Arisen, Book Four - Maximum Violence 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

  Glynn

  Since Michael (to follow) addresses questions about nationality and its influence on the books, I figured I may as well approach a different topic – how this all works and how we put it all together. We write online, most of the time, but we don’t usually write on the same page or at the same time. We work on our own chapters, and we butcher each other’s work mercilessly with Michael covering the military aspects and constantly correcting my misuses, whereas I add the horror and chill factor, where needed, and remove military acronyms that I need to use Google for. You have no idea how much I’ve learned writing alongside Michael – whose military knowledge never fails to amaze me. The wonderful thing about writing the books the way we do is that although we do extensive planning and brainstorming, neither of us is frightened of throwing in something completely new just because we decided it was cool and it fitted at the time. It means that even though we are both writing the book, we get to discover things about the Arisen world that neither of us knew.

  Michael

  I’d just like to take a second to address some speculation about my nationality. I’m American! And, yes, I’m also British. Proudly so on both counts. But I was born American, and naturalized as British, and was the former for a long time before the latter. I probably remain a bit more American in outlook and politics, if not in temperament and style. It’s also worth noting that Glynn and I have consciously decided to use American spelling and usage throughout the books, basically as a nod to the relative sizes of the markets. Military terminology, slang, and kit – excuse me, gear – also tends largely to be of American vintage, with the notable exception of the Royal Marines under Glynn’s command, and a certain flinty Yorkshireman in Alpha. Speaking of Glynn: I think he’s really taken his game to a new level on this book. While I’ve been learning horror, he’s seriously been mastering action – or as I put it in one of our chats, after reading one of his Canterbury chapters: “You’ve clearly been taking yourself to Crazy-Ass Over-the-Top Action School!” And it’s worked. Oh, one of us should also probably mention: yeah, originally Book Four was going to be called Exodus. But what we discovered on the path was that the various Egypts in which our people were stuck were not quite ready to let them go. But you can all look forward to freedom (of a sort) for everyone in Book Five. Lastly, and as always, thanks very, very much indeed to everyone who has bought, read, reviewed, written in, and so generously and enthusiastically supported the series – for spending your time, money, and emotional energy on our characters and their stories.

  ARISEN

  BOOK FOUR

  MAXIMUM VIOLENCE

  GLYNN JAMES &

  MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

  “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”

  – Revelation 21:8

  “Hell is not the place of evil; rather, Hell is the absence of any standards at all.”

  – Kenneth Tynan

  A Girl I Once Knew

  Canterbury

  The sound of ten thousand dead feet on concrete.

  A city as old as civilization itself, drawing its last breath.

  And being devoured by darkness from within.

  Deep amidst the chaos, First Lieutenant Jameson – Officer Commanding, One Troop, 42 Royal Marine Commando – popped the magazine from his L85A2 assault rifle and replaced it with another in less than two seconds. Ten seconds later he would do exactly the same again.

  Beside him, Staff Sergeant Eli – his troop first sergeant and perennial point man – followed like clockwork, as always. They never reloaded at the same time, never allowing a single instant when neither of their guns was on the enemy. If they did that, if they slipped, it could all fall apart in an eye blink.

  Something registered in Jameson’s vision, some movement, to the left, behind a car that was too close to the squad. A blur of something that he couldn’t lock onto.

  Fast movement.

  Too fast.

  A runner.

  The creature darted out from the gap in the parked cars, ignoring the debris that littered the road and blocked its path, and closed the distance before any of the squad could bring their rifles to bear. It lunged toward Eli, ravaged and bloodstained hands reaching out, broken and jagged teeth gleaming in the failing light as it closed in— and met Eli’s boot with its face. Even over the roar of gunfire and the moaning of the dead, Jameson heard the crunch as the runner’s jaw smashed. It fell back through open air, carried by the force of that kick, arms flailing and grasping at anything living that might come within reach. But nothing did, and it fell directly beneath Jameson’s weapon. He fired and the creature’s face exploded, a black cloud of blood and bone fragments spraying the street behind him – and splashing the feet of two more zombies that even then heedlessly lumbered forward.

  So far, this pair had by freak chance avoided the storm of bullets that lashed the streets – or at any rate their heads had avoided it. Now they went down as Jameson swept his weapon in a tight arc, squeezing off rapid single shots. The assault rifle kicked with each report, a short sharp recoil that he had al
ways found reassuring, a reminder of the deadly intent of the weapon.

  “Tighten up,” said Jameson, ignoring the petulant glance from Eli in response. He had a huge amount of respect for the skinny bald guy, but was constantly battling with the man’s ego. Sometimes Jameson wondered who really was in charge of One Troop, and doubted it was him.

  He glanced behind him, double-checking the positions of his Marines. They were back together now, all three squads. Elson and Travis, the leaders of One Troop’s second and third squads, had led their men along the streets parallel to the main road, where they ran into heavy opposition – much more than had first squad, with Jameson at its head, on their line of attack. The momentum of the other squads had slowed badly, but finally they had converged at a roundabout, all thirty-six Royal Marines still standing. Though some looked a lot less happy about life than they had a few hours ago.

  Jameson wasn’t exactly over the moon himself. He knew this roundabout well, just as he knew all of the streets that surrounded them. But they’d looked a hell of a lot better when last he saw them. Jameson was back in his hometown, where he’d lived as a boy – but under circumstances he couldn’t have imagined even a few hours ago, let alone wished for. And the macabre homecoming was producing a lot of unruly emotions in him that, right now, he needed to get under wraps. Because he had a job to do. And a great many lives hung in the balance.

  As the street opened up into the big traffic circle, there was too much ground to cover to double up, so instead Jameson put the entire unit shoulder-to-shoulder in a single rank, like a firing squad, barring the way of the masses of dead that now seemed to spew out of every alley and doorway. They held this line so that those civilians who had managed to keep their doors barricaded, and thus keep the dead out, could now escape to the rear, up the street and away.

  Jameson was surprised at how many were still standing, but he knew that not all of them would live out the day. Many would already be infected, and the checkpoint at the outskirts of town would deal with those. They would never leave this place alive. Some might try to sneak past, or to conceal wounds, but the inspection teams were just too damn good at their jobs. They’d been burnt before.

  “Fuck me sideways!” shouted Eli as he stepped back into formation. “Where did all these come from?”

  Jameson had no answer for this. How so many could be turned so quickly was something else new, another game-changer. Now a steady tide of the dead made their way toward them from the surrounding streets, and the piles of bodies grew so that even the dead needed to climb over them.

  Jameson’s focus moved to one of the fallen corpses across the road, one someone else had already put down. It lay twenty feet from a military all-terrain vehicle that sat abandoned at the curb. When the Marines first took the roundabout, Jameson had noticed three dead soldiers near the vehicle, with a large number of fallen zombies surrounding them. But he hadn’t noticed this lone figure laid out on its back, bang in the middle of the road. He couldn’t initially work out what was different about this one, what made it stand out among so many others.

  And then it hit him: it was much older. Its clothing, what remained, was shredded and faded, the flesh beneath much more pallid and rotten than the recently turned creatures overrunning the town. Its body was bloated and puffy, like a corpse that had been submerged in water for days, or even months.

  Jameson’s eyes widened as he got it.

  This was the one that broke out from the Channel Tunnel.

  It had to be. None of the others looked like they had been wandering around a sewer – or a flooded underground tunnel – for two years. Every other walking abomination was covered with fresh wounds and still-drying blood.

  Jameson continued to fire rhythmically, thirty rounds out, then reload. Repeat. But his mind reeled at the knowledge, or presumption, that he had just gained. The Typhoid Mary of this outbreak had been put down – or at least one of them had. Jameson, and CentCom for that matter, had no idea whether there were others; but they knew for sure that at least one had escaped the net around Folkestone. And here one of them lay. It had evidently been killed by these fallen soldiers, now lying in pieces near their vehicle, before they were overwhelmed by the many offspring the first had spawned.

  This was critical intel. Jameson keyed his radio.

  “Central, this is One Troop Actual, message over.” He reached to slightly adjust the mic that curled around the side of his helmet.

  Gunfire continued to erupt around him, the Marines’ three dozen assault rifles drowning out almost all ambient noise. And still the dead came staggering toward them, drawn by the noise of the battle that echoed across Canterbury louder even than the warning sirens that blared overhead.

  “Central, send over,” came the voice, after some delay, at the other end.

  Jameson coughed. The air was cold but dry, and he was breathing heavily. “Be advised: suspected Tunnel target located and down. I repeat: Tunnel target is KIA, over.”

  “Acknowledged, One Troop. Send mission sitrep, over.” This was the comms officer of the watch, a man who would be sitting in an office somewhere in London and miles away from the danger surging around the troop of Marines.

  Jameson sighed and pulled his weapon in tighter to his shoulder, snapping off three rounds in quick succession. The dead seemed to be increasing in number rather than dwindling. How many more survivors would they actually be able to help escape before the hammer came down? Before those in charge decided it was too late to control the outbreak, and the only choice was to flatten it all.

  Pretty damned soon, was Jameson’s guess in the matter. And, ultimately, as the man on the ground, it was down to him to advise CentCom – to report that his own hometown was now beyond saving. The people in power, sitting in their clean offices far away, might be the ones that made the final decision to bomb an entire city. But it was still down to him as team leader of the expeditionary force, stuck in the middle of it all, to tell them it was time.

  But would he be able to make that call? Yes. He had to.

  “Our situation is that we have an escalating outbreak. OOC. I repeat. The outbreak is out of control. Over.” As he said it, his heart felt as if it were sinking.

  He took down two more zombies, both of them formerly young people – students judging by their jeans and the rucksacks that still hung on their backs. These two wouldn’t even know what a textbook was now. Around him One Troop continued to drop the enemy, perhaps twenty or thirty falling every minute.

  Yet still they came, and the tide was growing.

  “One Troop, stand by for op order,” came the cool voice crackling down the line.

  “Roger that, standing by,” replied Jameson, and swung his rifle ten degrees to his left, where he clocked a large group of dead surging forward from behind the trees that lined the roundabout. He squeezed his trigger, taking three… four… five of them in succession. He counted himself lucky that virtually all of those they had encountered so far were the slow-movers. That was one nice thing about a fresh outbreak, he supposed.

  But as he lowered his rifle, he saw that the last of his targets had staggered back but only been grazed in the head, the shot missing the brainstem. He sighted in again, carefully settling his red-dot sight on the chin point. But then he hesitated, nearly frozen, as the dead thing’s features resolved in his vision… the nose, the auburn hair, and even a tiny scar above the right eye.

  It was a face he recognized, and for a few seconds he ceased to function as all he could do was stare into the dead eyes of his cousin Angela. A rush of memories flashed through his mind, of the times they had played together in his uncle’s backyard, when they had been just little kids. Jameson had sworn that he would marry her one day, back when such things seemed uncomplicated, and all that troubled their young minds was how they would spend their Saturday, or if they might miss their favorite TV program.

  Jameson’s heart thumped in his chest as he balked at the task that faced him now – that
of putting down the remains of what had once been such a wonderful human being.

  But then she was gone, taken from this world in an instant as Eli unleashed a volley of full-auto fire across the renewed mass of bodies surging from the treeline.

  Jameson snapped back to the present, even though his heart now ached with terrible regret. Now was no time to fall into some nostalgic stupor. He knew that among the swelling ranks of the dead, drawn from all over the city by the noise of their heavy small-arms fire, there might be any number he had once known. Over and over he told himself: They are gone now. They are gone now. These were not the people he remembered. And the best he could do for them now was to help them pass into the next life, help them to escape.

  A noise was sounding in his ear, his headset buzzing and hissing. Finally, a voice resolved and spoke to him, but for a few seconds he was too locked into the battle to make it out.

  “One Troop, message. One Troop, radio check.”

  “One Troop here, send over,” said Jameson, his voice now hoarse.

  “Stand by for new target location, over,” said the barely audible voice of the CentCom operator.

  New target location?

  A thrumming noise now crept in beneath the din of the fight. Something else. Jameson recognized it somehow, but there was too much going on around him for his mind to identify it.

  “One Troop, message,” spoke the earpiece, after what seemed like another age. “Your new target is due east of your current grid coords, approx four-zero-zero meters. The building is a tenement high-rise. You should already be visual with it now, over.”

  Jameson squinted in that direction. Beyond the legions of dead that lumbered up the street, a tall building stood just within view. Several others were visible beyond it, but only the nearest looked like it might be a block of flats. Of more immediate concern was that the ground between his three squads and the target was heaving with hundreds of dead.