ARISEN, Book Eleven - Deathmatch (20 page)

The problem wasn’t even that she was a woman with less upper-body strength. It was that she was an infantry soldier, and wearing nearly fifty pounds of body armor, weapons, and ammo. And she was only holding onto the platform, the floor of the guard tower, by her gloved fingertips.

Now the fingers of one hand slipped free – and she swung out with her side to the courtyard. She could see the helo still in the air behind and above her, its rotors cutting the air too close to her head, as well as too close to the tower itself. Yet too far away for anyone inside to reach her.

But it wasn’t too far away for al-Shabaab guys to reach out and touch her – as she realized when rounds started coming in on her.
Sons of bitches! You’d think those guys had their own set of problems…
But, evidently a helpless crusader was an irresistible target – never mind a female soldier, a special provocation to jihadis.

As usual, their rounds were smacking into a wide area. But then somebody found the range – and one thunked into her vest gear, which luckily had an ISAPI plate beneath it. Then two smacked into her back!
Ouch! Fuckers!
But it hardly mattered, since she couldn’t possibly hold her weight with one hand for more than another few seconds.

Just as she figured she was done for, as her fingers cramped and burned and told her they were letting go, a face appeared above her – and two hands reached out and grabbed first one forearm then the other, swinging her back to face the tower. And then a percussive explosion blasted over the top of that face, which pressed its eyes together and grimaced as the blast passed over the top of both of them.

Fucking al-Sîf.

Kate thought she might actually prefer falling into the zombie horde to being rescued by this guy. Another round smacked into her back, like an injury on top of this insult.

* * *

Handon stuck his head up into the cockpit – and instantly saw what Muralles had been screaming about. They were looking at the nose cones of multiple RPGs, which would almost certainly be fired at them, point blank, any second.

When Handon heard renewed shouting from the rear, he looked out the cockpit glass and saw SSG Kate Dunajski, hanging by her fingertips from the edge of the platform – with the al-Shabaab commander lying on his stomach and holding her arms. And he heard Baxter shouting:

“
Bring it back in! Bring us closer in!
”

Handon looked ahead again, and saw Muralles twisted around in his seat and staring at him. The shining whites of his eyes told the tale. They were all going to die if they stayed here.

They were all seriously about to die.

Even if there had been time for Handon to pull some super-hero shit like climbing out of the aircraft, taking out the RPG gunners, and saving the damsel, he wasn’t thinking about her. He was thinking about everyone else in the world. And about how he had just lost the one thing that could save them – and which was now flying away from them at high speed.

Handon looked at Reich, who was still staring straight ahead at the rocketeers, staring into his own death – either with balls of pure tempered steel, or perhaps just with the peace of the already dead. Handon had to decide – now.

“
Go!
” he said, clapping him on the shoulder. “
Go, go!
”

The engines screamed as Reich throttled them straight up to full power and the 18,000-pound beast climbed into the sodden sky, its nose tilting up, tail down, pulling away from the tower ass-first – even as two streaking RPGs tore through the air directly below, one passing eighteen inches beneath the fuselage.

The horror show that was the final destruction of the Stronghold, by the dead and by fire, now twisted and turned and receded below them, as Reich banked around and put the nose sharply down, taking them the hell.

Out.

Of there.

Dickless

Alfa Group Bunker – Interrogation Room

Oleg Aliyev sat in the dark, tied to his chair. At least he had been set back upright again. Small blessings – and even smaller mercies. His time in the Alfa bunker, kicking it with the entombed body of Lenin, being pounded on by the Wolf Pack, had not been one of his great travel experiences.

His head pounded rhythmically in the darkness, like a house beat in a night club. Something about being alone in the dark made the throbbing totally audible to him. His swollen lips felt like they’d gotten caught in a pool drain. And his ribs hurt so much he wanted them removed entirely. If they weren’t broken, he really didn’t want to know what it felt like when they were.

Even more than when he’d been buried beneath the dead in that tank out in the square, he was struggling to maintain any shred of optimism. Out in the tank, having made his SOS call, he could at least imagine that rescue might come.

Down here? Not so much.

He remembered what his tormenter, Akela, had told him when Aliyev succumbed to cliché and asked where he was.

“You are in a deep hole,” the spooky bastard had rumbled.

How far underground he was, Aliyev had absolutely no way of knowing. But it hardly mattered. There could be no question of anyone coming for him here. When he had merely been buried under the dead, it was easy enough to imagine a rescue force digging him out. The dead were easy to kill. Spetsnaz Alfa Group commandos?

Again, not so much.

He wasn’t utterly without hope, though. Sure, there was no way he was ever getting out of this place. But maybe he could make himself useful. He still knew more about the Hargeisa virus than anyone else alive. He’d already tried to offer the Russians his services while they were beating on him.

But no takers so far.

What Aliyev genuinely couldn’t work out, though, was why he hadn’t tried offering them the Meningitis Z, or MZ. If the Russians had already found it in the back of his crashed helo, they hadn’t said so. And if they had, surely the first thing they would have tried to beat out of him was an answer to the question of what it was.

But so far not a peep.

And yet, somehow, throughout all the pummeling he’d taken, during which Aliyev had willingly spilled his guts on every other conceivable topic… he’d never told them about the MZ, the zombie-annihilating virus. For some reason of his own that even he himself couldn’t understand, he just wouldn’t give it up.

As he closed his swollen eyes piteously in the dark, which made absolutely no difference to his visual field, he thought: maybe it was because the MZ was… his salvation.

Of course, it might still be humanity’s salvation.

But it was also deeply personal for Aliyev. It was the only thing that might save his immortal soul. Of course, he was a scientist, and didn’t believe in anything so primitive or ignorant as a soul. But he did find “immortal soul” to be a nice shorthand. It definitely signified something – something Aliyev had once had, but had long ago lost.

His humanity.

It was this which he had at best sullied horribly, or perhaps even annihilated, when his greed and amorality and sinister skills had resulted in the end of the world. His only prayer of getting it back was the MZ. And he just wasn’t ready to give up on that. On getting his soul back. On redemption.

Or something.

He opened his eyes again, just in time to squint against the most unexpected thing – light. The door to the interrogation room opened, admitting illumination from the hallway and revealing his old buddy, Akela.

Aliyev had the strong impression that Akela had somehow kicked open the door – in spirit, at least. In reality, he had turned the handle, probably because carpenters were thin on the ground in the post-Apocalypse. But he definitely rode into the room on a wave of aggression. Pausing only to slap at the light switch, he stalked right up to where Aliyev sat, bound and bleeding.

And he kicked him and his chair over on his back again.

Well
, Aliyev thought sadly.
It worked for him last time.

* * *

“Okay, worm,” Akela said, standing rather than squatting over Aliyev’s prone form now. “What makes your pathetic ass so valuable as to justify a cross-continental rescue mission?”

Aliyev’s eyes went wide.
They’re here? Really?

But this flicker of hope only lasted one second. Because he realized
here
was a broad concept. And a rescue force on the other side of however much earth lay between him and the world was about as useful as one on the other side of the Earth itself.

Akela once more got out his pack of cigarettes and lighter, and he held them out for Aliyev to regard. “I am going to take out a cigarette,” he said. “Then I am going to light it, and take a drag. If, by the time I exhale, you have not told me the truth…” He jerked his pistol free and laid it down with a solid clunk on the table. “I am going to take this and shoot you in the dick.”

He took the cigarette out, as Aliyev tried to swallow.

“And you will spend the rest of your days as the dickless Kazakh scientist, working to complete our vaccine development effort. And whatever else we have for you after that.”

Aliyev finally managed to swallow.

Akela flicked the lighter, and held up the flame. “You can work with no cock – no problem, right? It’s your huge brain that makes you so valuable, and not your tiny little penis.”

He lit the cigarette and brought it to his lips.

And as Akela inhaled, the strangest calm came over Aliyev. He knew that, whatever this gray wolf of a human being did to him, he was never going to give him the MZ. It was his, and he would die with it – or even lose his dick over it.

He would never give it up.

As Akela reached the apex of his inhalation and picked up the handgun, there was a knock on the door behind him. He hesitated, squinted, then turned and opened it. Behind it stood a younger man, in uniform, but not looking to Aliyev like one of Akela’s Wolf Pack. Maybe support staff. He was holding a tablet computer, and said, “You wanted a transcription of the Kazakh’s original radio communication – now that we have the key to decrypt it?”

Akela blew out a lungful of smoke and took the tablet. When he turned and sat down at the table, he wore an expression that said to Aliyev he’d totally forgotten about this. Then his brow furrowed with interest as he read. About two minutes later, he snorted with amusement, then looked down at Aliyev.

“Meningitis Z, huh? ‘Kills zombies dead – better than Raid on cockroaches.’”

Aliyev swallowed again.
Shit.
Yeah, those were definitely his words – and that was pretty clearly a transcript of his radio call to Simon Park on the American carrier.

So much for salvation.

* * *

Akela looked over to Aliyev’s bug-out bag in the corner, which had already been thoroughly searched. He squinted in thought, then somewhat absently picked up the pistol off the tabletop and pointed it at Aliyev’s crotch.

“Tell me where it is and you can keep your cock.”

Aliyev closed his eyes. He felt like crying. He understood that, now they knew about the MZ, it was only a matter of time before they searched his crashed helo and found the coldbox, wedged in the back corner. And his junk seemed like a very high price to pay to slow them down for a few minutes.

“It’s in the helicopter. Back of the cargo area. In a coldbox.”

It was over. He’d lost. As he always knew he had to.

Akela holstered his pistol. At least he was as good as his word. Or maybe he just didn’t want dick all over his nice interrogation room. He then touched his radio headset and said, “Put me through to Viper One… Lyudmila, Akela… new tasking. Return to the Square and search the crashed helicopter. Yes, I mean it this time. You’re looking fo—”

But he was cut off mid-sentence by a raucous and thundering explosion, echoing through the bunker. The very ground shook – as Aliyev was in a great position to know, due to his back and head being pressed against it.

And as he and Akela locked eyes across open air…

All the lights went out.

That didn’t bode well for him being put upright again.

Indiscriminate Killing

Outside Lenin’s Tomb
[Eight Minutes Ago]

Sanders slapped the security card, taken off one of the Spetsnaz he killed, into Jameson’s hand as he passed him at a run, Eli alongside. While they approached the door, the rest of the team established a security perimeter, shooting slowly and silently, but steadily. The run across the middle of Red Square hadn’t cost them any killed or infected. But it sure as hell hadn’t been silent, and it hadn’t left the undead Red Army still staggering around oblivious. They were locking on to the Marines. And rapidly converging on them at the tomb.

Jameson swiped the card through the reader.

A red light came on. He tried the door – nothing.

Suppressed firing continued to ramp up behind him, along with the sounds of moaning and pounding feet. One Troop was about to be a serious local attraction. Jameson swiped the card again, with the same result – but then felt a tug at his sleeve. Turning, he found Sanders handing him a thumb. Not a thumb drive – a thumb. Wasting no time on his distaste, Jameson took it, swiped the card again – and pressed the thumb on the reader.

A green light came on.

He pushed open the big steel double doors. In five seconds, all twelve men were inside and the doors slammed shut again. Dead hands pounded on the outside, muted through the thick steel and stone. Needing no orders, the men swept through and cleared the floor, weapon-mounted IR illuminators coming on to aid their NVGs. But there was little on this level other than a huge sarcophagus and a viewing area.

However, there was a very large elevator, right in the middle of the anteroom. Around the corner from that was a door to a service stairwell. And, finally, they found an electrical closet nearby, the lock of which Eli defeated in seconds. By the time Jameson got there, Eli was in the closet with a red-lensed light on, his NVGs up, and his multitool out.