civilian channels, as well as military ones – of the outbreak that had started at the Channel Tunnel. He couldn’t really work out how bad it was.

But it definitely wasn’t good.

And after Britain finally did fall, the only survivors would be small groups or lone individuals, the vast majority of them in extremely isolated areas. But even their days were numbered – at least Aliyev knew his were. When the supplies finally ran out, it would be death by starvation, or else death by scavenging, when he eventually got cornered by the dead, venturing out into populated areas to find food.

Hell, he’d likely perish on the bloody mountain, just trying to get somewhere to scavenge. And when and if he got there, to those tiny Mongol and Uyghur villages that dotted the vast wilderness that surrounded him, the scavenging would be damned thin.

Not that he was likely to bother.

If he wanted to, Aliyev could actually do the math on his supplies, and work out how long he had left. But he didn’t want to. Lately, he tried not even to look around, when he went out to the supply building to top up the kitchen pantry.

And now here came the stately chimes of Big Ben through the big home stereo speakers he had wired to the equally expensive and high-tech radio set. The chimes had been brought back from the old BBC World Service broadcasts, and were presumably meant to convey some theme of enduringness. Aliyev twizzled the volume knob down slightly – and then back up when the chirpy, cheery, female announcer, with her unmistakable BBC accent and Queen’s English, came on to greet what was left of the world.

She proceeded with her usual propagandist rundown of babies born in the UK… new pockets of survivors contacted out in the world’s great remote shitholes (for some reason they never mentioned the survivors they’d lost contact with, who had to outnumber new ones), new vaccine candidates and how promising they looked…

Aliyev was interested to learn if they were finally going to officially admit the outbreak, even if they downplayed it. But so far, not a peep. You’d never guess the barbarians were right outside their gates. Fortress Britain had been breached, as Aliyev had learned from the unofficial radio traffic. And the noose was starting to close on the very last world capital – London.

It was the beginning of the end.

The Hero With a Thousand Faces

The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains

Aliyev also knew about the so-called Zombie-Proof Wall they had constructed around the capital, along the M25 ring-road. He knew its general specs. And he definitely had done the math on that one: as soon as the rest of Britain went black, and its former population turned and converged on London… when over 40 million of its inhabitants became desperate besiegers, mindlessly pushing forward and climbing on top of one another to get in… well, the wall could not long stand.

It was, as the builder of the Titanic had said to its captain: “a mathematical certainty.”

Aliyev snorted, congratulating himself on a nearly perfect metaphor, and briefly considered getting into another bottle of Scotch. But he couldn’t quite be bothered to walk to the bar, plus he was still hungover from his last lecture-time bender.

Finally, as he listened to the broadcast, it became clear the Brits still weren’t going to cop to the outbreak, even now – and Aliyev got sick of listening to the stream of pabulum. He powered off the set, trudged back over to the leather couch, and dropped himself down. As he lay still, breathing, with his fingers steepled on his chest, he regarded the radio across the room – and considered tuning in to some civilian channels for more info. But there was little point – he knew which way the wind was blowing.

Huh, he thought, snorting once. Maybe I’ll just ring them up to say goodbye.

There was something appealing about the idea of speaking to a living person, just one last time. His radio included an extremely powerful transmitter, which also used the big aerial on the roof. He had just never used it. Before the end of the world, transmitting anything out of there would have been tantamount to suicide – it would have been the quickest way to draw the attentions of CIA, DIA, JSOC, those lovely and deadly all-American boys in the SEAL teams…

Oh, and particularly the NSA. Those guys had 100,000 world-class experts sitting around doing nothing all day long but capturing and decoding the communications of guys like Aliyev. No, screw all that.

Instead, what Aliyev had done was rather cleverly mount a transmitter on a small hand-held drone – really just a high-end civilian RC quad copter, one with especially long range and endurance. And, periodically, he would send that out about 100 kilometers, where it would connect to a remote server, fetch all his email for him, send anything he had to send, request web pages he wanted to see, etc.

Of course that was back when the Internet was still running, and so he hadn’t had any reason to send it up, not for a long time now. Of course, nobody emailed any more. Though funnily enough, last time he had been able to check, he was still getting spam. Probably a few data centers with extremely long-lived uninterruptible power supplies. Cockroaches and spammers, that was who survived the end of the world, both totally unkillable. Them and the dead.

Though, with his meningitis Z, it now looked like the dead were not as immortal as they had once appeared…

Anyway, with America and its security services and special operations forces also closed for the duration, Aliyev could now safely radio out if he wanted to. He’d just never wanted to. He hadn’t really seen the point.

He sighed and looked to his volume of Marcus Aurelius, where it sat on the radio. Then he let his eye wander over to the big, inset, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves – and the first spine that jumped out at him was Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. In that book, the great mythologist had posited something he called the “monomyth” – his theory that all mythic narratives in human history were really just variations of a single great story.

It went like this: In the beginning, the innocent homeland and tribe are threatened – and so the Hero, presented with a challenge, sets out on a quest into the dark forest, where he has to overcome many lethal challenges, slay the dreaded monster, and finally return with a magic Elixir – the cure to what had gone wrong, and which would be a blessing to the tribe forever. Osiris, Prometheus, Moses, Odysseus, The Wizard of Oz… fucking Star Wars – all were just variations on this same universal story.

For his part, Aliyev had always kind of thought that what the monomyth was really about was: the triumph of life in the face of mortality – and the otherwise inevitable encroachment of death. The Elixir represented the secret to eternal life – or at least the secret to making this short, doomed one meaningful. And the hero was the one who brought it back – who gave the people life, and who finally conquered death.

The Kazakh snorted again, and took a look up at the expensive ceiling he lay beneath, which he had done in classical Roman frescoes. If he was right, and the archetypal hero was the bringer of life and the conqueror of death… then what that made him was: the nearly perfect anti-hero. Instead of bringing life, he had brought death.

He’d embraced it, improved it, massively expanded its domain. And he’d brought it down upon everyone.

And now, because of him, it looked like death was actually going to conquer life, in the end. There would be no happy ending to the story of humanity. No homecoming for Odysseus, no victory for Beowulf over Grendel, no redemption for Macbeth.

No destroying the Death Star for Luke.

And the best Oleg Aliyev could do now would be to kill all the already dead. He could, as the final face of the anti-hero, and the last man to take his leave of this planet, turn out the lights.

It would be little enough.

* * *

No – fuck all that, Aliyev thought, very suddenly – and even more unexpectedly.

He was tired, but he wasn’t quite ready to pack it in. Not yet. His long and hard-fought victory with MZ, the zombie-killing disease, had fired his hope, which had long lain dormant, if not actually dead.

Now he sat bolt upright and went back to the radio. He had no more inspired idea than to scan some of the military channels, and see what was happening. He fired the radio set back to life, and started flipping digital frequencies.

Generally, he got a kick out of just listening to those guys bumble around. For starters, there was the simple smugness of being able to listen in on their communications. Funnily enough, the military continued to encrypt their radio traffic after the fall – Aliyev wasn’t totally sure why. God knows the dead weren’t listening. Then again, there were no doubt any number of dodgy living people still skulking around out there. Those who survived tended to be sketchy – the tough, mean, selfish, and merciless generally died last.

Aliyev considered himself exhibit A in that case.

But, then again, the British and European militaries had never encrypted their comms terribly well – and, post-apocalypse, they’d stopped updating their encryption keys and protocols entirely. So it had been a pretty minor project for Aliyev to decrypt CentCom’s, simply by using open-source software tools.

The other reason CentCom amused him was their habit of sending very elite special forces types off to get killed or infected on the Continent, scouring biopharma labs for a cure to the plague. What Aliyev could have told them, and in no uncertain terms, was that they weren’t going to find a cure.

Because there wasn’t one.

What he himself had created, and what had taken down humanity, was simply an absolute bastard of a virus. It was a chimera of smallpox and myelin toxin, which evidently had somehow further mutated in the wild when those asshats in al-Shabaab, the Somali jihadists, had let it loose – most likely when it entered a chicken coop, or pig farm, or best of all, some dump that subsistence-farmed both…

In any case, this motherfucker of a virus was absolutely not going to be cured in a day – or a year, or probably a decade. And almost definitely not without knowing how it had been designed, plus having a very early-stage sample of the virus – which could only be got in East Africa, which good luck traveling there. No… if a vaccine for HIV had not been developed after nearly four decades of worldwide research, what were the odds that someone had come up with one for the zombie virus, in the handful of weeks between when it had been discovered – and the complete collapse of civilization?

If someone had pulled that off, against all possible odds… it would be a one-in-a-million shot. The scientist responsible for it would be a savant, a supergenius, a once-in-a-generation talent – a comet streaking by at ground level. And Aliyev didn’t really believe in that kind of genius. If humans were that smart, they wouldn’t have pissed it all away like this in the first place.

But nonetheless, on a total lark, Aliyev now switched to the first of the common military frequencies. With the troposphere shrinking down tight with the storm, he might get some interesting radio bounces from far afield. Sure enough, there was some traffic, very hard to make out, not because it was broken and distorted – but because it was so frantic.

He was listening to the desperate battle for the south of England. Which did not sound as if it was going well.

He’d never before heard messages that sounded so, well, tactical. He could actually hear the firing, and the screams of men in pain or fear. Thinking about it, he realized the reason he’d never heard that before was: the personal and team radios of the men doing the actual fighting had very low power, and their signals would never travel so far. It was always the command frequencies Aliyev heard: colonels and generals in the field, but in the rear, talking to headquarters.

But now… even those senior officers were engaged in combat. They were all deep in the shit.

Jesus, Aliyev thought. It was a hell of a thing to hear men fighting, being overrun, and dying – at that very moment. For the first time, he was very glad to be here and not there. When a man stopped in the middle of his status report, and started screaming in a blood-curdling fashion – and didn’t fucking stop – Aliyev tremblingly changed the channel.

Now he was on one of the internal CentCom channels. And the man and woman on this transmission sounded utterly relaxed. They were either unaware of, or unconcerned about, the horrors that were happening elsewhere on their little island – and were seemingly ignorant that these horrors were almost certainly lying in wait, in their near future.

And, somehow, listening to the rear-echelon people cooly chatting, while soldiers died horribly, was even creepier. Aliyev switched channels again.

This time he hopped onto one of three long-range military frequencies. This was where he’d sometimes pick up traffic with units inserted onto the Continent. Also, he already knew CentCom had sent some type of warship across the Atlantic – the first time they’d ever ventured nearly so far afield. They were either onto something good; or, much more likely, they were very, very desperate.

He gave it a few seconds, but heard nothing at all on the first channel. Maybe they needed everyone at home – for the final defense. Not that it would avail them much.

He flipped to the second long-range channel. Nothing there either – only broken static. He moved the pad of his finger to the tuning button, and started to apply pressure to flip to the third and last channel… but then hesitated. Was that some faint whisper, or vague shape to the static? Sunspots? Just encroaching madness?

Still totally acting on whim, Aliyev switched from digital tuning to analog, and began twiddling the large dial with his fingertips, trying to zero in on he knew not what. He started to imagine he could hear something like human voices… though it was probably just evocative static… ghosts in the planetary machine… That notwithstanding, he finessed the big, sensitive, circular knob with two fingers.

Suddenly, the channel cleared, and the transmission resolved – for exactly five seconds, completely clear and audible, and nearly static-free. And what Aliyev heard was this:

“…firmative. I say again, we have successfully recovered the Biacore 4000. Interrogative: will this definitely allow Dr. Park to complete his vaccine for Hargeisa? Over.”

“Central, Seven-Nine Actual. Yes, yes – that is affirmative. We believe so. We are proceeding as per briefed mission plan to Gulf of Aden to insert Al—”

And then it went back to unintelligible static again.

And then nothing.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT, Aliyev thought.

He felt as if the requirements of drama meant he should stagger away from the radio, maybe clutching his chest. But he simply couldn’t will his muscles into action, and merely sat there, hunched over – with his jaw open, slack, and hanging halfway into his lap.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT, he repeated to himself.

I’ve got to get to London…

On Home Ground

CentCom HQ, Formerly Wandsworth Common

First Lieutenant Jameson – Officer Commanding, One Troop, 42 Royal Marine Commando – could feel his heart pounding as he ran across the road, feet thudding on the pavement, then the crushed grass of what used to be Wandsworth Common. Now this field was used as a maintenance ground for helos, two of which he and his men had just disembarked from, having miraculously survived, and successfully completed, their mission to retrieve the Biacore 4000 from Dusseldorf.

Now, as he sprinted away from the aircraft, aware of his troop sergeant Eli and the other men running alongside, Jameson felt sweat begin to pour from his face. They were all reacting to the gunfire and explosions that had erupted from the CentCom Strategic Operations Command building, unable to believe that something like this could possibly be happening here – but instantly running toward the sound of the guns.

In his peripheral vision, Jameson saw others heading across the grounds in the direction of the former Wandsworth Prison, which had been annexed and repurposed by CentCom. They were armed soldiers, also making a beeline for the chaos that was now erupting in the old prison building, and what was the very center of command for CentCom – the heart of everything.

Jameson saw a truck racing across the common a hundred yards away, spewing dirt and gravel behind it as it sped away from the Biosciences Complex toward the main complex, four other soldiers hanging on in the back and being rocked about as the vehicle bumped over uneven ground.

As they passed the helo pilots who had been their chauffeurs for the Dusseldorf mission, including Captain Charlotte Maidstone, Jameson shouted, “Secure the Biosciences Complex!” and didn’t stop to see if they complied. Maidstone outranked him, and he wondered if she’d harangue him later on, but she’d already shown she wasn’t fussy about rank or chain of command. He carried on running flat-out, checking only briefly that the rest of his troop was still with him, as they rapidly approached the gate.

The truck carrying the soldiers got there first, zipping past him closer than he liked and rushing through the open gate just ahead of the Marines, then screeching to a halt. The occupants, all Royal Military Police (RMPs), jumped out the back, pulling out weapons and instantly firing into the main entrance. Jameson was just wondering who the hell they were shooting at, when half a dozen more human figures burst into view, slamming into the RMP detail from its flank, totally surprising the soldiers. The first two went down, kicking and punching, but the second pair back-pedaled toward the truck, firing to cover their retreat.

Jameson ran on, closing the gap, then aimed his rifle and fired on three of the dead – and as much as he didn’t want to believe it, the view of the pale and bloodied figures through his rifle sight confirmed that what he was seeing was an outbreak. The trio lurched at runner speed toward the truck and the soldiers, but then fell to the ground as his burst of fire cut them down. They weren’t dead, but they also weren’t running any more. Good enough.

“Everybody on channel?” he said into his chin mic, and was relieved when he heard a volley of replies from his squad and fire team leaders.

A second trio of runners came out of the building and cleared the edge of the wall, giving him an open shot, and he took it, letting rip with another burst of full-auto fire and not even trying to get a bead on the ravening heads. Instead he hit them in the legs, ploughing all three to the ground, where they still crawled and scratched their way forward.

The two remaining soldiers, their compatriots now dying on the ground at their feet, opened fire again and took out the closest of the undead killers.

As Jameson hit the tunnel and ran through the gate, closely followed by Eli and more of the Marines, a dozen other security personnel and RMPs converged on the entrance just behind them. Jameson ran into the open ground beyond the gates, took stock of the half-dozen frantic lurching figures running out of the building toward them, and opened fire.

He knew seconds was all he had. The roar of gunfire on the upper floor – and now, as he listened closely, more gunfire further inside the building and off in other wings – told him this was no small outbreak.

All of CentCom Strategic Command was now in play – and the whole garrison was fighting a pitched battle against the dead.

* * *

Jameson waited for the rest of his men to clear the gate and form up, then started shouting orders.

“Four-man fire teams, everyone on me,” he snapped, and headed for the main entrance. He tried to do the math. He had five fire teams, not enough to cover the entire building, so he would have to prioritize and hope the security teams would follow his lead, or at least have the initiative to spread out and try to cover other areas.

Jameson burst through the main entrance, his assault rifle raised and ready. He had just three magazines left for the dead man’s rifle he had inherited, having lost his in Dusseldorf – and where he had also ditched most of his favorite gear just to run a little faster. He knew his men were little better off ammo-wise.

As he moved into the big open area that was main reception, he clocked six… no, seven figures moving around. To his right, over near the stairs, was a mess of a melee. At least two soldiers were fighting the dead hand-to-hand, but it was difficult to see who was dead and who was living. Eli rushed past him, heading for the fight, followed by two other Marines, all of them with bayonets fixed and ready to take the battle to the undead, up close and personal if necessary.

Jameson spun and took aim at the other fight going on nearer the main stairs. One man, dressed in what Jameson thought might be a medical uniform, fought furiously against two undead that had already latched on to him. He felt a stab of sorrow as he saw one of the dead bite down on the man’s arm. The medic screamed and tried to punch back, but the other zombie already had hold of his other arm.

There was no coming back for this guy, Jameson realized, and his rifle chugged three times as he fired single shots – two for the zombies, now sent tumbling away from the injured man, and then a third dead center in the medic’s forehead. As the man dropped, Jameson wondered why the hell that third shot had been so difficult to take. Nothing could be done for the man, and if he’d been given the few minutes more of life he no doubt deserved, he’d have turned and become just another part of the problem. Jameson had to shrug it off, and accept that sometimes it all goes to shit, no matter what you do.

He just had to keep going.

A glance at the other fight revealed that it had gone no better. All five figures lay dead on the ground as Eli and the two Marines with him scanned the corridor leading away from the carnage. Jameson saw blood on their bayonets, and realized he hadn’t heard a shot fired from that side of the room. As he watched, Eli spat in the direction of one of the downed zombies.

The shooting from the courtyard outside ticked down, and seconds later the last of his men surged into the room, spreading out and moving to the exits, until they had all the doors covered. Jameson stood at the foot of the stairs, scanning in all directions, trying to decide the best plan of action in the few seconds he had. As more gunfire erupted on the floors above, he decided he only really had one choice. Every section of the building was critical, but none more than the heart of the nation’s military operations – the Joint Operations Center (JOC), now two floors directly above him.

He turned and took the stairs two and three at a time, knowing Eli would be covering him. Other Marines spread out and followed, hitting the stairs seconds behind him. There was a burst of fire as he turned the first corner, and he turned to see four of his men, on their own initiative, holding the foot of the stairs and firing into the hospital wing. He recognized one of the youngest of his men – Nicks, a corporal only six months promoted to fire team leader – among them.

“Nicks,” he said into the radio. “Strongpoint that position and only withdraw if you have to. I want our access to the other wings and the main reception clear.”

“Understood, Lieutenant,” came the reply.

“And watch your back – we may not be able to hold every entrance to the stairs.”

“We got it, sir.”

The Fall

CentCom Strategic Command Center

Jameson leapt up the stairs, passing the second floor and then slowing as they hit the open corridor that bisected the upper floor of the command center. This was the hub of the operation, and usually heavily guarded, but all Jameson saw as he ran through it were mangled bodies.

Halfway along the corridor they arrived at the smashed-open doors of the Joint Operations Center. Two more RMPs lay on the ground, though one was still twitching and looking up at Jameson pitiably. He moved through the open doorway and looked upon the chaos and carnage that had once been the nerve center of Britain’s defenses.

The entire JOC was trashed. Monitors, keyboards, and chairs were smashed and lying in bits across the floor. The massive panel windows that once lined the far end of the room were also smashed through, with only jagged splinters of broken glass in the frame remaining.

And there were bodies everywhere. The struggle in here looked to have been bloody and brief. Where there might once have been thirty or forty personnel at any given time, all seated at their stations and managing the whole fight for the south, there were now torn and mangled messes littering the floor.

As Jameson, Eli, and the other Marines scanned around them, they noticed a few signs of movement. At the far end of the room, a collapsed desk flipped over, and a figure leapt from underneath it – then began to run full-tilt across the room at them. It had at least three big holes in it, obviously gunshot wounds, but these didn’t stop or even slow it down.

It had made it a quarter of the way across the massive room when Jameson took it down with a single shot. Just before he fired, he realized that he recognized the face, before its features were obliterated. It had been Colonel Broads, second in command of the entire operation.

More movement over on the other side of the room. Another dead body arose from behind a desk, this time to be taken down by Eli before it could make a move.

“Nicks, message, over,” said Jameson.

“Send message, sir.”

Jameson spoke while stepping carefully through the ruins of CentCom. “Get up to the third floor and strongpoint this level.”

“Roger that.”

“Everyone spread out,” Jameson said. “But stay tied in. Check each body in this room. If they’re dead, kill them again.”

Thirty shots later, with most of the JOC cleared, Jameson saw Eli turn and scan the offices running down one edge of the giant room. He knew these were the senior commanders’ offices, and soundproof. He could see that all the doors were shut, though each was fronted by a wall of glass – but the middle one, which Eli approached now, was mostly shot out. What glass was left was splattered with blood on the inside.

There were bodies everywhere, many of them obviously of destroyed dead. But the body pile out in front of the middle office was particularly high and wide.

“I’ve got movement in here, bossman,” said Eli, aiming his rifle into the window of that office.

“On my way,” said Jameson. As he looked up at the shot-out window he added, “I thought that glass was bulletproof…”

Eli glanced over at him and then nodded at the missing panel windows at the front of the JOC, and the massive gaping holes now letting in a cool breeze. “Weren’t they supposed to be bulletproof as well?”

Jameson nodded. “As far as I know, yes.”

“But I guess not.”

“Or someone used a cannon to shoot them out.”

Eli turned again to the middle office, and peered through the shards into the dimness inside, checking the slight movement, and scanning as much of the room as he could make out.

“Would a Gimpy do that, do you think?” asked Eli.

“A General Purpose Machine Gun?” asked Jameson.

“Yeah. Because whoever is in here is holding one, and looks ready to rock…”

* * *

“Go firm,” Jameson said into his chin mic. Immediately the rest of the Marines stopped their slow check of the room and dropped down under hard cover. Two of them moved toward the entrance, keeping that covered, while the others in the room covered their lieutenant and troop sergeant.

Jameson lifted his rifle to the closed door and slowly put his hand out to push it open.

“Hello?” he said.

“Who the fuck is that?” shouted a voice from inside. Jameson recognized it immediately, even though the voice was strained, and clearly in pain.

“Colonel Mayes?” he asked, pulling the door slowly open and peering in.

“One fucking step closer and I’ll blow hell out of you.”

“Sir, this is Lieutenant Jameson, One Troop. Are you injured?”

“The fuck I am. Are you? If you’ve been bitten or scratched I’ll roast the fucking lot of you.”

Jameson and Eli looked at each other, shocked.

“Sir, we have no injuries. Can you lower your weapon so we can assist you?”

“Lower my fucking weapon? Are you mad? They are out there. They’re all going to turn.”

“Sir, if you can just stand down, my men will take care of any… threats.”

At this, Mayes laughed. But it wasn’t a healthy laugh, and Jameson wondered if the fight had tipped the senior officer over the edge, sent him into some kind of dementia.

“You’re too damn late for that, but come on in,” said Mayes.

Jameson pushed the door open, looked around the room, and then stepped in. Eli followed.

Jameson pressed his radio PTT button and quietly said, “Resume sweep of the room.” He then focused on the man lying before him, propped up against the back wall.

His wasn’t the only sprawled-out form in the room. Two others lay near the shot-out window ahead of him, both armed – and both dead of multiple gunshot wounds. Jameson couldn’t recognize either, as both were face down. But he could see they had been shot in their backs – including the backs of their heads.

Mayes was a complete mess. His face was pale and covered with blood, and his left arm had a huge chunk torn out of it – a bright red wound that looked like it went right down to the bone. On top of this, he was covered in scratches, cuts, and numerous bite marks.

A GPMG medium machine gun, over four feet long, lay across his lap, with linked belts of 7.62mm ammunition snaking and piled up around him. There were also hundreds of empty shell casings, as well as piles of the disintegrating links that had held other belts together. The colonel was basically propped up in a pile of his own brass, most of it stained with his own blood. It also occurred to Jameson that if he had been wielding that thing while still on his feet, then the old guy was a lot stronger than he looked.

“That’s right, Lieutenant,” croaked Mayes. “The bastard got me – your old boss, Major Grews. He always was an asshole. I don’t know how he got past medical. But the son of a bitch bit my arm – and the others he’d already turned scratched me to hell before I could hole up in here.”

“Did you get them all?” Jameson asked.

“No. Grews jumped right out the window, but I know I tagged him – more than once. He’s out there somewhere right now. I’m afraid I also shot these two.” He nodded toward the two bodies by the window. “Things got out of control in the chaos.”

Jameson tried to keep any judgment off his face.

Mayes caught the look anyway. “We were being overrun. It was either all of them… or all of us together. They were dead either way. Hell, we’re all already dead…”

He took a few labored breaths before continuing.

“Look, you have to kill everyone in that room,” he said, nodding at the JOC out beyond his door. “And get your men out looking for Grews. He’s a type three, and a hell of a lot faster than a runner – doesn’t stop to eat, just infects and runs like hell for the next. Starting with just him alone, he took down this whole complex in under an hour. If he gets outside the wire and into London… well, it’ll be end of the world, Lieutenant. End of the fucking world.”

The Colonel lapsed into silence and ragged breathing. Jameson looked at Eli, and knew they were both thinking the same thing. They’d seen plenty of runners, but they’d also seen a few of the type threes, the Foxtrots. And the two were worlds apart.

If Grews got out, or another like him, the city could conceivably fall before the outbreak in the south even brushed up against the giant wall they had painstakingly constructed to protect them.

And London would go down like CentCom, like every other military installation, like virtually every other heavily defended place.

It would fall from within.

They Go, You Stay

CentCom Strategic Command Center

“We’ll find him,” Jameson said to the dying old soldier at his feet. He then turned to face Eli, and clicked onto the squad net to issue orders – to throw all of One Troop back into the fight.

“Okay, lads, here it is. We sweep and clear all the way out to the perimeter – and that’s everything, starting here. Four-man teams, watch your intervals, but maintain supporting fields of fire. What we’re looking for is Foxtrots, the nightmare fast ones. And they are fucking dangerous, so do not drop your guard for a second. And we have to take them all down. Because if any of those bastards make it out of this place… ”

He left the words hanging, knowing that every man in his unit would understand the consequences.

He turned back to Mayes even as he saw, in peripheral vision, his men stacking up and spilling out into the corridor, and the sprawling base that surrounded them. Eli hung back, moving back out into the room, going to finish the job that needed doing – the clearing of the JOC.

“We’ll find them,” Jameson repeated to Mayes, then turned to leave – but knowing he would have to shut the door securely behind him. Because not long after this last exchange, he would have to enter this room again – and put down the animated corpse that would soon replace the most indispensable field-grade officer running the fight for Fortress Britain.

“No,” said Mayes urgently, as Jameson turned to leave. “Your men go, but you stay.”

Jameson stopped, hesitating as he stood in the doorway. This was Colonel Mayes giving him a direct order – but the man was injured, infected, and in Jameson’s mind couldn’t be expected to act rationally. But still he stayed where he was.

“There are things you need to know, things that can’t be forgotten or lost. Send your men out. But you stay with me.”

“Sir,” said Jameson. “If we have FNs out there…”

“I don’t give a damn, Lieutenant. This isn’t a request, this is a fucking order. You have no idea.”

Shots erupted from the room outside, three of them in close succession, and then Eli appeared at the door.

“It’s clear in there. Let’s go, boss.”

“I have to stay with the Colonel,” said Jameson, giving Eli a look that his troop sergeant seemed to understand.

This is an order. No questions.

“Find those bastards and take them down.”

Eli nodded once and then he was gone, running out of the ops center to catch up with the rest of One Troop. They would even now be sweeping the floor below and the ground floor simultaneously. A twinge of regret crossed Jameson’s mind, knowing that his men were hunting the very worst that the apocalypse could offer, and he wasn’t with them.

At least the fate of humanity is in the best possible hands.

* * *

Jameson turned back to the Colonel. The senior officer coughed and spat out blood that was darker than it should be, and for the first time Jameson noticed black lines spreading across Mayes’s face, spidering out from his eyes, which were now bloodshot.

“Okay, listen up,” he said. “I don’t have long. Ten, fifteen minutes at most, if the speed people have been turning around here is anything to go by.”

“Do you want me to—” began Jameson, but was cut off.

“No. I’ll do that myself. And that’s not what I need you for. Listen carefully. We have two hundred thousand troops in the field fighting this invasion, and this ops center is the relay point for every decision we make. And right now there’s no one left alive in here to carry on. So you’re going to have to take over until relief from Edinburgh gets here.”

“But—” started Jameson, starting to protest that he was totally unqualified to serve as a theater-level operations officer, never mind commander…

“Just shut up and listen, Lieutenant,” said Mayes. “I don’t have the luxury of time.”

“Sir.”

“Have you heard of Secunda Mortem?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m about to share with you classified information, Lieutenant. Info that only those on the mission and those preparing here know about. That equipment out in the new Biosciences Complex? The machinery you retrieved, that Biacore 4000, and all the other equipment they have in there isn’t just to research a possible vaccine. It’s to manufacture one that is already nearly ready. Secunda Mortem is an operation – run by USOC, the boys in black out at Hereford. It’s objective was to retrieve a scientist trapped in the USA – one who had already developed a vaccine for the infection, but was unable to get it out before being trapped himself. Well, that objective has been achieved. They have the scientist and he has his cure, except it needs to be perfected before we can use it. So the mission has proceeded to Africa. Specifically, the Horn of Africa.”

“The origin of the virus,” said Jameson.

“Exactly. And if that mission is successful, they will be hightailing it back here – and that facility outside will have to be ready and functional. So that we can manufacture the vaccine.” He paused and coughed piteously. “Maybe even before it’s too late, and everyone is already dead.”

Jameson tried to get his mind around this. “Holy shit,” he said, finally.

“Yes, quite. And there’s no one we can pull out of the field to keep this place running, not in time, and not with transport buggered. Anyway, every senior officer in the field is needed there to keep the defense from falling apart, to delay the siege and destruction of London – until we can get the vaccine out. So you have to do this. You need to somehow get the tactical stations and radios up and running, or enough of them to run a skeleton operation. And you need to man them.”

Mayes gave Jameson a moment for this to sink in. He then concluded, “And delaying the fall is the best we’re going to be able to do.”

“I thought the invasion was being quelled,” said Jameson, half-stunned, and just parrotting the official line. He’d never really believed it. Now his skepticism was confirmed.

“Not in the slightest,” said Mayes. “And it isn’t going to happen. We’re on the verge of losing Portsmouth right now, and with that the entirety of the south. We have estimates of an army of a million undead already in the field. And we’ve spent most of our heavy ordnance.”

Jameson reeled. “A million?”

“Yes, Lieutenant. A million. Soon it will be tens of millions. And our deployed units in the field are already outnumbered five to one. The only thing we have going for us is that most of the dead haven’t reached London, or the main line of resistance – the MLR we’ve planned and fortified. Yet.”

Jameson looked into the Colonel’s eyes. And it occurred to him that, in his last minutes on this Earth, Colonel Mayes was sparing not a single thought for himself. Instead, he was thinking of everyone else.

Mayes coughed up blood, then went on. “In two years, no one ever figured out how it works, or exactly what drives them. But, following whatever urge or instinct, they’re all heading toward London now. Even though most of them are miles from the front, they still somehow know exactly which direction to head in. Those damn noises they make urge on the others… it’s like some twisted fucking game of Chinese whispers and they are much better at playing it than we are.”

Mayes coughed again, this time more violently, and Jameson saw a trickle of black blood seep down the side of his mouth and drip onto his uniform.

“Do you understand what I’m saying? You have to use what is left of our forces to delay the onslaught. If you can win a few engagements, then all to the good. But the main thing is to conduct a harassing and delaying action – so we can have some chance of getting the vaccine rolled out. When and if that happens, you’ve got to start vaccinating everyone left alive – soldiers first, civilian next, in the field and on the run if necessary.”

Jameson boggled at this. It was as if he was seeing the end days war-gamed out in front of him. He said, “But how is a vaccine going to stop them? They can still kill and devour.”

“Sure. But with no new victims turning, that means the numbers can’t keep stacking up against us. We’ll have capped the size of their forces. It would also massively reduce the threat of the Foxtrots – they’ll flash through and wound people. But we tape them up and throw them back in the mix.” He coughed piteously, fighting to get his voice back. “And it will mean that everyone left alive can stand and fight.”

Jameson nodded. He got it. This was their only hope. And it was slim enough. But it was real.

“You’ll have other problems though.”

“What?”

“Riots in the city – order is breaking down. Gangs of looters, some of them armed. Our civic control is collapsing as the noose closes. London might devour itself before the dead do.”

Jameson shook his head. Or, he thought, the city might fall from an internal outbreak. Just like this place did.

“I have a lot to tell you, and little time to do it. And unless you can spring me a general out of thin air, you are it. Until someone of rank can get down here from Edinburgh and take charge. But God knows how long that will take, or even if it will be possible now. For now… you’re it. And you just got yourself a field promotion to captain… no, sod it… to major. Consider yourself the new Grews – and a damn sight more capable than he ever was. You can thank the dead for the privilege.”

Jameson exhaled heavily, the reality of all this hitting him.

“Okay,” he said. “What do I have to do?”

Two Knives to a Knife Fight

JFK - Bridge

“…What?” Drake looked at Abrams in bafflement. The two were still standing out on the observation deck, having been drawn there by the streaking object rising up from the edge of land. And Drake was clearly stunned in the immediate aftermath of their Predator drone having somehow been shot out of the sky, right over their goddamned heads.

“Sir, I said we just lost our eyes on the Admiral Nakhimov—”

But before he could finish his statement, there were more reports pouring in from CIC on the open channel, and Drake was staggering back inside to hear them. The voice speaking now was one of Campbell’s subordinates, a male voice, young. Drake didn’t know where Campbell was. Fully tasked, probably.

“Bridge, CIC. Be advised, poin—”

Drake cut him off. “Who the hell did this?”

There was a tiny pause on the other end as the junior officer shifted gears. “Sir, unknown at this time. We are profiling the missile now. Point of origin was on shore, just north of the naval base.”

Drake turned around to see that Abrams had followed him back inside. Drake said, “We need to know what the hell is going on with that goddamned shore mission.”

Abrams stepped up close to him. “Sir, respectfully, what we need is to get some kind of ISR up – and right no—”

Drake silenced him with his hand. CIC was back on.

“Bridge, CIC. Missile profiles as a Starstreak short-range MANPAD.”

The Starstreak was a British man-portable air defense system, like the Stinger – except much higher-tech, more deadly, and a hell of a lot higher-velocity, traveling at Mach 3.5. This made it the fastest short-range surface-to-air missile in the world, and a serious threat.

Drake knew all this. He was just having trouble calling up the details. As he blinked, it slowly came back to him. Now he had to try to process it – and to decide, and to act. What he said was, “I know I pissed those CentCom guys off, but I presume it’s not the British shooting at us.”

“No,” Abrams said.

“So where the hell would the Russians get one of those?”

“Pretty much any overseas British military base they cared to scavenge.”

Oh, yeah, Drake thought. The British were the only country other than the U.S. with a significant overseas military presence…

“Last of her kind,” Drake said, finally.

“What?” Abrams asked. “Sir?”

“That was probably the last MQ-1 General Atomics Predator ever to fly.”

Abrams was visibly trying to disguise his total failure to understand why Drake would be babbling on about something like that. He was on the verge of doing an end-run around the Commander entirely. Seconds were ticking off the clock; and every one of them had potentially lethal implications.

He decided to try one more time. “Sir, right now we have absolutely no idea what the Admiral Nakhimov is doing. We need to get some kind of air up, to get eyes on them. And we need to do it right now.”

* * *

Because they were floating on the landward side of the carrier, Henno and Predator also saw the same bright streak across the sky, originating on land and arcing out over the water, that those on the Bridge did. But it wasn’t coming their way, there wasn’t a damned thing they could do about it – and they had a very heavy dead Russian diver to haul over the side of their boat.

“Well, I just can’t think why no one thought to put a fish gaff in the bloody load-out,” Henno grunted, as they dragged the body in, and it flopped down into the bottom like a very large tuna.

The first thing Predator did was flexicuff the body, wrists behind back. Henno snorted in amusement. “Hey, man,” Pred said. “I don’t want to end up like that dude who loaded a dead deer into his truck – only to have it wake up halfway home.”

“Fair play, I guess. We’re on the hook for this dinghy.”

They also both knew that only doctors could pronounce someone dead – and Spetsnaz guys were fucking dangerous. However, as Pred rolled the body back over, then got his mask and hood off, the deep blue tint of his face and lips told the tale. This dead man was truly dead.

Pred patted him down. “No obvious wounds… then again, diving accidents have probably killed more people than syphilis.”

Henno grunted. “Not divers at this skill level.”

“Fair point. Hey, look – two empty knife sheaths.”

Henno’s face remained impassive. “That might be a good sign. No one down there to take those off him – no one but our bonny boy. So Homer lives. What’s that on his neck?”

It looked like a swatch of tattoo ink peaking out. Pred pulled the neoprene hood further down. It revealed Cyrillic text, which read: “мировые лохи”. Pred looked up at Henno, who squinted in at it.

“Well, if my sixteen-week intensive Russian module don’t fail me… I think it reads: ‘fuck the world’? No, wait – ‘world fuckers’.”

Pred snorted. “Nice cheery outlook these guys have.”

Henno cocked his head. “Eh, might be their unit nickname. Look, it’s on a patch on his gear, as well.”

Pred wrinkled his nose. “What the hell kind of unit nickname is that?”

Henno shrugged. “Christ knows. The ones I heard back in the world were shite like reidoviki, for ‘raiders’, or okhotniki—”

He stopped mid-syllable as the water’s surface to the north of them churned and splashed, and a phhttt phhtt sound whistled through the air over their heads.

It took both of them a few hundred milliseconds to work out what the hell that was, and then drop down into the bottom of the boat. The incoming rounds were very much subsonic at this point, so they didn’t make that snapping noise of collapsing air pockets overhead.

But they’d still kill them just as dead.

The wild scattering burst of gunfire, from such an utterly unexpected direction – under the fucking ocean surface – continued for a full 2.5 seconds, kicking up splashes of water, and making the air over the raft a zipping swarm of lead wasps.

“Dude!” Pred said, finally poking his head and his rifle up over the side of the raft, as the underwater enfilade finally stopped. “The fuck…?”

Henno was down on his back in the bottom of the boat, weapon on his chest. “Amphibious rifle, mate. Which means there’s still someone else down there. Because I didn’t see one of those on Homer when he went in.”

Pred shook his head, and tried to peer down past the surface of the water. “Fuck it,” he said. “I’m going in.”

Henno rolled over and got up. “No, leave it. If he needs help, he’ll find a way to come ask for it. Anyway, you’ll do nought down there but sink.”

Pred couldn’t really argue with that. But he also found it very hard to sit still and do nothing. Looking around first, as if there might be someone around who would find this silly, he put his rifle down, leaned out over the edge of the boat – and plunged his huge head into the water. Upside down, he panned around, trying to make out something, anything.

But there was nothing to see.

* * *

Homer had ID’d the weapon when he closed with the second enemy diver – the one who had swum up right behind him and touched him on the elbow – and now had it wedged it underneath his left arm. It was an ADS amphibious assault rifle, a very dangerous article.

Specifically designed for Spetsnaz combat divers, it had a bullpup configuration (magazine in the stock), with a carrying handle above and a suppressor on the barrel – and even a 40mm grenade launcher underneath. It was the first such weapon that could be fired both underwater and above it, allowing Soviet frogmen to carry just one. A quick mag change to different ammo was all that was required when going from water to shore, or when boarding a vessel. The weapon’s effective max range underwater, with its specially designed cartridge, was only about 25 meters at this depth.

But, luckily, it also had a minimum effective range – namely, the length of the damned barrel – and Homer had managed to get inside its kill radius, as he’d intended.

The entire magazine the Spetsnaz diver fired off, on full auto, was probably due to his finger being wrenched across the trigger by Homer’s armlock. Thirty deadly darting lead fish left the barrel, raced through the water at a 45-degree angle, and headed for the surface, leaving tiny white trails behind them.

Homer’s challenge now was to maintain this grapple. If the guy broke contact, and was able to reload, he’d make short work of the SEAL, probably stitching him from to crotch to neck with 5.45mm underwater-optimized PSP rounds.

Not improving the situation was the fact that, over this guy’s shoulder, Homer could now see yet another enemy diver swimming toward them – at high speed. This one could see perfectly well the fight that was going on. Homer’s days of being mistaken for a Russian were at an end.

Now he very much needed to finish one of them – before he was facing two. Or maybe facing the whole team, if this spot became a local center of attention. And Homer had absolutely no idea how many of these guys were down here. The water around the hull of the giant ship might be crawling with them.

With his forearm under the guy’s tricep, Homer wrenched upward with all his strength. He hoped this would keep the man immobilized long enough for him to get a knife out. But the Russian seemed insensible to the pain, and just launched into a very rapid and seemingly well-practiced flurry of dirty tricks – like a boxing combination, but in some bruising aquatic street fight.

First he put his left hand, palm out, into Homer’s face, dislodging his dive mask and wrenching his head back. He instantly reset that hand, formed a fist with middle knuckle protruding, and popped Homer in the left side of the neck, at the precise nerve point level with his Adam’s apple. Homer knew a hard enough strike to this nerve nexus can cause instant unconsciousness – but in this case just resulted in his chest and arm muscles going instantly weak and numb. Now, with Homer’s grip on him relaxed, the Russian brought both feet up, planted his fins in Homer’s chest – right on that slash wound, which stung like hell again – and kicked off. All taken together, this separated the two of them, the Russian floating smoothly away – with his rifle in tow.

Homer figured that was it, then. This guy would be skilled enough to reload before Homer could close the distance again. And then it would be over. But he had no option other than to try. The guy might still fumble the reload.

But as Homer paddled madly to reverse his momentum, catch up, and lock on again, he saw the diver simply sling the rifle back over his shoulder – and pull out a big dive knife.

Either he carried no spare magazines, which seemed unlikely. Or else he was just such a hard-bitten badass that he relished a good underwater knife fight. Like he just never got enough of those.

And that was when the second enemy diver floated in, touched the first one on the shoulder, then paddled smoothly out ten feet to the side, while drawing his own dive knife.

So it was going to be two on one now.

And Homer was reminded that this was why SEAL training was never fair. Because combat almost never was.

He desperately wanted to clear his dislodged mask with air from his regulator, and get it back on. But there was no time. Another annoying thing about combat: one rarely got to call timeout for minor equipment failure – and almost no equipment was so minor that its failure couldn’t get you killed. So Homer simply hauled the Russian knife out of his leg sheath again, into a solid underhand grip.

And he got ready to dance again.

Only this time with twice as many partners.

On the upside, he remembered the first Kasatka he had taken off the earlier guy was still floating by its lanyard from his left wrist. He moved that hand in a wax on motion and got the second knife into an overhand grip.

Knives akimbo.

Homer suddenly felt very alone down here.

God surely hadn’t forsaken him.

But, for the foreseeable future, his left hand was going to have to be his dive buddy.

The Fight of Their Lives

Jesus Two Zero - CSAR Mission, Over the South Atlantic

So now the CSAR mission had a second casualty – the rescue swimmer, who was rolling around on the deck, clutching his face, and screaming. And the main cabin was looking like nothing so much as a field hospital on the losing side of some blood-drenched nineteenth-century battle.

But there was nothing Ali could do for him in this moment – not least because she was the last man standing back there. And it was back to the first rule of battlefield medicine. She couldn’t help anybody if they were all dead.

One reason the Spetsnaz sniper had been able to make his impossible two-in-one shot on the door gunner was that the Seahawk’s pilot had, with the cessation of incoming minigun fire, leveled them out again. Ali could almost hear the two of them up there start breathing again, when the metal storm that had been lashing them blew over.

And so it was now, when they were flying nearly level again, that Ali got a second, better look at her nemesis – the opposing sniper in the other helo. She slid back to the right side, brought her weapon up onto the window ledge, and sighted in. Her opponent’s success so far had perhaps made him cocky, because he had fractionally raised his profile in the doorway, just a bit back in the shadows of the interior.

As his head came into view and passed her crosshairs, Ali instantly took the shot – and then, as per long practice, looked to see where it landed, so she could adjust if necessary and fire again. The first thing she saw was that she had missed – because the head was still there.

But then, just as the light shifted, her scope landed for a fraction of a second on his face, and what she saw was: a scarred, and scowling, and tattooed mask of hate, pasted on what was obviously a complete and total hard man. His visible tattoos included a dagger sticking through his left eye; and, rather tauntingly, a red target reticle, or crosshairs, circled around the right one. The final tattoo on his face was text. It read: “мировые лохи”.

Nice, Ali thought. Classy dude.

Much scarier than the hardness and the hatred, though, was his coolness and poise. His soul somehow came out of those cold green eyes, and the message it transmitted was: I’ve got all eternity to kill you.

With a start, Ali realized she was hypnotized and ogling, when she should be fucking shooting. So she took her second shot – sparing the ballistics calculations and shooting on instinct and inference – in the same instant he took his.

His incoming round clipped her ICS headset on the right cup, tearing the whole thing from her head.

But hers clipped his fucking ear. Most of the ear disappeared, the rest left hanging off. Then he spun out of view again.

And she definitely wasn’t going to consider this dude to be down. Not until she personally saw a round go through that fucking bullseye – which he’d been thoughtful enough to paint around his eye for her. Because she damned well wasn’t going to let that go to waste.

And also because: fuck him.

For some reason, a wave of peace now washed over Ali and calmed her hyper-firing nerves and neurons, as she realized for the first time, and for certain:

She was in the fight of her life.

* * *

Whirl… parry… paddle… flutter-kick… stab… try to breathe…

This was like fighting off circling sharks. Homer was deep into it now, trying to take on two skilled combat divers at once. SEALs learn an unbelievable amount about fighting, and more than virtually anyone about diving. But actually fighting underwater just doesn’t come up all that often, so it wasn’t a big focus.

The way these two Spetsnaz divers fought, though… Homer had the impression they made a point of training for it.

He parried a slashing strike with his right-hand blade. It worked, but it exacted a cost – his right forearm was still all messed up from being stabbed through, and the jarring impact made it worse. The grip strength of the forearm was failing. Soon, he wouldn’t even be able to hold that knife, never mind wield it effectively.

Anyway, it was nearly impossible to take on two skilled opponents in a melee at once, even in the best of circumstances. And these circumstances weren’t good: Homer was thrice wounded, he was without a diving mask. His breathing was in trouble, and his strength flagging, from all the paddling and twisting he had to do to keep from being circled, enveloped, taken from behind, and gutted.

There was probably only one way this could end, and it looked like it was heading that way fast.

Homer wasn’t sure whether these guys were toying with him or just being cautious, making sure to take him out without undue risk of being killed or wounded themselves. But Homer didn’t think caution was a big watchword with this particular unit.

Anyway, his long list of problems and handicaps was of absolutely no consequence. The maximum effective range of an excuse was always zero yards. And SEALs are never out of the fight.

But he was going to have to gamble again.

He waited until the two of them spread to their widest interval, to come in and attack him from two sides. Then he waited some more, for them to start closing in. And now he turned and blasted forward for all he was worth, straight at the one on the right, an instant burst of explosive speed, kicking and stroking like Michael Phelps on meth.

His target hesitated, torn between trying to retreat and getting set to defend himself, and was finally forced to defend. And Homer, like the rabbit running from the fox, had the advantage of better motivation. Desperation, really.

He also had twice as many knives.

He whirled, feinted, slashed, and stabbed. In two seconds – which he figured was about all the time he had before the other guy arrived to perforate his liver – the Spetsnaz diver was cut in two places. This didn’t seem to faze him, and he went down fighting, scoring his blade across Homer’s shoulder and cheek. But he only did it at the same time that Homer buried a Kasatka in his throat.

One down. Now he had a fighting chance.

Homer pulled the knife free and whirled to face the second threat, who he knew would be right on him.

A bright blur flashed by his face as he spun.

And then he saw the second guy kicking and stroking away. For a second, Homer didn’t know what had happened.

Then the salt water hit the top of his windpipe.

His gaze darted down – to the cleanly cut end of his own airline, floating free in the water.

Damn, he thought.

How did I not see that coming?

Love in All Directions

SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse

Juice moved at a quick jog along the outside wall of the building, the corrugated steel wall off his left elbow violently rattling and banging, with Sergeant Vorster ranging just behind him.

Occasionally, they had to swerve further toward the interior, when pallets were stacked up against the outside wall. But, so far, they’d found no additional external entrances – or even internal ones that led to external entrances. They continued threading through this maze, sticking as close to the outside wall as possible.

Juice’s radio went again. The voice on the other end sounded a lot more stressed than last time. “Biltong, CIC. Be advised – you need to exfil that position and get to your extraction point. You need to leave NOW and RTB. Over.”

Juice sighed again. “Roger that. We’ll be out of here in a minute. There’s just one thing we’ve gotta do first. Wait out.”

“Biltong, CIC. You do not understand. There is a real possibility that, in the very near future, the USS John F. Kennedy is going to be FUCKING LEAVING.”

Juice’s eyebrow went up, but he said only, “Copy that.”

Belatedly, he remembered his direct video feed from their Fire Scout, which was still orbiting overhead outside. That made him want to slap his forehead, but then again he’d had a lot on his mind. He flipped down his video monocle and changed channels on that transceiver to the UAV. And then he saw what was waiting for them outside.

And very quickly, he really wished he hadn’t. Hundreds or maybe thousands of dead were converging on the warehouse, from all directions.

SAS Saldanha was rocking like the Vans Warped Tour.

* * *

Ali realized she was letting herself get swamped with tactical details – with staying alive, and somehow countering this death-dealing uber-sniper in the other helo. But what she really needed to be thinking about was the strategic picture: namely, how they were going to accomplish their mission and get their goddamned pilot back. Which was the whole point of coming out here in the first place.

It was just hard to be strategic when you were having your ass kicked, and staying alive one breath at a time.

She hadn’t been able to see whether the Russians had got the CAG out of the water and on board yet. But she assumed not – or else they wouldn’t still be hovering there, acting like a target. They’d be hauling ass for home.

Thinking about this, Ali realized this meant her tactical objective, and her strategic one, were actually the same. Kill that fucking sniper, and drive the Orca off this rescue site – basically, get it the hell out of their CSAR mission.

And with both miniguns down now, the helo that was going to fly away from this fight would be the one with the best sniper on it.

As she hunkered down and prepared to pop and shoot again, Ali found herself having to work to get her breathing under control, so she could make her shots. Ordinarily, she was superhumanly good at this – perfect control of both mind and body was a major secret of her success. In fact, she normally did it unconsciously, purely as second nature.

On the other hand, there was a lot of shit going on around her right now. Zoning all of that out was also part of the training, and experience. But until you’ve tried to make a shot at 250 yards, riding the equivalent of a roller coaster, with people bleeding and screaming all around you – and with another totally lethal sniper trying to turn your head into a canoe… well, don’t judge.

Ali knew she was out of time. She was, somehow, going to have to win this thing. Or else this guy was eventually going to just shoot them out of the ai—

This thought was amputated by Ali’s stomach climbing up into her throat as the aircraft fell out of the sky around her – nearly simultaneously banking, dropping, and going into an uncontrolled flat spin. The airframe also began to shriek, as if it was dying, which it was, and the shrieking quickly grew in volume and intensity.

Out of long habit, and also because she had little choice, Ali quickly put herself down on the deck, flat on her back – getting horizontal fast. This was the standard routine to keep her vertebrae from being compressed and permanently destroyed in a hard landing, or crash landing, of a rotary-wing aircraft. She knew it was pointless on this occasion – this thing was almost certainly going to come apart on impact with the water, killing her instantly.

She was about to become something like the four hundredth American special operator to buy it in a helo crash.

At least it wouldn’t be the stupid zombies that got her.

She mentally shrugged. There were now too many G-forces gripping her to move at all. As time dilated and spun out as it does at such times, and Ali lay prone at the center of this horrible, frozen, car-crash moment, the world whirling around her with outrageous force, the noises growing louder and more violent, she was actually amazed the Spetsnaz sniper had let them stay in the air this long. The MH-60 was a tough old bird, very survivable.

But this guy was good enough to find the seams.

And now he must have shot something the Seahawk couldn’t stay in the air without.

As their spin picked up speed, sending her brain careening in loops around her skull, Ali remembered that she was sharing this cabin with two other warriors – the dead crew chief, and the terribly wounded rescue swimmer. The swimmer slid into her shoulder from the centrifugal forces, still clutching his face. He was also still writhing and kicking from the pain, but he’d stopped hollering and cursing. Now he just whimpered and cried.

Mustering her strength, Ali put her arm around and under him, getting his head on her shoulder, cradling him. They’d go out this way – together. Not alone.

That was something. Being alone sucked.

Dying alone would be even worse.

And with this, Ali realized that her very last thought in this world was going to be of… Homer. No surprise there.

Dying out here over the empty ocean, so far away from him, was okay – she could live with that.

Much worse was the thought of him having to live on without her. And what she really couldn’t bear was: the thought of how she had left things. His last memory of her was going to be of her unceremoniously dumping him, out on that flight deck, minutes before the missile attack.

She’d done this, broken things off, to try and dodge the peril of their love for each other – of that love making each unwilling to sacrifice the other to the mission, if required. And leaving them both unable to fulfill their duty. Okay, and also maybe to try to dodge the unbearable pain of perhaps ultimately having to watch him die. Now it looked like maybe there was really no way of dodging any of that. The only safe way out would be to stop caring.

And there was no way she could do that.

This woman who had accomplished every impossible task she’d ever set herself had now been stopped cold by this insoluble problem. She knew it now. She could never stop loving him. She didn’t even want to any more.

But she knew she at least didn’t have to worry about Homer’s safety, in her last seconds on this Earth. She knew where he’d been headed with his scuba gear, and what he had in mind. But it didn’t scare her. Because he was back in the water, his true home, and where he’d be just fine.

As Ali would be, too – down in the water, all her problems ended – after just a few more spins, and the small number of heartbeats that were left to her. She would die with love in her heart. That would be her little victory over the hatred manifested by the Spetsnaz sniper.

It would have to be enough.

And in her very last seconds, she amended her view about why soldiers fought, why she herself fought. She’d been wrong. It actually was because of love for what was behind her – as well as love for those to either side.

It was love in all directions.

She stroked the swimmer’s blood-matted hair.

There, there.

Calling Him Home

Open Water, Beneath the JFK

Homer didn’t even have a full breath to work with, to tide him over. He’d only had about a half a lungful when catastrophe struck, and he got his own airline cut. He was almost instantly in a bad oxygen deficit. Hell, he’d already been breathing hard from the fight.

But there was a certain poetic justice to it. “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,” saith the Lord, Homer thought mordantly. Romans 12:19.

Nor, did it turn out, was this guy as cautious as Homer had been with his buddy earlier. He didn’t want to just sit back and watch Homer drown.

He wanted to gut him like a mackerel.

The big Russian diver waded back in swinging, forcing Homer to back-pedal and dig down deep just to counter his attacks. Homer had the immediate and unmistakable impression this guy was looking for instant payback – for his dive buddy, who had just got stabbed through the throat. In seconds, Homer was on his back foot, with two additional small slash wounds from strikes he hadn’t been able to stop. It probably wasn’t going to be the proverbial death by a thousand cuts.

Probably one big one would get him first.

And if that didn’t, drowning would. He had only a few seconds of oxygen left.

A few seconds to somehow finish this.

Because if he tried to run for it now, to swim for the surface, as had his first opponent, the exact same thing would happen: this guy would be right behind him, and would either cut him to ribbons from beneath, or else just drag him down while he drowned.

To run was death.

But so was to stay and fight.

There was no way out.

The overwhelming urge to inhale that first fatal breath of liquid gripped him. But Homer knew from the drownproofing training that he could exhale a tiny bit of air – he didn’t have much to spare – and that would dampen down his autonomic nervous system’s impulse to inhale. It would basically fool the body, for a very short time, into thinking it was on the verge of getting air.

He blocked an incoming stab with his right-hand blade – and the collision knocked that knife out of his hand. It spun glitteringly away into the darkness below. His right-hand grip was shot now, anyway. Most of that arm was numb and buzzing.

He blocked the follow-up attack with his left-hand knife, still kicking steadily backward.

He could feel the physical effects of the hypoxia, or oxygen deficiency, taking him now. First, the muscles went weak, biggest ones first – glutes, lats, quadriceps, deltoids. And those were exactly the ones he needed in this fight, for staying upright and stable, for kicking and paddling, striking and blocking…

And just as with the CAG on take-off in his F-35, Homer’s vision started to constrict to pinholes, hazy black enveloping the periphery, from the lack of oxygen to his corneas. All he could see was a wormhole view of this implacable, vengeful killer, lunging at him ceaselessly…

The lactic acid was also building up in his bloodstream and tissues, causing a special kind of fatigue, acidosis, that was acutely painful. The hypoxia also made him grow dizzy, and his mental clarity and judgment began to fail… coordination suffered… lips and extremities started turning blue. As he approached the final point of blacking out, the will to not give up, to keep fighting, got harder and harder to find.

Only those who have repeatedly been forced to battle to the outside edge of exhaustion – and, in the case of SEALs, to the edge of asphyxia and drowning – can know how they will react, much less find a way to continue to fight, in these circumstances. But, even with those advantages…

Homer was just about finished.

All he could see now was the swelling blackness – and that diver and knife which kept coming after him, lunge after lunge, strike after strike… and the misty brown clouds of his own blood floating in the water around him.

Heading for the surface was totally out now – even if the Russian didn’t kill him, Homer didn’t have the strength to cover the distance. And he definitely didn’t have enough oxygen to make it that far.

Any second now, he would black out.

And then he would either drown, or be stabbed to death. And he wouldn’t even know which.

Somehow his limbs still moved, seemingly on their own, both to paddle weakly away and to defend against the incoming attacks. It was only decades of training and experience that kept him going at all. But it couldn’t last.

He looked up now, toward the lighter water up above him. It seemed to turn heavenly now – and in that golden glow there slowly resolved the face of… his wife. She called to him, to come home, to come and join her there. And now he also saw the faces of their children, Ben and Isabel, who were somehow right there beside her.

Now all he wanted was to go to them.

He parried one more attack…

…but lost his grip on the second knife as he did…

…and then, out of weapons, totally out of options, he turned and kicked out and stroked with the last flickers of his evaporating strength. He kicked and swam for the light, with everything he had left in him.

He knew he could never make it to the surface. He knew he’d never outrace the killer and blade behind him.

But those golden faces drew him on.

God was calling him home.

* * *

Emily had somehow found – in an abandoned storage closet full of Christmas decorations – a string of white fairy lights, which she had strung up in the kids’ corner of the compartment they shared with their father, over their little cots. The pale gray bulkheads there had also been hung with their colorful drawings, on bright white paper.

So Ben and Isabel’s faces were in fact at that moment bathed in a lovely golden glow. The whole stateroom, with Emily holding court as babysitter, and the two children waiting for the return of their father, was warm and awash with a glowing light.

Also glowing was the digital face of Emily’s little MP3 player. When Isabel first found this in Emily’s bag, she’d asked what it was.

“It’s my MP3 player… my music player.”

Isabel had merely given her a blank look. And when Emily placed the earbuds in the girl’s tiny ears, then carefully selected some songs with lyrics that wouldn’t be too traumatizing… and then finally saw her eyes go wide and light up… Emily realized with a start that the girl might actually never have heard music before. Or at least had not heard any since before she was too little to remember it.

Isabel had lived almost her whole life in the twilight at the end of the world.

With this crushing thought, but also with such a lovely and delighted vision before her, Emily couldn’t decide whether to laugh out loud or to sob. She felt like doing both at the same time. But she fought back the tears, maintaining her composure for the two little ones. The last thing they needed was another adult guardian folding on them.

Ben grabbed her sleeve. “Can I listen next, Emily?”

“Yes, you can. And you can call me Em if you want.”

Ben laughed, his smile bright and beautiful. “We’ll call you Auntie Em! Like in The Wizard of Oz!”

Isabel took one of the earbuds out and said, “I want to play this for Daddy.”

Emily squeezed her arm and said, “He’ll like that.”

But then Isabel frowned. “But you’ll go away when he comes back.”

Emily closed the girl’s tiny fingers around the matchbook-sized MP3 player. “Then you can have this.”

Emily lit up again. “To keep? Forever? And ever?”

“Forever and ever.”

Isabel’s smile seemed to light up the whole ship, the whole world. Emily thought maybe the girl was coming to find that her own little world had become safe, maybe even fun. And in so doing, she made Emily’s worth living in again. And worth fighting for.

But then, as the eighteen-year-old and the three-year-old looked into each other’s eyes, Isabel’s smile started to fade again. She said, “Our mommy’s gone to live in heaven. She has to stay there forever.”

Emily swallowed hard, searching for some response.

“I’m scared Daddy’s going to go live with her. And leave us alone again. I don’t want him to.”

Emily picked up the little girl and cradled her in her lap. Wiping a tear from the corner of her own eye, out of sight, she said, “He would never do that. Your daddy’s not going to heaven. Remember how he came all that way to find you, where you were in the last place? He’ll always come back for you. He’ll always come back.”

Isabel just nodded as Emily rocked her.

But, over the little girl’s shoulder, Emily could see Ben watching them. The older boy looked at her like he knew better. Emily guessed he was old enough to understand something about his father’s job – and to know that what she had said was not necessarily true. And, as she looked away guiltily, she knew it wasn’t true, either.

Their daddy might indeed not be coming back, and would instead be going to heaven.

Where he’d live – forever and ever.

* * *

Homer’s oxygen and strength were gone now.

His family’s beautiful faces still called out to him from the shrinking pinhole of light, so far up above him.

But he knew there was only one way to get back to them – and it wasn’t up there, at least not yet. He also knew his job would always be to stay between the dangers that pursued them down here in the cold and dark – and the innocent, defenseless, precious cargo on that bright ship above.

And in the next second after he turned to swim away toward the surface… as he felt his consciousness begin to wink out… and he felt himself starting to inhale, no longer able to control his body… and as he could begin to feel the vise-like hand closing around his ankle… and his flesh tensed against the cut he felt coming… he knew that now was the time to execute his last gambit.

He knew that now he had to be reborn.

In a blur of bubbles, he reversed course – his body folding in half over itself and spinning 180 degrees in place, doing a lightning flip-turn in the water, as only a man who has spent half his life in the ocean can do. Instantly face-to-face with the pursuing Spetsnaz killer, Homer blocked the incoming knife strike with his left arm. And with his failing right one, he yanked the man’s regulator from his mouth and struck him viciously with two knuckles in the solar plexus – location of the nerve center that controls the whole cardiorespiratory system.

The blow caused the Russian to instantly, and totally involuntarily, draw in a deep, full breath – of seawater.

And now Homer just floated in place, very nearly dead himself, and watched the drowning man flail around and die.

And then he got the dead man’s regulator in his own mouth, and took great deep draughts of the unbelievably sweet oxygenated air. When both his body and his mind had crawled back from the blackness at the edge of death, and dialed back up to something like life again, he got his own tank off, removed the Russian’s, and strapped the new one on.

Finally, he pried the knife from the dead man’s grasp.

Now he could finish this thing.

You are NEVER Out of the Fight

Jesus Two Zero - CSAR Mission, Over the South Atlantic

Screaming, shuddering, howling as if being born into the world in blood and thunder, the Seahawk came out of its dive – just inches above the ocean surface – and somehow started to recover from its lethal spin. In a few more terrifying seconds, it had resumed something like normal flight, as someone up on the flight deck regained control.

Unbelievably, it looked like they weren’t all going to die.

Ali filled her half-collapsed lungs with air, heaved herself to her feet, lurched up toward the front, and stuck her head into the flight deck. She found the whole area splashed with blood – and large, ugly, spiderwebbed holes decorating the cockpit glass.

That sonofabitching Spetsnaz sniper had killed their pilot. Right through the damned glass. That was the seam he’d found. But it wasn’t an irreplaceable part.

Because the co-pilot had taken over the controls in time to save them – but with almost no time to spare before they hit the water. Ali didn’t know what would account for the nearly lethal delay between the pilot losing control and the co-pilot regaining it. But she hadn’t been up here, she didn’t know how things had gone down, and the only emotion she felt entitled to was gratitude. All she really knew was that it had been photo-finish close. And that they’d all been saved from a death that had seemed inevitable and imminent.

Not for the first time, Ali’s fate had been out of her hands. But the great thing was to control everything you could; and then get lucky with the rest.

Now she could actually see little sea waves cresting out the front, coming at them head-on – they were that close to the water. Finally the co-pilot, breathing loudly and raggedly, started to get them some altitude. He didn’t seem inclined to speak, and Ali wasn’t sure she could spare much breath for words either.

But she couldn’t see the Russian helo, so she finally managed: “Can you bring us back around?”

The co-pilot didn’t turn to face her as he answered, speaking just loud enough to be audible. “Half the crew’s dead, and the other half’s wounded. I think we’re out of this fight.”

Ali exhaled heavily. She wanted to tell him not to be so dramatic – only a quarter of the crew was wounded. And, much more importantly, she wanted to tell him something Homer had taught her:

You are NEVER out of the fight.

Ma-RINES! We Are LEA-ving!

SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse

As Juice jogged around the last section of the perimeter, looking for doors to secure, his radio went again. He was starting to really regret turning the command channel back on.

“Biltong, CIC. Be advised – there are A LOT more dead inbound, and you are out of time. It’s a big-ass contact, and you’ve got to get out of there now or never. Also be advised: THE JFK IS OUT OF TIME – we are raising anchor to steam north. You’ve got to exfil and RTB – NOW!”

“Biltong copies all.”

And with that, the two remaining combat-effective fire teams of this expedition, consisting of two men each, met up exactly where Juice expected they would: at the same door where they originally came in, the one that led to the room with the booby traps.

“Sitrep,” Juice said.

“Good to go,” Lovell said. “Found two doors, one external, one internal. Both sealed up tight. Even shoved a crate of crap in front of each of ’em.”

“Awesome,” Juice said. “Now let’s get our guys and get the fuck out of here.”

As they turned and trotted back toward their casualty collection point (CCP), Juice continued to monitor the drone video from outside. But he quickly realized there were two problems with this: one, all he could see outside were heaving throngs of dead guys. And, two, while he could look down from the eye-of-God POV of the Fire Scout with this monocle video feed, he couldn’t move the damned camera around where he needed it.

“CIC, Biltong Actual, how copy.”

“CIC copies, send it – FAST.”

Juice struggled to manage his breathing, facing the challenge of trying to speak intelligibly while running in full battle rattle. Thank God for those conditioning runs on the flight deck with Pred, he thought. Wish I’d had the foresight to do it wearing sixty pounds of crap…

“Yeah, can you have your drone pilot fly a quick loop around our position… and let me know if there’s any side of this structure that’s not like a Dead concert?”

“Affirmative, Biltong. Wait one.”

No sooner was this said than Juice saw the drone view looping and banking in his monocle. At its current rate it would complete a full circuit in only a few seconds.

Now the four of them emerged into the open area where they’d left the others. Marines, even banged up, were still consummate pros – the healthy one they’d left here had gotten Raible loaded up onto a gurney, a bag of plasma tucked into his side, ready to move. And everyone’s wounds had been wrapped up and squared away to the extent possible.

Even O’Bannon, the man who’d been grievously wounded in the face, and whose head was now two-thirds wrapped in bloody gauze, looked not only ready to move – he looked ready to fight.

Juice was impressed.

Now he had to do his part – and get the survivors the hell out of there and back to safety.

While the getting was good.

* * *

“Biltong, CIC – it looks to us like only the southwest edge of your building is anything like clear at this point in time, how copy, over?”

Juice not only copied this – he’d seen it himself, taking in the same view as the drone operator.

“Biltong, the good news is that’s also the side facing the docks, and your ride out of there – the southwest side.”

Juice started to inform this guy of the bad news: there wasn’t a fucking door on that side of the warehouse. But he decided to save his breath. Anyway, for people with explosives, door was a fluid concept. And the whole team was already up and moving through the maze-like interior toward that side.

“Biltong, be advised – our asset in theater is armed with a full load of APKWS rockets, and can help clear you an exfil path.”

Juice grunted in response. Now that was actually useful. He grinned, thinking: Things do always go smoother when your Kill Weapon System is both Advanced and Precision…

As the group reached the inside of the southwest building edge, he put down his corner of the gurney, unslung his assault pack, dug around for a couple of breaching charges, and got them stuck on the wall.

“Breaching!” he shouted, causing Marines to duck behind cover, or else lay their own bodies over the wounded.

“Wait!” shouted Lovell. “We just sealed this place up. Now you’re going to blow it open?”

Juice stopped. “Good point.” He had definitely missed a trick there. “Who’s got rope?” A Marine produced a 100m coil from his pack. Juice nodded toward the nearest big pallet of crates. Lovell caught his meaning, and helped him loop the rope around it, then secure it.

“Breaching!” Juice repeated.

The two small charges went up – opening up a hole just large enough for a man to squeeze out of. Two healthy Marines went out first, setting perimeter security. Juice could hear them engaging instantly – shooting fast and steadily. There clearly wasn’t going to be a ton of time for this escape maneuver. Working as a team, they got the wounded out, others joining in the gunplay as they emerged – including the wounded.

Stepping out last, and squinting against the daylight, Juice scanned the area – and could see there were a fair number of dead in sight, most stumbling, some running. A few started heading toward them now, following the sound of the gunfire, suppressed though it was. Juice also got a strong sense there were a hell of a lot more just around each corner of the warehouse. And he didn’t intend to hang around here until they all showed up.

Spitting once into the grass, he nodded at Lovell, and the two of them slung their rifles, grabbed the rope that emerged from the hole, and put their backs into it. Slowly, but just as predicted, the pallet inside scraped across the cement floor, inching toward the hole they had made. When it got there, it should effectively seal it up.

As they hauled for everything they were worth, and the pallet started to close the last few feet… two gray hands appeared around the ragged steel edges of the opening, and a dead dude hauled himself out. He was frantic, and moving jerkily, clearly a fast one. But Juice was faster, dropping the rope and quick-drawing his side arm in a blur, putting a lightning double-tap through its mouth. It collapsed, lifeless – right in the fucking hole, and in the way of the pallet.

Juice could also hear the shooting behind them ramping up even more. This meant that with every second they spent here there would be more dead – and less ammo. He holstered his pistol and grabbed one arm of the protruding dead guy while Lovell grabbed the other. But even as they started to yank it out, another Zulu appeared from inside, trying to climb out around the first. Juice drew again and put it down.

“What the fuck?” Lovell said. “We cleared that place!”

Juice keyed his radio. “CIC, Biltong, can you tell me if the dead are still somehow getting inside this structure?”

There was only the shortest pause, which Juice used to steal a look over his shoulder. He didn’t like what he saw: figures running at them from all directions, all converging on their position – like a zombie explosion filmed and run backward through the projector. The Marines were all shooting and reloading constantly now.

“That’s affirmative, Biltong. Looks like maybe some structural blast damage, near the north corner. It’s not a big breach, but the Zulus appear to be fighting their way inside one at a time, over.”

“Copy that. Listen, I’m going to need you to start walking some of those rockets on, RFN. Start one-zero-zero meters southwest of our position. And keep hitting them in a straight line all the way to that dock. How copy?”

“CIC copies all. Confirm danger-close airstrikes at one-zero-zero meters southwest your current coords.”

“Confirm, confirm!” Juice turned to Lovell. “Now – mo—”

“Biltong, please reconfirm danger-close strikes at—”

“Break, break. Motherfuckers! Put those rockets in now, or you can put ’em as close as you like – because we’ll all be fucking dead.” He twiddled down the volume on that channel and turned back to Lovell. “Move out. You lead the team now. Get to the boat.” And then he bent over to duck back inside the warehouse.

“Bullshit!” Lovell shouted over the outrageous noise of small-arms fire – which was, even then, being drowned out by the first rockets, close enough for them to feel the heat of their exploding warheads. “We’re not going without you.”

Juice paused fractionally, sighed, and just said: “This job’s not done yet. Hold at the dock as long as you can, and I’ll try to be right behind you.” He considered telling Lovell that if he wasn’t back in a few minutes, or if they found themselves in danger of being overrun, he was to cast off and get back to the Kennedy. But it didn’t need saying. Lovell wasn’t stupid, or anything like it.

And before the Marine NCO could protest any more, Juice had disappeared inside. Lovell saw the dark hole light up from half a dozen more pistol shots. Then, somehow, that big pallet got pushed, from the inside, right up to the breaching hole.

And like that, it was sealed up.

And Juice was entombed inside.

Going Toward the Light

JFK - Bridge

Drake finally seemed to come back to the room, taking in his XO’s urgent advice – that, after their Predator had been shot down, they couldn’t long survive without having eyes on the enemy ship. “Okay,” he said. “Recommendations?”

“We’ve only got one option,” said Abrams. “Re-task the Fire Scout.”

Drake crinkled his brow, considering this. “Just give me a second…”

“Sir, we don’t have a second.” He picked up a desk mic. “CIC, Bridge.”

“CIC, go ahead.”

“You need to re-task the Fire Scout UAV. We need it up at 15,000 feet, to give us radar and video imaging of the enemy surface contact. And we need it urgently.”

“Copy that, Bridge. Wait one.” There was a one-second pause, after which Campbell herself came back on.

“Bridge, CIC. That is negative, negative on re-tasking the Fire Scout. Right now the shore team is in heavy contact. We are using that asset both as ISR for their maneuver – and close air support for their breakout and exfil. Repeat: we have troops in contact, and are doing fire support with that asset.”

Abrams looked over at Drake, then responded. “Copy that, LT. But be advised: this is a priority highest tasking. We have to have eyes on that battlecruiser.”

“Copy that. How long do we have?”

Abrams wanted to tell her they had 0.0 seconds. But he knew that, with the Russians a bit over 400km out, and the range of their Shipwreck missiles only 200km, they had a little time left. It was terrible not to know what the Russian ship was doing. But it wouldn’t necessarily be lethal. Not right away, anyway.

Campbell came back on. “Sir, let me finish my gun runs. And clear the Marines’ way out of there.”

Abrams exhaled. “Get it done – ASAFP.”

“Roger that. ETA ten minutes for that re-task.”

Abrams put the mic back down. He started to look over at Drake to see how he was faring. But then his gaze was immediately drawn back out the screens, on the landward side. Onshore, they could now make out tiny explosions blossoming across the base. They seemed to be starting inland and walking out toward the docks, and the water.

The faint sounds of the blasts reached them through the open hatch a few seconds afterward.

* * *

Nine minutes later, Campbell was back on the line.

“Bridge, CIC. I’m ready to re-task the drone. But be advised: unless we can find, engage, and suppress that missile shooter on shore, the one who took down the Predator… then in order to move the Fire Scout without losing it, we’re going to have to get it way down on the deck, keep it at that altitude until it’s way offshore, and then climb. All of which is going to take time.”

This time, Drake responded before Abrams could. And Abrams was nothing but relieved. The last thing he wanted was to see the strike group’s acting commander so incapable that he had to be worked around, or kicked upstairs.

“That’s understood,” Drake said. “Make it happen.”

“Already in progress,” Campbell said.

Abrams moved to the starboard screens and could now see the sleek and faceless little helo drone zipping out over the waves, low enough that it was probably getting wet.

“How long until we’ve got our eyes back?”

“Wait one for ETA.” They all knew this was basically a simple function of the Fire Scout’s top speed, and the max effective range of the Starstreak missiles.

The answer came back: “Six minutes sixteen seconds to safe distance. Then probably another 100 seconds for it to climb to sufficient altitude to reacquire the surface contact.”

Drake and Abrams looked at each other while the seconds ticked away. Then again, a lot of people on the bridge were looking around at other people. It was all incredibly tense. But it looked like this might be okay. They’d been blind, but not for long.

Tick, tock.

The camera view from the Fire Scout was now piped to the one overhead display on the bridge. It showed water zipping along underneath, close enough to make out the ripples.

Mainly just for something to do, to keep from screaming out loud from the tension, Abrams checked the shipboard status boards, and Drake flipped through damage reports – there were too many now for any one man to keep track of – on the touchscreen at his station.

Finally the video view showed the water receding, as the helo drone ascended at its maximum rate of climb.

Tick, tock.

“Commander! The Admiral Nakhimov is on the move!”

Fuck fuck fuck. Obviously the drone had gotten just high enough to reacquire the Russian ship on radar.

Drake cursed, thinking that their timing in being blind couldn’t have been worse – it was totally rotten luck.

Abrams, who was thinking a lot more clearly, knew this wasn’t any kind of luck at all. They had been blinded right then on purpose, their drone shot out of the sky specifically as cover for the battlecruiser’s new advance.

It had all been carefully coordinated.

And, as usual in this engagement, they were being played like a cheap fiddle.

* * *

Corporal Raible found himself floating up toward the light.

At first his reeling and drifting consciousness thought this was it – the light. But it turned out it was only the sun, high up in the sky now, and somewhat bright despite a scattering of high cirrus clouds.

Also, both the sun and clouds were bouncing around crazily. That didn’t make any sense.

No, wait, Raible thought. That’s actually ME bouncing around. He belatedly realized he was flat on his back – and, luckily for him, strapped down. He felt something squishy and cold by his side. Raising his head the inch or so he was capable of, he saw a clear bag of plasma nestled between his hip and arm.

Wait, who the hell’s that for?

“Hey…” he croaked, trying to speak through a mouth that was paper dry. “Did somebody get hit?”

He couldn’t even tell if he’d spoken audibly or not, because of the percussive roar of rifle and pistol fire cranking off crazily on all sides of him. But beneath that, he could also make out that terrible moaning of massed dead in frenzy.

Holy shit… he thought.

And then he saw two brilliant streaking flashes from overhead, a pair of firework-like projectiles zipping across the sky and striking down at the ground ahead, the explosion of their impacts shaking the Earth, and unbalancing whoever was carrying whatever the hell he was lying on. Brass casings were also showering down around him from all directions. Raible could see them bouncing off his body, though he couldn’t feel them.

Wait… Now Raible realized it was a gurney he was lying on, and which was bouncing him all over the place as he was carried forward at a run.

Huh. I guess it was ME who got hit… Well, shit.

There was clearly some morphine in that IV drip. And he had absolutely no memory of the explosion that had taken him down, and nearly taken him out. Why would he?

Now he could also hear guys yelling, as the whole world bounced around him:

“Nine o’clock, nine o’clock!”

“Runners, dude – fucking light ’em up! Shoot! Shoot!”

“Frag up!”

“Reloading!”

“Reloading!”

“I’m out! Who’s got a rifle mag?!”

“FUCKING KEEP MOVING! Another hundred yards!”

That last voice he recognized as Sergeant Lovell’s. And it was pretty much the only sound in this whole auditory horrorscape that was anything like reassuring.

But it was. And it was enough.

Raible could now feel hot pains across his arms and legs and torso – burn wounds? – where he was strapped down, particularly now that he was being carried across the hard dock, and handed over into the boat they’d come in on.

That’s good, he thought, drifting back away from consciousness again. Looks like we’re getting out of here…

And that was when he heard the glorious whine of the boat-mounted minigun start up. It seemed to be firehosing right over his head, spitting out thousands of rounds a minute, sweeping from side to side, and pouring oceans of brass over the side into the Atlantic.

“Get the fuck aboard! Get aboard!”

“We’re not leaving yet!”

“What?!”

“Set a perimeter! WE HOLD HERE!”

The small-arms fire redoubled in intensity, and more explosions echoed out in the grass behind them – the guys were chucking grenades now, dozens of them. Raible vaguely remembered they’d brought more ammo on the boat with them. That was good, too. Finally, he just let his heavy eyelids drift down to half mast, and enjoyed the sight of the blue sky and the drifting white clouds above.

The furious firefight all around him was wrapped in soft cotton wool, and the gentle rocking of the boat on the sea – as the whole structure of it vibrated with the electric death hum of the minigun – lulled him back to sleep.

Hatred’s Little Victory

JFK - Bridge

“Range, speed, and heading!” Abrams barked. The Russian battlecruiser was on the move again. And now he desperately needed to know where to, and how fast.

“Range is 382, speed 32 knots, headed straight for us, dead on!”

Drake looked at Abrams, who said, “Whatever damage we did to them, it wasn’t enough.”

Drake swallowed heavily. “Our hand’s been forced. We have to launch now.” He meant the single combat aircraft they had left which was anything like launch-ready. He was reaching for his phone to call PriFly and issue the order… when Campbell broke in on the open channel.

She’d obviously overheard all this. She said: “Negative, negative, Commander, we canNOT launch aircraft.”

Drake’s hand froze, halfway to the phone handset. “What? Why?”

There was a long pause on the other end, during which Abrams would have sworn he could hear Campbell actually grinding her teeth.

Drake’s phone lit up and buzzed. He answered it. It was Campbell, on a private channel again. Her voice said she was battling to keep her tone calm and neutral. She said:

“Commander, I explained this to you.”

“No,” Drake said. “I relent. You win. Let’s do it. Launch the one bird, alone. I don’t care.”

Now Campbell’s tone said to Drake that it had required a great deal of willpower on her part not to say this over the open channel – where everyone in CIC, and everyone on the bridge, more or less all of Drake’s senior officers, would have heard it.

“Sir, we’re still outside of the 200km radius of their anti-ship missiles. But we are now INSIDE the 400km radius of their S-400 surface-to-air missiles. Anything we put in the air now is going to be blown right back out of it. In seconds.”

Understanding slowly blossomed in Drake’s battered mind. Basically, even if they were still outside of one circle of death… they were now just inside a larger one.

Somehow, Drake had fucked up again.

And he had zero idea about what to do about it now.

* * *

Looking around at all the gore on the Seahawk’s flight deck, Ali realized she was very tired. And she didn’t have the strength to argue with the co-pilot – to try to convince him that they should take this torn-up bird, with its wretchedly shot-up crew, back into the fight.

So instead she just unbuckled the dead pilot, grabbed him under the arms, and dragged him back into the main cabin. For two seconds, she thought about starting chest compressions on him. But she could see he was gone – as was a chunk of his head, inside his blood-dripping helmet.

Looking down at this pitiable figure, she flashed back to that ice-hate mask she’d seen on the face of the Spetsnaz sniper. And she thought:

Hatred won its little victory here.

She turned now to the rescue swimmer, who had made it up onto his hands and knees, and seemed to be fighting through pain and panic, to the point of being able to function. She got him up into a sitting position, then pulled his hand away from his face to check his injuries. It looked like he had actually been hit both with fragments from the destroyed minigun feeder and the ricocheting sniper round.

The fragments had made a mess of his right eye. And the bullet had created a small dark entry wound underneath his jaw on the right side. The exit wound, in the middle of his right cheek, was less small, and a lot less neat. It was a miracle this guy’s airway was intact, but his breathing seemed okay for now.

Ali dug out an oversized Kerlix pad from her aid kit and got it pressed up against the side of his face, covering most of the wounds at once. She hadn’t forgotten the first rule of battlefield medicine. She just didn’t give a shit right now.

And then their flight path suddenly started to go squiffy again. Fuck me…

Ali could hear a faint voice, and realized it was leaking out from the swimmer’s ICS headset, which was lying on the deck, probably shot right off him. She picked it up and put one cup to her ear.

“—ay again: can somebody come back up here, please?”

Ali swivelled the chin mic. “What do you need?”

“Well… it’s just that I’m probably going to pass out from blood loss.”

Ali found her energy returned when needed, and she leapt back up to the flight deck – just in time to see the co-pilot slump over his controls.

Well, hell, she thought. He wasn’t being dramatic after all… half the crew really had been wounded. It turned out he’d been shot high in the left shoulder, where she hadn’t been able to see it before.

The Spetsnaz sniper had gotten both of them.

Ali poured herself into the lead pilot’s seat on the right side and took control of the aircraft. She’d never flown an MH-60 Seahawk before – but she had a good hundred or so hours in UH-60 Black Hawks, and the differences were relatively minor.

It was only when she saw all-new droplets of blood falling on the already blood-splashed controls that she remembered: she’d been hit, too. She could feel the sting of the shrapnel and bullet fragments in her neck and cheek now, as the adrenaline finally bled away.

With one hand on the cyclic, she used the other to dig out another gauze pad, ripped it open with her teeth, and pressed it against her own face and neck. It stuck.

Only now, finally, did her thoughts return to the Russian helo – and to their downed pilot. She brought the battered bird around again, and onto a heading that would take them back toward the transponder signal. As she did so, she could just make out the shrinking speck of the Orca – heading out for the southern horizon.

They must have recovered their swimmers.

Ali frantically checked the color multimap readout on the instrumentation panel, looking for the signal from the CAG’s beacon. To her amazement, it was still there, it was static – and it looked to be right where they had first picked it up.

For a second, Ali’s heart leapt with hope.

She picked up airspeed, then slowed and dropped them down, eyes scanning the trackless ocean surface. Casting around the cockpit, she found a pair of NVGs, powered them up, and put them to one eye.

And there it was, bobbing on the thick swells kicked up by the rotor wash: the flashing infrared strobe on the CAG’s life jacket. The location transponder was sewn into the fabric of the life preserver and survival vest – which just floated there, empty, upon the chop.

It was over. The Russians had their CAG.

The CSAR mission had failed.

For about two seconds, squinting off into the distance, Ali was seized by the manic urge to give chase. But of course she knew that would be folly. Even if there were anyone alive and unhurt left on Jesus Two Zero to carry on the fight, they would be blasted out of the sky .05 seconds after coming within range of the Admiral Nakhimov’s AA batteries.

No. They’d lost this one.

They say you win some and you lose some – but Ali had never really reconciled herself to losing some. She intended to win all of them. And she was going to be a long time sorting through what she had done wrong here – why she had failed to accomplish the mission, safeguard the crew, or kill that sonofabitching Spetsnaz sniper before he did such horrendous damage.

About the only thing she had really accomplished was keeping the aircraft in the air, which was little enough.

But she also knew the enemy always gets a vote – and so do the other people you have to depend on to complete your mission. In fairness, she knew that no one had been more motivated to recover the CAG than this aircrew. And they’d paid with their lives attempting to do so. That they’d gotten trapped into a pattern of wild evasive maneuvers, which made it hard or impossible for Ali to do her job, was neither here nor there, and not really anyone’s fault.

No. Ultimately, Ali had just been beaten, and by another sniper no less. That had never happened before. And she felt an intense desire to see that it never happened again.

Operators don’t do regret – they do resolve. In this case, it was her solemn resolve that nothing like this ever happen again.

* * *

Having explained to Drake why it was fatally impossible for the Kennedy to launch any aircraft now, Campbell failed to resist the temptation to tell him I told you so. “This is why I STRONGLY recommended putting up our air while we still could.”

“What?” Drake said. “When?”

“When I called you an hour ago. When you were down on the deck, by the elevator. I made this VERY clear, and got you to verify that you understood.”

Drake blinked stupidly, racking his brain. He had absolutely no recollection of this conversation. And it was, it seemed, more than he could do to admit to it now. He knew he had fucked up again. And this would be just one fuck-up too many. So instead, he battled to clear his mind, and to try to become effective again.

Looking up, he saw that Abrams had picked up a handset, switched to this channel – and was now carefully following both ends of the conversation. Drake mustered himself and said, “Okay, so we head north. Increase the distance, get out of range of their SAMs again. And then launch.”

There was another short pause. “Sir, that enemy ship is now steaming toward us at its top speed of 32 knots. At our top speed of 40, we’ll only get one mile further from them for every four we travel. And that’s four miles farther away from the shore team. And four miles farther away from our CSAR mission. We might even sail outside the combat radius of the Seahawk entirely, in which case they’ll be following those F-35s right into the drink. Even if we left this second, we’d still have to travel over 100km to make up the distance and get out of SAM range again.”

Drake stared into the distance. He muttered, “So there’s no choice now. We have to go.”

Abrams looked up and spoke now. “Commander, the LT is right that we’re going to have to go. But – if we go now, we leave both the shore team and the CSAR crew with their asses hanging out in the wind.”

Drake looked up. “It’s better than losing the ship.”

“Yes. But we don’t have to leave now – not until the Russians approach that 200km circle. The range of the Shipwrecks.”

Drake still felt stunned, but he had a moment of clarity. “But when we do leave… we lose the base, and we lose the supplies. If the Nakhimov moves back into that harbor, we’ll never dig them out again. And without those supplies…”

Abrams persisted, not to mention kept his cool. “Maybe so. But we can deal with that then. Right now, we have to get our people back. While we still can.”

Drake just nodded. “Make it happen.” He stood up. “I’ll be… back there,” he said, heading toward the Captain’s Ready Room again. In that moment, Abrams wouldn’t have been able to say whether Drake would be coming out again.

Nor did he know if that wouldn’t be better.

* * *

Having assessed her defeat, resolved to bounce back from it, and put it fully behind her… Ali knew the best she could do now would be to get the wounded back alive. As she put the Seahawk on a heading for the carrier, she found the pilot’s headset, got it seated, and prepared herself to update CIC with their status. But of course, the damned radio didn’t work.

However, they were elevated, over open water, and quickly closing the distance to the JFK, so she dared hope her own team radio might reach them. She tuned it to the air mission frequency. It worked, and she issued that status update: mission failed, two KIAs, two litter-urgent casualties, and a badly shot-up bird – all coming in fast.

That grim task complete, she figured she’d try the support channel for the shore mission, and catch up on current events there. When she did, the very first thing she heard was: "—ative, negative. Biltong Actual, be advised – your air cover has gone OFF-STATION, repeat, CAS is DOWN. The Fire Scout has been urgently re-tasked with priority mission. No ETA on replacement air. We cannot clear you a path to the boat. And there is no clear exfil route, no path that we can see to the extraction point."

There was a longish pause. The voice that came back was flat, neutral, and resigned: "Copy that. Looks like I’m not getting out of here then."

Ali instantly recognized the second voice.

Juice.

Across the Lines

Six Miles South of the M25 ZPW

Private Elliot Walker of the Parachute Regiment tried to steady his footing in the deep mud, then leaned against the old wooden fence and took careful aim across the field, as the first of the dead came into sight.

The lull in the fighting, after they were ordered to break contact with the enemy and withdraw, had only lasted an hour at most. Elliot thought it a strange strategy to pursue, now that they were only twenty miles from the first line of trenches around London, with their backs practically up against the ZPW. But he couldn’t deny he was glad for the rest.

Most of the dead stumbling toward them now, in increasingly greater numbers, were the slow-moving type, but they had the advantage of numbers, and had flooded over some of the outlying defenses already. The men on the front lines, Elliot’s Para brothers, were exhausted now from the constant contact. So a cessation of the brutal fighting, an hour of rest, and a resupply of water and rations, had come as a short but much-needed relief.

The creature that now appeared from the treeline, about two hundred yards out, was a slow one, a stumbler as Elliot liked to call them, and it didn’t seem to have locked onto the line of Paras crouched in a ditch, behind a thin row of bushes. The weather had turned over the last couple of hours, and as well as the drifting fog that hampered long-range recon, the rain was lashing down on them now, in thin cold sheets that seemed to burrow in right to the bone.

As Elliot watched, the lone Zulu pushed past brambles and bushes, waded heedless through a patch of stinging nettles, and finally lurched out onto the open grass of the field. He could see it had once been a middle-aged man, very thin, and he wondered if the man had been starving already when he’d died. He wore a pair of ripped jeans and a torn sweater, both blue, and both now splattered with patches of dark gray gunk that Elliot presumed was some combination of mud and the black shit they had for blood.

There was also a yawning hole in the side of its neck.

A few days before, some of the lads in his squad had debated how the dead could rise up and grow in number so quickly. The rapid expansion of the outbreak was staggering, and as the Paras took stock of the towns between Folkestone and the surging front line, the numbers just didn’t add up.

Not until Elliot remembered the migrant camps.

There were tens of thousands of homeless people in the wilderness outside London now, maybe even hundreds of thousands. Elliot had seen the makeshift camps strewn across the landscape, dotted here and there amongst the woods and fields, filled with people who didn’t want to be trapped in the cities, or else had no place else to go. And Elliot thought those thousands of vagrants and wanderers were what made up much of the mass of dead that was now devouring Britain – one town, one county, one field at a time.

But this particular vagrant wasn’t going to get any closer to London. And Elliot wasn’t going to let him have this field.

His suppressed L129A1 sharpshooter rifle bucked once, and his single round took the dead man in the face, the whole operation producing almost no perceptible noise. Elliot slowly crouched back down behind the post.

Job done.

He glanced to his sides, double-checking that the other front-line sharpshooters were still positioned at 50-meter intervals. He could see they were also hunkered down, hiding behind cover, but meticulously observing the treeline and fields to their front.

Dissolution and delay of the horde was the aim of their retreat. At least that was what Elliot had been told. If the dead lost track of the front line of troops, at least some of them would cease their advance and wander aimlessly, or possibly even reverse course. The military’s constant, measured retreat had only been pulling the dead along with them, and drawing more and more into the fray from a distance. Elliot’s thinking was that they should have considered a quick evacuation to behind the wall instead.

Or maybe that was just his instinct to get away from the damned things.

He was anxious to do his duty – and he would do anything, including give his life, to support and protect his friends in the regiment. But he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t scared. Not out here on open ground, with God knew how many thousands of them swarming around out there, perhaps just out of sight in the mist and rain.

As Elliot watched, another one stumbled through the thicket at the field’s edge, but as he checked the distance, he decided it wasn’t in his sector. As though reading his thoughts, another Para marksman, in the position to his immediate left, rose up, took careful aim, and dropped it with a single shot.

* * *

A hundred yards away, Captain Evan Forester paced the ground, glancing from his radio operator to the treelines that ringed the fields. He and the radio op were in a small copse of trees to the rear of where his men squatted in that damp ditch. His slightly elevated position meant he could keep an eye on his paratroopers, as well as any enemy movement from the forests.

The numbers were definitely lower now, as they had hoped, but not to the extent they had been depending on. And Captain Forester knew that the minute his troops got caught up again in any significant engagement, those dead that had been left behind would soon catch wind of it, and all start trundling forward once more.

His unit had lost over a tenth of its strength in the last few days to that damned horde, and he was worried. It was nothing like panic he felt, not yet. But the battle for southern England was not going well. And Forester saw little reason to hope that command was going to turn things around.

“Still no word from CentCom on the ammo drop?” he asked the radio operator, and felt his stomach drop when the man shook his head.

The radio op, a young private, exhaled heavily. “I’m not even getting an acknowledgement, which is weird. Even if they can’t answer the call they normally queue it up and back call, but I’m not getting through at all.” The young man paused and turned to a different piece of field electronics. “But I am picking up a faint transponder beacon, about two miles from here. Could that be our drop?”

“This is a pile of shit,” muttered Forester, sitting down heavily on a tree stump a few yards away. He fidgeted briefly, then stood again, only to resume pacing. He needed to know where their resupply was.

“It’s almost like there’s no one manning the fort,” continued the private. “Maybe they’re having a power outage?”

Forester grunted. “Can you get Briars?” he asked, referring to the Major, their officer commanding in the field, who should be less than a mile away, also behind the lines.

The private nodded.

“Find out if he has a new operations order for us. And then try and get accurate grid coordinates on that beacon. It might actually be our drop – God save us.”

If it was their drop, then it had been catastrophically mis-dropped, with even its giant cargo canopies out of visual range. Or perhaps it was because of the mist and rain. In any case, maybe they could still get to it and bring it in.

The radio op started speaking into his headset, hailing the nearby command post, while Forester stood by impatiently watching the misty treeline in the distance.

At least we don’t have to resort to message runners, he thought.

Finally, he heard the call go through. As he eavesdropped, already working out from this end of it that Briars was having the same problems everywhere, he scanned out over the distant fields, his vision struggling to resolve anything in the soup-thick mists.

Slowly, his expression changed… and the Para officer spat on the ground, silently mouthing curses, as a dozen dark and spectral shapes slowly resolved from the fog, within the treeline. They stumbled forward, making their way out of the forest, features still obscured by the dense mist, but their movements unmistakably clumsy and slow. Behind them more appeared, another dozen, and two dozen after that… and soon Forester could see the makings of an undead army mustering along the far edges of the field.

The field that his men, and they alone, now held.

Alone, and cut off from higher command.

Forester silently prayed that someone was still running this war. And that they had some tricks left up their sleeves.

Because this one had just failed.

Into the Mist

UK, Six Miles South of the M25 ZPW

Private Elliot Walker cursed, drew in a deep breath, released half, and took aim again. This time his shot was true, taking the zombie in the chin point – just inches from the crease that his first shot had scored along the side of its neck. The gray figure lurched backward, head lolling to one side, and then it was gone, tumbling backward into the long grass.

Elliot checked his flanks, and the location of the others in the patrol. This time he was not manning a fixed position, but had been sent out into these swirling mists on a mission. To his left and just behind were Corporal Johnson and Private Abbot, and to his right were Privates Reeves and Clifford. All were keeping their formation tight and staying with him at a brisk walking pace. Behind him, Private Ahmit Patel cursed quietly. He was Elliot’s friend of four years, since they had both entered recruitment on the same day and in the same intake group.

“It should be here,” Ahmit hissed. “This fucking GPS is shot, though.” He shook the device and peered closer, squinting and tapping the display. “I’m getting intermittent readings at best. But we should be right on it.”

Captain Forester had given them a set of GPS coordinates that corresponded to the position of their ammo drop – or at least the transponder that had at one time been attached to it. The problem now was finding those coordinates.

“Keep trying,” said Corporal Johnson, the patrol leader. “And it’s not the device, it’s the sodding satellites.” The squad slowed, then came to a stop, while Ahmit turned around several times, trying to will the device in his hands to function, to pick up the signals that had been reasonably strong ten minutes before.

On a clear day, they probably would have been able to see the drop from there, but now they were surrounded by a wall of fog that had descended in the last few hours. Visibility had gone from fifty yards, to twenty, and finally to ten – all in the few minutes since Ahmit had taken the last reading. And though Elliot was confident he had kept them on a straight line, heading in the direction Ahmit had first indicated, it was difficult to judge.

“It’s not fucking here,” cursed Clifford, a tall lanky soldier who Elliot always thought fit into the Parachute Regiment about as well as cat in a room full of rocking chairs. He’d never been able to work out exactly what it was that he didn’t like about the guy.

“Quiet the fuck down,” said Johnson. “Minimal noise.”

Clifford grinned, a smile that Elliot hated for its insincerity.

“Keep it moving,” said Johnson, and the squad pushed forward, slowly trudging through the overgrown field.

At the front, Elliot tried to peer through the mist, but was finding it hard to even focus on anything solid any more. All that he could see was the grass beneath his feet, and only about ten yards of that. The breeze had also started to pick up slightly, the mist drifting past in small swirls that made the visual field even harder to make sense of.

“Still no signal,” said Ahmit, shaking his head. “We’re back to map and compass – and dead reckoning.”

“Keep trying,” said Johnson. “We’re not going back without that ammo.”

Then Elliot spotted something up ahead – a dark, looming shape about the size of a van, but still too far away to make out clearly. He moved forward slowly, aiming his rifle at the gradually materializing bulk. As they got closer, the mist cleared around them, folding back and revealing each yard as they advanced.

The dark bulk ahead continued to resolve until Elliot could finally see that it was an armored vehicle of some sort, though no make or model that he recognized. It looked more like a large up-armored SUV than the military personnel carriers he was used to. The big truck was tilted to one side, and as the squad passed by it they saw that it was mired in the mud on one side. Both the big cargo door in the back, and the two front doors, had been flung open and left that way, as if someone had abandoned it in a hurry.

Elliot glanced inside the cab as he passed, and saw that the front seat was covered with blood – and it couldn’t have been more than a few hours old.

“Does that thing have a GPS?” asked Abbot, from the rear of the squad. Ahmit moved toward the vehicle, treading carefully in the slosh of mud surrounding the driver side. He leaned in, checking the darkness in the cab before climbing up to look at the dash. A moment later he jumped back out, shaking his head.

“Even if it did, it’s completely dead now.”

“And I told you,” said Johnson. “It’s not the GPS.”

They hitched up their packs and moved out again. And as the dark bulk of the truck was swallowed again by the mists, they began to hear sounds around them, distant at first and muffled by the fog, but then clearer – and closer. Moans drifted toward them from multiple directions.

“I thought we were behind the lines?” whispered Abbot, glancing at Johnson for confirmation, but the Corporal looked confused, or distracted. “There shouldn’t be many Zeds here.”

“Wait,” said Elliot. “What’s that up ahead?”

Just within their shallow field of vision there now appeared a bulky object of some sort, sitting heavily in the grass. Elliot couldn’t make it out initially, but as he stepped toward it a pale light became visible, pulsing and flashing – the beacon. And here, in the middle of nowhere, just thirty yards from the abandoned vehicle, was a palletized container drop, stacked high with nylon-strapped metal cases and wooden boxes. Trailing across the grass nearby was the limp shape of its oversized cargo chute.

It was the ammunition drop they had been sent to find.

“Fuck me,” said Johnson. “Finally.” He lowered his weapon and put one hand on his hip, looking content.

Elliot moved forward, getting within three yards of the drop before he suddenly realized the mist around it was moving. He stepped backward quickly, bringing his weapon up to his shoulder, his breathing instantly going rapid and shallow.

From behind and around the drop began to emerge the shadowy shapes of human figures. Elliot barely had time to consider that maybe another patrol had been sent out and found the supplies at the same moment they had, before he sensed more than saw the flash of movement that hit their right flank.

Something rushed past, nearly noiseless, but still kicking up a swirl of mist, and Elliot only spun around to track it after it was already inside their ranks, and leaping at the nearest soldier – Corporal Johnson.

Their patrol leader, his eyes focused on the mist ahead of them, never saw the runner coming. And before he or any of the others could react, it had leapt, latched on to his shoulders, and sunk its teeth into his neck – managing to get between his body armor and helmet, and tearing out a huge chunk of flesh and uniform. The corporal bellowed out a gurgling cry, but still managed to stay on his feet as he spun around and clawed at the creature with his left hand, trying to wrench it off him, while holding onto his rifle with the other.

“Ah, shit!” shouted Abbot as he raised his rifle toward the struggling pair, attempting to engage the enemy that was now trying to tear the corporal a new face – but he hesitated and didn’t crank off the shot in time. Instead, Johnson’s spasming nerves twitched, his arms flailed wildly – and the rifle in his own hands went off, a burst of panicked rapid fire cutting across the two men at the back of the patrol. Abbot and Reeves went down, falling and sending clouds of blood merging into the mists.

They both hit the ground and didn’t get up.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!” shouted Clifford, also raising his weapon and firing, jamming on the trigger repeatedly and not letting up. The torrent of bullets ripped into both Johnson and the runner attached to him, sending them both falling to the dirt, tangled up and bleeding.

Elliot stood dumbfounded, completely numb. In three seconds flat, half of their six-man patrol had been cut down. Mastering himself, he moved woodenly to the fallen and knelt down to check on them. Nobody was breathing. Even the manic dead guy had caught a headshot, and was now dead for real. The silence of the scene roared in his ears. Death wasn’t just all around them now.

It was right in their ranks.

“What the fuck?” muttered Clifford. “I fucking shot Corporal Johnson.” He stood in place, shaking and staring down at the smoking rifle in his hands.

More movement stirred around the three survivors, dark shapes emerging from the thick drifts of mist that set the limits of their vision at twenty yards.

“Grab what you can,” said Elliot, his voice numb and affectless. “We need to get out of here.”

Everywhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide

UK, Six Miles South of the M25 ZPW

The three surviving members of the patrol moved as quickly as they could through the field, all with weapons raised, peering breathlessly out into the fog that just seemed to get thicker the longer they were out here. With two rucks slung over each shoulder, all at the limit of what they could carry and still be mobile enough to fight, they struggled to move any faster than a slow jog. The original plan had been that four of them would hump the ammo, with the others pulling security, but that seemed like a long time ago now.

Ahmit, out on point, stopped them every fifty yards or so to check the GPS, but he mostly shook his head and peered around, trying to regain their bearings from the terrain.

And all the while the dead were still closing in on them. None had attacked the group since that disastrous first contact, when they lost half their number in a few heartbeats. But the dead were close – so close that occasionally a moan would sound just yards away, or a dark figure would momentarily slip into vision through the swirling vapor.

Each time this happened, the trio stopped and watched to see what it would do. If it spotted them and locked on, they took it down. But if it didn’t, they just waited and then moved on. Every engagement, every shot fired, reduced their life expectancy out here.

“Never seen fog like this,” whispered Clifford, spitting into the grass.

Ahmit glanced at him, hissing “Shut it, you daft prick.”

Clifford glared back. “Who you calling daft? You’re the one who can’t fucking find our way out of here.”

Elliot stopped. “Will you two shut up?” he hissed. “You’re gonna draw them to us.”

The argument was left hanging as, up ahead, barely twenty yards out, a lumbering figure appeared. It had once been a woman, dressed for the outdoors, but now most of her torn down coat was emptied out. She staggered through the grass, heading directly across the patrol’s path, and for a moment Elliot hoped she wouldn’t notice them. But then her head swung round to face them, and the three Paras saw that most of her face was missing, including both of her eyes and her nose. All that remained now was a gaping jaw, half hanging off. That jaw opened, and a low, quiet moan followed.

How the hell it even knew they were there was beyond Elliot. And now it didn’t matter anyway.

He raised his rifle and fired, the bullet striking her where her chin would once have been, and sending her falling backward into the fog soup. The three Paras stood stock-still, waiting to see if others would follow, and expecting the worst.

After half a minute, Ahmit started moving again. The other two followed, stepping carefully through the grass and skirting around the spot where the faceless woman had gone down. There were more moans now, and the rustling of movement.

They’ve clocked us, thought Elliot, increasing his speed and overtaking Ahmit, who picked up his own pace in response. And Clifford broke formation entirely, passing the other two and ranging out ahead on his own. As he went by, Elliot could see the terror in his eyes.

Trust us to get stuck with this muppet, he thought, marveling that the selection and training process that he had found so grueling still somehow allowed an idiot such as Clifford to become a paratrooper.

As they skirted around a hillock of rock and stepped down into a dirt track, Elliot saw them, moving in from their left flank – dozens of the dead, stumbling into view, all seemingly heading in the same direction across their path, and all merely yards away.

And it was the sight of these that broke Clifford. Elliot tried to reach out for him, intending for them to take cover behind the rocks and let the herd pass. But he missed the man’s sleeve by inches as Clifford took off, running ahead of them and away from the shambling crowd that now saw his movement. A chorus of moaning erupted – and the dead, a moment ago slow and almost passive, quickly became an animated and lively pack of predators.

“Idiot,” whispered Ahmit as he passed Elliot, heading in the same direction that Clifford had run. Elliot took off at a labored jog, trying to keep up with the others, but the long wet grass, the poor visibility, and the extremely heavy load forced him to slow down or else risk a fall. He could still see his friend about ten yards ahead, cursing under his breath as he ran on, trying to catch up with Clifford… but then Elliot slowed as a rising, terrified scream erupted ahead of them.

“Oh, shit,” cursed Ahmit, stopping as Elliot reached him.

Just ahead, and only barely inside their visual range, was a heaving mass of the dead. Countless palsied figures surged in all directions, pushing and shoving against one another, trampling upon those that fell. There were perhaps as many as a hundred, and they were all jostling to get to the spot that Elliot judged was the center. There, he could just make out slivers of wet flesh being pulled from a writhing figure in the middle of it all, and he realized what the dead were tearing apart.

Clifford.

* * *

“Back,” hissed Ahmit, moving quickly away. “While they’re distracted!”

The two surviving Paras stumbled away from the scene, Elliot boggling that Clifford had run off in fear of the dead behind them, only to barrel straight into the middle of an even bigger mass.

“Not that way,” said Elliot, as he tried to catch up with his friend, but Ahmit wasn’t listening, and carried on into the mist. Then he turned, heading in another direction, and Elliot followed, not knowing where the hell they were, or whether they were even heading back toward the safety of their own lines. Behind them he could hear a lot of movement, and a quick glance over his shoulder rewarded him with something he didn’t want to see at all.

Runners, a pack of about six, were just within sight behind them now. And if it hadn’t been for the tall grass and the uneven ground, Elliot knew they would already have caught them. He’d seen their like many times as the regiment faced the endless hordes of dead, had seen them burst from the ranks of the slow-moving ones, at a speed even many of the living couldn’t match. But he’d been within the relative safety of a formation of infantry then. Now, out in the fog, alone and cut off, stumbling around without a clue which direction they should be going, the frantic creatures overtaking them were ten times more terrifying.

Elliot pushed on, glancing back every few seconds and trying to judge if he had time to turn and engage them. But they were too close, and he knew that if he stopped to fire, he would never be fast enough to take them all down – not before they were on him. And then it would all be over for him.

“Shit,” came a muttered curse ahead of him, and he saw that Ahmit had stopped running and was staring straight ahead at something just outside of Elliot’s vision. He caught up with him and raced past, having zero desire to slow or stop now.

And he saw it was the abandoned armored vehicle, still stuck in the mud, right where they had left it. They had gone around in a complete circle, which meant they were nowhere near the Para lines. And there was also no way they could continue to stay ahead of what was right behind them.

“Runners!” Elliot shouted. “Get inside!” He ran past his friend, making a direct line for the open rear cargo door of the truck, and hoped like hell Ahmit would follow.

It was only when he reached it that he even thought about the fact that he’d been carrying the heavy load of ammo, two full rucks, this entire time. It wasn’t that he had been too scared, or distracted, or stupid to drop them. It was simply that his brothers were depending on him to bring it back. And, even with death licking at his heels, when his lifespan might be measured in seconds, it simply had not occurred to him to lay down his burden – to fail at his job, to let down his teammates.

Now, he had to drop the rucks simply to get in the truck.

As he reached the open rear door and dove inside, he heard Ahmit’s heavy breathing pass by him as his friend scrambled in the driver-side door – but then he heard cursing, and turned to see Ahmit kicking out at something just outside the door, trying to bring his assault rifle to bear, but there wasn’t enough room. Elliot saw a dark humanoid shape trying to force its way in, but it was being pushed back every time Ahmit lashed out.

His hand slapped at his waist and Elliot drew his handgun in a flash, then clambered forward, pushing himself up over the rear bench seat and into the front passenger area – just as the runner managed to get its body half inside. Ahmit screamed and kicked out, just as Elliot opened fire. The runner was thrown back, the force of the rounds catching it across the shoulders. This wouldn’t destroy it, but did send it tumbling away, knocking down two others behind it.

And that was all Ahmit needed, two precious seconds, to grab the door handle and slam it shut. The percussive roar of the gunshots in that enclosed space rang in Elliot’s ears, and he had to shake his head to focus. Then the runners were back, hammering on the windows and the sides of the truck.

Elliot climbed into the back and lunged for the open cargo door – which somehow he had forgotten to close in the panic of helping his friend. He reached it just as another runner leapt for the gap. He raised the pistol and opened fire again, emptying the magazine and sending that one and another tumbling backward away from the truck.

If they could get the doors all shut, Elliot knew the dead wouldn’t be strong enough to get in, and as he grabbed the inside handle and heaved on the heavy hatch, he checked that the others were all already closed. This one slammed down, and Elliot heard a chorus of loud thunks as the locking mechanism kicked in.

From the driver’s seat, Ahmit stared back at him, eyes wide, chest heaving as he took long gulps of air. His left hand was on the driver-side door, on the auto-lock button, but his other hand was on his right knee, and Elliot could see a trickle of blood oozing from between his fingers.

Brothers

UK, Six Miles South of the M25 ZPW

Ahmit cursed as he crawled back out from underneath the dash. For the last twenty minutes he had been pulling out panels and checking wires, every few minutes crawling back up into the driver’s seat to try and start it up, but not once had the engine even threatened to turn over.

“It’s screwed,” he said.

“Damn it,” said Elliot.

“I’ve tried everything,” said Ahmit, wiping the sweat from his face. “Either the battery is dead, or something is just knackered in the electrical system, and I can’t get at that without going back outside.”

Elliot looked to his left, out the window, and directly into the face of one of the runners as it beat frantically on the glass. “Not an option,” he said.

Ahmit shook his head. “No. I think we just have to settle in and wait it out.”

Elliot sighed. If they ever actually go away, he thought.

He knew that what they might be waiting out was: the end of the world.

* * *

Two hours later, the hammering had died down.

Elliot sat in the front passenger seat, with his assault rifle lying across his lap. He’d been watching dully as the dead mindlessly, implacably tried to force their way in. At first it had been just the pack of runners that had chased them here, and which they’d had to fight to keep out. But of course other dead soon homed in on the noise, and came in droves to hammer at the sides of the truck, and the windows – which, being bulletproof, at least were never going to break.

But the noise of a hundred hammering fists on the steel shell of the vehicle had given Elliot the mother of all headaches.

All the way in the back, Ahmit was now lying down on a makeshift bed.

He’d been fine – for a while.

“Maybe it’s okay,” Ahmit had said. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, and the cut isn’t infected.” And Elliot had agreed, helping to bandage the wound up – but wearing a pair of surgical gloves from his aid kit, and carefully disposing of them after. Another man might have refused to go near the blood, but this was Ahmit, his friend of so many years.

They had walked into that Army recruitment office on the same day, both fresh out of secondary school, then gone through recruit selection side by side, and then on to Parachute Regiment selection. Finally, there had been the arduous thirty-week Para training course, where they kept up each other’s spirits and motivation, and each finally earned the coveted maroon beret on the same day. After that, to the delight of both, they were assigned to the same battalion, company, and even platoon.

It had been like that at every stage of their military careers.

Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it was fate. Or maybe the British Army knew exactly what it was doing – knew that the real reason soldiers fought, and suffered, and sacrificed, was for the men they did it beside.

Elliot never had a biological brother, just three sisters. And in Ahmit that was what he had found.

This man was his brother.

* * *

Ahmit had been fine for the first hour after being injured, and that, Elliot knew, was a hopeful sign. These days it seemed people could turn in just seconds if they died, and even if they lived they could start showing signs within minutes. Though there seemed to be no hard and fast rules.

But that hour had been merely grace, and soon Ahmit started to feel weak, and needed to lie down.

Half an hour before the hammering stopped, Ahmit threw up, and as Elliot looked him in the eyes, he saw the signs – the darkening and redness of the eyes, the faint spider-like tendrils of black lines creeping slowly across the skin over the places where veins lay underneath.

And just a few minutes before, Ahmit’s breathing had become strained.

“I don’t want to be one of them,” he said, his voice floating up from the darkness at the back of the truck. There was little illumination, but Elliot could see his best friend’s eyes shining back at him, reflecting the dim light through the windshield glass.

Elliot sat silently for a moment, unable to believe that after all these years it had come down to this. When the outbreaks had started, and the plague spread across the face of the world, the two of them had promised they would take care of things for each other, if it came to that. Elliot never thought it would actually happen, even though he had seen men die every day since. He and Ahmit were supposed to be untouchable.

Maybe it was because they were young. But no one left alive was any longer as young as they used to be.

“You know I won’t let that happen,” Elliot said.

“We promised,” said Ahmit.

“Yes, we promised.”

More silence.

“I want you to do it,” said Ahmit.

Elliot coughed. “What, now? You’re not even near going yet.”

“But I can feel it. I can feel something changing already. It’s in the back of my head. Like I have someone else speaking to me. And they aren’t my thoughts. It’s all wrong.”

“You’re talking bollocks. What does that even mean?”

But even Elliot himself knew he was in some sort of denial. He just couldn’t bear this. It was too sad, and he couldn’t take it.

“I mean… it’s like there’s someone else, or something else in here with me, something alien.”

Finally, Elliot straightened up, slowly picked up his handgun from where it lay on the dash, and climbed into the back. Then he crouched down and looked his friend in the eyes. And he was stunned at the rapid change. Just minutes ago, Ahmit’s skin had been clear and nearly flawless, glowing with youth and vigor. Now it had gone deathly pale, the spiderwebbed black lines growing stark and unmistakable, and his eyes wretchedly bloodshot.

“The sickness is terrible,” said Ahmit, coughing into a blanket that lay next to him. As he pulled the cloth away from his mouth, Elliot saw a spreading stain of black liquid. “I’ve never felt so bad before.”

Elliot took a deep breath, knelt down by his friend, and gripped the handgun tightly, wondering if he could possibly go through with this.

“Please,” said Ahmit. “Do it now. Make it fast.”

Elliot took another breath, then raised the weapon, pointing it at Ahmit’s head. Ahmit leaned forward and pressed his forehead against the tip of the barrel and looked Elliot straight in the eyes.

Elliot tried to pull the trigger, but a rush of nerves flooded his stomach, and he released the tension on the trigger, withdrew the gun, and turned away. He was finding it simply beyond him to kill his own best friend.

“You can do this,” said Ahmit. “You have to.”

Elliot turned back and looked his friend in the eyes again. He saw pain there. This young man had been his mate through many difficult times, and he couldn’t fail him now. As hard as it was to accept what he had to do, the alternative was worse. No, not Ahmit turning, and becoming a monster, though that would be bad enough.

It was the thought of failing his friend that he couldn’t face.

He took a deep breath and raised the handgun. Once more Ahmit leaned forward. And closed his eyes.

“Goodbye, my brother,” Elliot said.

Then, without hesitation this time, he pulled the trigger.

* * *

Elliot sat once more in the front passenger seat, near the front of the vehicle, his rifle again on his lap, his handgun back in its holster, at one round under capacity.

He peered out the windshield at the shapes that lumbered by. After the noise of the single gunshot, they had come back, and once more the hammering had begun, and it had taken over three hours this time for them to stop. He had covered Ahmit’s body with a blanket, and laid his friend’s rifle over him, even leaving the magazine in. He just couldn’t make himself take it.

The dead still wandered by infrequently, but he had noticed in the last fifteen minutes that the numbers were thinning.

Elliot wasn’t deep inside the enemy lines any more. He was out the other side, and behind them.

And completely alone.

Gun to a Knife Fight

Open Water, Beneath the JFK

Having miraculously won all his knife fights, and also having secured for himself a working supply of oxygen, now Homer had to hunt down whatever survivors there were of the Spetsnaz combat diver team. Luckily, they turned out to be close by, as he’d suspected they would be – and all in one place. He found them over on the other side of the ship, the seaward side, another hundred yards up toward the prow.

Sticking close to the hull, like a black and silent remora clinging to the body of a whale, he spotted their lone sentry, and swam up at him from directly below. As he did so, he carefully unslung the amphibious rifle from his back.

Sure enough, it had turned out the guy he’d killed earlier, the one who had tried to shoot him with this thing, actually didn’t have any more magazines. But Homer had taken the rifle with him anyway.

And now he was glad he had. Because as he swam up toward him, he saw that this single lookout not only carried one of the rifles himself, but had a whole pouch of magazines on his dive belt. Now, instead of attacking the sentry, who floated in place and scanned around to either side of him, Homer just paddled up beneath him slowly, like an undersea ghost. And he reached up to the mag pouch…

…yanked one free, rammed it home in his stolen rifle, charged it – and shot the sentry in the face from below as he startled, looked down, and tried to react.

From this position, the remainder of the dive team, the bulk of their original force, was visible. Two were operating a big and sleek mini-sub, while two others floated nearby, doing something up against the carrier’s hull – attaching a limpet mine, Homer assumed.

The mini-sub was a wet submersible, much like the SEALs’ own SDVs (Seal Delivery Vehicles). It had no pressurized interior, so those using it relied on the air in their own scuba tanks. It was more like a big torpedo that the divers clung to, using it to take them much greater distances, at much higher speeds, than they could swim on their own. It also had an onboard guidance system, power, and an additional air supply they could tap into.

The two working at the hull were head-down in their work – but the two at the mini-sub looked up in surprise and alarm as Homer swam up to them, fins kicking smoothly behind him, rifle pointed forward, leaving a blood trail in the water behind him – and closing to within twenty feet.

From there, he emptied half the rifle’s magazine into the pair, taking care not to damage the mini-sub behind them. The Russians’ wetsuits blossomed with red divots, and they did a jerky undersea pantomime, as the long and thin 5.45mm PSP rounds tore into their bodies and killed them.

The noise of this was muted underwater, but not totally silent, and the two at the hull turned around at the sound of it. Homer had to be even more careful with them, with what he thought was a high-explosive behind them, so he switched the fire selector to semi-auto, and started putting aimed single shots into the pair as they kicked frantically toward him, knives in hand. One of them made it to within five feet.

Homer paused, exhaled heavily, and blinked slowly. He still didn’t particularly like killing people, even ones who badly needed killing. But he sure as hell preferred this to getting stabbed to death in installments.

And he thought: I really must remember to bring a gun to future knife fights…

Finally, he reloaded the ADS, then swam over to the mini-sub and checked the power, systems readout, and storage bay. Now he had some work to do – namely harvesting all those limpet mines. But at least he had a big tractor to take them all in with.

When he moved to get started with the mine this team had just been attaching… he found it wasn’t a mine after all, but a big thermal imaging camera, of the type tactical teams use to peer through walls, and see what’s going on inside a target structure.

I knew it, Homer thought.

He was tempted to leave these dead guys where they floated, but he also knew they were likely to have exploitable intel on them. So he went around dropping their weight belts, and one by one they floated up to the surface, where Pred and Henno could police them up.

Because Homer still had a mine harvest to bring in.

Time For You To Go

SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse

Alone again, and now sealed back inside the warehouse, Juice wasn’t feeling particularly excited about having to clear a large structure – one with bad lighting, twisting and narrow corridors, and an unknown number of Zulus – all on his lonesome.

Then again, he wasn’t all that worried either.

And he definitely wasn’t leaving until this place was properly sealed up.

Once he cleared the area around their improvised exit, he had something like a wall to his back. Now he just needed to follow the trickle of dead back to their source – whatever hole in the dyke it was they were coming in from. He gathered, both from the drone pilot and from facts on the ground, that this was somewhere in the long northeast wall – but on the opposite end from the one which Spetsnaz had cleared out of.

He clicked on his weapon-mounted light again – both to augment the weak and flickering overhead lighting and because, as before, he actually wanted to attract the dead. And he started walking smoothly but quickly, weapon up, right across the middle of the warehouse.

He spotted one coming straight at him twenty yards out. Two quick and easy shots to the mouth put it down – but distracted him from one coming from the side as he hit an intersection. This was slightly awkward – he had to back-pedal quickly, then get off two shots in very close quarters. Those were also the last two in his mag, but they got the job done.

When he changed mags, he found he was down to his last one. This slightly surprised him – but, then again, it wasn’t all that surprising, not after the heavy contact with the Spetsnaz pipe-hitters. It was pretty damned amazing how much ammo you could run through in a close-quarters, balls-out firefight. Generally, the last thing you were thinking about was saving ammo for later. Hell, if you lived until two minutes later it sometimes seemed like a miracle. And should you live that long, you could hope maybe more ammo would fall from heaven.

Basically, discounting the future was rational behavior in this line of work – namely gunfighting.

Juice decided to go ahead and fix his bayonet – because that next mag change after this one was going to be a long way off. He also did a count of pistol mags by touch.

And then he got moving again.

Every second he spent here screwing around was more dead guys he had to deal with.

* * *

He got where he was going, and found the spot he was looking for, three minutes later. By then, his rifle was dry, and he had it slung, with his pistol out and up in a two-handed Weaver stance. He looked balefully around him, at all the shrink-wrapped palletized crates, many or most of them without a doubt containing ammo. It would just take too damned long to tear them open, never mind reload mags from the boxes of loose rounds inside.

Finding crates of ammo always seemed so straightforward in video games… he thought. You just walked over them and your weapons reloaded.

While moving to this position, he’d racked his brain trying to figure out how the hell they had missed a hole in the wall on their sweep earlier. The two teams had circled the warehouse completely, and both had hugged the outside wall. But when he got there, Juice realized:

No, we didn’t hug it. We approximated it.

He now put a single shot – double-taps were out the window again – into the face of a skinny-ass dead guy crawling out from under a pile of crates, and then waited for his buddy behind him to show himself enough to get the same treatment. What they were crawling out from under was essentially a narrow path between the outside wall, and a row of pallets stacked a few feet away it. And this short, narrow corridor had gotten an IED emplaced inside it – a perfect little kill-zone for whoever might have tried to slip around the Russians’ flank on this side.

When the IED did go off, it knocked over several of the higher stacked crates, turning the corridor into a tunnel – and closing off one end. That had been the side Juice and Vorster had come from, and they hadn’t looked back once they were past it. From their point of view, it just looked like a jumbled pile of crates at the outside edge of the room.

Also, obviously, the IED had blown a hole in the wall.

Not a big one – and, Juice guessed, not big enough initially to admit bodies. But then, he figured, one or two enterprising dead guys had managed to peel back the splintered and weakened metal just enough to make it work.

They were bum-rushing the show even now, squeezing in through the small hole one at a time, leaving chunks of themselves smeared on the jagged metal around the edges.

Luckily, the fix for this was straightforward. Juice holstered his pistol, put his back up against the nearest crate, and shoved like hell. This time, he didn’t even bother clearing the hole before he sealed it – and he ended up with a seal that was half crate, half dead guy. No, scratch that – the crate was the seal. The dead guy was the sealant. Like putty.

Nice one, as Henno would say.

* * *

Now – there was the small matter of getting his precious ass out of there. “Biltong Two, send status, over.”

Lovell came back instantly. “Yeah, man, we’re propping open the door for you. But we can’t hold this pier much longer. We’re getting very popular at this location. And our minigun just went dry.”

Juice didn’t really have to be told. He could hear the furious firing, shouting, and moaning over the open channel. He gave Lovell a lot of credit for keeping his cool and sense of humor in the middle of a shitstorm like that.

“Wait out,” Juice said, then switched to the command net. “CIC, Biltong, how copy.”

“Solid copy! Send it.”

“Yeah, how’s the southwest side of this building look?”

There was a pregnant pause on the other end. “Biltong, your target structure is completely overrun. There are dead on all sides, no gaps.”

Juice sighed. “Copy that. Any chance of a little rocket action, to clear me a hole to punch out of here?”

Another pause. “Negative, negative. Biltong Actual, be advised – your air cover has gone OFF-STATION, repeat, CAS is DOWN. The Fire Scout has been urgently re-tasked with priority mission. No ETA on replacement air. We cannot clear you a path to the boat. And there is no clear exfil route, no path that we can see to the extraction point."

Juice acknowledged that, then got back on the squad net. “Biltong Two, this is Actual.”

“Send it.”

“Shove off, Lovell. It’s time for you to go.” Juice could sense the Marine sergeant trying to formulate some objection to this. But there was no possibility of them fighting their way back to retrieve him. Hell, they probably couldn’t even stay where they were for more than another minute or two.

So he made it easier for him. “Go, Sergeant. You’ve got critical casualties. And I’m fine here – this place is all sealed up. Get to the carrier and lead them back here for the supplies. I’ll just keep an eye on it all for you. GO.”

“Roger that, will comply. Out.” Lovell’s voice was flat and affectless. It was clear to Juice that the man was faithfully doing his job, even when he didn’t like it.

And he had also probably been thinking exactly what Juice was: the JFK either would be, or would not be, coming back for those supplies. Lovell’s radio was tuned to the command net as well, and he probably heard the news about the carrier steaming north, same as Juice had.

Neither of them been told the reason, but Juice had a pretty good guess: it was huge, had a shitload of missiles, and was named after a Russian naval officer. And if that thing came back, the Kennedy had no choice but to go – whether they still had men on shore or not.

Juice was still sitting on the concrete floor, with his back up against the crate he had been shoving. As he shifted to get more comfortable, his ass – the flesh, the underwear, the uniform – all squished together. He looked down to his right side and saw it was covered with blood.

Hmm. I’d probably better wrap up that arm wound now…

He had no idea how long he was going to be here.

* * *

Handon stood now at the stern edge of the flight deck, on the starboard side – the very back left corner of the ship. This was as far south and east as he could get without getting wet. He’d come out here pretty much the instant both the shore team and the CSAR mission had radioed in – the moment they both proved to still be alive.

He told himself this was so he could see both teams as soon as they were inbound and in visual range. He was also willing to admit that he needed some air – for the enormous breath of relief he had to take. But he would deny it was also because the strain of listening to the live ops from CIC had gotten to be too much for him. He’d had people out in harm’s way uncountable times. This shouldn’t be any different.

But somehow it was.

He turned around when he heard footsteps behind him.

It was Fick. The Marine senior NCO stepped up very close to Handon and said, “The shore team’s inbound. ETA five mikes. But, listen…” And with this he paused and gripped Handon’s bicep, as Handon had gripped his before.

“Your man isn’t with them.”

Handon didn’t visibly react.

And it was only when he heard a motorboat engine going by on the surface of the ocean far below, and moved to identify it, that he remembered what Ali had told him about Homer – and his intention to dive and sweep the hull for mines. And Handon belatedly realized that he had not two people in peril, but three.

More than half of his surviving team members.

When he craned his head far out over the deck edge, what he saw down there was their own CRRC burbling by, heading for the dock at the stern, with Predator and Henno manning it.

And behind that was… well, Handon did a cartoon double-take, and Fick just breathily intoned:

“Holy shit – that glorious green-faced son of a bitch of yours was right…”

The French Lieutenant’s Woman

Ocean Surface, Off the JFK’s Starboard Side

Predator and Henno were just debating going for help – despite there not being any more combat divers on board the Kennedy than before – when the mini-sub breached five meters off their bow. It was fully twenty feet long, with space for eight swimmers, plus the storage bay. It was as if Homer had gone off on his own – and come back riding a small whale.

Not to mention that the ocean surface all around them was now littered with the floating bodies of dead Spetsnaz combat divers.

Predator shook his huge head and spoke across the open water to Homer. “We were all like, ‘Let’s take this thing out and see what we can do to support Homer!’ Turns out – not a thing! You’re a goddamned one-frogman armada.”

“Yeah, nice one,” Henno said, understated as usual.

Homer took his regulator out and removed his mask, but didn’t say anything. He just waved toward the stern of the Kennedy, and the dock there. Pred fired up their outboard motor and led them back.

When both craft and all three operators cruised up to the dock, Pred and Henno got their raft up out of the water and up onto it. The mini-sub seemed too big and heavy for that. But Pred grabbed its stern, and pulled it in to the edge of the dock, where it hit with a clang.

“Go easy with that,” Homer said.

“Yeah, why?”

“Because there’s 47.5kg of explosives in there.” Homer pointed to the mine-filled storage bay.

Predator peered inside. “Seriously? Holy shit, dude.”

It was only then, when Pred looked back up, that he noticed Homer was bleeding from at least six different places.

“Holy shit, dude!”

His two brother operators helped him out and onto the dock. Once his feet hit, he pulled his rocket fins off – then knelt down and touched the deck. “The engines are back up,” he said.

Henno ignored this. “C’mon, mate,” he said. “Let’s get you to hospital.”

But even as he said it – the hospital came to them.

They heard banging and voices from up above on the fantail deck – and then looked up to see LCDR Walker leaping down the ladder like the ship was sinking and she was heading for the lifeboats. Right behind her was a train of doctors, nurses, medics – the operators couldn’t really tell them apart. And before they could ask the stupid question about whether all this was for Homer…

The ship’s launch came blasting around the stern from the landward side, kicking up a curving wave of spray five feet into the air as it cornered like an F1 motorcar, and came sliding sideways into the dock. The pilot reversed the engines violently at the last second, bringing them to a perfect stop at water’s edge.

Homer, Pred, and Henno leapt out of the way, particularly as they saw what was inside the boat: two fire teams of Marines – a third of them wounded or dead, one lying prone down in the bilge, and at least one other severely wounded. Two of the healthy ones were doing chest compressions on the prone one. His name tape said “Raible” – and he was clearly in a bad way.

The Alpha operators’ first impulse was to try to help – but they were also smart enough to know when they would only be a hindrance. So instead they moved away, to let the medical personnel leap past them and into the boat, where they started checking vitals and transferring Marines onto litters. Two of them took over compressions on Raible, relieving the two distraught Marines.

They started coming out of the boat seconds later. The one walking wounded insisted on coming out under his own power. “Never let the bastards see you coming out prone,” he muttered. Within a minute, this whole mobile naval surgical hospital, along with their patients, were out of the little boat, and moving inside the big one.

And that’s when Henno whispered to Pred and Homer: “Eight Jarheads go out. Six come back.”

Predator stepped forward muscularly, rumbling, “Nine went out.” He then raised his voice considerably and said, “Where the fuck’s Juice?”

* * *

The last Marine out was one they recognized as Sergeant Lovell. He looked up and said, “He didn’t make it.”

“WHAT?” Predator was now standing over him, blotting out the sun.

Lovell put his hand up – either in a gesture of placation, or maybe just in self-defense. “He didn’t make it out. He’s still there, in the warehouse at the depot. But we secured it.”

“Is he alive?”

“Yes – to the best of my knowledge. He’s wounded, but he was on his feet when we left him.” Lovell clearly instantly regretted putting it that way – that they had left him – and was perhaps about to regret it more, when a pair of sailors dashed between him and Predator. Overhead, four heavy winch lines with iron tackle were coming down, and the two sailors instantly started securing them to the ship’s launch.

One of them noticed Homer’s captured mini-sub up against this dock. “This pleasure craft belong to one of you?”

“Aye,” Henno said.

“Well if you want to keep it,” the sailor said, cinching the last line and giving it a yank, “you’d better find some way to bring the sumbitch aboard – now.” The launch started rising smoothly out of the water, shedding streams of water – tinted slightly in places with Jarhead blood.

Homer knew the sailor was right – he could feel the engines powering up beneath their feet. This ship was about to be under way. He motioned to Pred and Henno – the former a land-giant, the latter merely a very big, very strong man – and the three of them dug down and rolled the 1,400-pound mini-sub up over the lip of the dock, and dragged it a few feet across it.

Homer looked up to Pred – and saw that the man-mountain looked like he was in physical pain. And it wasn’t from the deadlift of the mini-sub.

But he also looked resolved – and unstoppable. He stood up to his full height of nearly seven feet and said, “If that goddamned warehouse is secure, then we can go there and pull Juice out of it.”

“Not if this vessel is making way,” Henno said. “The Russians’ll have it. And they’ll also have him.” He looked across at Homer, who was still bleeding on the dock. “C’mon, mate. Hospital for you.”

Homer shook his head. “No time. Got an aid kit? Grab it and follow me…” When Pred didn’t immediately follow, instead gazing forlornly out over the sea like the French Lieutenant’s Woman, Homer gripped his arm and said:

“Come on, brother. We can still get him back. Oh, and grab some duct tape, if you’ve got it…”

Predator looked like he was on the verge of tears. But he knew from long experience that in his worst moment… his best bet was always to trust his teammate.

So the three Alpha men together climbed up and away from the dock, as the carrier started churning great gouts of water and steaming north. Leaving behind them the naval base… and the indispensable supplies…

And the beloved bearded commando.

The Honor of Commanding

SAS Saldanha - Main Warehouse

Well… maybe I am going to die in Africa after all.

Juice spat weakly on the bare concrete – just making it far enough out to hit a non-bloodied spot. Thirty minutes after ordering the Marines to leave him, he was still sitting in the same spot – up against the crate that was sealing shut the warehouse.

He’d finally got the arm wound wrapped up. But it was still seeping. He’d also rewrapped the through-and-through wound on his leg – but that was an even worse story. He was pretty sure now his femoral artery had been nicked, probably in a ragged way, and no amount of pressure was going to fix it. He’d put his one tourniquet on the leg, as that wound was clearly worse. But it still didn’t totally stop the bleeding. Realistically, it was going to need trauma surgery to get it properly staunched.

And he wasn’t likely to get that anytime soon.

The Marines had humped a number of bags of plasma in with them – most teams did on combat ops – but they’d also humped them right back out again. And Juice didn’t have any himself, because plasma was heavy, and he needed to save the weight for his toys, his electronics. Not to mention all the batteries they required.

His juice.

He snorted in amusement. Now he had juice for all his many devices… but none for himself. No Juice juice. That was typical.

It occurred to him that there absolutely had to be medical supplies in this warehouse somewhere, including plasma – it seemed to have every other damned thing – but he was loathe to go rummaging around looking for it, tearing into plastic-wrapped pallets and sealed crates. Basically, the more he moved, the more blood he pumped around his body – and then right out of it again.

So. He’d just sit here and take it easy. And probably they’d come back in time. But if they didn’t… well, that wasn’t actually so bad.

Juice tallied his results for the day. He’d taken some bad casualties, including two KIAs – and some of the wounded might yet die. But, on the other hand, he’d gotten home most of the men he’d been given the honor of commanding.

And, even more importantly: he’d achieved the mission objective. He’d secured the supplies. Even if he was dead by the time the others came back, they would find him right here – still faithfully guarding what they had sent him out to find.

So perhaps they would think well of him.

More importantly, his brothers in Alpha would know he hadn’t let them down. That he had completed the mission they needed him to. That he had gotten it done. So even in death he would remain in the brotherhood. And that meant everything.

Juice also knew he could now think well of himself. Because he had finally conquered his fears. His fear of death, his fear of inadequacy, his fear of not really deserving to be a Tier-1 operator… and his terrible fear of letting his brothers down. All of these had fallen away.

He was free now.

And if he died, he died a happy man.

* * *

“Big Teddy Bear, how copy?”

Juice wasn’t sure he’d heard that right. He had drifted half off to sleep. His head still wobbling unsteadily, he looked down his chest at his radio.

“Big Teddy Bear, acknowledge. I know you’re in there.”

Juice smiled tiredly. Well goddamn, I DID hear that right. It was a female voice – and definitely not LT Campbell. No, this was a voice that was much more familiar to him, and much more beloved. He squeezed his PTT button.

“Hey, Ali. What the heck are you doing here?”

“I was just on my way back to the carrier. Heard those dumb Jarheads forgot you. Need a lift?”

Juice laughed weakly and nodded. “Yeah, love one. But I don’t think you’re going to find any place to park. And I’m not real optimistic about being able to leave the building.”

There was a brief pause. “I might be able to help you with that. Wait out, Elvis.”

* * *

“Yeah,” shouted the Seahawk co-pilot over ICS, albeit weakly, from back in the main cabin. “I actually CAN get the minigun up, if you give me a minute. We’ve got a spare feeder on board.” The man was audible, but Ali could tell the morphine was slurring his speech for him.

Ali, up front at the pilot’s controls, keeping them in a banking racetrack pattern around the naval base, wasn’t all that surprised to hear this. CSAR wasn’t the kind of mission you could just postpone due to defective equipment, and failure wasn’t on their menu. So a major theme would be replacement parts for things.

She was also aware of what the co-pilot wasn’t (yet) saying: that they had critical casualties on board, who were this guy’s brothers, and they needed to get back to the carrier where they could get desperately needed medical care. But the co-pilot also knew Ali’s own brother was in peril, and had been left behind, so he was keeping his problems to himself – for now.

When he reported the minigun was back online, Ali formulated a plan of action – then communicated it to Juice on the radio. He had a brief debate about whether it was better to stay where he was, keeping more of his blood in his body, and wait for the real cavalry – if they ever came. Or else gamble now by trying a risky, frantic breakout. In the end, he was game.

Get on the train that’s at the platform, he thought, perhaps discounting the future again.

Ali felt the same – not least because she was flying around in an aircraft full of gore, with two dead men and two badly wounded ones, all lying in pools of blood back there. The least wounded, the co-pilot, was now her door gunner. And she’d better make use of him while he was still on his feet.

She revved up the engines and pointed the nose east – and down. So far, she’d been keeping her distance from the legions of dead swarming around below – lest the noise of the helo rile them up and make Juice’s problems even worse. But now she used that noise tactically, flaring in close to the south corner of the warehouse – about 50 yards from the breaching hole she could see had been blown in the southwest edge of it.

And the massed undead in the area got very interested in her, very quickly. Keeping it about 25 feet off the deck, she began to slowly circle the building counter-clockwise – leading most of them on that side on a merry circuit around to the far side of the building. And once she was exactly opposite that breaching hole, she yanked the cyclic, climbed violently, popped right over the top of the building, and dropped down again. It was a decent little bit of flying.

Lining up the minigun port perfectly with the open area in front of the exit, Ali keyed her mic and said: “Light ’em up.”

The devil’s whine of the minigun started up now – the co-pilot, no expert on the weapon but not quite a newbie either, was spraying hundreds and thousands of rounds out the door, and mowing the grass in front of the exit. Those dead who either hadn’t followed Ali’s Pied Piper routine, or else had wandered in since, went down as if being weed-whacked. Others were coming to take their place – but the area was getting clear fast and, God willing, would stay that way long enough to get her man out.

Not a moment too soon, she saw that closed-up hole open up again, from the inside – so she flared in to land, and to get her friend the hell out of there. Now she could see Juice bent over at the waist and emerging, pistol in hand. He took a couple of shots on nearby dead. But he was moving slowly, and didn’t seem to be in a good way.

KA-BLOOM!!!

Something exploded behind her – and Ali wished she could say she were more surprised. This aircraft had very recently been shot all to hell, and any number of systems could be failing now, from stress, or leakage, or insufficient redundancy.

Not surprising, she thought. But really shitty timing…

But, then, when the co-pilot didn’t respond to her hail, and she clocked that the minigun was down, she turned and craned her head into the rear cabin, and saw what had actually happened: the minigun receiver had exploded. Most likely it had been damaged by a round from that Spetsnaz sniper.

Ali really fucking hated that guy.

The co-pilot was now down on the deck, barely moving and borderline unconscious. He was sharing that space with two dead men, and another too grievously wounded to see, or to help in any way. Ali was truly the last man standing.

This just really isn’t my day, she thought.

She’d already begun to abort her landing, and now brought the nose around and surveyed the scene. With the minigun down, the space she’d intended to land in was already filling up with walking and running dead.

And Juice’s escape from the warehouse had also been cut short. He was barely twenty feet from the entrance, firing and reloading his pistol constantly. With the minigun down, he was being swarmed again. So he began to retreat, backing toward the hole he’d just emerged from. She saw him half collapse, and drag himself into it. The dead were right on his heels.

Everything had gone completely to shit. But that was always the time to step up and operate more effectively, not collapse in a puddle. Ali slapped at the controls, looking for the Digital Automatic Flight Controls System (DAFCS), and hit the Barometric Altimeter hold, which put them into an auto-hover. Then she unstrapped herself, leapt back into the main cabin, and grabbed her rifle up off the deck.

Stepping into the open doorway, she started doing precision shooting like her brother’s life depended on it – which it emphatically did. She waited until each pursuing Zulu or Romeo was right at the breached entrance – then she put it down with a brainstem shot. One by one, they started to pile up – until the ones behind couldn’t get around the destroyed ones at the front.

In a few seconds, a dozen bodies effectively blocked the entryway. But Ali could still just see around and behind them – and finally saw something solid, probably a crate, slide into place. Juice was safe, at least right this second.

But he was also entombed again.

And, now… he didn’t respond to her hail on the radio.

But Ali still had critically wounded men depending on her to get them to safety. And there was nothing more she could do here. So she climbed back into the cockpit, turned off the auto flight controls – and, feeling very much alone, blasted the Seahawk off to the west, back out to sea.

And finally, at least, toward home.

Loya Jirga

JFK - Bridge

At least half the bridge crew stood up in shock as a man in a dripping wetsuit strode through the hatch and straight into the middle of the room. It wasn’t the water still streaming from his figure that stoppered the mouths of those there.

It was the streaming blood.

This man was visibly bleeding from God only knew how many wounds, with all but those on his face partially or fully hidden under slashed folds of neoprene. Two extremely scary-looking dudes – one of them big, the other gigantic, and both very obviously not Navy surface-fleet personnel – were trying to tend to the diver’s wounds.

But he wasn’t staying put long enough.

He also carried something big, metallic, and heavy.

“Commander Abrams,” Homer said. “I need to brief you – plus Drake, Handon, Campbell, and Fick. And right now.”

Abrams stood and looked him in the eye. That told him everything he needed to know.

“I’ll see who can be spared,” he said.

* * *

Six minutes later, everyone Homer had requested had been assembled. Drake had been pulled out of isolation in the Captain’s Ready Room, still looking weak and fluttery. Handon and Fick had been called back in from out on the flight deck. And, with the shore mission back – or all of it that was coming back – and the CSAR bird winging its way home, plus the Kennedy now steaming north toward relative safety, Campbell had been willing to be pried away from CIC, at least for a few minutes.

As they filtered in, most looking edgy to be off-station, and disinclined to stay off it long, Homer leaned back and let Predator and Henno work on bandaging and taping up his injuries. Other than the through-and-through wound in his arm, they were all pretty superficial – just skin and muscle laid open from slashing strikes, though some of them had bled freely. Now the bleeding was being stopped.

“You should let me properly disinfect these,” Predator scolded Homer.

“I got them while immersed in salt water. They’re probably pretty much sterile now.”

Pred pulled out a multi-tool to scissor off Homer’s sleeve and get to the arm wound. But Homer vetoed this, and told him just to duct tape the whole thing up. Pred and Henno looked at each other like, Dude’s planning on going swimming again? But neither had any desire to get between a SEAL and the water.

And with this, the last of the arrivals filed in and took a seat. Homer reached under the table, hefted the big Russian limpet mine, and dropped it on the table with a resounding clang. If anyone was dozing, this woke them up.

“I pulled this off the hull of this vessel twenty minutes ago,” he said. “Along with nine others exactly like it. There were also seven Spetsnaz combat divers down there, at work affixing them, with a wet submersible mini-sub.”

Nobody spoke in response to this. But there was a very palpable Jesus fucking Christ… vibe in the air.

Finally, Abrams found his voice. “Are you sure you got them all?”

“I’m sure,” Homer said. “That is, I’m sure I got all the mines. I didn’t get everyone in that Spetsnaz naval brigade, the remainder of whom are still out there somewhere. And I can all but guarantee they’ll be back. Unless we sink the vessel they’re basing off. Which we have to do. Now.” He looked at Drake when he said this. Abrams didn’t feel like explaining that Drake wasn’t the man he had been a few days or even hours ago.

Drake cleared his throat. He said: “We’re not attacking the Admiral Nakhimov again.” And, with those four words alone, Homer could see it all: Commander Drake was finished. He had been burned badly on this one already.

And he’d lost his nerve.

Then again, he also had a point. Now he amplified it, and the others let him speak. “We already lost half our remaining squadron of F-35s in our initial attack. We lost our Predator UAV. Now we’ve recovered the shore team—”

“Most of it,” Pred rumbled.

Drake looked pained, but went on. “We’ve recovered the shore team, and the CSAR mission is on its way back in.”

Now Campbell rumbled, “Minus the rescue part.”

Abrams spoke up now. He had his issues with Drake, and serious concerns about the man’s mental state. But he was also able to see both sides of it. And he was loyal. He said, “Then that’s another argument against sinking the Nakhimov. The CAG is almost certainly being held on it now.”

“Pardon me,” Homer said. “But fuck the CAG.”

No one moved or spoke. Breathing was minimal.

Finally, Predator broke the tension. “Damn, dude.” He had never heard Homer talk like that before. And he had been side by side with him, many times, when they were both inches or seconds from death or disaster – usually both. And one thing Homer had never been was rude.

Homer now looked around the table, pinning each person there with his serene blue eye. When he spoke again, it was in a quiet and calm manner. He had everyone’s complete attention.

He said: “The CAG knows his duty perfectly well. Even if we’ve temporarily forgotten ours. Alpha has left a man behind, too, in that warehouse. But there are fifty million lives on the line. I’m sure you’re very fond of your man, as we are of ours. But I shouldn’t have to tell you: one man doesn’t matter.”

He paused again, significantly, before continuing. “And, pardon me putting it this way… but remember the last time we sat around this table? And I told you it was a lot easier to take out a ship at anchor than you thought? And that we needed to be concerned about these Spetsnaz naval units?” He put his hand on the still-wet limpet mine and patted it.

Drake coughed. “Okay,” he said. “You were right. I was wrong. They did come, and they were trying to sink the ship.”

“No,” Homer said, shaking his head sadly. “I was wrong.”

“What?”

“They weren’t trying to sink the ship. They were trying to take it.”

There was a faint but audible intake of breath around the table. “Oh, come on,” Drake said. He obviously found this fanciful at best.

Homer looked undisturbed. “What I’m telling you this time is: it’s also a lot easier to take down or capture a ship at anchor than you realize. Hell, a bunch of organic farmers and messianic nutjobs almost took this ship.”

Handon looked at Homer from under lowered brow. He knew full well that Homer had spent a big chunk of his life training for and executing VBSS missions: visit, board, search, and seizure. This meant swarming onto an enemy or pirate-controlled vessel – from the air, from the water, or usually both – and taking control of it by force. Usually with a relatively small team.

“As you discovered yourselves,” Homer said, “you don’t need that many guys – they just need to be in the right place, have the element of surprise, and be moving a million miles an hour. If they’re highly trained and skilled, as well as vicious and merciless, so much the better. And a major training task of any Spetsnaz naval unit is going to be VBSS – ship takedowns.”

Abrams suddenly found himself doubting that Drake’s dismissal of the idea was totally warranted. He said to Homer, “What makes you think that’s what they were attempting?”

Homer looked across at him. “Firstly, they had a lot of personnel, plus a mini-sub, cruising around underneath this vessel. And two of them were doing hostile reconnaissance – peering through the hull with a thermal imaging camera.”

Abrams didn’t yet find this compelling. But Homer wasn’t done. “And those two helos that flew directly at us after the missile attack? Anyone have a competing theory about what they were planning on doing when they got here?”

The silence said no one did.

“And the missile attack itself. They had no way of knowing our anti-missile defenses were almost completely exhausted. I think that attack was a feint – they expected it to fail, that their missiles would be shot down. Because they didn’t want to destroy this vessel. They wanted to own it.”

Fick spoke, his gravelly voice respectful. “Why the limpet mines, then?”

Homer shrugged. “The mines were insurance. They were prepared to sink us if they had to.” He laid his hands flat on the table, and looked from Fick to Drake. “But there’s maybe one vessel still floating that would be better to ride out the ZA in than a Kirov-class battlecruiser. And it’s this one. Really, you should have NSF doing foot patrols right now on every deck. Checking people’s IDs.”

“Jesus,” Abrams said, the magnitude of this hitting him.

Homer shrugged again. “We chased off their helos, and I disrupted their sub-surface op. But for all we know they have combat swimmers climbing up onto the rear dock and changing into U.S. Navy uniforms right now. That would be exactly in character for Spetsnaz. And it’s not as if ship’s security is what it used to be – back when you faced opponents with working brains.”

Abrams looked around the table, where pretty much everyone was sitting rapt and wide-eyed now. It occurred to him that this was all suddenly looking a lot like a loya jirga. After a year in Afghanistan doing intel work – a strange place for a naval officer, but that was post-9/11 for you, plus he had volunteered – he knew this Pashto phrase meant “grand council.” It was a mass meeting, called for major decisions such as choosing a new king or planning a war. Abrams had a sense that the direction this discussion took in the next few minutes, and whatever decision they all reached, would have a critical impact on, perhaps, the fate of the entire world.

But before Abrams could speak, to try and channel the discussion, Drake beat him to it.

“Homer’s right,” he said finally. “They’ve been two steps ahead of us at every stage. We’re getting out of here.”

Homer sighed. “That’s not my point. My point is: we have to destroy them. And we have to do it now. The time for half-measures is over.”

Now Handon spoke, his expression about as dark as most of those there had seen it. “Leaving now would also entail one other terrible cost.” He looked around the table before finishing. For a second, Abrams thought he meant the ground commander who’d been left behind on the shore mission – Juice. But he didn’t. He said, “We can’t do without the supplies still sitting in that base.”

Drake said, “Then we’ll have to find another source.”

Fick scratched his stubble and said, “You got some plan for getting us to the Port of Aden and Somalia – with that big bastard floating right between us and it?”

Drake blinked. “We’ll go around it if we have to.”

Handon said, “That could take days. And the world might not have days.”

Drake looked down at the tabletop. When he looked up again and caught his eye, Homer thought his expression was very strange. He looked horror-struck – like he was somehow already looking at a dead man.

When he finally managed to speak again, Drake said, “I don’t care. We’re not attacking that battlecruiser again. They’ve had our number every time. I’m just not doing it. I’m not sending more people out to their deaths.”

He stood up. This apparently settled the matter.

“I’m on the bridge,” he said, and exited.

* * *

The others kept their seats, and regarded one another around the table. They all sensed that this was the discussion after the discussion.

“I’m sorry,” Abrams said. With these two words, he conveyed to the others his understanding that Drake had lost the ability to command. But also that there was nothing he could do about it.

Campbell, known more for her caginess, smarts, and tactical acumen than particularly for her loyalty, said: “Okay, so previously Drake dismissed Homer’s warning about the threat to this ship. And if it weren’t for Homer, we’d all be sleeping with the fishes right now.”

Predator leaned forward over the table, casting a shadow. “Not to mention that he was nearly killed doing it, fighting off the threat on his own.”

Campbell shook her head. “And now Drake’s doing the exact same shit again. Not listening.”

Handon peered pointedly at Abrams. “Look,” he said. “You’ve got to take command of the ship.”

Abrams shook his head. “I can’t do that.”

“There’s no choice. Drake is incapable.”

“Just because he doesn’t agree with your tactical assessment doesn’t make him incapable. Anyway, only a medical officer can make that determination.”

Campbell tapped her thin fingers on the table. “Handon’s right. Drake’s not getting the job done.”

“Nonetheless,” Abrams said. “He’s still in command.”

Fick now pushed himself back from the table with this thick arms, sleeves rolled up to the elbows. He looked around the table and said: “You know what they call a leader with no followers?”

The others waited for him to answer his own question.

“Just a guy out taking a walk.”

Homer leaned in closer to Handon now and said: “We can fix this ourselves. I can get it done.”

“Define fix,” Handon said.

Without hesitation Homer reeled it off: “Save Juice. Secure the supplies. And finish this – for good.”

Handon nodded. “Talk,” he said.

Abrams rose to his feet and said: “Whatever you guys are planning… I don’t want to know about it. Also, do it fast.”

And with that, he exited in Drake’s footsteps.

Through the open hatch, and down the length of the flag bridge, the others could just hear the whooping blades of an incoming helicopter.

Get Some

Jesus Two Zero - Inbound to the JFK

Ali watched the flight deck below swarming with movement as she descended and flared in to land. She aimed to put the Seahawk down close to the island, mainly so the wounded could be gotten below quickly. The people moving around below her were partly flight deck, air wing, and maintenance guys. But mostly medical personnel.

They had been alerted well in advance that this flight was bringing in critically injured men.

As Ali descended, something about one of the figures below grabbed her. Focusing in, she saw it was Homer, just exiting the island – and he had Predator and Henno with him. She watched him turn and exchange shouted instructions with them. Then those two ducked back inside, while Homer dashed out toward Ali’s landing spot.

He still seemed to be wearing his wetsuit.

Plus what looked like quite a lot of duct tape.

Ali touched the aircraft down on its three fat tires, kissing the deck dead level and smooth as silk. This was slightly surprising – both to her, and to everyone apprehensively watching – as she was flying a helicopter so shot-up that you could probably read a newspaper through it.

But these Seahawks were tough old birds.

Gurneys and medics swarmed the main cabin, after yanking open both side doors. In seconds, they were assessing wounds, applying tourniquets – and injecting adrenaline and doing chest compressions. Ali looked over her shoulder and was not in the least surprised to see all four crew members being treated, as if all had survivable injuries.

They were alive, and they could be saved, until a certified flight surgeon damn well said otherwise.

She was just reaching up to bring the engines offline when Homer pulled open the cockpit door, stuck his head in, and started shouting at her. Ali pulled her ICS headset down around her neck and leaned over.

“Keep her running!” Homer said.

Ali started to ask him why. But she got the answer from his expression alone: she was going to have to trust him. She nodded and let the rotors turn. Slightly belatedly, she noticed his injuries – including the bandaged knife wound across his face. “You look like shit,” she said.

He reached out, put his hand on her left cheek, and said: “You look beautiful.”

Smiling despite herself, Ali touched her own hand to her right cheek – where the giant gauze pad was still stuck to her face with dried blood.

“How’s your fuel situation?” Homer shouted again, his head pressed up close to hers now.

Ali shrugged. “Not bad. We weren’t actually out that long.”

“How far can you go?”

“Depends. How far do you need to go?”

“Depends.”

Ali rolled her eyes. “We can always top the tanks.”

Homer shook his head. “This isn’t exactly a scheduled or supported air op, so I don’t think we’re going to get refueling services. Anyway, there’s no time.”

He looked around now at the variety of large bulletholes and exposed insulation. “Will this thing stay in the air?”

Ali shrugged again. “Yeah, probably. It has so far. Radio doesn’t work.”

“Perfect,” Homer said, and climbed in.

* * *

After they roared back around the stern of the Kennedy, and flared in again over the rear dock, Ali had to try and hold a hover – beside a gigantic warship moving at near its top speed. Staying just off the rear edge of the dock required keeping her rotors spinning about six inches from the stern. She was also flying sideways, so the side cargo door faced the dock.

This was harder than it looked.

Stealing a glance down and across at the dock, she could see Henno and Pred already down there – with a large bundle of nylon strapping, which they were using to ensnare what looked like a gigantic dildo.

In reality, it was the Russian mini-sub.

Homer jumped out the door onto the dock and started trans-shipping what looked like a shit-ton of limpet mines, from the bay of the wet submersible, over to the main cabin of the Seahawk. He finished doing that at the same time as Henno and Pred finished fashioning what Ali realized now was a sling-load.

It was also clearly going to be a heavy one – and Ali was obviously going to be expected to lift it off that dock without swinging it, or the helo itself, into the Kennedy and killing herself and everyone in the vicinity.

Homer climbed aboard now and reached back as Henno passed across his dive equipment – air tank, rebreather, fins, etc. – and then a second nearly identical set of dive gear. Finally, Henno and Pred grabbed their rifles and threw themselves on board.

At the last second, Gunny Fick and two Marines came leaping down the rear ladder, each carrying a pair of ten-gallon fuel cans. As they handed them across, Ali thought she could hear him shout something like, “Been keeping these in reserve! I don’t want to hear any bullshit about how you didn’t have enough to get back!”

As Ali pulled her collective and lifted away, doing complex back-of-the-envelope calculations to keep the swinging weight of the sling-load from turning the flight into an exciting but short carnival ride, she could see the Marines down below, pumping their fists and waving their hats as they shrank to toy-soldier size. And she could read their lips as they shouted:

“Yeah! Get some!”

* * *

Abrams stood on the observation deck outside the bridge and watched the Seahawk come around from the stern again, drop down close to the deck – as low as it could, with what looked like a gigantic steel dildo slung underneath it – and blast straight toward shore, nose down and looking serious.

Within seconds, it had disappeared among the trees and ground clutter – which Abrams ardently hoped meant it would be invisible to radar on the Russian battlecruiser as well.

He was so lost in his own thoughts, which were at this point chasing one another around in increasingly frantic circles in his head, that he only realized Handon was standing at the railing beside him when he spoke.

“Looks like I was wrong,” Handon said.

“About what?”

“About Alpha being unable to do anything to help with naval surface warfare.”

Without turning his head, Abrams said, “Does your guy know what he’s talking about?”

“Oh, yeah,” Handon said.

“Does he know what he’s doing?”

Handon just bobbed his head and gazed off toward the shrinking dot of the Seahawk. And he kept his mouth shut while thinking:

I sure as hell hope so.

All the Way Home

JFK - Captain’s Ready Room

Commander Drake sat in the cocoon of the silence and near dark. A thick coating of dust covered the desk in front of him. No one had disturbed it, not for a long time. And neither had he.

He was still sharing this compartment with the dead. They kept assailing him. And no amount of blocking them out, through sheer force of will, seemed to make them go away. Willpower, and denial, were working worse for him all the time.

Trying not to see their faces, he couldn’t stop himself thinking again of the two sailors who had taken their own lives. That committal ceremony, which Drake had thought would buck everyone up, pull them all together, hadn’t been enough to save them. Hell, the damned depressing thing was probably what pushed them over the edge.

And now he remembered all the men and women who had died in the terrible mutiny and outbreak – including most of the engineering section, in that magazine explosion. And all because he hadn’t listened to Homer – who had tried to warn him of the activities of the Zealots down in the chapel.

And evidently he hadn’t learned a damned thing from the experience, because hadn’t listened to him the next time, either, about the threat of the Russians. He kept doing the same shit, repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Maybe he shouldn’t have defied CentCom, should have gotten the scientist the hell out of there and back to Britain while he could. Maybe he’d screwed up to think they would all be safe here. This floating city had seemed so secure – away from the dead, away from the world.

Maybe he should have listened.

Then there were the fatalities, and all the terrible burn injuries, from the missile strike. And the death of Sergeant Brandon “Ice Cube” Coulson – a Marine who could hardly be spared, but who had spent his life anyway, trying to save others. All because Drake had failed to take sufficient precautions coming into port. Then the death of Tom-o, and the loss of the CAG, because he had been in too much of a hurry to attack, had been so sure he knew what he was doing.

Then again – some still-rational part of Drake’s mind tried to tell him – everything was obvious in retrospect. They even had a name for it: “hindsight bias.” It referred to the difficulty of remembering how little you knew at the time, how uncertain things were, before they all played out. Even wildly contingent events looked inevitable in retrospect. But they weren’t. And it’s actually psychologically difficult to imagine not knowing back then what you know now.

It was also easy to cherry-pick the blown decisions after the fact. For instance, all the clues pointing to 9/11 were there beforehand – but they were buried in an ocean of thousands of clues, all of which had to be sifted through. Similarly, Drake had been dealing with a thousand issues and making hundreds of decisions at the time. After the fact, it was easy to pinpoint the calls he should have made differently, and the people he should have listened to.

But good advice doesn’t come in a box marked “good advice.” And pointing out what facts he should have paid attention to at the time was painting the bullseye around where the arrow happened to hit.

But there was also no denying that Drake’s arrows were going increasingly wild.

He knew that the decline of his powers of judgment, and of command, had all gotten much worse, started spiraling out of control really, after he survived that gunshot wound and grenade explosion – when that last surviving Zealot had almost gotten him after all. He’d had a lot of bad and worsening physical symptoms – headache, dizziness, ringing ears, blurred vision, light sensitivity – before the behavioral ones started to kick in.

It turned out Doc Walker had been right to try and keep an eye on him. And he had been wrong to brush her off. Once again, he hadn’t listened.

Drake shook his head, and almost laughed. Now, for some reason, the fog around him seemed to clear a bit, and the dead retreated. It gave him space to breathe. And to think. And what he thought was:

All the good decisions I’ve made, all the close calls and breaks we’ve gotten, all the wildly improbable victories… none of it will mean anything – if it all falls apart now.

If he fell apart, and got everyone killed, took everything down with him. Two inches from the goal line or two thousand miles… two seconds from victory, or two years… it wouldn’t matter in the least.

It would all come down to nothing.

And his legacy would be failure.

And his memorial – death. Death covering the world.

And in this brief moment of clarity, that voice within him told him the truth: that he had stepped up to take command of the strike group in its hour of greatest need – and had saved this ship and everyone on it many times over. He had kept her floating, and everyone on her alive, for over two years of post-Apocalypse. He had even led them to victory in the Battle of the JFK, damn near miraculously getting the ship and crew out from under ten million Zulus.

But everyone has limits.

And maybe he just wasn’t going to be able to take them all the way home.

His eye was drawn again to the framed photo in the corner of the desk. It was a humble little six-by-four, a photo of the Captain’s family – and evidently the only personal item he had allowed himself. It was a reminder to Drake that one man could only do so much. And that he was not the first person to be pushed past his limits trying to do this job.

But if he had filled a crucial role for a while, at the critical moment of history… maybe that was enough. Part of him still felt as if he was quitting, running out on his people, and on his duty. And that feeling was lacerating. But maybe the last contribution Drake could make, his last indispensable act, would be to decide that, at least for now…

He could do no more.

He picked up the phone handset from the desk.

And he dialed the hospital.

* * *

“Commander – enemy surface contact is slowing!”

Abrams went back to the station with the drone video and radar feed. Both were now being fed in from their Fire Scout helo drone, which had replaced the destroyed Predator. Up at 15,000 feet and ranging out way ahead, it was also having to fly at a pretty good clip both to keep up with the JFK and, mainly, to stay out of the Russian’s long-range SAM circle of death.

Abrams sighed as he leaned over the station again. He wasn’t actually sure why he ever left this spot.

“How slow?” he asked.

“Sir, they appear to be stopping… enemy contact is now static. It looks like they’re giving up the chase.”

Abrams blinked once, slowly. “They’re not giving up the chase. They’re consolidating their winnings.” He pointed at the radar display. “Look. They’ve taken up their old position, in the mouth of Saldanha Bay. They’ve got their base back. And their supplies.”

Abrams straightened up and went back to his station.

“Helm,” he said. “All stop.”

Face blank, Abrams collapsed back into his chair. They were now, it seemed, and in every sense…

Dead in the water.

High Explosives, No Knife Fight

Admiral Nakhimov - Well Deck

Lieutenant Commander Cole, formerly the Kennedy’s CAG, but now a prisoner of war, looked around in the tiny cabin, his pupils dilating and straining to see into the darkness that filled the corners. There were random bits of crap, unused gear, an actual mop in a bucket.

LCDR Cole retained his rank. But Drake would have appointed a new acting CAG by now. Though, thinking about it, Cole was not entirely sure who that would be. Who was left? Wells, maybe? What a pass things had come to if Hailey was in charge.

Cole was tied to a chair, his bare feet flat on the cold, wet, not terribly hygienic floor, in a cabin that he had a strong sense was way down in the bottom decks of this huge warship. All his gear, plus his shoes, had been taken from him. But at least they let him keep his flight suit. And his excellent looks, broad shoulders, eyes that flashed with intelligence, and general air of being the master of events was as yet undimmed.

He shivered slightly and rubbed his bare feet together. It wasn’t warm down here, and it wasn’t pleasant – but it was warmer than floating out on the open ocean, and it was more pleasant than that abortive fist-fight he’d tried to have with the Russian combat swimmers who came for him.

He’d lost. But he’d at least put up a fight.

The same might be said of his air mission. He and Tom-o had both gotten their missiles off before being taken down. He’d been blindfolded while in the Russian helo, and while being taken aboard – but he could tell this ship hadn’t been moving at the time, and there was also the unmistakable smell of smoke. Clearly, some kind of damage control effort was going on.

So one or more of their missiles had gotten through. And they had stopped the enemy vessel in its tracks. He was pretty sure it was moving again now, though it was hard to tell on a ship this big and heavy. Anyway, for all he knew, it might yet sink from the damage he’d inflicted.

That would rule, he thought, laughing internally at his own self-conscious bravado. But however clichéd the sentiment, it was also true. He’d be delighted to go down with this particular ship.

As long as he took all the bastards on it with him.

* * *

Abrams looked up as an unfamiliar figure entered the JFK bridge. It was Lieutenant Commander Walker, flight surgeon and CO of the hospital. She had a look on her face that said she wished she were here under better circumstances.

She saluted as she passed Abrams, but then wordlessly carried on walking the length of the bridge, only stopping before the Captain’s Ready Room. She paused a second before knocking twice, letting herself in – and closing the hatch behind her.

Abrams only had a few seconds to wonder whether this represented good news or not, when the door opened again and Walker exited. She had Drake with her. The two walked side by side to Abrams’s station and stopped.

Drake looked a little better. But the words that came out of his mouth could have hardly have been more surprising if they had been laser beams.

“Commander Abrams,” he said. “Be advised that I am sending myself down to the hospital, and reporting to sick call.” He paused and swallowed. “I am ready to be relieved.”

Abrams stood, took up the position of attention, and saluted. He said: “I relieve you, sir.”

Drake saluted back. Snapping it down sharply, he said: “The ship is yours.”

Abrams held the position of attention and kept his salute up as he barked, “Commanding officer leaving the deck!”

Every man and woman of the bridge crew – officer, petty officer, and seaman – rose, stood at attention, and saluted. And they held the position until Drake and Walker were gone from sight.

* * *

As the hatch unexpectedly opened, Cole opened his eyes again to the harsh glare of lights coming in from the companionway outside. He must have drifted off, for how long he didn’t know. He also guessed the Russian ship had stopped again. As before, it was hard to tell. But there seemed to be a very low-frequency vibration that was missing from before.

As his eyes adjusted to the light, he saw there was a single figure silhouetted in the doorway. The newcomer entered carrying a chair, put it down opposite Cole, then sat down in it facing him. As his eyes continued to adjust, Cole was able to make out an ordinary Russian naval officer’s uniform – long double-breasted tunic and pants, both dark-blue, and dark-blue flat cap with gold braiding – but not much else. There was one striking thing about the officer, and it only hit Cole when she spoke.

“Do you know what I am?” she asked in lightly accented English.

Cole was tempted to answer, because he did know – she was a Russian naval intelligence officer. But he wasn’t planning on saying much here, so he figured he’d start as he meant to go on, and just keep quiet.

“I am a Spetsnaz interpreter,” she said.

Got that one wrong, Cole thought. Glad I kept my mouth shut.

His eyes had adjusted now. And the first thing he saw was that she was not a small woman – part of why he hadn’t recognized her gender in the first place. But that didn’t mean she was fat – far from it. Her extremely low body fat was visible in her face, in the fine lines on her forehead, in her big lean frame. She also moved smoothly and radiated some kind of power. Not only was this woman clearly in great shape, but it also seemed obvious she had discipline, probably in all areas of her life and work.

She radiated pure will.

“And for interpreter,” she said, “you can translate that as interrogator. And for interrogator, well…” She reached down and patted a black bag at her side, which Cole had not seen before. The fact that he had to imagine what was inside somehow made it much more ominous.

Cole steeled himself, digging down for his own will – to resist. This, after all, was part of his job. He just never thought he’d actually end up like this…

But the woman made no move toward the bag. Not yet. Instead, she said, “You know about Spetsnaz?”

Cole just put on his most bored expression. It was a disguise – to her, but also to himself. He could feel the fear welling up in him. It was unfamiliar, and it was unpleasant, and he didn’t like it one bit.

“I will tell you a little, then,” she said. “The typical Spetsnaz soldier is a skeptic, a cynic, and a pessimist. He believes in the depravity of human nature, and knows – from his own experience – that, in extreme conditions, man becomes a beast. He does not believe in justice, goodness, or humanity. He exists in a state of complete freedom – in which he fears nobody, trusts no one at all, and would not ask anyone for anything. Especially mercy.”

She paused and looked down at her hands, which were folded serenely in her lap.

“Do you understand?”

Cole had to hand it to her that her English was flawless. But he still had no interest in talking to her.

She shifted her posture very slightly. “Let me put this in more concrete terms for you. I was once asked, at an embassy cocktail party in Moscow, the following question: How long can a very strong person hold out against questioning by Spetsnaz? And do you know what my answer was? One second. One second is how long the strongest can hold out against Spetsn—”

But she swallowed her last syllable, as the ship rocked violently, just one time, all around them. Before either could react, there were three more hard jolts, all in a series. The lights out in the companionway flickered, then came back up – then went out entirely. Emergency lighting came on at floor level, providing just enough illumination to see.

The interrogator traded one last emotionless look with Cole, then wordlessly rose and walked out, pulling the hatch shut behind her.

“How’s that pessimism working out for you now, you spooky bitch!” Cole shouted after her.

He had finally found something he wanted to say.

The Sound of Children’s Laughter

JFK - Bridge

When Abrams first sat down again – after Drake’s withdrawal from the field, and his handover of command – he had breathed an enormous sigh of relief. The burden of command was of course terrible. But that was dwarfed by a sense of relief – that Drake was no longer having to struggle to fill his role.

And, mainly, that a bad or confused call on his part wasn’t going to get everyone killed.

Now, almost two hours later, Abrams looked around the bridge – his bridge. And it seemed like there was something he was supposed to do, something he had forgotten. It finally hit him. He got up and relocated himself to the Captain’s station. And as he did so, he said aloud: “All standing orders, regulations, and instructions remain in effect.”

And then he sat himself down.

“Sir,” the bridge radar operator said, “Jesus Two Zero is inbound. Again.”

As Abrams rose and headed for the observation deck – as usual, he wanted to see this firsthand – the interior hatch opened, and Handon came back in. Evidently, he had his own radar operator, or other intelligence source. He fell in with Abrams, and they both exited the bridge, stepped outside, and leaned up against the railing.

The Seahawk reappeared from the same place it had disappeared to, emerging from the trees and ground clutter on the coast of Africa, still staying close to the deck. But this time, its sling-loaded mini-sub was gone.

Abrams didn’t even want to ask where to.

And then the shot-up helo approached the Kennedy flying low, soared upward to clear the flight deck, then set down by the island, just as pretty as you please – and just like they had been out on any other mission.

Abrams still didn’t want to ask.

He and Handon listened as the engines came offline, then watched the rotors spin down. Four figures exited the aircraft – just as several flight deck crew, who had not been alerted this time, raced out to make it secure and safe. They didn’t look pleased.

But, somehow, the four heading the opposite direction did look pleased. Handon could now make them out as Ali, Homer, Pred, and Henno. The first two were still visibly dinged up, with bandages on their faces and elsewhere. Also, Henno was now wearing a wetsuit, and both he and Homer were still dripping water.

Intrigued, Handon and Abrams circled around the observation platform, following the four as they went around the island toward the stern. When they reached it, Pred and Henno remained standing, while Homer and Ali sat, their legs dangling off the very back edge of the boat.

And they all stared off toward the south.

They looked as if they were waiting for something.

Abrams looked over to Handon and said, “What the hell are they doing? It’s not like they can see anything from here.” There was absolutely nothing in visual range to their south. Certainly the Admiral Nakhimov wasn’t close enough to see – not even with binoculars – and not even if it weren’t tucked away back in Saldanha Bay.

Handon just smiled. When Abrams looked back down to the deck, he could see Homer conspicuously check his watch.

Two beats passed.

“Commander!” This was his old friend the drone video and radar operator. “The Admiral Nakhimov! She’s…” but his voice trailed off.

Abrams darted back inside to see for himself on the monitor. And he immediately knew why the ensign hadn’t had words to describe it. Great gouts of water were blasting up on both sides of the Russian battlecruiser, in four different places. Now the ensign found the words.

“She’s listing, sir! She looks like she’s floundering! She’s going down!”

And so she is, Abrams thought. Son of a bitch.

Handon was just wondering what Homer had done with the six remaining limpet mines.

* * *

When the first water hit Cole’s bare feet, it was already coming in and rising fast.

Nice, was all he thought.

He was going to get to die thinking he and his wingman had done this, with their missile attack – and the follow-on damage it had no doubt caused. He had no way of knowing who had recently been swimming around underneath this vessel, nor what they had been sticking to the keel. And that was okay.

So the “best day of their lives” had gone rather quickly and completely to shit. But, you know what? He still got to fly today – and he got to fly the best, most thrilling, and most completely ass-kicking aircraft humanity had ever produced.

Moreover – he got to do his duty.

And he got to go out doing what he loved.

So it was still a damned good day.

And, like every day, it too would eventually end.

The water was up to his waist now, having only taken a few seconds to rise to that height. This vessel was taking on water at a rate that could only mean one thing – it was heading straight for the bottom. The water was extremely cold. But that was okay, too.

Cole closed his eyes, leaned back, and smiled.

It looked like his last thoughts were going to be of his parents, and especially of his sisters, all of them gone these two years now. He wasn’t a believer, and he knew there were actually plenty of atheists in foxholes. And he was one of them. But… who knows? Maybe he’d be going to see his family now. It was a lovely thought to have. To choose to have.

And to finish up on.

As the water reached his chin, he decided he would hold his breath – just to enjoy a few more seconds of consciousness, of awareness. Of life.

Of gratitude for having been here.

* * *

Handon could hear the uproar, tumult, and celebration exploding out behind him from the bridge. But he stayed where he was out on the observation deck. He couldn’t take his eyes off his three men and one woman below, who he figured could also hear the celebratory whoops.

What you maniacs did…

And as Handon looked on, both Homer and Ali, still sitting, leaned way back and rested on their hands behind them. And then… he saw Ali turn and kiss Homer once on the shoulder.

But then there came new shouts, higher pitched ones, and from down on the flight deck – and these caused Homer to drag his obviously weary bones up from the deck, open his arms wide, and smile enormously.

“Daddy!”

Emily had brought Ben and Isabel up from below. Evidently, they’d also gotten word Homer was back. Handon was glad someone had thought to tell them. And as he watched Homer sweep up both angelic children and whirl them around, it became totally obvious to Handon exactly why, and how, Homer had done what he did.

For them. He did it all for them.

And it occurred to him: the safest place in the entire world might actually be wherever Homer’s kids were. It was starting to look like they were the future – in every sense.

Guess we’d better get them back to Britain, he thought.

Then it would never fall.

Even if Homer had to defend it singlehandedly.

* * *

Hailey got her stand-down order over the radio, and instantly popped her canopy.

As the breeze hit her, and she climbed out and stepped down the ladder, she realized two things. One, she was soaked in sweat. And, two, she could start breathing again. As the fear and tension melted away, it was as if no Navy pilot had ever been so happy not to have to fly anywhere.

And as she descended, she found her own thoughts were of her brothers and her father. She might disappoint them again. But it wouldn’t be today. And it wouldn’t be getting the whole world killed.

And maybe she would yet make them proud.

As she reached the flight deck, her legs not terribly steady, some strange impulse seized her… and she just laid herself down flat on the sun-warmed deck, arms and legs out snow-angel style. And she let gravity press her down, and the rushing wind caress her.

And she just lay there, feeling life flowing through her.

And listening to the sound of children’s laughter.

The One That Tried to Get Away

CentCom - Biosciences Complex

Captain Charlotte Maidstone stood in the entrance of the newly built warren of labs, white rooms, and fabrication facilities, with her side arm, a Glock 17, in her right hand. She was tensely monitoring the road that led to the prison. Gunfire was erupting everywhere up there now, and she figured Jameson and the Marines had arrived and were at that moment wreaking havoc. Anyway, she sure hoped they were.

And she also figured they had probably worked out, right around when she did, just what the hell was going on.

Behind her, out in the main open atrium of the complex, scientists and technicians moved around nervously, three of them hovering around a phone at the security station. The soldier who had previously been stationed there, an RMP, was now standing a few feet away from Charlotte, along with the other two helo pilots – all of them armed and waiting.

“It’s an outbreak,” one of the three scientists had said, after being briefed over the phone. “And it’s inside the compound.” Of course, this had sparked near-panic.

“Is it being put down?” asked the second of the trio, just as the chatter of gunfire began to sound in the distance.

“I can’t get them to answer me any more,” replied the man at the phone. “Let’s assume they’re busy.”

The lights in the entranceway and across the atrium flickered, causing several people to cry out in fear, but soon came back up.

Charlotte turned to the MP and the other pilots. “Can one of you guys try and calm them down a little in there?”

One of the pilots nodded and headed inside. Charlotte tapped at her thigh, wishing to God she still had her radio headset, so she could try to listen in on local frequencies, and maybe find out more about what the hell was going on. But she realized the only local frequency she had anyway was flight control. Then her eyes lit up as she remembered Jameson’s squad net! She’d been given that frequency for the mission just completed.

She turned to the MP and said, “I need your team radio.”

He gave her a look like: Are you out of your freaking mind? Not happening.

So she rephrased her request: “I need your team radio – Sergeant. And right now.”

He shook his head as he regarded the three stars of her captain’s insignia, on the shoulder of her flight suit. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and started unthreading the radio and headset from his chest rig.

Charlotte had it strapped on and tuned to the Marines’ radio chatter in seconds.

“Nicks here. All clear on north corridor, proceeding up to the second floor.”

“Halldon here. In heavy contact in south corridor. Assaulting now. Wait out.” Underneath the voice, Charlotte could hear thick and heavy gunfire in the background.

“Halldon here. South corridor is clear to halfway point. Out.”

She wanted to break in, to ask them for an update, to ask how she could help. But she knew better than to interrupt operational radio chatter, never mind troops in contact. So she settled for listening in.

The lights flickered in the building again, this time for longer – then they finally went out completely. Charlotte had just accepted that they weren’t coming back on when the row of fluorescents behind her in the reception area, and those alone, flickered to life. Now the area was dim, spooky, and slightly glowing.

In the distance, she could see a plume of smoke rising from one of the main buildings. Then, on the second floor of the south wing, the section most visible from where they stood, a row of windows exploded outward – followed almost a second later by the sound of multiple grenades going off.

Jesus, these guys aren’t pulling any punches in there, Charlotte thought.

Glass and debris rained down in the distance.

* * *

Charlotte had seen, or at least heard, Jameson and his men in action in Dusseldorf, where they had taken the target building with near-perfect stealth – until the mission had gone noisy and descended into chaos. But the fight here was obviously totally different from the start – fast, brutal, explosive, and merciless.

Charlotte continued to monitor the squad net, eyes narrowed and lips slightly parted, as the radio traffic told a tale of the different sectors of the complex being taken down – methodically, efficiently, and totally by storm.

But then some motion drew her gaze from the air in front of her face, snapping her head toward the horizon – and there she saw something running through a line of trees, and across the two-lane road that bisected the common.

She squinted, trying to focus in on the figure as it raced in the opposite direction, away from the main building. It was one of the base personnel, or so she thought – but the soldier wasn’t running like any normal man. And as Charlotte watched, she realized his foot was twisted around the wrong way. And he was making excellent time for a man with a badly broken ankle.

It was a runner.

And it was headed in the direction of the quarantine building – the security detail of which she had just seen rushing toward the fight in the main building. The place would be totally undefended. With God only knew how many unarmed people locked up in quarantine there.

Charlotte turned to the other pilot and the MP. “Guard this door – let nothing get by you.” She then turned and took off out the entrance, sprinting toward the road.

Nearer to the prison, the area beside the road had been cleared of trees and now played host to a row of parked helos. This included a couple of Apaches, Charlotte noted as she approached. It was actually near them that she judged the runner would emerge from the treeline, on its way to the quarantine building, so she angled to intercept.

She soon spotted it through a gap in the row of helos, and darted toward the nearest. As she slowed to a trot, crouched down, and skirted around the nose of the airframe, she fought to calm her frantic breathing, while also raising her Glock.

She came round the corner – no more than five yards away from the dead soldier. It saw her immediately, and now Charlotte knew for certain this was no living man. Its eyes burned with rage, and its mouth opened wide as it emitted a shriek. It lunged for her, much faster than she had expected, so she was forced to back-pedal while opening fire.

Keeping her feet from tangling up underneath her, while simultaneously aiming and discharging the weapon, was a task many times harder than anything she’d ever attempted at the range. And the stakes were infinitely higher. She had one go at this, and if she failed she’d never get another try – at anything.

But the shots ripped into its dead body, four hitting its left shoulder and chest, the next two missing completely as it was knocked into a falling spin. It fell sideways and rolled on the ground, but then flailed and tried to stand again, hauling its mortified dead flesh up and straight back into her. Charlotte took a quick shallow breath, squinted over the top of her front sight, and shot the creature dead center in the face.

It collapsed to the ground in an unmoving pile of limbs.

Then she simply stood there, still breathing crazily from the combination of running, terror, and adrenaline. And she found she needed a second to figure out what she was experiencing. She was used to taking these things out a dozen at a time from the remote safety of an Apache helicopter gunship – not one-on-one, and face-to-face, right on the ground. Not like this.

And that thought caused her to turn and regard the row of helos behind her. Her heart immediately sang out for her own ride – but that was the better part of a mile from here, plus had been running on fumes and black on ammo when she put it down. As for the ones right in front of her, she guessed the only reason they’d be parked up here, rather than engaged in the south, was that they were in for some type of maintenance. But she also guessed at least one of the Apaches would be fit for flight – it was an incredibly complex machine, and maintenance was rarely delayed until the thing actually broke down. With luck, one might even be fueled and armed.

She checked the nearest – no missiles or rockets on the hardpoints, no 30-mil in the autocannon – but then she struck lucky on the second. Its hardpoints were also bare, but the autocannon was topped up with what looked like a fresh belt.

Charlotte pulled open the hatch and climbed in, quickly checking the fuel gauge and finding it a quarter full. With a wide grin, she strapped herself in, fired up the APU, ran through the fastest flight checks of her life – and then started the bird up, as she glanced around outside, half expecting to get rushed by more runners. She’d be happy to deal with them – once she was off the ground.

The fierce metal bird hummed to life, then lifted powerfully off the deck, Charlotte simultaneously spinning it to face back toward the main prison complex. It seemed to respond to the controls slightly sluggishly compared to her own personal dragon. But it was all fine with her.

It’ll do the job, she thought as she continued to gain altitude, accelerated forward – and immediately spotted three more unsteady figures sprinting across the grounds, heading away from the main building and toward the perimeter.

Yeah. It’ll do just fine.

Grews Has Left the Building

CentCom Strategic Command Center

Eli hit the bottom of the stairs and skidded to a stop. Nicks was right behind him, followed by most of the remaining Marines. They spread out, splitting into their fire teams and moving swiftly across the large open reception area, and toward the various exits Eli had indicated.

There was no movement in the immediate area – most of the dead had been taken down as they entered the building, or in the fight that had raged when they moved out of the JOC. There was still a lot of ground left to cover, and many rooms and corridors to check, so Eli made his instructions simple.

“Each team take a wing. Clear it room by room, missing nothing. We have multiple FNs out there right now, and not one of them can make it out of this complex. Or we’re fucked.”

This was met with acknowledgements by each team leader, and they headed out and started their sweeps.

Eli moved into the middle of reception and took up a position that allowed him to monitor most of the corridors heading off into the various wings. The fire teams moved rapidly and smoothly out the exits, self-organizing, parceling themselves out among the ground-floor corridors, and Eli noted the position and direction of each in turn. The radio channel was silent – though that would change pretty quickly, as they started sending updates.

But for now Eli allowed himself a brisk nod of satisfaction.

This shit almost seemed to be going well.

* * *

Private Simmonds of second squad stepped out into the third-floor corridor and peered through his ACOG rifle sight into the brightly lit expanse of doors and interior windows. They had covered the two floors below quickly, and met little opposition, aside from a group of orderlies hiding in a room at the far end of the building. A dozen living people had stared back fearfully at them when they kicked the door in, their expressions melting into blessed relief. But there was an FN close by and on the move, one of them had said. They thought it had climbed to the upper floors.

After watching the group flee down the corridor toward reception, Simmonds and the other three Marines of his fire team headed up the stairs, taking the second floor quickly, again meeting no resistance. Now only the top floor remained, and Simmonds felt a prickle of anticipation run up his spine as they moved down the main corridor. There was noise coming from somewhere further on, and the instinct to rush forward was unbearable. But they weren’t going to make the mistake of leaving enemy in their rear and getting cut off, so every room got cleared as they advanced.

As they approached the noise, the four men aimed their short-barreled L85A2 assault rifles at the door and nodded to one other, preparing to go in. Simmonds kicked the door, and it gave way easily, revealing a room filled with utter carnage. Twenty feet away stood the FN, and in its hands was a decapitated head, which it seemed to be slamming against a closed door on the far wall. The rest of the body was spread across the floor and walls of the room. A breeze from outside hit the four Marines, and Simmonds saw that one of the two massive windows had been smashed out – a window that was supposed to be impact resistant.

Four assault rifles sang bloody murder, and the FN danced for a few seconds, twitching as the torrent of high-velocity 5.56 rounds cut it down. It fell to the floor with thunk, taking out a table nearby. Simmonds stepped into the room, avoiding the mess, and moved past the dead Foxtrot toward the far door.

“Anybody in there?” he said, removing his gloved left hand from his rifle’s vertical foregrip and knocking twice.

“Yes!” came a reply. “Are they dead?”

“Yes, the zombie is dead. You can come out.”

There was the noise of something heavy being dragged away from the door, and a clatter of falling objects, until finally the door swung inward to reveal a pale-faced man.

“They chased me in here,” he said. “I had to stack all this stuff up to barricade myself in.”

Simmonds frowned. There had only been one zombie in the room. “They?”

“Yes,” said the man. ”There were two of them, the mental ones. I heard them banging, and then heard the window crunch.”

Simmonds rushed over to the panel where the window used to be. Sticking his head out, he saw that thirty feet below was the spiderwebbed and badly cracked panel of glass.

Holy shit, he thought. One of the FNs must have literally bashed the window out of its frame. Now where was the second one?

He craned left and right out the window, scanning across the expanse of yard all the way out to the perimeter walls – and then he saw it. A hundred yards away, on the ground around a parked truck, lay two bodies. Beyond that, and just disappearing around the edge of a building and running full-tilt for the outside wall, was the dark figure of a Foxtrot. Simmonds brought his rifle up, but wasn’t fast enough. The manic figure vanished from view before he could put his sight on it.

He keyed his radio. “Eli, Simmonds.”

“Go,” said Eli.

“Yeah, we have a problem.”

“Care to be more specific?”

“One of the FNs got out of the building before we could engage it. Now it’s out in the grounds – and I think heading for the perimeter wall to the north.”

“Received.”

Their troop sergeant didn’t say anything else.

But he didn’t sound happy.

* * *

Damn it, thought Eli as he took off running, blasting into the ground floor of the newly built prefab building that was attached to the side of the old prison, on the north side.

“Did you copy that, LT?” he asked as he ran, dodging turned-over furniture, and making tracks for the doors at the far end, which he hoped would lead him out into the yard where the runaway Foxtrot was heading.

“I copy,” said Jameson. ”Just looking out the JOC now to see if I can get a bead on it. Wait, I’ve got it, it’s near the outside wire… nope I was too slow. Damn thing is fast and it’s gone up the side of the low building that abuts the wall. Eli – it’s jumped outside the perimeter. I repeat: it’s outside the wire.”

Double damn, thought Eli, as he passed three RMPs putting shots into the heads of fallen soldiers along the main corridor. He stopped at the main doors to the building, and saw that it led out onto another courtyard, and one without an exit to the main street. Seconds were passing with the sodding FN outside the complex, and the possibility of it attacking civilians on the street.

Gotta think faster…

He turned and bolted back down the corridor, skidding to a halt beside the three RMPs.

“Where’s the nearest exit to the street from here?” He presumed his tone, expression, and rate of travel made the urgency obvious.

The three MPs looked at each other.

“Errr… I think—” started one of them.

He’d been wrong. “Faster,” Eli barked. “I have a fucking FN outside the compound.”

Another guard pointed down the side corridor a few feet away. “That way. Then turn right. But any outside doors in the perimeter wall are usually locked nine different ways…”

Eli heard this last bit trailing faintly behind him, as he had already taken off at a bloody-minded sprint. He shoved through a set of double doors and burst out into another corridor, arms and rifle pumping wildly.

He took the first right, skidding on the tiled floor, and then blasted toward the large and solid wooden doors at the end of the corridor. As he approached, still accelerating, he could see they were thick and ancient, more like a gatehouse door in the wall of a medieval castle, and he could tell straight away that if it was locked he wasn’t going straight through by just charging and putting his shoulder in. He would probably knock himself cold. Nor did it appear all of the locks could be opened from this side without keys.

But the grizzled troop sergeant had other options.

He saw to it that he always did.

Now as he thundered forward, he slung his assault rifle, reached over his own shoulder, and drew the pistol-grip Benelli shotgun from the padded scabbard cinched to his backpack, where it had been riding undisturbed practically since the beginning of his military career. As he sped toward the huge doors and they swelled to take up his whole visual field, he leveled out the twelve-gauge, aimed at the locking mechanisms, and started squeezing the trigger and pumping the slide.

“I knew this day would come,” he muttered to himself, the words drowned out by the roar of shotgun blasts and the shredding of heavy timber by buckshot.

On the fourth blast, the right-side door swung out, fractions of a second before Eli was about to hit it with his shoulder. He shoved it out of his way as he burst through it and into the open air of the outside street, then cantered down the steps to the road that paralleled the wall, and finally skidded and turned in the direction where he guessed the FN had exited the compound. He turned the corner, running full-tilt along the sidewalk – just in time to hear the screech of car brakes, and see a vehicle slam into a figure thirty yards away.

The body flew through the air like a penalty kick.

London Bound

London - Inside the M25

The Portsmouth road to London had been a two-hour nightmare for Alan, and even the usually chilled-out Tessa had been nervous. After his phone conversation with his sister Rebecca, who was currently smack in the middle of the troubles kicking off in London, Alan was in a big hurry to get to the city – not least because the outbreak had spread far enough across the south of the country to reach Portsmouth, just a few miles from his quiet home.

He’d hated leaving the place unattended, and worried that with the dead now stalking the countryside, he might never be able to go back. Nowhere else in the world, as far as he knew, had managed to take back territory that had been overrun by the dead.

The drive normally took him forty minutes, tops, to reach the M25, and then straight into London. But two hours later their 4x4 crawled slowly through the massive security gate in the wall, and into the security zone around the capital.

Tessa had commented on the staggering size of the wall as they passed under it – at least twenty or maybe even thirty feet higher than it had been six months ago. But as it finally disappeared in the rearview, Alan wondered if it was anything like high enough to keep the dead out.

He took a deep breath, and was thankful that the dogs, all curled up in the back of the Range Rover, were calm. Even the new one – his latest addition, and the one that had saved him from being torn apart by the dead – had settled in and seemed comfortable with its new family.

Once past the wall and out onto the open road, Alan put his foot down. He’d actually worried they wouldn’t let them in, and had completely skipped the bit about nearly being killed by zombies, when he spoke to the border guards. Tessa had complained about lying to the security detail, but when Alan brought up the subject of quarantine, she soon gave in.

“Holy crap,” blurted Tessa now, as they passed a large stretch of parkland.

Alan glanced out over the road and toward the spread of fields, and could see what had surprised her. A grid of military tents covered the landscape for miles. Where once there had been open grass fields and farmland, with copses of trees, there was now a flattened and barren sprawl. Here and there were clusters of what looked like tanks, or armored vehicles, as well as a handful of helicopters, sitting immobile in open areas.

“Jesus,” he said, but then turned his attention back to the road. “That wasn’t there the last time we came this way.”

“No,” said Tessa. “You think it’s a bad sign?”

Alan shook his head. “No idea. I guess they have to pitch the tents somewhere.”

“But so many?” said Tessa.

The huge makeshift military encampment slowly vanished from view as they sped toward London, passing a long column of military transports heading in the other direction. There had to be a hundred of them, all heading toward the wall.

* * *

Half an hour later they pulled off the A3 and headed down a surface street toward the old Wandsworth Prison.

“Are you sure she meant the actual CentCom base?” asked Tessa.

“That’s what she said.” Alan tried not to get irritated that Tessa had asked the same question, worded slightly differently, three times in the last half hour.

“She said to meet her outside the north entrance…”

Alan tailed off as he slowed the 4x4. Ahead of them, where the road should have carried on south past the prison, there was a sheer wall, maybe thirty feet high, blocking the way. It seemed to link in with the walls of the old prison, off to the southwest.

“Okay, that’s new,” he said, turning right as they came to within thirty yards of the barrier. “Where do we go now?”

Tessa pointed at the dirt track leading over what used to be a grass verge. “Around?” she said.

Alan sped up, bumped the curb, and drove over the verge. It looked as though a lot of others had done so over the past weeks or months.

“I’ll go to the west side, see if there’s an entrance there. Maybe she’ll be waiting. If not I’ll stop and call again.” Though Alan wondered if his mobile would even work any more.

They turned the corner and began to accelerate – and even though Alan immediately slammed on the brakes, he wasn’t quick enough to avoid the running figure that raced straight out in front of them, smashing into the bumper and grille head-on.

“Shit!” he shouted, hearing the brakes screech as he tried to put his foot through the floor, knowing it was already too late. The blurring figure was launched into the air and thrown thirty feet down the road, tumbling across the blacktop and then coming to a stop.

The 4x4 stopped dead, and Alan threw off his seatbelt, shoved the door open and leapt outside, cursing as he went. He had just cleared the front of the vehicle when he slowed, then stopped dead.

The person he had just hit wasn’t lying on the ground as he had expected, but was already up and running – flat out, and straight for him. Alan took a step back, wanting desperately to run for the truck again, but the thing closing with him was moving at a nightmarish and totally inhuman speed.

And he knew he would never make it.

He heard Tessa cry out behind him, and the dogs barking – and then a series of thunderous blasts from a few feet away. He watched dumbstruck as the running figure stopped speeding toward him and rocketed off to the side, defying any sense of physics or biology as its head half-disappeared in a cloud of mist and viscera, and then finally tumbled over and slammed into the road, where it remained, prone and motionless.

Alan’s legs went from under him, and he collapsed to the ground, sucking in deep breaths as he looked to the left, at the sidewalk nearby, where a soldier was approaching, reloading a pistol-grip pump shotgun. Alan was vaguely aware of people on the street around him, running away. The soldier looked out of breath, but still managed to nod at Alan as he pressed a radio button on his chest and spoke into a microphone curling down from his helmet.

“Jameson, it’s Eli.”

Alan didn’t hear the reply, if any. Instead, he just sat there, stunned into silence as the man walked forward, raised the shotgun, aimed it at the unmoving figure on the ground, and blew off what was left of its head.

“Grews is KIA. I repeat. Grews is down.”

And We All Went to Hell in a Crap Basket

CentCom - Joint Operations Center

The newly promoted Major Jameson stared at the bank of LCD screens. Every few seconds, the scenes switched. The man at the desk – one of the few surviving CentCom security personnel who was familiar with the camera systems – looked up at him, awaiting orders.

A few feet away, at one of the desks that had been cleared of debris, two other survivors of the outbreak sat, and in Jameson’s mind these were by far the two most vital. Two actual junior operations officers, who had been found in a room at the far end of the JOC, barricaded into a small storage space. Jameson’s expression was blank as he listened to them try to field the staggering volume of calls coming in, some from the battlefront, and some from other theaters.

“I have over two thousand troops on the ground, and we’re less than five miles from the first line of defense trenches…” came a voice that Jameson actually vaguely recognized. Squinting in thought, he realized it was the officer commanding of the Parachute Regiment, currently deployed to the front – and right in its center, where the action was thickest and the danger most dire. Jameson had spoken to the man briefly when One Troop had escaped into the Paras’ lines on their exodus from Canterbury.

“…I mean five fucking miles. I was expecting a flight of Chinooks to extract us two hours ago and I’ve already lost several squads just trying to locate the damned supply drops. We’re critically low on munitions. Where the hell is my air lift?”

“Wait one, sir,” said the ops officer, and turned to look at Jameson expectantly. He stared back down at her, glassy-eyed.

In the last half an hour, seemingly the entire world had landed on his shoulders – what felt like absolutely every corner of the war, all at once. Before there had been Mayes, and Broads, and half a dozen other senior officers managing an ops center with nearly a hundred specialized personnel. But virtually the entire JOC staff had been killed in the outbreak, or else fled, location unknown. And so now there was just Jameson, his surviving Marines, one security guy, and two junior ops officers, and everything was going to hell out on the front lines.

And everywhere else, evidently.

Worst of all, Jameson had both been promoted and briefed in by Mayes in his last minutes, so now this was all his shit-show. And he had to somehow make it go on.

In roughly twelve hours, a flight of helos was supposed to arrive from Edinburgh with relief staff, and some ranking officers from the Northern Defence Group. But until then there was no one but him to make the decisions, and he knew about as much about the strategic situation – what forces or support or logistics were available, the immediate or long-term strategic objectives, availability of air assets, state of the battlespace – as a junior infantry officer out in the field might be expected to.

He pretty much knew jack shit.

“Do we have air lift for these guys?” he asked.

The ops officer looked up at him with a confused expression. “We had the flight that dropped them off a few days ago, but those are currently deployed north of the city, moving ammunition and supplies.”

Jameson nodded, and then glanced at the screens in front of them as they flicked through new camera views, all of them placed along the outside of the ZPW, and showing views of the landscape to the south. The security guy, fortunately, knew the system pretty well, and was used to performing this same duty with Mayes standing over him.

Colonel Mayes – who now lay dead in the office behind them, having shot himself.

“How soon can they finish the supply drop and haul ass to pick those Paras up?” Jameson asked. “Is it feasible?”

The young woman took a heavy breath, and started tapping at the keyboard. Jameson saw screens of tabulated data blur by in front of her.

“I’ll find out, sir,” she said.

“And put me on with that colonel.” He heard a click in his ear, and the noise of battle assaulted his ears. “Colonel Briars? This is Major Jameson.”

“Major!” snapped the field commander of the Paras. “What the hell is going on over there?”

“Sir, there’s been a bad outbreak at the Strategic Command Center. We’ve taken heavy casualties, including virtually all of the command element. And until—”

“What the hell? Where’s Mayes? Or Broads?”

“Both dead, sir.”

“So who the hell is in command?”

“That would be me, sir, until we get relief from Edinburgh.”

“Holy fucking shit.”

“Yes, sir, roger that.”

* * *

Jameson took a steadying breath before continuing.

“As for your situation, we have air lift that we can mobilize and send as soon as they’ve finished supply drops. I’ve got someone here doing her best to find out how long that wi—”

“Major. With all due respect to your current fuck-up of a situation, I have two thousand men out here, and maybe two or three hours to get the hell off the ground – or we’ll have to climb through the goddamned outer trenches to get back.”

“I understand that, sir.”

“And those helos were supposed to be on standby, just the other side of the wall, for when we needed them.”

Jameson frowned deeply. He could see the other calls from the field backing up ten deep at the ops officer’s station. And way out in front of him, at the other end of the room, was the ruined face of the massive digital display that used to show a complete and real-time view of the deployment and posture of all units in the field. Now it was smashed beyond recognition, and even the bank of computers sitting beneath it, which ran the damned thing, were ruined. So, basically, Jameson hadn’t the least clue who was where or what they were doing. The joint operations center was effectively blind – and inoperative.

“I will absolutely see what can be done,” said Jameson.

“Thank you very much,” said Colonel Briars. “And in the meantime do you suggest we just sit here and mark time?”

As Jameson watched the smaller map display in front of him at that station, showing lines of trenches spreading out for miles from the ZPW, he realized that it had fallen to him to make the kind of call he was never intended to make.

Jameson thought again of the last twenty minutes of Colonel Mayes’s life, and the startling situation report he had given him.

“There is no extraction for units deployed along the south edge of the wall,” Mayes had said. “They are to fall back until they run out of rear area to do it in – and then hold for as long as they can. They are there to provide us with time.”

But Jameson couldn’t understand the point of leaving thousands of troops to die on the front if they had the wall to defend from behind. He kicked the nearest chair, sending it skittering across the room, and startling the handful of other people in there with him. How the hell could he leave all those troops out there, when they could be behind the wall?

“Colonel,” he said, finally. “I suggest you pull back and withdraw through the nearest gate on the wall.”

“That’s fifteen miles from here,” said Briars. “Are we abandoning the front and switching to static defense? And am I supposed to run my men fifteen miles along the MLR?”

“I don’t see another way.” Jameson was about to add that there was no helo extraction imminent. But he decided the men out there facing an army of the dead didn’t need to know they had been put there to die.

“Sir, we have updates from Portsmouth,” said the other officer.

Portsmouth? thought Jameson. What the hell is happening in Portsmouth? Then he remembered what Mayes had said. They were evacuating, and dangerously close to losing the city.

“Go ahead.”

“The lines are breached and they’re falling back to the port.”

Jameson sighed out loud. And he thought:

I am in WAY over my head.

Only an hour ago, it had already looked to him like Fortress Britain was going down fast – falling to a rampaging outbreak that they simply could not get under control. Now, somehow, he and a handful of others were all that remained to coordinate the final defense of the last flickering remnants of humanity.

Jameson had no idea how they had got here.

And he didn’t know how to fix it.

He only knew that he had to somehow keep their heads above water… long enough for the life raft to arrive.

The vaccine.

Beginning of a New Beginning

The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains

It wasn’t even the fact that the Brits and Americans were somehow on the verge of successfully developing a vaccine against the zombie virus – if Aliyev had even heard them right across that ghostly radio transmission, and also presuming they had any idea what the hell they were talking about.

No – it was that Aliyev knew the man who had done it.

He shook his head in continued disbelief as he dashed around the lab, pulling out drawers, rifling and removing slides and beakers, and racking his brain for the basic principles of vaccine development.

Jesus Macarena-Dancing Christ… It couldn’t really be SIMON Park – could it?

Then again… Park had been just about the most blindingly smart sonofabitch Aliyev had ever worked with, even amongst the community of geniuses and bioscientific badasses they had at the biotech in Dusseldorf. If anyone could pull off such a thing as developing a Hargeisa vaccine…

Aliyev paused his ransacking of the lab and dashed back out to the living area, running his finger frantically across the biomedical reference section of his bookshelf, until he found something that might tell him what he needed to know. He yanked out two heavy volumes and carried them back to the lab. He needed to catch his breath, and clear his head. Because, at best, this wasn’t going to be easy.

The funny thing was, this new, sudden, frantic, unbidden, and wildly unexpected vaccine development project of his had nothing to do with Park’s claimed Hargeisa vaccine. No, Aliyev had spent eighteen months on that, and proven only that it was well beyond his skills. With that chimera virus, he had created a puzzle too complex for he himself to solve.

No – what he needed to produce now, and produce fucking fast, was a vaccine for meningitis Z. Because if that glorious bastard Park actually did come up with a vaccine to protect the living against Hargeisa… then that changed everything. If the tiny remaining dregs of humanity could somehow be vaccinated and rendered immune to the zombie virus… then they could also, at the same time, be vaccinated against Aliyev’s bad-ass zombie-killing pathogen. And then the two could easily be bundled up, like the MMR jab (for measles, mumps, rubella), which all kids in the developed world routinely got.

And then Aliyev could release his MZ out into the wild to do its wonderful, terrible work of killing the dead. And it got even better: London, with the zombie horde right at the gates – especially with the horde all mobbed together in one place – was the perfect place to do it. Out here in the ass-end of Mongolia, with its negligible population density, Aliyev could certainly infect a few of them. But the disease would never reach any kind of epidemiological critical mass, and wouldn’t reliably spread anywhere, never mind to the whole world.

But with a singularity closing on London… Aliyev could, just maybe, God really willing, both save London – and kill all the dead. He could kick off what would be the beginning of the end for the world’s seven billion ravening, slavering, rotting, biting, infecting, disgusting dead sons of bitches.

And, for humanity… well, it could be the beginning of a new beginning.

* * *

Six frantic, non-stop hours later, he had it.

I think, he thought – half-collapsing onto a lab stool and mopping his damp brow with his sleeve. Initially, racking his brain, he decided that – in theory – the existing vaccine against meningitis C should almost work. It would just need a little tweaking, a little clever biohacking. Which Aliyev felt confident he was still a dab hand at.

He didn’t have meningitis C vaccine on hand – but he did have a culture of the meningitis C bacterium itself, tucked in the back of the omni-maleficent Fridge of Death. For a few panicked instants, he couldn’t find the right test tube. With his shaking hands, he also almost killed himself several times over, by nearly dropping a couple of the other particularly horrible pathogen samples stored in there. But it turned out he didn’t even need the C culture.

Because, shortly after that, he got lucky again, by finding a detailed description of the strategy and design of the meningitis C vaccine in one of his big reference books. (Goddamn, I miss Wikipedia, he thought.) After that, it was pretty much just a matter of producing a conjugate-type vaccine that was, for practical purposes, identical to the C version, just with Z antigens.

This involved isolating and detaching the antigen (the bit that causes an immune reaction) from his designer meningitis Z bug – and then attaching it to a suitable carrier protein, safely inactivated. For the carrier protein, he ended up using the same one the C vaccine used – a non-toxic derivative of diphtheria toxin. (Diphtheria, check – yep, definitely got that in the Fridge.) Producing both the antigen and the carrier protein involved fermenting, homogenizing, and purifying cultures of both organisms – all pretty standard, if detailed and exacting, lab tasks.

The resultant vaccine, which he had already derivatized, conjugated, and loaded up in the syringe that now lay on the lab bench in front of him, should, in theory, induce a T-cell-dependent antibody response and immunological memory – thus protecting anyone inoculated with it from ever being infected with meningitis Z.

The trouble was… he didn’t have anyone to test this shit on. He could potentially test it on a dead guy, but A) that would by no means prove it worked on living people – in fact, even if it did work on the living, it still probably wouldn’t work on dead ones, who were believed to have no immune systems, and thus no immunological reactions for a vaccine to provoke. And, B) he simply wasn’t going out in that fucking snowstorm to collect dead Mongols again.

No, fuck that noise.

And it wasn’t strictly true that he had no one living to test it on. He took a baleful look down to the veins in his own forearm, which were already bulging from all the fiddly vaccine development work, and stress over saving the human race, and whatnot.

Jesus Christ…

Ideally, there should be about five years of animal testing, starting with mice and progressing to chimps – followed by cautious and very limited human clinical trials. In real life, it would have taken the better part of a decade to demonstrate that a new vaccine like this was safe, and get it approved for clinical use.

But in this life, Aliyev was exactly six hours into the process – and needed to wind it down fast. Because, judging by the radio reports, he was probably looking at a runway of not years for rolling out this vaccine – but weeks or even days. After which, there would be no one left alive to benefit from it.

There was also the small matter that his body’s immunological reaction would take, at very least, the better part of a week to spin up and start protecting him. Only then would it be safe to expose himself to MZ and see if he was resistant to it.

Then again, if the vaccine was going to kill him, that might be demonstrated rather more quickly.

Fuck it, he thought, sitting on a stool at a lab bench, tearing open an alcohol swab, wiping down the crook of his arm… and then taking the syringe in his right hand and lofting it in the air.

His thumb twitched on the plunger.

10,000 Days

The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains

Ninety minutes later, Aliyev huffingly laid down the last case of bottled water on top of the other three. All of them were stacked against the front wall of the lab, near the point where the lab met the living area – and just beside the vestibule and outside doorway.

Why is water so goddamned heavy? Aliyev wondered, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. But as a scientist, he already knew the answer. It was because it was extremely dense, almost a thousand kilograms per cubic meter. At any rate, he probably had as much as he needed out here now – four cases, 72 liters in total.

The stack of water bottles was the first of a number of piles of survivalist shit, which now stretched along the entire front wall of the lab, all the way down to the Fridge of Death at the far left. Following along the row with his eye, Aliyev suddenly got the feeling that the Fridge was laughing at him. Because back inside it now was that syringe loaded up with the MZ vaccine.

He hadn’t been able to make himself do it – hadn’t dredged up the required courage to inject himself with the seriously unknown quantity of the new vaccine.

So he was putting it off by packing, instead. Which he had to do anyway, right? And what was another hour or two? And by packing up the helo, he was committing himself to this course of action.

Wasn’t he?

Or maybe he was merely fooling himself into thinking he had the guts to leave the Dacha and attempt to fly over 3,500 miles to London – all in an aircraft that had a range of less than 750 miles, even with the auxiliary fuel tanks under the cabin floor – all of it over two continents heaving with flesh-chomping dead fuckers from coast to coast…

But if he wasn’t serious, he didn’t want to know.

I AM fucking going to do it, he told himself.

He was just going to finish packing first.

* * *

Now he had pretty much everything he needed staged out here. Maybe just one more trip to the supply closet. After that, it would simply be a matter of ferrying it out to the helo.

He’d always vaguely had a plan, what he’d do if he were forced to abandon this place. (A plan, that is, aside from: Die shortly thereafter.) If the Dacha fell, if it got surrounded by a zombie singularity, if (God forbid) it caught fire, he had a whole bunch of essential supplies earmarked for evacuation, and shoved into a storage closet in the main building. They had been set aside – if not quite bundled up for transport.

So they still required a little staging.

Aliyev did have, like any good survivalist, a “bug-out bag,” packed and ready to go in an instant. This was a large backpack from the fine folks at 5.11 Tactical, stuffed full of survival essentials, and now propped up by his feet.

He unzipped it and rifled through the contents: maps and compass, GPS, multi-tool, tarp/emergency shelter, survival blanket, 200m of paracord. Magnesium firestarter, some spare hiking socks, LED flashlight. There was a good-sized first aid kit (with broad-spectrum antibiotics), a hand-cranked radio, three days worth of water, a case of energy bars. Fishing kit. Night-vision goggles (the good ones). Spare batteries, Gore-tex jacket for foul weather, a shitload of duct tape. Hand sanitizer, gloves, face mask.

The commonly included signal mirror and emergency whistle he had, for obvious reasons, ditched. The last thing he’d want to do was get anybody’s attention.

Lastly, there were six full mags for the pistol, plus an additional two boxes of 50 cartridges each, as well as two boxes of 25 shells each for the Benelli M4 Tactical shotgun.

The shotgun itself was currently propped up by the inner door, and Aliyev admired it for the thousandth time. It had a tactical light, visible and IR aiming lasers, all the nice accessories – including an 8-shot magazine extender, and 6 more in a sidesaddle shell carrier on the solid fixed stock. No expense spared.

So, yeah, he did keep a bug-out bag – he just knew it wasn’t going to keep him alive very long in the fucking Altai mountains, or anywhere else in the world these days. He knew he’d realistically need a lot more supplies, especially for this crazy-ass trip he was planning now.

Zipping the bag closed again, he cast his eye over the piles of additional crap he’d ferried out here, cross-referencing it all against his mental checklist. Now was definitely the time to remember anything critical that was missing. Later would be way too late.

Beside the piled crates of water, there were four cases of civilian MREs – 48 meal kits in total, each with at least 1,250 calories, each self-contained and non-perishable. Next down was the two-man tent and four-season sleeping bag – the best money could buy.

Further along was the real ammo cache – 40 boxes of shotgun shells, a mix of double-ought, buckshot, and slugs. On top of those were 20 boxes of 5.7mm rounds for the pistol. And down beyond that, sitting right beside, perhaps fittingly, the Fridge of Death…

Yes, that actually was a small wooden crate of motherfucking grenades – complete with rope carrying handles. These were formerly the property of the United States Army – how they got loose was unknown, or at least untold by Aliyev’s buddy, a former Russian special forces guy, later loosely connected with the Russian mafia. With money and the right connections, one could buy absolutely any goddamned thing in post-Soviet Russia.

In this case, Aliyev had bought a mix of high-explosive, anti-personnel fragmentation, and even a couple of flashbang grenades. Basically, you just never knew when you were going to have to blow some shit up – or when there would be too many damned zombies coming at you at once to shoot them all.

Aliyev had almost no military or weapons training. But he tried to make up for it with sheer firepower.

* * *

He decided to make one more trip back to the closet, then start ferrying it all out. On his way through the living room, for some reason the stereo cabinet caught his eye, and he was stabbed with a tiny twinge of remorse. He’d paid a fortune for this thing, including its gigantic amplifier, sixteen satellite speakers, and embedded subwoofer system. But he’d never once turned it up to anything approaching its maximum volume – for fear, initially, of attracting attention from the living; then, later, of drawing the dead, sparse as they were in this 1.6-million-square-kilometer wasteland.

Last chance, he thought. Fuck it.

He selected Tool’s 10,000 Days from his music library – sometimes, nothing else was hard enough, and there was also the amusing fact that 10,000 days was almost exactly how long it had been since the fall of the Soviet Union and Biopreparat – casting him out into this wilderness – and which had led, perhaps inevitably, to all of this.

Cueing up the first song, he twisted the volume knob to the three-quarters mark. No, okay, that’s actually painful – and then spun it back down to the one-half mark, which was still atrociously loud, arena-concert loud. He nodded in approval, half-squinted his eyes, pursed his lips, and bobbed his head rhythmically as he threaded his way back to the supply closet.

Now, let’s see… what else? He decided to take a second crate of grenades. You couldn’t be too careful – and better to have extra grenades and not need them, than need them and not have them…

There was also a lot of additional camping gear in there, but he didn’t plan on spending any more time outside the helo than it took to refuel the damned thing. And if he found himself sleeping overnight on the ground, well, he’d have much bigger problems than malleting tent pegs or washing camp cookware…

But he did eye up the kerosene lamp. Yeah, what the hell… In an age of LED flashlights, which ran forever, there wasn’t all that much point, but you never knew. He looped his elbow through the carrying handle, threw a few other bits on the crate of grenades, and hefted it all up. He should probably make two trips, as this load was precarious. But he was tired – from his frantic full day of vaccine development, and from the months of work on the MZ before that.

As he carried the last survivalist goodies back through the living room, the blasting music seeming to shake the very floor, he found himself wheezing again. Should have had that home gym installed, he thought. But he knew himself well enough to know that he’d never use it, and had decided not to blow $20,000 on optimistic self-delusion.

And it was too goddamned late now anyway.

Plus, the ass-kicking music was sustaining his energy levels – was overloading them, in fact. His muscles buzzed and his foot tapped.

Or maybe he was really just thrilled that, after all his grim expectations… he wasn’t going to die in this stupid Dacha after all.

* * *

As he set the lamp down on the top crate of MREs, it occurred to him to see if there was actually any kerosene in it. There was. He flipped the cover closed again.

Okay, he thought. Now he could begin ferrying it all out to the helo. For sound tactical reasons, he started with the bug-out bag – and for no very good reason also grabbed the first crate of grenades. When he stepped outside, the snowstorm was finally winding down. But there was nearly a foot of powder on the ground, the wind still whipped loose flakes around, and the glare of the low sun nearly shut his eyes. He’d definitely be needing his Ray-Ban Aviators to fly today.

He picked his way carefully down that same front path he’d traversed earlier, then turned right at the corner of the building. The helipad was off to the side, carved out of the side of the mountain – there hadn’t really been any flat places to start with.

The aircraft sitting upon it was a sleek, beautiful, and stupidly expensive Eurocopter, in gunmetal blue – with a shark-like nose, a four-bladed rotor (same color), a lot of glass, and all sitting on four shiny black tires. It was fueled up – it always was – and Aliyev was reasonably hopeful it would start, despite not having been flown in quite a few months.

He set his load down in the snow and slid open the cargo door in the side. He’d already had all the rear passenger seats removed, for ferrying supplies up here. Now he hefted the bug-out bag and crate up and slid them across the deck to the back wall.

Then he paused, the reality of how far he was actually planning on flying this thing hitting him for the first time.

Jesus Christ, he thought, shaking his head. I should have my head examined.

He trudged back around the building, the fantastic, mystical, head-banging stylings of Tool greeting him long before he reached the entrance. He went back inside, leaving the door open behind him, as this was going to take a few trips. Pacing down the row of gear, he leaned over to pick up the second crate of grenades. But then he stopped, still bent over, and looked to his immediate left.

The Fridge of Death was smirking at him. Goddammit.

He shook his head. He was committed to this course of action – wasn’t he? No, not by a long shot. In fact, he seriously doubted he’d have the courage to really do it. Trying to get to London was basically just an elaborate form of suicide, anyway. But by loading up the helo, he could, at least for a while, convince himself that he was serious.

But, in his heart, he knew when he’d actually be committed: when he injected himself with the damned MZ vaccine. Then he’d be in it for real – one way or another. And the Fridge knew this, too. And that was why it was laughing at him.

Okay, screw you, Fridge, he thought. He couldn’t take the tension any more. He’d do it, or die trying. All it takes is one quick injection. Then I’m all in.

But when he yanked open the glass door, he found himself frozen again. Sitting there at the front of the shelf were the two cultures he needed to take with him to London: the meningitis Z, and the vaccine for it. He pulled those out and loaded them into a self-powered coldbox, which he’d already dug out of another part of the lab. This would keep the cultures viable for weeks if need be.

But he knew he was really just stalling again.

As he shut the coldbox, he was seized with another wave of self-loathing. Goddammit. Was he even willing to try and fix what he had done? Or was he going to die as he had lived – a selfish, self-absorbed, amoral coward?

He grabbed the loaded syringe, his own personally earmarked dose of the vaccine, slammed the Fridge shut, and stalked over to the same lab bench where he’d wussed out last time. The head-banging music gave him courage – and also made everything seem slightly dream-like, the way it washed over him and drowned out every other sound. He yanked open a drawer, tore open an alcohol swab, and wiped down the crook of his arm for the second time.

And he picked up the syringe.

It was extremely cold to the touch – the Fridge was kept at about four degrees Celsius. He hesitated again. It was well-known that ice-cold injections going into your veins resulted in more stinging and soreness – and he had no idea how bad this one was going to be to start with, due to no one ever having taken it before.

Glancing down into the open drawer, he saw a flint-spark lab lighter. If he were going to warm this up – and was he just procrastinating again? – he should probably go use the microwave in the kitchen. But he decided he couldn’t be arsed to make the trip. And, anyway, what was the point of having these nice glass syringes?

He grabbed a Bunsen burner from the next bench, sparked it with the lighter, and held the syringe just above the flame. He took a deep breath to settle himself.

For no reason, he looked up.

And there was somebody STANDING IN THE MOTHERFUCKING DOORWAY.

How the Dead Live

JFK - Biosciences Lab

Back on the Kennedy, down in the biosciences lab, Doctors Park and Close were having an unaccustomed reflective moment. They had just completed their tag-team work on a comprehensive spreadsheet, one which listed and described in detail every clinical task that was now standing between them and a finished vaccine.

And if they were really lucky, the damned thing might even work.

But, in any case, they had at least fully mapped the terrain. There was no doubt that challenges, obstacles, and unpleasant surprises would come up along the way. But they both felt like they had a good sense of what lay between them… and salvation for humanity.

And they were close. Extremely close.

As the two of them finished a last review of the document, each sitting at his own laptop, Park smiled out loud – at the thought of those unexpected obstacles they might yet face.

He knew now that adversity was inevitable, a universal of human experience. But the contest would be decided, always, by how he reacted to it. Much of life, he realized now, consisted of how we respond to adversity.

And he felt now like he had really internalized the appropriate, irresistible, and eternally powerful response to obstacles and unpleasant surprises:

Adapt and overcome.

With those three words, you almost couldn’t lose at life. And Park had no illusions about who had taught him this. The operators had not only saved his life, repeatedly.

They had changed his life.

Park’s vision only came back to the room when the hatch opened, and Sarah Cameron strode back in, riding as always on a wave of confidence and capability.

“Can you feel that?” she asked.

Both Park and Close gave her blank looks.

Sarah put her palms on a countertop. “That’s the ship turning. We’re reversing course, heading directly for the Gulf of Aden – with one stop only, to load supplies. Handon, Fick, and their guys are going to get you your Patient Zero. So be ready.”

Park straightened up and nodded. But when he looked across at Close, he saw the Oxford don’s expression was more troubled. “What’s wrong?”

“I was just thinking how… we’ve neglected something.”

“What’s that?”

Close seemed to gather his thoughts. “Bit of an elephant in the room, really.”

“What is it?” Sarah said, seeming not real charmed by this Hugh Grant-esque rambling.

“Well, even presuming we’re able to successfully inoculate the fifty million living people who remain… How the devil do we get rid of the seven billion dead ones?”

Park exhaled and sagged slightly on his lab stool. “Yes. That’s occurred to me, as well. And it won’t be an easy problem to solve either, will it?”

“No. No, it will not.” Close seemed to hesitate slightly. “Back at Oxford, we did give it a little thought… tossed a few ideas around – no real research, mind you…”

Out with it, Sarah wanted to say, but let the man get to it in his own time.

“But we did wonder whether the dead might be susceptible to some other pathogen. Or some new one. It was the rampaging spread of the virus that got us into this pickle in the first place.” He paused and looked at the other two. “What if we produced, or stumbled upon, some bacteria or virus that was—”

Park cocked his head. “Fatal to the dead?”

“Yes, it does sound a bit far-fetched when you put it like that. But if you put the pathology problems aside, and just consider the epidemiology – how the vectors of a massive outbreak amongst them, with the dead clustering up in big groups as they do now… well, it might take them out a damn sight more efficiently than we could ourselves, one by one.”

Park nodded. “And there would certainly be an elegance to it. If not actual irony.”

“Yes. It would do a job on them like the one they did on us. Unfortunately, transgenics and bioengineering are not really my fields.”

A few beats of silence passed, before Close noticed that Park’s gaze had gone long again.

“What is it?”

He refocused on the room. “Sorry. I was actually just remembering a man I used to know whose fields those very definitely were. He was a colleague of mine, back in Dusseldorf. Bioscientist on a fellowship from Russia. Very big into bioengineering, genetic design of microbes, custom bacteria and viruses, that sort of thing. I was never totally sure what he planned on doing with those skills.”

“Oh?”

Park tapped his fingers on the lab bench. “It was a little creepy, honestly. For a while, I was half convinced he was a Soviet spy.”

Close arched his eyebrow. “Whatever happened to him?”

“No idea.”

“Any chance he’s still alive?”

Park exhaled. “No. Of course not. None.”

Close deflated. “No. I didn’t suppose there would be.”

The Mongol Horde

The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains

Holy motherfucking shit.

The silhouetted figure standing hunched in the doorway of Oleg Aliyev’s Dacha was, it immediately became clear, a dead Mongol. And he had simply let himself in – walked right through the doorway that Aliyev had moronically left open for his next trip ferrying out supplies. Now, standing less than twenty feet away, it finally looked up at him and locked on.

Aliyev looked balefully over toward the living room, where the raucous stylings of Tool were still playing at absurdly high volume.

That wasn’t very clever, either, he thought.

And then he dropped the syringe of MZ vaccine from suddenly frozen fingers. The glass cylinder hit the top of the lab bench, then rolled rapidly toward the edge. Coming slightly back to life, Aliyev darted his hand out and caught it just as it rolled off into open air. It definitely would have shattered on that tile floor.

When he looked up again, the Mongol had raised its arms, and was coming straight for him.

Holy fucking fuck!

Instead of going for his gun, he’d gone for the plummeting syringe. His instincts were all wrong. How he’d survived this long was a complete fucking mystery, even to him.

By the time he shifted the syringe to his left hand and drew his pistol, the half-frozen dead guy was on top of him. Aliyev had nowhere to go, so he hopped up on the lab bench behind him, lifted his boots up between him and it – and, with a solid two-legged shove, sent it stumbling backward.

Now he got the pistol clear and started triggering off. The sharp reports tore through the progressive metal blasting out of the living room, his rounds hitting all over the place, sending up shards and splinters of building structure, lab equipment, and piled-up supplies. Then again, there were a hell of a lot of bullets in the gun, and one must have finally found the Mongol’s brainstem. As the creature disanimated and fell down, Aliyev could now see that there were others coming in behind it – at least two or three.

HOLY FUCKING FUCK ME.

It’s the Mongol horde, all over again…

He emptied the rest of his thirty rounds messily into the crowd in the doorway. Bodies lunged and tumbled. One of them fell across the piled cases of bottled water, and carried on across the stacked MREs, knocking the kerosene lamp off the top. Glass smashed on the tile floor, and a sharp-smelling clear liquid splashed out, a large pool of it forming and racing toward Aliyev’s feet.

His first thought was to get his boots clear.

Wrong impulse again.

But something else, some other related matter, began tickling faintly at the back of his mind…

He spun around – and saw that the Bunsen burner was gone from where he’d left it sitting on the lab bench. He’d obviously knocked it off when he jumped up there. But had he also put the flame out when he knocked it over?

No. No he hadn’t.

The floor erupted in racing, leaping flames, roaring up all around him, as he spun again to face the door. There were more dead Mongols coming through it, heedlessly lurching through the licking inferno.

Aliyev raised the gun again, but saw that the slide was locked back.

Empty.

* * *

And now his boots were on fire.

He didn’t even know what to freak out about first.

But his body did react and dictate that he had to avoid burning to death before all else – so he nearly autonomously leapt out of the lake of fire, scurried toward the rear of the lab, and got several of the benches between himself and everything going horribly wrong at the front of the room.

When he looked down, the kerosene on his boots had flash-burned off – and his clothes never caught – Thank you, REI! – leaving him only with an uncomfortable hotfoot. (And, as he would find later, half-melted and deformed soles.) He was also left with several long-dead villagers, who were now either actually on fire, or else just smoking suggestively, all of them pushing their way in and trying to thread through, or just stumble over, the lab benches between them and the scientist.

Aliyev stared at this scene, his face a rictus of barely comprehending horror. He still didn’t know what he should freak out about next.

FUCK!

But then the question resolved itself when he looked up to the front wall of the lab, and over to the left. The pool of burning kerosene was continuing to spread down that side of the room, right in front of the piles of staged supplies.

Clearly this floor wasn’t level.

Motherfucking Chinese contractors, he thought, with their lowball bids. I should have flown in Germans or Swiss—

But that thought was amputated mid-stream when he saw the burning pool of kerosene reach… the other crate of motherfucking grenades, which sat on the floor at the far left end of the row of survivalist crap. In another second, the soft wood of it had ignited, burning in a bright and lively fashion.

“What kind of asshat!” Aliyev actually screamed aloud, “Makes a grenade crate! That’s fucking! Flammable!” But immediately he was assailed by an alternative, and rather more pressing, question:

What kind of asshat leaves a crate of grenades… sitting right next to a FRIDGE OF DEATH?

The flames on the softwood crate now licked higher, reflected in the glass door of – well, the door of what comprised the most completely horrifying and deadly collection of pathogens that had ever existed in one place before, in the entirety of human history.

And so the matter of what to freak about next clarified perfectly for Oleg Aliyev. Screw the zombies. Screw the fire.

He had to get the ever-living fuck out of there.

And he had to get really, really far away.

Really fucking fast.

* * *

And, in this state of play, he realized he only needed to take two things with him.

The coldbox with his MZ pathogen and vaccine.

And the motherfucking shotgun.

Everything else could fuck right the fuck off.

He looked down and saw he was still holding the empty pistol in his right hand, and the syringe of vaccine in his left. He jammed the gun in its holster, and the syringe between his teeth. (God I hope THAT works…)

But now the first two smoking dead Mongols were on him – reaching and lunging over the top of the rear-most lab bench. Not giving the dumb sons of bitches time to work out the complex issue of going the fuck around it, Aliyev instead juked left, drawing them to that side, then dashed right.

In another two seconds he was flying up the right wall of the lab toward the door, and a second after that had snatched up the fully loaded shotgun – his spec-ops/mafia friend had once dryly asked him, “What good, my friend, is an unloaded gun?” – and he started triggering exuberantly off.

The tattoo of rapid-fire twelve-gauge blasts thundered in the enclosed space, for a second drowning out even the mighty Tool, and making the pistol sound like the toy popgun it was. Aliyev wasn’t even really aiming, and he didn’t really have to. The buckshot storm ripped arms from shoulders and legs from groins and sent half-decomposed but still animated bodies tumbling to the previously white tile floor in great angular heaps of dead flesh and black gunk.

And thus did the Kazakh simply shoot his way through the dead Mongol conga line still coming in his front door, and then he powered forward – straight toward the coldbox sitting by the Fridge. And also right beside the motherfucking flaming crate of grenades.

In two seconds he had snatched up the coldbox, turned again, rested the shotgun barrel on top of the box – and started shooting his way.

The fuck.

Out of there.

Empire of the Dead

The Kazakh’s Dacha, Altai Mountains

And now Aliyev had cause to say another quick prayer of thanks to his spec-ops/mafia buddy, for talking him out of buying a pump-action shotgun. (“Leave that shit to the purists. Buy an autoloader – faster is always better.”) Now it meant he could operate the weapon one-handed.

As he rapid-fired, long strings of evil sparks falling out of the blasting barrel, the room filling with smoke either from the fire, or the gunfire, or probably both, he now had to pick a direction, which also turned out to be an easy one.

Going out the front door was a non-starter, because he had absolutely no way of knowing how many dead assholes were queued up out beyond it – for all he knew, they stretched halfway down the mountain, drawn by his idiotic blasting of that music. (But you know what? It was totally worth it.)

In fact, he didn’t even want to know how many dead assholes were out there.

So he headed instead for the living area, shooting his way straight back through the surviving dead pressing in through the doorway, the music growing even more thunderous in volume as he got clear of the lab, and the kerosene behind him having burned itself out – but not before igniting, well, more than enough flammable crap in there to keep burning out of control, and to, no doubt very soon, turn the whole Dacha into a black, smoldering, useless memory of its formerly luxurious and grand and self-reliant self.

Wait! – Aliyev didn’t quite pause to think. Why the fuck isn’t the halon fire-suppression system coming on!? Granted, he had never tested it. Those Chinese fuckers again. All this time, he had been working in a bioengineering lab with any number of horrifyingly dangerous pathogens – and without a working fucking fire-suppression system.

Oh, well. Fuck it.

He ran on, syringe still in his teeth, but now with his left arm hooked through the handle of the coldbox, so he could reload the Benelli from the shells in the side saddle. He didn’t have the faintest fucking idea what he was going to find out back on the helipad, but he knew one goddamned thing: he’d be better off with a fully loaded shotgun than a nearly empty one.

He exited the living room, dashed through the kitchen, and turned the locks on the back door with trembling and adrenaline-flooded fingers. Then he was out in the cold air, whumping his deformed and half-melted boots through the snow, skidding right around the storage building, and finally skating onto the helipad.

It was all clear. Aliyev exhaled dramatically.

But he quickly realized it wasn’t going to stay that way for long. He could hear but not see more moaning, wheezing dead sons of bitches coming up the trail toward the front door. And as soon as he started the helo’s engines, they were going to hear him, too – and no doubt change course, and simply go around the side of the Dacha to the helipad.

He slammed shut the cargo door – which he’d left open on his first, and very terminal, trip ferrying supplies out to it – then swung open the cockpit door, tossed the Benelli across to the co-pilot’s seat, then heaved himself in and hauled the door closed behind him.

When he paused to look out beyond the glass of the side door… he could see the first of the Mongols was already coming out the back door.

Hmm. Missed a trick there. He should have shut that.

Never mind!

He reached over into the passenger seat and snatched up the stapled sheaf of papers that was his preflight checklist. He had never flown enough to commit it all to memory, and there was little point in remembering shit you could just look up anyway. He flipped to the first page.

External checks: Remove the blade socks. Engine air intake – clear. Main rotor he—

A blackened hand, terribly burnt and bloodied, slapped violently against the glass of the door inches to his left, snapping Aliyev’s head around, where he watched the hand drag down, leaving black bits of itself.

“Okay,” he said aloud. “External checks are out…”

He flipped pages with trembling fingers to the internal checks, the much more critical ones, and started narrating aloud as his palsied finger traced down the page.

“Fuel shut-off valve in forward position – check… Collective, pitch, and yaw pedals moving freely – check. Ditto rotor-brake control… Battery voltage – okay, hydraulic pressure – okay…”

More hands, and faces, were now slapping at the outside of the cockpit glass, and Aliyev realized he was hyperventilating – and having serious trouble focusing. The whole aircraft was starting to shake from the assault of overwrought dead guys outside. Aliyev shook his head and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

“Emergency rotary throttle control – fuck it, got bigger problems right now… Gyroscopic instruments on… warning and caution lights off…” He closed his eyes and whimpered as nightmare Mongoloid faces mushed horrifically against the glass barely inches from his own. As much as he tried to block them out, they invaded his peripheral vision, squished against his naked soul.

And he knew perfectly well that if too many of these dead bastards swarmed the helo, he either wouldn’t be able to take off – or they’d jam the air intakes, and the engines would shut down or flame out. When he looked over again, out past the glass-deformed faces, he could see thick black smoke rising from the the far side of the Dacha.

And he belatedly remembered the grenades, and their location, cheek-to-jowl with the Fridge of Death.

And it did not slow his breathing or calm his nerves one goddamned bit to remember that, in probably a very short time, maybe only seconds, this bit of Eurasian mountainside was going to become THE SINGLE DEADLIEST SPOT THAT HAD EVER EXISTED ON THE ENTIRE FUCKING PLANET. No collection of pathogens so utterly hostile to all known forms of life had ever before been collected in one place, and never would be again, and as soon as they wen—

The whole front of the Dacha erupted in a bowel-shaking explosion of smoke, flame, and debris, causing Aliyev to cover up, cower, and seriously worry for the structural integrity of the helicopter.

“Fuck the internal checks!” he yelped, as debris rained down all around, plinking on the thin skin of the helo, the dead not even noticing as they continued to paw and shove, rocking the aircraft violently on its wheels…

“Starting selector to on…” Aliyev almost began to breathe again as he felt and heard the big rotors begin to turn up above him, and then he stared daggers down at the instrumentation. “Oil pressure increasing… rotary handle back to flight notch…”

He could now only barely see out the cockpit glass at all as the whole helipad, the whole mountainside apparently, filled with dust and black smoke – not to mention with smallpox, and with Marburg, and schistosomiasis, and Dengue fever, and Hantavirus, and Lassa, and Holy fucking SHIT…

Aliyev looked frantically down to the instrumentation panel, and hit the Recirculate button on the internal climate control system.

Thank fuck for luxury aircraft for rich assholes!

He had no idea how far or fast those pathogens were going to spread, nor even if they’d survive the explosion. But he sure as hell wasn’t counting on them not surviving. They’d done okay out in the world so far.

And the mayhem certainly hadn’t discouraged or slowed the mob of undead Mongols that was still pouring onto the helipad, both from inside the Dacha and also from the path down the mountain out front, and which was now shoving and climbing up around the airframe of the helo with increasing vigor and violence.

And, on top of that, as Aliyev could just make out behind all the dead bodies, and through the billowing smoke, the Dacha was, in the wake of the explosion, now burning furiously – the flames leaping and spreading at a breath-stealing rate toward this side of the complex.

And now he remembered one other thing: that there was a gigantic tank of aviation fuel sitting right the fuck beneath this fucking helipad. When that raging fire reached this spot – never mind that by then he’d already be breathing weaponized anthrax, and fucking Ebola, plus being torn to pieces by the rampaging undead Mongol horde – he would burn to death in a flaming inferno, a massive and intense firestorm that he imagined would engulf this whole face of the towering Belukha Mountain.

Basically, there was now.

And there was never.

All but slamming his eyes shut in terror, Aliyev jacked up power at the same time as he yanked on the collective, jerking the helo off the ground in a manic dust-off that would be described as safe or professional by absolutely no one…

“Ha!” He glanced down to see the hands falling away from the door – and there were thank fuck no skids for them to grab onto…

“HA! I’M OUT OF HERE, BIZZLES!!!”

The big, sleek, and powerful helo now drifted and floated recklessly and perilously from one side to the other – and too much lateral movement would take it either into the burning remains of the Dacha on the left, or the nearly sheer mountainside on the right, neither of which Aliyev could even fucking see now in all the billowing black smoke…

He worked the pedals to try and keep it something like steady and level, and forced himself to keep power static and climb with the collective only, finally rising out of the clouds of ash and smoke (and Ebola, and zombies) and soaring like a phoenix over the top of the burning and exploding and overrun Dacha, his home and sanctuary for these last two long, horrible years.

The mountain itself started to fall away beneath him, and the black smoke thinned, and the great brown-and-white wilderness of the Altai mountains and this endless ass-end of the world began to spread out below, and Aliyev drew in a great intake of breath. He had forgotten the extent of the utter wasteland he had long inhabited – and also realized with a start that he had never in his life been so glad to see the back of anything.

He shouted out loud again:

“Ha! HA! I am NOT going to die in this shithole!”

He had been so convinced of that, that he would buy it here, one way or the other – and the realization now that he would not was like a massive jolt of some extremely illegal stimulant to his system.

The fact that he had no idea whatsoever if he could even survive actually exiting the helicopter – with the horror-movie menagerie of pathogens that probably coated its surface now – was of relatively little concern. He’d just deal with that shit later.

He revved up the power, pushed the cyclic forward sharply – and as the rotor disc above him tilted dramatically forward, Oleg Aliyev, and his sleek Eurocopter, and his bug-out bag, and his crate of grenades, and his coldbox of meningitis Z and meningitis Z vaccine, all took off like a high-tech bat out of a remote Eurasian hell, blasting straight out to the west and directly into the setting sun.

* * *

As he finally remembered to start breathing again, Aliyev mastered his thoughts and tried to mentally review the travel plan he’d put together earlier. This was a theoretical route that might, if he were super-lucky – a lot luckier than he remotely deserved – might just allow him to hopscotch his way across Eurasia, landing only in places where he A) could find fuel for the helo; and B) might not immediately be swarmed and devoured by arbitrarily large numbers of rampaging dead fuckers, who would instantly be drawn by the noise of the engines and rotors.

He figured his odds of A were pretty decent, considering how quickly and completely civilization had fallen. Plenty of fuel depots and tanks would still be topped off.

But his odds of B were shit.

He knew he would have to keep the rotors running. And if the dead turned up before he could finish refueling… well, even if he played it safe and landed a lot more often than he strictly had to… eventually, too many failed refueling attempts would doom him. He’d be out of fuel and dead in the water. Much more to the point: he’d be dead.

Worse, if the helo got swarmed or overrun before he could lift off, then the game would be up as well. To say that this was going to be touch-and-go would be to indulge in unwarranted optimism.

Aliyev sighed out loud, figuring he would just have to take his damned chances, and deal with all that as it came. And letting the details of his forthcoming odyssey go out of mental focus, instead he thought about what he was leaving behind… what he was heading toward… and all that would scroll by underneath him along the way.

Behind him was his little empire – his Empire of One, with his handful of hapless zombie test subjects – now fallen and destroyed. It had gone down hard, fast, and violently, as had virtually every other empire across all of human history. And, amusingly, it had also sat at the heart of what had once been the Mongol Empire – the second largest ever known, until it fractured into bloody infighting and dissolution after the death of Kublai Khan…

Ahead of him, along his path, if he lasted that long, Aliyev would also overfly the former lands of the Islamic Caliphate, taken down by the great blood-drenched catastrophe of World War One… and he’d fly within sight of much of the remains of the Soviet Empire, which was eventually (and peacefully) put out of its misery by simple capitalism and modernity…

Finally, far out beyond the Atlantic Ocean, lay the remains of what had once been the mighty American hegemony, that gargantuanly powerful, culturally all-conquering, and globe-straddling benevolent despot – which in the end could only be taken down by… the very end of the world.

None of these empires had lasted. All had fallen.

All lay in ashes and ruins.

But now Aliyev was going to try to make his way to the very heart, and all that remained, of the once-mighty British Empire – which had been the very largest and most powerful of all time, the world’s dominant power for well over a century.

Now that globe-straddling dominion had been reduced down to just a single city – London, the world’s final capital – and humanity’s last stand. And, as far as Aliyev could make out, that final spark was a hair’s breadth away from going out forever.

And when it did, that would be it for humanity: evolution’s weird, hyper-intelligent, neurotic, self-destructive experiment – so sacred and profane, divine and damned, nearly unlimited in its potential for both achievement and failure, triumph and tragedy, good and evil.

And when the last of them died, the contest would be decided – and all of life’s staggering potential would have been squandered.

And instead the Empire of the Dead would be triumphant. And complete.

And eternal.

But, even now, in the final hour, there was still some trace, some hint, some ghost, of a hope. But, even if there wasn’t, and it was already too late… well, there was nothing to do but act as if hope still lived – and carry on.

London or bust, Aliyev thought, putting the helo on autopilot just long enough to stab himself with the syringe, and flood his veins with the meningitis Z vaccine.

And, with that, he vowed to stop looking back.

One way or the other.

Forever.

Epilogue: Sparks in the Dark

Brilliant blue sparks rained down from above, turning the previously rich blackness into brilliant glare and deep shadows. The overhead lights had gone off a while ago now – no doubt due to the portable generators finally running out of fuel.

Way down below this shower of sparks, a single eye half-opened to take in the show. Its owner had long ago lost the ability to sit up. He was slumped on the floor, neck bent at an awkward angle. His body sat at the center of a wide, rich, and nearly perfectly circular pool of his own blood.

He lay like that, unmoving, as the sparks finally came to a stop – and then a very large circular section of roof, made of heavy corrugated steel, came loose with a groan and a shriek, and fell whistling through thirty feet of open air, landing like a thunderclap on the bare concrete floor below. Daylight poured in through the opening, not exactly illuminating the gargantuan space below, but definitely chasing away some of the darkness.

A human form – well, it was recognizably of human shape, but seemed much too big to be an actual human – appeared inside the circle, blotting out much of the light. The figure was in the posture of a rapeller, leaning back in a harness, and the man slumped on the floor below could just see a big bundle of rope drop and fall free down to the floor. The rapeller took the full distance in a single bound.

The slumping, bloodied man on the floor let the immense weight of his eyelids bring them down again.

Whatever was going on, he was well past helping.

* * *

When Juice opened his eyes again, he was in a moving aircraft, the noises and vibrations telling him it was a helicopter. He looked to his side where a thick IV tube – pumping red blood, not clear plasma, and presumably his own blood type – snaked out of his arm, up into the hands of a Navy medic. She was focused on monitoring his vital signs.

“Right here, man.”

This rumbling voice – definitely not from the woman – was deep and loud enough to cut through the wind, rotor, and engine noise. Juice turned his head to the other side, and the next thing he saw was the man-mountain of his friend: Predator.

He was holding Juice’s hand, squeezing it tightly.

“You’re gonna be okay, buddy,” Pred said, nodding toward the medic as she replaced the liter bag of blood at the end of the IV. “Just gotta fill you back up is all. You sprung a couple leaks.”

Juice nodded weakly.

Trying to see around Predator – not an easy task at the best of times – he looked out the half-open side door of the helo. And he could see they were just crossing the border between land and water, leaving SAS Saldanha behind, and heading out to sea – presumably back to the Kennedy.

But as he struggled to focus, he could also just make out, in the distance behind them, a second helicopter. It was rising up over that big warehouse, the one he now knew too well. A heavy line descended from its belly down to the roof of the structure, and disappeared through that big circular hole. As the helo continued to climb, it pulled up a huge and ponderous sling-load – composed of probably half a dozen lashed-together pallets of crates, barrels, and boxes.

Supplies. A whole shit-ton of them.

Juice’s mission objective.

He somehow found the energy to laugh aloud, though it devolved quickly into a coughing spasm.

“Rest easy, man,” Pred said, propping up Juice’s head, then cradling it. “Take it easy. We’re all going home.”

Juice nodded, then let his head fall back into his brother’s catchers-mitt-sized hand, and let his eyes drift blissfully closed again. It occurred to him now that there must be some painkillers in that IV. Which was just fine with him.

Yeah. Juice let the image of those beautiful pallets, all lashed together, linger on the insides of his eyelids.

He could definitely take it easy now.

* * *

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the observation deck of the JFK’s island, high up and just outside the bridge, Command Sergeant Major Handon, Master Gunnery Sergeant Fick, and Commander Abrams all watched the first incoming helo grow in aspect and volume.

Soon the big Seahawk was flaring in to land beside the island, and medical personnel were rushing out to meet it with a rolling gurney. Off in the distance, back over land, they could also just make out their second helo, coming in slowly and carefully, with its first giant load of critically needed supplies slung underneath it.

Abrams exhaled heavily before speaking. “What do you say we load up all this crap – and get the hell out of here? The Gulf of Aden’s not going to come to us.”

“Seriously,” Fick said. “Next stop Somalia. Six lanes, no waiting. And no more fucking field trips. Or firefights.”

Handon’s steel jaw just remained set, as his strong hands gripped the railing before him. “That’s if we’re not already too late. This has been a hell of a costly diversion.”

The expressions of the other two darkened as they all looked down at the Seahawk, its spinning blades slowing, as Juice was lifted out and transferred to the waiting gurney.

Handon shook his head. “And not just in time. What a price to pay for some MREs and ammo crates. Dead Marines, grievously wounded aircrew, another one of my guys hit.”

Abrams said, “Supplies are life. And the Russians knew that. That’s why they wanted the base so badly – and fought so hard to keep it.”

Fick grunted. “Yeah, maybe they did. But at the end of a prize fight, you look at the guy who’s dancing around, and that’s who won.”

Looking down again and squinting intently, Fick now saw Juice being wheeled across the flight deck – and noticed that his pants had been cut completely off him, to expose the leg wound. Cupping his hands, Fick shouted down, probably louder than necessary:

“Hey Green Beret! When you’re done fuckin‘ those dead guys, you’re supposed to put your pants back on!”

Flat on his back, half-conscious, most of his blood gone, and hopped up on painkillers, Juice evidently still heard him. Because, in response, he raised up his right hand, middle finger extended – and held it proudly aloft every second until he was finally wheeled out of sight down below.

Handon and Abrams laughed, then exchanged sad looks behind Fick’s back. Still shaking their heads, they both turned and went back inside.

All alone on the observation deck now, wind rippling his uniform, Fick gripped the railing and nodded his head once in satisfaction.

Damn, sometimes I do still really love this job…

Come back and live through the beginning of the end of the world in
ARISEN : GENESIS, the pulse-pounding and bestselling first ARISEN prequel.

Love this book? Share the love, support independent authors, and make us your best friends forever, by posting a quick review on Amazon.   Thanks! – Glynn & Michael

Want to be alerted when the next ARISEN book is released? Just drop an e-mail to arisen@glynnjames.co.uk and we’ll keep you updated. (And we’ll never share your address or use it for anything else.)

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Thanks and Acknowledgements

Michael

Thank you, forever, to our amazing readers. You make us so happy and grateful, and we love you so much.

Here’s an overdue thank-you to the special operators – not only for going out and saving the world and battling for freedom and decency every day; not only for training like professional athletes and performing like minor gods; not only for their enormous sacrifice and commitment; but for providing such an amazing and priceless example of how to make it through life successfully: with resilience to all difficulties, and with resolve to never quit. (More on this, and how the operators saved my life, here.)

This author also wishes to thank indispensable uber-reader Amanda Jo Moore, as well as go-to readers (and subject matter experts) Mark George Pitely and Alexander M. Heublein; also Anna K. Brooksbank, Sara Natalie Fuchs, Richard S. Fuchs, Virginia Ann Sayers-King, Valerie Sayers, Matthew David Grabowy, and Michael and Jayne Barnard, for their indispensable support. Also, Bruce, Wanda, Alec, and Brendan Fyfe.

The bit about how the typical Spetsnaz soldier is “a skeptic, a cynic, and a pessimist” – as well as about how “one second is how long anyone can hold out against Spetsnaz interrogation” – was taken pretty much wholesale from Spetsnaz: The Story Behind the Soviet Special Forces by Viktor Suvorov. Virtually everything else about Spetsnaz was also taken from this outstanding and fascinating book.

The line “from the moment a helicopter comes off the assembly line, pretty much all it wants to do is kill you” was stolen from an episode of The Unit called “Natural Selection,” written by Sharon Lee Watson (series created by Eric L. Haney and David Mamet). If you haven’t watched The Unit, boy are you missing out big-time.

The line “Never let the bastards see you coming out prone” was taken from this excellent Military Motivator.

The line “Good advice doesn't come in a box marked ‘good advice’” is David Frum’s.

The wisdom of “adapt and overcome” (or, more completely: “Tough. Deal with it. Adapt and overcome.”) is from retired SEAL and sniper instructor Master Chief Brandon Webb, in his truly outstanding book, The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America’s Deadliest Marksmen.

Fick’s penultimate line (about the prize fight) was stolen from Josh in The West Wing, and written by Aaron freaking Sorkin. His earlier line about a leader without followers being “just a guy out taking a walk” was also stolen from that program, in an episode written by Mark Goffman.

Fick’s final line – “When you’re done fucking those dead guys [hajjis], you’re supposed to put your pants back on” – was stolen from Phil Klay’s Redeployment, which is probably the very best fiction to come out of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars so far, and an absolutely outstanding read. (And now one of the New York Times Notable Books of 2014! Awesome job, man – richly deserved.)

Thanks again to Tool – once again, I wrote most of my best sequences to Aenima, Lateralus, Parabola, and 10,000 Days (which also, obviously, lent both a title and some theme music to a particular chapter). Hurry the hell up with the new album guys! It’s been eight years – and I’ve got more books to write!!!

Finally, it didn’t play a huge role in my work on this book, but I’d be remiss not to mention the new Celldweller album End of an Empire – the title track of which even mentions Hellfires! Crazy coincidence.

Here are a few other books that were either helpful or inspirational in producing (my bits of) this one:

- Operation Spetsnaz: The Aims, Tactics and Techniques of Soviet Special Forces, by Michael G. Welham and Bruce Quarrie

- The Trident: The Forging and Reforging of a Navy SEAL Leader, by Jason Redman with John R. Bruning

- Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, by David Mamet

- The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, by Jonathan Gottschall

- Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World – Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran It, by Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman. Virtually everything I’ve written about Biopreparat, about bioengineering dangerous pathogens, weaponizing them, genetically modifying them, and for that matter about pandemics, bioterrorism, viruses in general, etc., all came straight out of this amazing and terrifying book. Any resemblance between Alibek and Aliyev is clearly you’re imagining things.

Over 2.3 million Americans have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Studies indicate that at least 20% of them (nearly half a million) suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and/or depression – half of whom do not seek treatment. Untreated PTSD can result in destroyed marriages, lost jobs, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide. Additionally, more than 260,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have been diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), usually caused by close proximity to explosions such as roadside bombs. TBI can result in memory and mood problems, headaches, and difficulty sleeping. To learn more, check out Military Minds. If you’d like to help, you can raise awareness by liking the Military Minds page on Facebook; if you want to make a donation, one great place is the Brendan MacDonald Fyfe Fund and the Campaign to Bring Our Veterans All the Way Home.

Glynn

Thanks to all of the Jameses – Julia, for your patience and encouragement, and my pipsqueaks, for just being you (mini me).

To my parents and my brother for not being too surprised that I write crazy fiction, and for telling me it’s cool.

To Bill, Sara, Billy, Jim & Jean for taking me seriously and never doubting that I could actually do this, and for demanding signed copies when I thought that whole idea was daft.

To Jacqui, for patience and editing expertise beyond the call.

To Michael, for going along with this daft and crazy idea, and turning it into something much more awesome than I originally conceived. From this point on we’re into new territory that is beyond the original plan.

ARISEN
Hope Never Dies.

Fans of the bestselling ARISEN series are calling it “a non stop thrill ride”, “unputdownable”, “the most original and well-written zombie novels I have ever read”, “riveting as hell – I cannot recommend this series enough”, “the action starts hot and heavy and does NOT let up”, “astonishingly well-researched and highly plausible”, “non-stop speed rush! All action, all the time – got my heart racing”, “A Must Read, this book was a hell of a ride”, and “may be the best in its genre.”

Humanity will return in
ARISEN, BOOK NINE – CATACLYSM

They are the most capable, committed, and indispensable counter-terrorist operators in the world.
They have no rivals for skill, speed, ferocity, intelligence, flexibility, and sheer resolve.
Somewhere in the world, things are going horrifyingly wrong…

Readers call the D-BOYS series “a high-octane adrenaline-fueled action thrill-ride”, “one of the best action thrillers of 2011 (or any year for that matter)”, “a riveting, fast paced classic!!”, “pure action”, “The Best Techno Military Thriller I have read!”, “Awesome!”, “Gripping”, “Edge of your seat action”, “Kick butt in the most serious of ways and a thrill to read”, “What a wild ride!!! I simply could not put this book down”, “has a real humanity and philosophical side as well”, “a truly fast action, high octane book”, “Up there with Clancy and W.E.B. Griffin”, “one of the best Spec Ops reads I have run into”, and “hi-tech and action in one well-rounded explosive thriller.”

There is a place where nightmares are real. It is a dark and terrifying place, hidden from the world we know by borders that only the most unfortunate of souls will ever cross.
James Halldon woke up in the dark, alone, without any food or water, without a clue where he was, and with no memory of where he came from.
It only got stranger…

Readers are calling the bestselling DIARY OF THE DISPLACED series “fast-paced, thought-provoking and thoroughly entertaining”, “utterly compelling from beginning to end”, “a fantastic book – gripping from the very first couple of lines”, “ghosts, zombies, London buses and even an evil nemesis. What’s not to love?!”, “truly magnificent”, “the best book I’ve read in a long time”, “one of the finest-written stories you will ever read”, “a brilliant series – right up there with Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker”, and “simply perfect… absolutely enjoyable from start to finish.”