Arisen, Book Six - The Horizon Read Online Free Page B

she’d grabbed to save the poor thing’s life, he thought.
    There was a loud bang at the other end of the toilet block, and it snapped Wesley from his thoughts, so violently that he jumped up and froze, both hands braced on the sides of the stall. He pulled his trousers up, thankful that he hadn’t even gotten started, and stood there for a moment, listening.
    Another bang. This one loud enough that whoever was in the cubicle, or outside of it, had to be hitting the door with some force.
    “Hey. Everything all right over there?”
    No reply.
    Wesley placed a boot on the toilet behind him and peered over the top of the door, into the open space near the sinks. He could see along the row, and no one was outside the far cubicle. He grabbed his gunbelt from its hook on the door, rushed to buckle it on, and then slowly, quietly as he could, drew his handgun, flicked the safety off, unlocked the door, and stepped outside.
    But the weapon swung toward only a blank wall as he rounded on the room. There was no one outside the cubicles, and that meant…
    He stepped slowly along the row, pushing open each door as he went, until he finally stood outside the last door, the one with the jacket hanging over it.
    “You okay in there?” he asked again.
    A gurgling sound came from inside, followed by a low, deep, rasping moan. Wesley went down on all fours and peered under the door, carefully staying a yard away. And he was glad he did, because the moment the thing in the cubicle clocked his face, it lunged, stretching its arms as far as it could. It was only inches from him.
    For ten seconds, Wesley stayed on the ground, staring into the eyes of the dead man, and Melvin’s hateful glare came back to him, jumping from the dream he had already half-forgotten. He blinked, pushing the image away. Melvin hadn’t died in the battle, and his own jaw was still firmly attached to his face. Then he saw that this was someone he didn’t recognize, just another crew member, someone who had probably been bitten, panicked, and hidden himself away to avoid a bullet in their head.
    Oh boy, he thought. What an absolutely shitty way to die. Sitting on the toilet.
    Wesley aimed the gun at the creature’s head.

Just Another Day at the Office
    Britain, Oxfordshire - CentCom
    Colonel Robert Mayes was a troubled man. Standing on the balcony that overlooked the huge room that was the CentCom Joint Operations Center – his JOC – and looking out over the heads of dozens of busy ops-desk personnel, he was beginning to see a pattern that didn’t bode well for anyone.
    Directly across from him, nearly a hundred feet away, was the massive, digital Area of Operations (AO) map, and it displayed the entirety of the south of England. Near the top was London, and down on the far right, amidst a jarring tangle of red blips, was Canterbury and then Folkestone – where he had just deployed a significant portion of the world’s remaining combat troops and heavy firepower. Each deployment was marked with its own flashing star, and they were distributed almost evenly across the bottom of the map. All engaged. All in a slow, controlled, tactical retreat.
    The problem, he figured, wasn’t the net that had been cast to trap the outbreak. Everything had been in order there. That was, until fifteen minutes ago, when three new blips appeared on the screen. Down in the rows of desks below, ops officers relayed instructions and controlled communications across his defense network. They would take SITREPs from the front, issue commands, and update the tactical map so that he and his staff could make the right moves in this game of breathtakingly high-stakes chess. Fifteen minutes ago they had learned they were facing more opposing pieces on the board, represented by new markers on the map – red ones. Outbreaks.
    And the new blips were outside of his entrapment circle. Appledore, Wittersham, New Romney, all of them reporting small-scale contact, and all of them southwest of