Arisen, Book Three - Three Parts Dead Read online

  Dr. Park continued to monitor the still surface, which sparkled faintly with starlight and a tiny sliver of moon. But it was not the water or the reflections he saw. In fact, he looked beyond the still surface, into memory, which now reflected back at him from those black depths.

  While he had some time here, and since he couldn’t seem to stop it anyway, he decided to try and review the last two years, to put them into some kind of sequence. And to try and make sense out of what had become a jarring, flashing, careening car crash of images in his head.

  * * *

  The bright flashes of the TV news spots flashed past his mind’s eye. Initially they had been broadcast from exotic locales – and he’d watched them with the detachment that always attended disasters in faraway places. Life went on, the channels flipped. But then, terrifyingly quickly, those places got less far away… faster than anyone could believe, faster than those in charge could react.

  He remembered the vise of fear that gripped his chest when the seriousness of the virus started to hit home – its contagiousness, its virulence, its treacherously long incubation period… not to mention the fact that there was no cure, no vaccine, and a 100% mortality rate.

  He felt the bone-deep fatigue as he’d found himself working 12-hour days, then 16, then more… Pausing only to register news of outbreaks in bigger and closer cities, the rioting and the breakdown of public services, always growing closer – while a cure seemed just as far away…

  And then the surreal view out the glass walls of the lobby of NeuraDyne Neurosciences, during the first outbreaks in Chicago, where he was safe up above it all – for a while. The panic in the streets, martial law, the National Guard with their machine guns and armored vehicles… Through it all, Park had stayed on station, as had his colleagues – at first.

  But then there was the profoundly creepy sensation of the company’s employees slipping away, just disappearing, in ones and twos… He remembered the unnerving silence and emptiness of the labs – contrasted with the apocalyptic chaos down below. His colleagues had gone to be with their families, or to try to escape (to where?)… But Park’s closest family had been in Korea, on the southern island of Chedju, where he imagined they would be safe.

  He could hear the cracking of fear in their voices, for themselves, and especially on his behalf, in those last phone calls that went through… It was a universal, constricting fear – a sensation of impending doom, which can only feel so total and consuming when the threat is existential, everywhere, when the danger is to the whole world and everyone in it. When no one is going to come and save you.

  Because no one can.

  Then, at the very end, when personal survival finally fell heavier on the scales than his scientific labors on behalf of humanity, and he ran for it. That kinetic disorientation and blurring of his panicked, nightmare dash across six blocks of disintegrating Chicago, the sick and the healthy clashing in the streets, screams and sirens and gunfire, the streetlights going out as the power failed… Trying to get to the one place he thought he might have a chance – to the bunker that he, and perhaps he alone amongst the living, knew existed beneath the Mercantile Exchange.

  And into which he alone made it alive.

  Somehow the next two years blurred together into only a few frames… the dull beige walls, the canned food, monitoring of the radio and television until they went black for good… Then shepherding his power and resources, and doing desultory research, when he could find the energy and motivation. Mainly he remembered the silence, and the soul-scraping loneliness, and the tedium… Until, one day, this very morning, when there came the utterly unexpected sounds of gunfire, then shouts, then moaning, all leaking in through his two-foot steel and airtight back door…

  And then the operators of Alpha crashing the party… The next two hours were somehow more vivid and traumatizing than the prior two years… The failure of the generator, the fire and smoke, the explosions, the desperate flight… And then that endless, nightmare, horrifyingly perilous sprint through the heaving surface streets of Chicago… When all he could hear was non-stop gunfire, and grenade blasts, and the howling and moaning of the inexhaustible ranks of the dead… The operators had fought like vengeful gods, down to their last bullets, down to their swords and knives, to get him to the airfield at the shore of the lake…

  And then when the plane sent to recover them fell out of the sky and blossomed into a transfixing bloom of fire tumbling along the dry grass… And the seven of them finally stood utterly helpless and hopeless and fatally breathless and drained, with nowhere else to flee to, and the entire former population of Chicago bearing down on them… until…

  * * *

  Park startled, his reverie interrupted, when Homer emerged from the hatch again.

  “Okay,” he said, delivering his report mainly to Handon. “It’s going to be eight hours at best, and that’s if we’re lucky. Ideally, I’d want to leave some oil in the cylinders overnight, before even trying to start this thing – and all we’ve got is gun oil. Either way, we risk it seizing up. And I’ve also got to get the condensation out of the gas tank, and there’s no quick way to do that.”

  Handon nodded, expressionless. “How about improvising oars? Or paddles?”

  Homer shook his head. “Realistically? Look at the freeboard on this thing – even with all of us aboard, it’s 30 inches above the waterline. And this thing displaces twenty thousand pounds. Oars would have to be fifteen feet long to get any traction. And we can throw our backs out trying to lean down and paddle – but it’s not going to get us anywhere.” Homer smiled. “But it’s not all gloom. The wind can’t hide forever. She always comes back.”

  Handon didn’t smile in response. In fact, his expression darkened. “That may be. But right now we’re drifting into shore. The current’s slight, but it’s perceptible – at least to GPS.” He glanced at his watch, then at the shore. “And those look like buildings. Maybe a marina.”

  Everyone onboard, even Dr. Park, knew the score.

  If they drifted into a section of forest, no problem. Virtually everyone on this boat was an expert hunter, tracker, pathfinder, and wilderness survival expert. But if they drifted into an area of human settlement… well, wherever there had been humans, now there were the dead. And, at least so far, the dead in fallen North America didn’t look to be loner types.

  And now the tiny group of the living all felt the dark body of the sprawling shore grow closer.

  Whether they could see it or not.

  Jarhead

  Commander Drake looked across the small table and scratched his chin, regarding the man opposite him. Drake was XO, executive officer, of the USS John F. Kennedy – the biggest, most powerful, and most complex warship, or machine of any sort, that had ever been built by the hand of man.

  Across from him sat Gunnery Sergeant Fick, acting commander of the platoon of Marines that had previously been attached to MARSOC – the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command. Now they worked for Drake as his designated ground combat and security detachment for the JFK – and for the entire surviving carrier strike group that it led.

  “Let me go get them,” Gunnery Sergeant Fick said intently, referring to the currently lost Alpha team. “I’ll bring them all back, gentle as you please. Vaccine and all.” With this, he tried on a smile. But this merely creased the dramatic scars down the right side of his face, which already looked like it belonged in a Paleolithic diorama, and basically gave him a horror mask visage that would frighten small children.

  And probably big ones, Drake thought.

  He already knew well that the thirty men under Fick’s command were some of the baddest hombres fighting anywhere since the world ended, and probably before. And he knew that if any team could fight their way through half of fallen North America, it’s was Fick’s.

  But that was a huge if.

  Drake checked his wristwatch, exhaled, and looked back up at the Marine. He thought of their small transport prop
plane, which had inexplicably gone down while trying to extract Alpha from Chicago. And that was after surviving, and somehow taking off in the middle of, the ship-wide mutiny and outbreak that had spilled out across the carrier’s flight deck – all as the ship was being run aground at speed. That plane had been the only aircraft they had with both the capacity to lift a whole squad, and the range and endurance to get to Chicago and back.

  After taking a sip of coffee from its hurricane-proof mug, Drake spoke across the table again. “With the Greyhound splashed down, all we’ve got to move you in are the Sea Hawks. And, as you already know, those helos can make it there but not back. Which is no good to me. That just means we’ll then have the lot of you humping overland, or up Lake Michigan, trying to fight your way home. And anyway, they’ve already got what they went for, and they’re out of the Chicago death zone. It’s transport they need, Gunny, not fire support.”

  Fick started to object again, but Drake cut him off.

  “No, what we need is some kind of workable extraction plan to go get them. I’ve got the surviving air wing commanders reporting here in ten. And we’re all just going to have to sit here and brainstorm until we come up with some options. We’re going to have to get creative.” With this his voice lowered a notch. “Though I’m very much afraid we’re going to end up trying to sail something right up the goddamned Eerie Canal.”

  Fick stared at him evenly. “The locks won’t work without power,” he said. “Sir.”

  “Goddammit, Gunnery Sergeant, I need solutions. Not fascinating new problems.”

  “Yes, sir.” Fick paused, and his dark eye developed a certain gleam. “Okay, then. With respect, and pardon me speaking frankly, but the air wing commanders are going to be about as helpful as a dick sandwich on this one. We already know what our existing air capabilities are. What we need is bigger aircraft.”

  Drake nodded once. “Go on.”

  “Oceana Naval Air Station.” He said it with careful emphasis.

  Drake gave him a sharp look. Fick went on anyway. “It’s right there. Practically on the water. I could piss on it from here.”

  “I have no doubt you could,” Drake said, not showing any amusement at Fick’s creative distance-reckoning. “But you could also get your entire team infected or eaten there. It’s not only onshore – it’s right in the middle of Virginia Beach, and all its suburbs. It’s practically a downtown airport.”

  “I readily admit the risk,” Fick said. “But I say it’s worth the stretch. You said it yourself – we don’t recover Alpha, we don’t recover the vaccine. And, with no vaccine, maybe that’s humanity itself smoke-checked.”

  Drake knew Fick was using Marine slang for, basically, getting dead. He also knew Fick was probably right. This is the bit, he thought to himself, where the dumb-looking jarhead surprises you for the hundredth time with how shrewd and cagey he actually is…

  Drake looked up and locked eyes with his ground commander. “Okay. Make it happen. Put your team together, and put together a mission plan. A short one. Five-paragraph op order.”

  “Sir.”

  “I’ll get a drone in the air, to recce the airfield. See how bad it looks. And see if we can spot any aircraft still on the deck.”

  “Very good, sir.” Fick rose to leave. Drake stopped him with a raised hand.

  “This is not an ordinary scavenging op. And this will not be an ordinary shore party. You’re going to war. Take anyone you need who is not absolutely critical to the repair effort, essential fleet ops, or shipboard security. I want you out there in sufficient strength to be survivable. And I want you to make sure and get the goddamned aircraft we need.”

  “Roger that, sir. We’ll make it happen.”

  Drake slumped slightly in his chair. “And make it fast, too. Despite the radio silence, we assume Alpha is alive and en route to their extraction point. And we assume that they’re going to make it. And we’re damned well going to be there to pick them up.”

  Fick was thinking that was a lot of assumptions. But he just nodded.

  Drake started to look down and check his phone. “Oh, and – good thinking, Gunny.”

  “Semper Scrotus,” Fick said, saluting and exiting.

  Drake, head down in his messages now, didn’t need to be told what that meant.

  Always on the ball.

  Eyes in the Dark

  Elham, East Kent, England

  Walter Jennings had lived in the lodge for four years now. He owned a house, or presumed he still owned a house, in the older part of Ashford, some ten miles away. But he hadn’t been there since the day they had buried his wife, Melanie, in the old church grounds. He’d never liked living in the town anyway, but Melanie had, so he had put up with it for her. He hadn’t even liked the house, but again, she had, and whatever Mel wanted, she got.

  The lodge was tucked away in Acrise Wood, a mile or so from the town of Elham, and that was the way he liked it. It was ten miles to the nearest big towns – Folkestone south on the coast, and Canterbury to the north; and, beyond that, a million miles, or what happily felt like it, from the teeming and crime-ridden capital of London.

  When they had bought the place from one of the local landowners, a few years before Mel passed away, they had intended it to be a getaway, someplace not too far away from Ashford, but far enough that they could relax and forget. It had been his thing, and he knew that Mel only let him buy the place because deep down she knew how much he tolerated just for her.

  The day after they covered her coffin in dirt, he woke up, feeling more empty than he ever had in his life, packed some bags, closed the door of the house in Ashford, and never went back. He had made sure that he had everything he needed to remember her by – photographs, diaries, and all the keepsakes they had collected over the years – and he also took everything from his shed in the back garden.

  That had been four years ago.

  He had a small radio on the countertop in the tiny kitchen he’d built himself, by hand, and he had a television. Not that he had ever watched the TV. No, that had been Mel’s thing. At least it had been until he found himself alone, in the lodge, with no one to talk to but the birds outside. The birds he liked, and he thought he would like the quietness of the lodge, but the being alone bit was the trouble.

  A week after he moved into the lodge, he switched the television on and started to watch the news. It was strange. He had never been interested before, but now he needed something to focus on. There was his garden, which was now expanding after a week of heavy toil; in fact it had probably just exploded beyond the tiny patch of land he actually owned. But in the evening there was very little to do, so he took to watching the news and reading Mel’s books.

  These became his obsessions.

  Over the next two years Walter would watch the news on every channel he could, learning more about the outside world than he had ever known, ever cared to know.

  Then two years ago the terror had begun. He had watched it all unravel over such a small amount of time, on every news channel he could find. Moment by moment Walter watched as the world fell apart around him. He saw the dead folk that walked on his screen many times, and also the horror that often followed in those short, terrible clips. He watched it all, right up until two months into the terror, when the TV channels, one by one, started to become nothing but static fuzz.

  Then nothing.

  He hadn’t gone into town immediately. No, he only wandered down to the tiny store in Elham once every couple of months to stock up on things that he couldn’t grow in his garden or trap in the woods. He waited a few days before he did finally go. And when he got there he was surprised how quiet the town was. The shop was open, but the young girl who normally served him had been replaced by her elderly grandmother.

  He’d asked about the girl, and the grandmother said that she had rushed off to London to be with her father in the troubled times. He asked if the old woman had heard anything about the news and the terror, but the old lady j
ust shrugged.

  “I don’t pay a lot of attention to world doin‘s,” she’d said.

  Walter bought out everything of use he could find in the shop and left. When he got back to the lodge he went to the small storage box at the back of the structure, took out the three woodcutter’s axes that were propped up against the side of the tiny space, and carried them inside. One he left at the front door, one at the back, and the other, a much smaller hand axe, he attached to his belt.

  He had killed three of the creatures in the last two years. Two of them had been dressed in fisherman’s overalls, and they had wandered in off the road a hundred yards away, maybe attracted to the small outside light on the front of the lodge. They had been so slow they might just as well have been comatose. And he supposed that in a way they were.

  After they both lay dead on the gravel drive, he had sat on the wooden steps and cried.

  The third he killed had been the old woman, the next week, when he went to stock up again.

  It was then that he realized that the world around him had gone awry, and that it had done so right up to his front door. He suddenly knew that the only way he would survive was if he cut himself off completely. The lodge, his home, was distant enough to do that, especially now that Elham, the nearest village, was deserted. In the last four years his garden had grown to a considerable size. He’d also taken up hunting rabbits, with some success. This was something he could do, he decided.

  That was, until he met the fourth creature.

  He’d sensed it approaching through the woods, and was standing ready for it when it stumbled out of the treeline. It was dark, lightless apart from the small lamp outside the front of the house, and Walter could see the thing lumbering along, completely oblivious to him. In fact, as it traipsed through his vegetable patch and carried on heading toward the drive, and the road, he wondered if he wouldn’t have to kill it. Maybe it wouldn’t even notice him. He stepped backward, moving into the heavier shadow at the side of the house, deciding to let the creature pass by.