Arisen, Book Three - Three Parts Dead Read online

  A world fallen – under a plague of 7 billion walking dead

  A tiny island nation – the last refuge of the living

  One team – of the world’s most elite special operators

  The dead, these heroes, humanity’s last hope, all have…

  First published 2013 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, 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.

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS, in addition to co-authoring the ARISEN series with Glynn, 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 later in 2013); 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.

  Notes from the Authors

  Michael

  I want to thank Glynn again for being an awesome collaborator and writing partner, and for seeding the idea that has turned into a whole world. (Albeit a crapsack one.) Thanks and enormous respect, as always, to the amazing Editrice. Mainly, I want to thank ALL the very many awesome readers who have bought and read the books, who have written so many incredibly gracious reviews on Amazon, and who have contacted us directly with so much fantastic support and feedback. To the long list of clichés that turn out to be true, add this one: it’s really you guys who inspire us to get out of bed every morning and get to work. Thanks for populating our world – with living people.

  Glynn

  I think I speak for both of us when I say that the success of the ARISEN series in the last few months has been both a surprise and a joy. Who’d have thought that a story written by two writers who work in completely different genres would be this popular? Not me. If someone had told me a few years ago that I’d be writing a high-action series involving special forces operators, and that people would love it, I’d have laughed at them. As ever I’d like to thank Michael for being such an awesome (and highly tolerant) collaborator and a meticulous researcher. And of course our readers. The amazing reviews and comments are coming in faster than I can keep up with. We do read them all!

  For our readers, who rock

  ARISEN

  BOOK THREE

  THREE PARTS DEAD

  GLYNN JAMES &

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

  “To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

  – Bertrand Russell

  “He that dies this year is quit for the next.”

  – Wm. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2

  Adrift

  Humanity on its raft.

  The raft adrift on the sea – empty, Godless, endless, depopulated.

  And surrounded by darkness.

  Dr. Simon Park, bioscientist and amateur hack survivalist, stared emotionlessly across the deck of the Catalina 40-foot fiberglass sailboat that had recently become his entire world. He shared this drifting capsule of life, this single-species arc, with a half-dozen other human beings. These six others were not scientists. They were “operators,” or so they called themselves.

  To Park, they were soldiers – strange, violent, foreign. But at least human.

  Together, these seven fragile vessels of flesh, packed onto this small boat, and adrift on a staggeringly wide inland sea, represented way too big a proportion of the world’s last 50 million people still breathing air. Overshadowing even that was their relative importance, and that of the secret they carried with them. In that boat, and in the mind and on the laptop of Dr. Simon Park, resided what might be the first, last, best, and only hope those other 50 million were going to have to survive.

  So it could almost be said that humanity was literally on this raft.

  As for the other seven billion humans with whom these seven had, only two years ago, been sharing this wet, whirling hunk of rock… well, those people were not technically gone. Much to the misfortune of the living, they were very insistently hanging around. They just weren’t breathing air anymore. Instead, they were slouching and moaning.

  And hunting the living – remorselessly.

  It had occurred to Dr. Park that what had befallen them was a lot like any other really bad global pandemic. Except that in this one the already infected people hunted you down.

  And he was afraid.

  Dr. Park – thirtyish, boyish, lean, bespectacled, with a manner both careful and precise – knew terrible fear. He’d been afraid for a very long time, and the problem had gotten worse in the last few hours. Now, he let his eye wander over the other figures arrayed around him on the dark and nearly silent deck of the sailboat. These newcomers had, in the space of a few seconds, massively expanded the scope and scale of Dr. Park’s social universe – which had long been, and had looked as if it would be forevermore, a universe of one.

  These six, these operators, had now shucked their helmets, their face shields, their load-bearing tactical harnesses. But they all still went armed. And they could be distinguished from Dr. Park in a fraction of a glance. The posture. The musculature. The lean and powerful lines, and economy of motion. The coolness, and unflappability, which bordered on some kind of monk-like serenity, and which Park could not really fathom.

  And, of course, their total lack of fear.

  Fear was one thing Simon Park didn’t lack. It had subsided somewhat from the galloping panic that had enveloped him, and threatened to subsume and extinguish him, as the seven had escaped at a dead run, with not even seconds to spare, from a city of three million very fast-moving dead guys, all of whom wanted to eat them. Chicago itself had seemed like it wanted to eat them.

  It had nearly succeeded. It had taken a bite, in fact.

  Alpha team, as Park had learned this unit was called, had originally been an eight-man team. But it had lost a full 25% of its strength in a few very bad minutes in downtown Chicago. That was after two long years of non-stop battling in what the military, it seemed, called the “Zulu Alpha.” Two years and not a scratch on them. And then this debacle – two down, including their commanding officer – wo
rse than decimation, in minutes.

  Until that moment when these men, and one woman, had turned up, Dr. Park had every reason to believe that everyone else on Earth was dead. For those same two long years, ever since the fall of human civilization, Park had been holed up in a basement bunker, deep beneath the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Two years, during which he had come to believe he was truly the Last Man on Earth. He’d continued doing vaccine, antiviral, and genomic research… but found it much harder to take seriously after he concluded there was nobody left anywhere to vaccinate.

  But in his heart he was a man of science, so he had kept working with the research results and bioengineering and genetic models that he had first produced – during those frantic weeks between the first global outbreaks and the final fall. Back when every biomedical researcher in the world had been working round the clock to try and save humanity, as it teetered on the brink.

  But Dr. Park had beaten them all. Maybe.

  And humanity fell anyway.

  Now Park monitored the black, featureless, rippleless surface of the lake. The great gusting winds of Lake Michigan, which had carried them on their privateered craft away from Chicago and to safety, or what seemed like it, had now abandoned them. Now they were adrift. They floated – if not aimless, then temporarily helpless.

  They floated and waited. And got into their own heads.

  Dr. Park saw the one they called Homer emerge from the hatch, from down below. He was the one who seemed to have most of the nautical skills and experience. Park gathered he had been a Navy SEAL, back in the world. This gentle-seeming and measured man wiped black grease on his black clothing in the black night, and spoke quietly from halfway out of the hatch.

  “Could do with a second pair of hands.”

  Homer had been trying to get the boat’s gasoline engine running, since the wind failed.

  Handon, the one who was clearly in charge, in every manner a man might indicate such a thing, nodded toward Dr. Park. “Robert Neville here will give you a hand.” They’d been calling him that, on and off. That, and “Hey, lame-o.” He didn’t get either joke. But he rose carefully on the lightly swaying deck, and readied himself to follow Homer down.

  Before he could take a step, though, the woman, Ali, popped to her feet.

  “I’ve got it,” she said.

  Handon nodded, but gave her a look out of the corner of his eye – as did one or two of the others. Park gathered there was something between Homer and the woman.

  “This toy sailboat’s not giving you trouble, is it?” she asked, as she stepped below.

  As the pair receded Park could hear the man’s answer fading off into the muffling darkness of the cabin. “Well, the battery won’t hold a charge because its plates have sulfated, there’s water from condensation in the tank, the hoses and belts are all shot, most of the fluids are now solids, the cylinders are gunked up, and the spark plugs corroded. But, other than that, she’s shipshape…”

  * * *

  Command Sergeant Major Handon, senior NCO of Alpha team, and its commander since the death of Captain Ainsley in the foyer of Dr. Park’s apocalyptic residence, rose to his feet, all smoothness and power. He followed the other two down into the cabin, stopping just inside the hatch. Then he inclined his thick neck and lit a cigar.

  He’d gone belowdecks for this purpose, but cupped his hands around the flame anyway. Good old noise and light discipline, he thought to himself. There were two tactical principles, at least, that had carried over from the old world, and the old wars.

  In the Zulu Alpha, light and noise were definitely not your friends.

  The flaring waterproof match made chiaroscuro, dramatic light and shadow, of Handon’s heavily stubbled jaw, his brow-shadowed steely blue eyes, and his wavy black hair. He puffed once, contentedly, and let the sweet rich smoke exit his mouth at its own pace.

  The grizzled sergeant smoking a cigar was a cliché. But at least it was his cliché.

  The interior of the Catalina 40 sailing yacht was plush, without being spacious. There were fabric couches and hardwood fixtures, a forward sleeping compartment wedged into the V of the prow, head and shower behind that, a small salon and galley amidships, master sleeping compartment in the rear. Cockpit up top and aft – around which, and out on the surrounding deck, sprawled most of Handon’s team as they passed the time.

  Spec-ops guys, most military personnel actually, tended to be good at killing time as they got shuffled from one place to another. Or, as now, when they were stuck between one place and the next.

  With most everyone on deck for the air, a little privacy could still be had down below. Handon could hear, and almost see, Homer and Ali doing wrench work, half swallowed up by the engine hatch. This sat amidships, beneath the galley sink cabinet. He let them get on with it. He knew Homer’s griping about the state of the engine was only to make Ali laugh. Handon’s people rarely complained.

  And Homer never did.

  If Homer were storing up any grief, Handon knew, he’d hash it out with his Maker on the Day of Judgment. Total faith in a Creator, and the righteousness of his Creation, conferred a lot of damned serenity. Or so it seemed to Sergeant Major Handon.

  Nonetheless… two years into the Zulu Alpha, and everyone left alive, including the people on Handon’s team, was feeling the strain. And none of those under his command were as young as they used to be. None were in their twenties. These guys all came from Tier-1 special operations units – the most capable, committed, and indispensable commandos ever known on the planet, pre- or certainly post-ZA.

  And Tier-1 operators had always been older – for the simple reason that the skills, expertise, reactions, intuition, and especially experience required at that level were not picked up in a couple of years. There were few if any shortcuts to combat wisdom, and the people in Delta, in Seal Team Six, in SAS Increment, in the Air Force 24th Special Tactics Squadron, had been doing it, and surviving it, and endlessly training and honing their techniques to the point of perfection and beyond, for at least ten years. The most senior of them had been doing it for twenty.

  But, in the world that had been, they’d at least been able to look forward to retirement, if they lived that long.

  But now there was no retirement. The money they’d socked away existed only as inert bits of magnetism on hard drives that had spun down long ago, in banks staffed by the dead. The organization that owed most of them a retirement pension, the U.S. Department of Defense, no longer existed. The highline private security contractors that begged to hire former special operators for big bucks during the counter-terror wars no longer existed.

  Hell, money barely existed.

  And of course it now looked like there would never be any end to it.

  Unless… unless, somehow, they could get this scientist, for whose rescue they had paid such a heavy price, to some kind of a viable extraction point. And thence back to the aircraft carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy, which sat off the Atlantic coast waiting for them. And, finally, back to Fortress Britain. And then if… he could produce a working vaccine, and if… they could manufacture enough doses for all 50 million survivors, and get it distributed.

  And after all that, they would still have the small problem of a world teeming with seven billion ravening dead guys. And even if those mean, ugly, dead bastards couldn’t any longer infect, they’d still be perfectly happy to rip you to bits and eat you. With regard to which immunity from the virus would be small enough consolation.

  And then if they somehow put down all the soulless, or maybe just waited for them to fall apart and rot away, they still faced the crushing and monumental task of rebuilding all of human civilization. Starting from one little rainy island in the North Atlantic.

  It was exhausting just to think about.

  Handon snorted quietly, twirling his cigar in the dark. But you know what? he thought to himself. It was at least something. And it was a hell of a lot more than they’d had to look forward to yesterday, which
was nothing.

  Especially as a combat leader, Handon knew that hope was a funny old thing. It was a bit like a virus, actually. It could infect the most resistant of bodies. It could spread rapidly and widely, given only the chance of a little human contact. And, finally, however little of it you had, however tiny the traces that remained, it was still enough to nurture, to grow – and to infect the whole world. After that… who knew what might happen?

  It had to be enough. To hang onto. To keep taking the risks.

  Because something had to keep them going.

  Somehow, life had to still be worth it.

  Handon put out his cigar with thumb and forefinger, replaced it in his shirt pocket, and went back out into the clean night air. There he would try again to make radio contact with the carrier. This had been going in and out, but mainly out, since they’d gotten on the water, and as another weather front crawled heavily into the black sky above them from the east.

  * * *

  The great black body of the night pressed down upon them from above. But it was from below, and to every side, that the great lake, this immense inland sea, menaced the seven on their tiny craft. Nearly 60,000 square kilometers it stretched around them – and almost a thousand feet straight down at its deepest abysses.

  More troubling was the thought of what lurked on its 1,600 miles of shoreline.

  In the unpopulated stretches of forest that made up much of it, well, that was perhaps just trees. But in the populated sections… the great metropolises of Chicago and Minneapolis, the heavily industrialized southern tip, the small towns that dotted the shore, and the isolated but numerous waterfront properties and developments… well, wherever people had lived, now the dead ruled.

  Every population center had become a death zone.

  For this reason, they had steered a course near the center of the lake. That was when they’d had wind, and the ability to steer. Now they drifted.