Necropolis (Necropolis Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  NECROPOLIS

  Book 3 of the Necropolis Trilogy

  Sean Deville

  Copyright 2017 by Sean Deville

  “Then I looked and saw a pale horse. Its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed close behind. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill by sword, by famine, by plague, and by the beasts of the earth…”

  - Revelation 6:7-8

  “And the LORD will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalem. Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away. Their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. On that day they will be terrified, stricken by the LORD with great panic. They will fight their neighbours hand to hand.”

  - Zachariah 14:12

  Important Characters

  British Government

  Arnold Craver – Head of the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (MI5)

  Bill Dodson – Prime Minister’s Private Secretary

  ‘Davina’ – Interrogator MI6

  Sir Nicholas Marston – Chief of the Defence Staff and acting head of all remaining UK forces

  Sir Michael Young – Head of MI5

  Sir Stuart Watkins – Head of MI6

  Snow – MI6 Agent

  British Military

  Arthur Mansfield (General) – Commander, Operation Hadrian

  Bull (Sergeant) – Royal Marines

  Craig O’Sullivan (Sergeant) – SAS

  David Croft (Major) – Investigating Officer for the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure

  Lewis Hudson (Captain) – SAS

  Lucy Savage (Captain) – Head of Biomedical Science, Porton Down Research Centre

  Mark Grainger (Captain) – Grenadier Guards

  Phil (Corporal) – Royal Marines

  Vorne (Sergeant) – Grenadier Guards

  US Government/Law enforcement/Military

  Ben Silver – White House Chief of Staff

  Damian Rodney – President of the United States

  Fiona Carter – SAC FBI

  General Roberts – Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

  Jason Tucker – Head of FBI

  Keith Johnson – CIA Director

  Madeleine Cozens – Head of Homeland Security

  Mitch Carter – FBI SWAT

  Philip Bradstone (General) – NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe

  Wynona Cooke – Assistant Director FBI

  Clarice Sterling – USAF

  Civilians

  Alexei – Russian Mob

  Brian – Police Officer

  Fabrice Chevalier

  Gavin Hemsworth

  Jack Nathan

  Owen Patterson

  Rachel – Undead

  Rasheed Khan – Undead

  Stan – Police Officer

  Victor Durand – Scientist

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  (This cover sheet is unclassified)

  703-101

  NSN 75690-01-21207934

  NSN 75690-01-21207934

  The Department of Homeland Security

  A confidential report to the President of the United States

  09.18.2015

  To: The President of the United States of America

  From: Madeleine Cozens, Head of Homeland Security

  Mr. President,

  As per your request for a daily briefing on Operation Clean Sweep, I have outlined below the figures for the first day of the operation.

  Number of suspects detained

  5015

  Number of suspects yet to be detained

  24,673

  Number of suspects killed during detention

  9

  Number of Law Enforcement Personnel injured

  37

  Number of Law Enforcement Personnel killed

  0

  We have as yet not encountered resistance from the State or Federal level. I spoke with the leaders of both houses of Congress last night, and they reiterated the position that the proposed measures are both necessary and proportionate. State governors are also so far supportive.

  The National Guard has been fully mobilised as per standing orders, and the FBI are now prioritising Clean Sweep with state police and the US Marshals office. Local law enforcement is being conducted by the various sheriff’s departments. If you remember, with Operation Clean Sweep, it was decided not to utilise the sheriff’s for detention duties due to the definite resistance many of them would pose to the smooth running of the operation.

  Going forward, we will be instigating stage 2 of the operation shortly. As you are aware, most of the Relocation Facilities were manned on a caretaker basis, and they will need several days to be made ready due to the short notice caused by the unexpected nature of the emergency. You anticipated this delay, however, and the bulk of the detentions will be able to take place over the coming week.

  As yet, there has been little in the way of public resistance to the detentions. Print, broadcast, and online media are so far complying with Executive Order 10995. Social media has already been sequestered under Operation Earnest Voice, and all critical posts about your government’s actions are being deleted and the accounts of those posting suspended due to “technical issues.” Many of those dissenting voices are, of course, on the detention list.

  If everything goes to plan, I anticipate Operation Clean Sweep to be completed within 15 days. All major occupation centres are now under Martial Law, with all major highways, ports, railway stations, and airports under military control. We have also implemented the series of checkpoints on all major access points to Washington, DC, and will be rolling out this construction project to all major cities over the coming months.

  Your plan for a safer America is one step closer.

  Yours faithfully,

  Madeleine Cozens

  Book 1

  Projected spread of infection based on satellite and computer predictions

  Day 3 of the infection, 18th September 2015

  - 18.4 million infected

  03.23AM, 18th September 2015, Defensive Position 5, Cornwall, UK

  It could smell them, could almost taste their precious flesh. Crouching motionless at the edge of the trees, it watched the humans work in their artificial brightness, almost savouring the moment it would be amongst them. There was no moon in the sky, and yet the scene before it was awash with light from several powerful floodlights that caressed the land around where the humans beavered away like hyperactive termites. The urge to run at them, to attack, was strong. But it resisted; that wasn’t its mission here. And besides, instinct told it that it wouldn’t stand a chance.

  A moment ago, it had briefly remembered its name, but it had been infected over twenty-four hours now, and the virus had stripped most of its humanity away, reforming the synapses and the dendrites to create the new species. Now it was one with the collective, and what it saw, they saw. The deep bite mark on his hand was already healing, the flesh slowly knitting together as the virus did what was needed to keep this vessel alive and functioning. The thumb would be forever useless, the bones and
ligaments irreparably damaged, but it didn’t matter. It did not need its thumb to grasp and claw and bite and chew.

  It salivated suddenly, the hunger roaring in its belly painfully, begging to him for sustenance. And yet, despite that desperate need, the collective mind denied it the satiation of that desire. The Collective mind had turned the fiendish simplicity of the virus into a form of global intelligence, but that intelligence was diminishing as the memories and the ideas that made humanity so unique slowly evaporated from the neural tissues in the millions of minds that were all intimately connected. And with the gradual deterioration, the infected became more feral. It was becoming harder for the collective to control the very creatures connected to it, because the collective mind itself was degenerating. How long before the infected became just random agents of chaos?

  But for now, there was still control, control over the many and the individual. So the single infected sat and it did as it was bid, the pain and the hunger a part of who it was. Its job was to watch and wait, wait for its brothers and sisters to join it. And they were coming, drawn to the last real outpost of human resistance, drawn to the danger that they posed. It would feed, it knew that, but not yet. No, now it had to wait, wait and observe and stay out of sight. They would be here soon, and then they would start the assault. And then, in their millions, they would feed.

  There was a sound it was familiar with and it cowered down back behind a large oak. The sound was followed by a sharp cry from further down the tree line, and it knew one of its kind had fallen, the sniper’s bullet blowing a great chunk out of its skull. So many of them had been lost to the humans, but for every one that died, hundreds were even now being born from the vestiges of the old empire. Despite its distance from its kind, it could feel the voices of the collective grow, their numbers swelling. But that voice was slowly becoming nothing more than a mindless roar.

  03.26AM GMT, 18th September 2015, DOHA International Airport, Qatar

  Omar was still annoyed. This sort of thing was not supposed to occur in five-star hotels, especially with the amount of money he had been paying for the room. It was completely unacceptable. Ironically, he had been in the shower when the fire alarm had gone off and had been forced to flee his room in the complimentary bathrobe that came with his hotel room along with some slippers that were several sizes too big. It hid his nakedness, but it did nothing to protect him from the water pouring down from the ceiling or the embarrassment at being in such a position. By the time he had reached the hotel lobby, the bathrobe was drenched, and he’d had to stand outside in the cold night air whilst the hotel rectified their stupidity. Naturally, it had been a cold night, and so his inconvenience had turned into actual discomfort. He was rich and he had lawyers, and they would definitely be making an issue of his humiliation over the coming weeks. At least those were the plans he formulated in his mind, denied the knowledge that he would never live long enough to bring such plans to fruition.

  Omar didn’t know about the virus that was worming its way through his system, slowly spreading to every organ in his body, eating into each and every cell in his being. Even now it was multiplying, rewriting his very DNA, and yet still lying dormant as it matured, hiding away from the body’s immune system that would, over the coming days, become one with it. The immune system would become so powerful that it would be able to fight off any disease, except the very virus that mutated it. It had been mere hours since his exposure, and he was already highly infectious to anyone he encountered, the briefest touch from his exposed skin enough to place the virus upon any surface where it would survive for hours. Everything he came into contact with became a virulent vector of transmission.

  The virus on the handle of the taxi had been smeared with the oil and sweat from his hands, spreading the pathogen to two other people who had jumped into the vehicle minutes after he evacuated it. He passed the virus onto the first class check-in clerk when he passed over his passport, and to several passengers who, as he had, lay their hands on the barrier that said checkout lady sat behind. He passed the virus onto the staff member in the airport shop when he bought his favourite newspaper, the shop employee passing the virus onto hundreds more people. Each one of those people passed the virus onto dozens of others, and so it progressed like a cascade through the population.

  Now sitting in the first class lounge, sipping an orange juice and reading the paper he had bought, he realised how fortunate that most of his luggage had been packed away in the bedroom’s cupboard, safe from the water that had descended mercilessly from the ceiling. Those suitcases still infected the baggage handling staff that loaded them onto the plane, who then infected all the subsequent baggage they then handled. Omar was not sure what he would have done if his suitcases and his clothes had become drenched. Even now, not realising he was a dead man walking, he thought about how he would have managed that horrifying potential. Would the hotel have acquired him dry clothes with hundreds of other guests in a similar situation? Would he have had to traipse down to a local shop in the hope it was open just to get something to wear for the flight? It didn’t even bear thinking about because scorn and ridicule, and even the thought of it was not something he could allow in his life. Of course, days from now, the inconvenience caused him that night would be almost forgotten in the pain of transformation. And then everything about him would be forgotten completely.

  And across the Middle East, there were now tens of thousands of people like him. Some were already on planes, some like him waiting to board. Some would spend the rest of their short human lives in and around the areas where they were infected. But they would all become soldiers in the battle that would rip the world apart, and see Great Britain almost forgotten in a Blitzkrieg of genetic corruption. With every hour that passed, their numbers grew, and the army of the damned readied itself for the ultimate battle against a foe who had no inkling what awaited them.

  04.11AM, 18th September 2015. The English Channel

  Croft stood at the Stern of the boat, watching the darkness that failed to consume the world, the wine bottle in his hand all but empty. He didn’t usually drink, but this, he had decided, was as good a time as any. There was nothing for him to do but sit and wait for their voyage to be over. They had escaped London, but they were not able to escape the country that was under complete NATO quarantine.

  Although the sky was starless, lights shone off in the distance on the British Coast, beacons of normality that taunted him. There were people still there, living the last hours they had left. How long before the hoard descended upon them? How long before human’s manipulation of nature came to claim them, to make them one with the infected? How long before the power failed, before the last of those with human minds were returned to a medieval world without mobile phone, modern medicine, and industrialised agriculture. Even if the infected didn’t get them, most of them would die just from the breakdown of society.

  His failure burned within him like acid. He knew logically that there was nothing he could have done to stop this, that he was just one cog in a bloated bureaucratic machine that half the time worked against him. Logic didn’t help how he felt. Deep down, ever since the Hirta incident, he had suspected that something like this would happen; it had been there gnawing away in the deepest recesses of his mind. He had known there were traitorous elements at the heart of the British Government, and despite his best efforts, he had been unable to find them. The fact that the traitor they had subsequently discovered was the head of one of the world’s most powerful clandestine organisations, MI5, didn’t make him feel any better, although logic dictated that it should have. His Prime Minister was dead, his country was in ruins, and his own future had less certainly than a British frontline soldier at the battle of the Somme. The Prime Minister he didn’t give a stuff about; it was the rest that chewed away at him.

  He cared little about his own wellbeing, however; hadn’t for some years now. Some people tried to hide the truth from themselves, but he didn’t. He revelled
in the truth for it was all he had. And he knew, that if he hadn’t accepted the job offer in that Whitehall office back in 2008, he wouldn’t have been here now. His despair and self-loathing would have consumed him and he would have undoubtedly eaten a bullet. People like him needed a purpose, needed something to fight for and fight against. Without that, he was adrift in a world that had no place for him. Croft had one skill, and it demanded to be used.

  Even now, his failure in Afghanistan and the deaths of the men who perished under his command stuck in him like a hot knife. It didn’t matter that the helicopter crash they died in wasn’t his fault. He had promised to get them back alive, and he had failed in that promise. They had been hardened veterans, the best of the best, and he still felt he owed them something better. And now, with everything in ruins, he wondered what it was inside him that kept him moving forward. Had he just been going through the motions for so long that he didn’t know how to stop? Had that been a factor in his inability to uncover the truth? Looking at the dark water below him, he was seduced by how easy it would be to just let himself go. The cold ocean could just swallow him whole, pulling him down to the bliss of its oblivion. The thought pulled at him, gaining prominence in his drunken mind.

  Wasn’t that secretly part of why he had agreed to travel with Savage from the relative safety of Cornwall into the heart of the infection? Flinging the bottle into the abyss, his hands grabbed the brass railing and his knuckles turned white, so strong was his grip. He remembered the nights he had sat, alone in his Waterloo apartment, the automatic pistol sat out of reach, enticing him, calling to him. There had been times when he had sat for hours looking at that gun, but he had never picked it up for that purpose. He had never put it in his mouth, never tasted the end of the barrel. Despite the hatred that lived within himself, there was just something that stopped him taking that final step, the same something that now stopped him throwing himself to the mercy of the bitter waves. He was needed, that’s what kept him going. And despite everything that happened, he was good at what he did. One of the best. He could still fight, and he could still protect those around him.