Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon (10 page)

It was also a lot like mowing the grass – except that this shit couldn’t keep growing back forever. There were only so many living people in England. So there could only ever be so many living dead ones.

This was small consolation to Captain Charlotte Maidstone, as she zoomed and panned with her helo's chin-mounted camera to assess the impact of her rocket volley. Despite her resolve, despite all her carefully honed professionalism, she couldn’t stop scanning those faces on the ground, thinking about her family. It was ridiculously unlikely, but still…

The flechette rockets were the same type that her commanding officer at USOC, the Colonel, had ordered her to launch into their own hospital on the base at Hereford, to cauterize the terrible outbreak that had threatened to devour everyone who served there. Dead, alive, undead, or indeterminate, all those people she had cut down in that terrible minute had been her real family – her truest brothers and sisters. If she’d somehow white-knuckled it through that, then she could steel herself to get through today.

Anyway, she had no choice. There was damn little resistance holding some parts of this line. And along her assigned segment she was pretty much all that stood between the outbreak and the Capital – the ancient and mighty city of London, which had long been the center of the world, and which was quickly shaping up into the last bastion of humanity. But if anyone could hold this line single handedly, it was Charlotte and her fire-breathing dragon.

“Riding the dragon” – that was how they referred to piloting an Apache AH Mk1 attack helicopter. Totally deadly – and ridiculously complex. It has been said that taking one into battle was “like playing an Xbox, a PlayStation, and a chess Grandmaster simultaneously – whilst riding Disney World’s biggest roller coaster.”

Qualifying to fly one required an 18-month conversion course, just to transition from being a regular old combat helicopter pilot. It required learning to deal simultaneously with the flight instruments, four different radio frequencies, the weapons targeting computers, the defensive suite’s threat reports, the cameras and radar – plus watching the ground for muzzle flashes and friendly units, and the air for other aircraft. You also actually had to teach your eyes to point in different directions – because one of the weapons systems was
slaved to your retina
.

That was the 30mm electric cannon, which spewed ten high-explosive rounds per second wherever the pilot or gunner looked. This was in addition to the pods of anti-personnel rockets and the laser-guided Hellfire missiles – the shape-charged warheads of which pack a five-million-pound-per-square-inch punch. The aircraft also had an array of day and night cameras providing 127-times magnification, thermal viewing, and all-weather radar.

Then again, like so many things in the ZA, riding the dragon wasn’t what it used to be. There were no more air-to-ground threats that needed to be scanned for or defended against – never mind enemy aircraft, which were a feature only of wars long past. And because Charlotte wasn’t being shot at, she didn’t have to make attack runs. She could simply pick a spot, hover in place, and unload from there – which, if less thrilling, was a hell of a lot easier and safer. And with that much less to attend to, not to mention a military-wide shortage of pilots, she was doing without a gunner in the front seat these days.

It was just her, the legions of advancing dead, and her own morbid thoughts.

And she really was alone here. Right now, on this section of the line, there were no friendlies on the ground – for her to support, to look out for and avoid blowing up, or even just to hear their comforting chatter and matey accents on the radio. She knew the Paras were out there somewhere, fighting hard on both her flanks. But they were too far, her altitude too low, for them to be visible.

No, this was a pure anti-personnel mission, and she was the only personnel assigned to it. One living woman, and one fire-breathing dragon, against maybe ten thousand dead guys.

It was this fact of her aloneness, along with the 127x zoom optics, that was unsettling her mind now. She continued to peer through the camera, via the monocular lens in front of her right eye, trying to get a sense of the effect on target of that last rocket volley. The good news was she had basically destroyed, single handedly, the entire front wave of rampaging dead.

The bad news was that she could already see the next one advancing behind it. Another dark line was coming over the horizon – taking over the damned horizon, actually, making their own mass of rotting bodies into a new and twilit edge of the spinning Earth. England was being overrun in not-so-slow motion, the sceptered isle becoming a floodplain.

And the other bad news was… Charlotte could see their faces. All of them. With the high-powered optics, nothing was opaque or obscure to her. She could dial up the detail to an arbitrary level. She could see nose pores from a mile out. And, still very much against her will and better judgment, she once again found herself scanning faces, both hopeful and terrified of seeing a hairstyle, the familiar curve of a cheek or jawline, a scarf given and forgotten a hundred Christmases ago.

Because, for all she knew, her own father could be down there right now. Maybe her mother, too. Or her brother or sister. This wasn’t really her family’s part of the country. But she had lost touch with everyone, after running away and joining the military, the day of her eighteenth birthday. She knew seeing them down there was vanishingly unlikely.

Then again, vanishing was her family’s specialty.

Her father had gone for good by the time she was ten, and had not made himself very present before that, disappearing for weeks and months at a time. Her mother had been around – but only physically, retreating into days-long alcoholic hazes, numbing the pain of her past bad choices and dwindling future prospects. Even when she was sober, her coldness and psychological distance made it seem as if her soul had long departed her body. And Charlotte’s brother and sister, both older than she, had taken off as soon as they were old enough to support themselves.

Everyone had left her, one at a time.

Until she was finally old enough to leave herself.

Home had just been a place to escape from – and definitely not one to return to. But it didn’t matter now. The first proper home she’d ever known was in the British Army Air Corps, which had taken her in, and taught her to fly – in every sense. It had allowed her to make something of her life.

Later, her family and home had been among the operators and support personnel of USOC, the Unified Special Operations Command, to which she had been detached for the past eighteen months. Her job had been to provide close air support (CAS), casevac security, and if necessary defense of the very base itself.

She had found a place where her skills and contribution were valued, where she was esteemed and loved for who she was – a place where she truly belonged.

But, in the last few days, many of the teams at Hereford had been thrown into the desperate defense of the southeast – trying to reverse or at least stem the terrible outbreak. They said it had come from out of the Channel Tunnel – then rampaged through the county of Kent, and spilled out across the borders into Essex and Sussex. And now it was racing mindlessly, implacably, and seemingly unstoppably toward the Capital.

London.

Maybe they’d gotten complacent, letting themselves start to feel secure in the moated castle that was Fortress Britain. After all, no one had successfully invaded England’s green and pleasant land since the Norman Conquest – back in 1066. Even Hitler’s thousand-year Reich, and the blitzkrieg of his Wehrmacht, hadn’t laid so much as a single tank tread on Her Majesty’s soil. No, they had always been safe there, defending their island home, as the Great Man, Churchill, had put it.

Well, sure enough, now they were fighting in the goddamned fields – ones less than fifty miles from the bloody M25, which was the ring-road, and now the ZPW (Zulu-Proof Wall), that defined the outer border of London.

No, Charlotte’s parents weren’t down there, and she wouldn’t recognize them even if they were. God knew they wouldn’t have had the strength, or the adaptability, or in particular the resolve, to survive the Zulu Alpha. But Charlotte did. She was damned well going to survive all this. And so were her friends in the Army.

And so was Britain.

The next wave of surging dead was still nearly two kilometers back behind what had been defined as the MLR, the main line of resistance. But she was due to be relieved in this sector, and this carve-up of airspace, in a few minutes. And she still had a lot of ordnance left. There was little point in spending the fuel to ferry those heavy rockets and missiles all the way out here, and then right back to base again.

Moreover, Charlotte suddenly just found herself not in a defensive mood. And she was under her own tactical control right now – CentCom seemed task-saturated, as it woke up to the seriousness of the threat, and tried to run the many fronts of this battle from their Joint Operations Center (JOC) in Oxfordshire. Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard from the USOC TOC at Hereford in hours, either.

Fuck it
, she thought.
We’re not backing up anymore. Not today. Not on my watch
.

She didn’t know for sure what unit was meant to replace her. But whoever it was, she was going to make damn sure their backs weren’t up against the sodding wall.

She revved up her bird’s dual custom Rolls-Royce engines to something in the ballpark of their peak 2,100 horsepower, climbed until she’d gained 400 feet, and the engines, wind, and rotors were all screaming around her. And then she put her targeting laser just ahead of the next rank of advancing dead, out on the left flank. And she fired all four Hellfire missiles from her rail, moving the targeting laser a half a kilometer to the right each time. She then put her remaining rockets into the surviving dead behind that. And then she played clean-up with her 30mm auto-cannon, dropping dozens of the rapid-fire high-explosive rounds into groups and singles that were somehow still on their feet.

Sixty seconds later, she had single handedly cleared up a major chunk of overrun Kentish real estate. But then she remembered another Churchill quote – “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results” – and performed another careful battle damage assessment (BDA). Her effect on target was still excellent. She’d knocked the dead, at least in her sector, halfway back to effing Calais.

With these weapons and targeting systems, she almost couldn’t miss. And against that level of firepower, nothing could stand. Basically, nothing cleans house like an Apache.

“Quality, mate,” she said aloud. “Fucking quality.”

After this one-sided curb-stomp battle, she was now “Winchester” on ammo (totally out), and within five minutes of “bingo fuel” (just enough to get her home). And with that, her radio chirped up on the air-mission net, a flat and staticky voice, but recognizably masculine, growling at her across the sky – and approaching quickly.

“Wyvern Two Zero, this is Dambuster One One, coming on station. We are a flight of two Typhoon FGR4s, with standard weapons payload and two hours playtime. Requesting handover of your sector, over.”

Charlotte smiled as she keyed her mike. “Dambuster One One, Wyvern Two Zero. She’s all yours, mate. Happy times. Out.” And she kept on smiling – because she knew it took four men in two 90-million-Euro jet planes to take the place of her, riding alone in her dragon.

For the past 36 hours of this combat mission, she had been grabbing gas, and ordnance, and the odd half-hour of sleep, at a forward rearming and refueling point (FARP), about two klicks behind the MLR. But now her deployment was definitely done – it wasn’t safe to fly any longer without sleep, and CentCom wouldn’t let her try it even if she asked.

So she tightened her grips on the collective and cyclic, checked the moving map display, and mentally computed a course. She would be heading now toward the opposite horizon, the green and hopeful one. And, out beyond that, maybe her future lay waiting for her… So she wheeled her agile and deadly bird of prey around in a tight arc, the whole 80-foot and 16,000-pound machine feeling like a single sleek prosthesis, an extension of her body.

And she pointed it toward home.

“Home.” She said that aloud as well.

She liked the sound of it.

* * *

“Hotel X, this is Wyvern Two Zero, I am RTB minus one mike, requesting priority clearance for primary helipad.”

Because she was so obviously within radio range, and because this was such a routine clearance request – hers was one of only a handful of helos that used the USOC helipad – she hadn’t even waited for an acknowledgement before broadcasting it.

But now nothing came back. No clearance. No acknowledgement. No answer of any sort.

“Hotel X, Wyvern Two Zero, commo check.” Her eyes darted down to her radio panel. Everything was glowing in the right places. Looking up again, she could actually see the base, nestled in the Herefordshire hills, and growing in perspective. She was actually visual with the people she was trying to talk to.

But her Spidey sense was perking up now, so instead of flying straight to the X and flaring in to land, she instead wheeled around and did a clockwise circuit over the base.

Not only were there no other aircraft coming or going – but she couldn’t even see anyone moving on the ground. That made zero sense. She did a second circuit, while hailing the TOC twice more. Sweet F-A. No radio contact, no visual on anyone or anything.

Her dragon was basically breathing fumes at this point, so she had no choice but to put it down. She didn’t have the range to reach any other military airbase now. And she certainly wasn’t going to put it down outside the wire. Not with the island's defenses breached and the hills crawling with dead fuckers.

Dust billowed up around her as the beast settled on its three fat tires. Charlotte got her head out of her heavy, high-tech helmet, while the canopy lifted around her. Before climbing out of the cockpit, she unholstered her HK MP7 personal defense weapon from where it was nestled under her arm, then hopped down to the tarmac.