Free Arisen, Book Nine - Cataclysm by Michael Stephen Fuchs Page A

loud. “Ha! What the hell does that mean?”
    Already passing him by, Ali said, “I saw it on a t-shirt once – the punchline being that it was being worn by a woman.”
    “Okay, what does it mean now ?”
    “That this is definitely going to suck. But it’s not gonna do it on its own.”
    Reyes laughed again as he filed by.
    As Brady passed the commanders, he had his bayonet out and held in an overhand grip. Having lost almost everything, he’d somehow hung on to this. Fick nodded his approval – if you’re going to get hauled overboard and nearly drown to death for a knife, you may as well come out of it with the damned knife. Marching beside him, Graybeard glanced over and said, “Looks like you’re kicking it Walking Dead style on this one.”
    “Yeah, man. Silent and deadly. This and some BJJ takedowns, and I’ll have this continent subdued in a week.”
    Graybeard shook his head. “Kid, you’re cockier than a guy with six cocks.”
    Brady nodded in agreement. “And I get more trim than the hedges at Versailles.”
    Following behind those two were Predator and Homer. Pred was still limping, and Homer still had visible band-aids on his face – not to mention stitches and bandages on his arm and half his torso, from all the knife wounds he had taken fighting off half a naval Spetsnaz brigade underneath the carrier. As they went by, Handon could hear them talking quietly to each other. Pred, making light of their dinged-up state, shook his head and muttered, “I expect we’ll all be wounded, dead, or turned before this is over.”
    Homer nodded, but said, “Hey, don’t rule us out yet. Humanity’s made it a long time.”
    “I’d give humanity even odds.” Pred smiled sadly. “But not us.”
    “C’mon – everyone knows you’re invulnerable. You’ll make it. And I’d like to see you in peacetime.”
    Pred shook his head. “I can’t even remember that now. I can’t imagine it.” As he’d been doing on and off since his one-man rampage on the flight deck battle, Pred thought again of his young wife Cali, far behind him in North Carolina – and lost to him forever. And, for just a second, he wondered what he was going to do if they did manage to save the world – and he survived long enough to live in it.
    He figured he’d just have to work that out then.
    Following behind, Juice overheard this exchange, and wished he knew how to help his friend. But he knew Pred would put it aside for now, for the sake of the mission. Because there was still a hell of a lot of ZA between them and a saved world. Or even between them and safety back in Britain.
    If there even was still any kind of safety back there.

No Fuck-Ups
    London - 500 Feet Over Wandsworth Common
    Squirters.
    That’s what Captain Charlotte Maidstone was looking for as she took her borrowed AH-1 Apache attack helicopter through another long, low, sweeping pass over the grounds of CentCom Strategic Headquarters. This whole place had recently been the site of a rampaging and nearly terminal outbreak – one which, had it not been stopped, almost certainly would have proved fatal to the last defenses of Britain, and humanity’s last stand.
    After taking down a runner right to its face with her side arm, and then hopping in a spare Apache, Charlotte had been instrumental in containing the eruption of rampaging dead before it reached critical mass. Now, with her shoulder-length straw-blonde hair spilling out in a ponytail at the back of her £22,000 custom-made helmet, her eagle-like green eyes scanned the whole area below. Her excellent vision was augmented by the aircraft’s combined sensor and targeting system – electro-optics, laser rangefinder and target designator, plus a 127x zoom camera – all of it fed into her helmet-mounted sights and slaved to the movements of her head.
    And while she could clearly make out various groups of human figures moving around below in the complex of buildings, landing strips, and parade grounds,