Read Online Arisen : Nemesis by Michael Stephen Fuchs - Free Book Online Page B

Despite the sounds of chaos, what he was saying was impossible. She couldn’t process it. She also couldn’t believe how hard she had slept, or how groggy she still felt. “How long was I out?”
    “It’s almost dawn.”
    “Jes—”
    “I put an Ambien in your water bottle.”
    “Motherfucker.”
    “Staff Sergeant! You gotta shake it off! Grab your shit and get moving – now !”
    Kate took a huge indraft of breath, like a baby coming into the world and breathing for the first time.
    And while Elijah went back and forth from the window to the door, she got kitted up in the fastest such maneuver of her life. She was still badly confused and disoriented, but by this point she could also strap on her weapons, ammo, and armor while unconscious – and she damn well knew that whatever the hell was going on, she’d much rather face it tooled up than not.
    “How?” she tried again, while rapid-lacing her boots. “We fought off the incursion. Are they back?”
    “It’s not the jihadis. It’s the sick people.”
    Kate’s face twisted with confusion. “What? What does that even mean?” She stole a glance out the window, where she could see lights arcing by, silhouetting the outlines of figures running – and somebody staggering as if he’d been wounded, or stunned by an explosion…
    And then the window glass crunched two feet in front of her and both of them bounced away in reaction, Elijah snapping his rifle to his shoulder. The glass pane had spiderwebbed in a large oval pattern – and what had impacted it was a human face. It was still pressed against the indentation in the glass, but backlit, so no features were visible. As the two of them stood frozen to their spots, the face withdrew, its owner presumably walking it off somewhere else.
    Kate picked up her rifle with trembling hands, and muttered a silent curse or prayer. Elijah grabbed her arm again and yanked her to her feet. And as he started to physically pull her out the door, she resisted, reached back, and snatched his shemagh off the bunk, getting it looped around her neck as they ran.
    And as they dashed through the team room, she saw there were a lot fewer weapons on the racks than there had been last night.
    The outer door was wide open to the madness beyond.
    * * *
    As she rushed out behind Elijah and the warm air hit her face, the scene now made last night’s chaos seem like the Pax Romana – a thousand years of peace and order. Fighting off the attack on the wire, she’d at least had something solid to her back. Now the threat was everywhere, bedlam swirling around her on all sides, and instantly threatening to envelop and subsume her.
    The only advantage they had was that the team room was near the edge of camp, providing some kind of safety on that side – but this instantly went away as they started to run for, well, wherever the hell Elijah was leading them.
    Holding her rifle with arms that felt too weak for it, she scanned over her ACOG, trying to resolve the kaleidoscope of shapes assaulting her visual field. At least one building was on fire somewhere nearby, not quite in sight, but its evil orange glow painting the low black sky. The acrid and particle-thick smoke made it even harder for her to breathe – on top of the running, the adrenaline, and the panic.
    She saw two guys in hospital scrubs chasing a wounded-looking dude, then attempting to restrain him. He shrugged them off, then wheeled on them, furious, like he was possessed or delusional. She caught two frames of that, then it panned out of sight as she raced after Elijah in the open area between two rows of CLUs. As they passed another gap in the buildings, she looked down the same direction, back toward the med shack. Something frenetic was going on there – violence and motion and animal panic, but it was too far and too dark to make out and it all disappeared behind the next structure a second later anyway.
    She suddenly had the sense that she’d goddamned well