United We Stand

by John Ringo, Gary Poole

Genres: Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections; Apocalyptic

Synopsis

STORIES SET IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE BEST-SELLING ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE SERIES BLACK TIDE RISING, CREATED BY JOHN RINGO.

The world was brought to its knees by the zombie virus. But humanity has risen from the ashes and has begun to rebuild. Courageous men and women have kindled a fire of hope in the darkness. But mere survival is not enough.

The real challenge is how to keep that future alive. How not just to survive, not just to rebuild, but to actually thrive. To tell the universe that mankind can take whatever nature throws against us and not back down.

To stand united.

Stories by John Birmingham, Jody Lynn Nye, Jason Cordova, Jamie Ibson, Sarah A. Hoyt, Brian Trent, Dave Freer, Griffin Barber, Lydia Sherrer, Mel Todd, Christopher L. Smith, Mike Massa

BLACK TIDE RISING SERIES:
Under a Graveyard Sky
To Sail a Darkling Sea
Islands of Rage and Hope
Strands of Sorrow
Black Tide Rising
Voices of the Fall
We Shall Rise
At the End of the World
At the End of the Journey
The Valley of Shadows
River of Night

Release date: March 5, 2024

Publisher: Baen

Print pages: 384

Sample

Extraction

JOHN BIRMINGHAM

 

Night fell on the dead city, and with it, the sounds of things not dead.

Caitlin Monroe leaned against the cold, stone battlements of the old fort and scanned the edges of the forest to the north with the night vision scope fixed to her rifle. The forest had grown wild over there, obscuring all but the roofline of the empty houses beyond.

Well, maybe they were empty, she thought. Maybe not.

Her earpiece crackled with reports from the other lookouts. All of them in French.

“Sector West, clear.”

“Sector South, clear.”

“Sector East . . . hold on.”

A single rifle shot cracked out. The report bounced off the stone walls of the fortress, but she did not turn towards it, staring instead into the darkness to the north, waiting for any sign of movement. But all she saw was the forest; the only movement was the trees swaying gently in the early evening breeze.

“Sector East, clear,” the voice said.

The channel went quiet again, and Caitlin gently pivoted, sweeping the tree line one last time.

“Sector North report,” a new voice crackled inside her ear. In English this time, but heavily accented. Thierry.

“Sector North . . . clear,” Caitlin said at last. And then repeated herself in French.

“Secteur Nord . . . dégagé.”

Still, she did not stand down.

“You see anything, Doc?” Caitlin asked, taking her eye from the scope at last.

Standing beside her, Dr. Juliette le Marjason scoped out the same length of forest with a large pair of high-powered night vision binoculars.

“Nothing,” she said warily, but like Caitlin, she kept looking. Finally, Juliette blew out the breath she had been holding. It steamed in the cold air.

“I think we’re good, Caitlin,” she said. Her English was accented, but not heavily. She had worked in America for three years before all of . . . this.

Caitlin nodded and took a moment to survey all of . . . this.

It might be the last time.

The two women stood at the apex of a massive, graystone bastion, an arrowhead-shaped tower at the northeastern corner of Le Fort de Noisy-le-Sec. Before them, the haunted suburbs of Paris stretched away into the absolute gloom of night. The landscape was a ruin under a clear black sky filled with stars and a waning moon’s gunmetal blue light. Caitlin looked down upon streetlamps snuffed out and broken. Telephone poles had snapped and splintered like matchsticks, and weather-worn billboards faded to white slumped over rusted car bodies.

The houses on the far side of the forest stood two and three stories, and there were nights when Caitlin thought she could hear the hushed whisper of monsters shuffling through the dry dust and mold of those crypts.

“We should go inside,” Doctor le Marjason said. “Bachelard has outdone himself tonight. A feast is promised.”

“Yeah, I can already smell the slow-cooked tins of corn beef from here,” Caitlin said. “Nom nom.”

“No, no, you are awful, Caitlin,” the doctor said, but she was grinning. “Bachelard has made a cassoulet of everything we cannot take tomorrow. He has even done duck legs.”

“Wait, what?” Caitlin said. “What about Daffy? What happened to Daffy?”

“We cannot take him with us, Caitlin. We cannot leave him here. The infected will get him.”

“Doc, there’s not even that many infected left. They died off. Mostly.”

“There are enough,” Dr. le Marjason said. “Daffy was old and lame. He only had one wing. It was a mercy.”

“You’re not selling this, Doc.”

But the French woman did not have to sell the meal. Caitlin had been working hard all day preparing for the bug-out in the morning, and she hadn’t eaten much after breakfast. Just a handful of dried fruit, nuts, and a protein bar so old it had real archaeological significance. As she ducked her head under a low stone lintel, the smells from the kitchen wafted up the spiral staircase from below. What Bachelard was cooking smelled delicious, and her mouth watered.

Pity about old Daffy, though.

Caitlin had liked that grumpy old duck.

Halfway down the stone stairwell, the women had to press themselves against the wall to allow the night watch, Roche and Mercier, to get past them. The young men, a former paratroop sergeant and a Tier One operator from the Bureau were talking and laughing as they climbed the stairs. Roche sucked grease from his fingers, and Mercier chewed on a small drumstick.

Too small for poor Daffy, Caitlin thought, but she greeted the men and wished them well for the night.

The fortress was as secure as anywhere could be in a fallen world. Noisy-le-Sec had been the headquarters of the French Secret Service and, specifically, the military intelligence arm of the French state, the Deuxième Bureau. The layers of security which had once defended the Bureau against enemies foreign and domestic—and once upon a time, Caitlin was very much counted among the former—had allowed a small crew of survivors to hold out here in the first days of the plague. The fort’s thick stone walls, well-stocked armory, and two years’ worth of provisions meant for dispatch to the Bureau’s overseas posts saw them through the worst of the following year.

That and the serum, of course.

Dr. le Marjason had vaccinated everyone who still drew breath in this place in a mad rush by the end of that first horrific week.

“We heard a shot before. Was that you?” Roche, the paratrooper, asked.

Caitlin shook her head.

“Dion, you know when I pull a trigger, you’ll never hear it.”

Roche snorted, and Doctor le Marjason rolled her eyes.

“You boys stay warm up there tonight,” she said. “It’s going to get down near freezing.”

“But don’t cuddle too much,” Caitlin teased them. “I’d prefer you kept your eyes out for the biters, not each other.”

They did not rise to the bait. Instead, Roche shrugged in a very Gallic fashion.

“I don’t think there are many biters left. I haven’t seen one in months.”

“Dude, come on,” Caitlin said. She folded her arms and leaned back against the curving stone wall. It was cold and felt a little damp against her neck. “Remember your classics. It’s the character who says things like that at the start of the movie who gets bitten on the ass by

a zombie before the end of the first act. And they get specifically ass-bit because they’re not looking out for shit. The biters are still out there. And plenty more besides. Stay on it, Sergeant.”

Neither man looked particularly chastened. Caitlin had no place in their chain of command. She remained an outsider. It was an accident of history that she was even here. And that accident was sitting at the big common table in the kitchen when she and le Marjason emerged from the stairwell.

Wales Larrison raised a glass of brown liquor, probably cognac, as the women appeared. There had been no bourbon in the fortress stores when everything fell apart, and Wales had been forced to improvise in the years since. More than a dozen people had crowded into the kitchen, and their voices roared even in that comparatively large, open space. Everyone was up, excited for the morning.

Wales’s voice boomed out.

“Caitlin! Jules! Get your asses on down here and have a last drink with me. These cheese-eating Asterixes wouldn’t know how to get on the outside of a decent drink if it was the last thing they ever did.”

Doctor le Marjason frowned at him.

Larrison had been drinking a lot the last few months.

“Wales, this will be the last drink you ever have if you can’t evacuate tomorrow. Thierry will leave you here for the biters.”

“Don’t you worry about me, Doc,” he shot back in his big American voice. Larrison swung one leg up on the table, and it crashed down with an almighty bang. Marjason had crafted the artificial limb from an old table leg.

“I’ll be ready to hop on down the happy trail the hell out of here, but right now, our liberation calls for a toast.”

He banged the wooden leg on the table a couple of times, loud enough that the roar of the small crowd fell away.

Larrison climbed to his feet, or instead to his one good foot. His peg leg, as he called it, he propped up on the seat he had been warming.

“Friends. Countrymen . . . that’s you, Monroe. It’s just you and me now that Daffy’s gone.”

Somebody cheered.

Wales patted the air with his free hand, taking a quick hit from his drink with the other.

“My friends, I cannot let this our last night at your marvelous chateau pass without saying what a wonderful time we’ve had here and how much I’m looking forward to never seeing any of your ugly-ass faces again.”

The cheer was louder this time. It sounded somehow drunker to Caitlin. They had been at the fortress a long time. Long enough to reclaim the grounds, plant their own crops, and even source livestock. Chickens, some

goats from a nearby petting zoo, and the sadly departed, slow-cooked Daffy. Everyone was used to Wales by now. And to her, of course.

A hell of a thing, really, when you thought about it. The Bureau and Echelon had once fought a shadow war in this city. Caitlin herself had been taken and tortured in the cells below this fortress. But all of that meant nothing now.

No, she corrected herself, fetching a plate and filling it with roasted vegetables and chicken pieces while everybody listened to Wales’s speech. No, she thought. She and Wales had been allowed into Noisy-le-Sec after she escaped from that charnel house of a hospital precisely because the station chief here, Thierry, had known them so well as rivals. And even, to be completely honest, as enemies.

Thierry was one of those men who were very good at recognizing when circumstances had changed.

Caitlin caught his eye as he leaned against the mantlepiece which ran over the kitchen hearth. A fire burned in there, and Thierry Duval seemed quite content to warm himself by it, nursing a glass of red wine and smiling at Wales. He nodded to her, and she returned the gesture.

Thierry had overseen her torture when she had been imprisoned here in the before times.

It didn’t matter.

He was why she still lived now.

* * *

Wales, who had run Overwatch for all of Echelon’s field agents in Paris, went on with his speech. His French, unlike hers, was flawless. He worked the room into a small riot of laughter and fake outrage, telling stories of the time before the fall when they had been enemies. Only fifteen souls remained within the ramparts of the fortress, and apart from Wales and Dr. le Marjason, they were all field agents and operators. It made sense that only the strongest, most ruthless had survived. The years had been hard. The small audience cheered Wales through his long and often hilarious retelling of old spy stories, but the biggest cheer came when he had so much to drink that he stumbled on his peg leg and fell over. The doctor rushed forward to help him, summoning a couple of Bureau agents to help her get him back to his room. She grabbed a couple of bottles of water to take with them.

Thierry Duval tapped a small fork against the edge of his wineglass, bringing order and quiet back to the room.

“And that, I think, is enough fun for this evening,” he said. “Each your fill, drink no more except for water and get to sleep. We will need all of our energy and focus tomorrow morning.”

A couple of people started to clean up, but Duval stopped them.

“No. Do not bother with that,” he said. “It is a waste of time now. Leave everything exactly as it is. It will be quite the find for some historian a thousand years from now. It is enough; we’re done here.”

He clapped his hands twice, making a sound like rifle shots. The party broke up.

Caitlin, who was not finished eating, stayed at the table, piling more food onto her plate. Thierry raised an eyebrow at her, but she kept eating.

“You never did quite fit in here, did you, Caitlin,” he said.

Caitlin chewed and swallowed a roasted duck-fat potato. Poor Daffy.

“None of us ever fit anywhere,” she said. “That’s how we ended up in this life. That’s why we’re still alive.”

He shrugged.

“A fair point, I will concede. But do not be up all night. We must be rested. I fear this will not be an easy journey.”

She held up a chicken leg.

“Just getting my protein.”

* * *

They were up early, but the convoy did not leave until well after dawn, with the sky a dull gray and the moon still visible to the west where the clouds had frayed like the page of an ancient book. Caitlin climbed the tower one last time after waking and took a final look over the sanctuary. The massive stone walls of the fortress glistened dark and gray. The dead world beyond was shrouded in a cloak of early morning fog.

She wondered what waited for them out there.

The only sound was the wind, whistling across the fort’s southern walls and over the battlements, stirring the thick soup of cold fog.

Thierry had ordered patrols further into the city over the last six months after the first government radio signals came in from Castle Saint-Ulrich. With cautious patrolling to verify hours of drone cam coverage, the surrounding arrondissements were familiar enough now. They had even begun to imagine they might have an easy time of it, driving to the extraction point. But then bandits shot down one of the fort’s two precious drones, and they lost a patrol vehicle to an ambush a few days later.

There was no question of that being the work of the infected. Biters did not use RPGs.

With unknown numbers of le infecté still wandering the city’s ruins, now joined by armed hostiles of unknown strength and capability, Thierry had ordered a daylight evacuation. They did not have enough night vision equipment to spook their way to the extraction point at Orly Airport, and once they passed into the unknown wilds of Paris, it would be too easy to become lost and separated in the dark.

Caitlin was surprised to find Wales Larrison waiting for her by the vehicle they had been assigned, a Land Rover Defender in light desert tan.

Wales was showered, shaved, and had even dabbed on a spot of cologne. Unlike everyone else, who had dressed in combat fatigues or some civilian

analogue, he sported a pair of cream slacks that hid most of his wooden leg, a blue shirt and a dark sports jacket. He looked like a high-tone bookie, off to the races, and Caitlin couldn’t help but smile when she saw him.

“How’s your head this morning, old man?”

“I have taken more out of strong drink than it has ever taken out of me, young lady,” he said.

“I made him drink two liters of water, and I gave him a vitamin B shot,” Juliette le Marjason said, appearing from around the other side of the Defender. She wore cargo pants and a photographer’s vest over a long-sleeved T-shirt. Every pocket was stuffed with medical supplies. She had a pistol at one hip and carried an FN SCAR rifle slung over one shoulder. If the doc was this tooled up, they really were going on an adventure, Caitlin thought.

She had dressed in plain black coveralls, lace-up boots and a ballistic vest; light body armor protected her at the most common bite sites, on the forearms, shoulders and neck, even though her vaccine was still good. A human bite could still kill you, even if it did not drive you insane. Caitlin carried an M4 as her primary weapon, but the Bureau’s armorer had kitted her out with whatever she’d asked for.

“Just gimme the lot, Gaston,” she said.

Four vehicles made up the convoy. Two Ford Rangers, her Land Rover and a Panhard VBL armored car. It looked by far the most rugged, but the fort’s other VBL had eaten a rocket-propelled grenade in the ambush a month earlier. Caitlin was more familiar with the Land Rover and was glad to have been assigned to it. It offered no protection against anti-armor weapons, but she wasn’t likely to crash it into a canal if things got sporty.

Also assigned to travel with her were Roche and Mercier, who arrived shortly after Caitlin, looking none the worse for their night watch. More B12 shots, probably. The doc had offered her one, but Caitlin said no. Noisy le Sec’s medical stocks were aging out, and the last thing she wanted was a bad reaction to a jab the morning they were supposed to leave.

There was no ceremony to their departure. Nobody to wave them off. Thierry, in the armored car, signaled to a couple of men at the great iron gates securing the tunnel through the old breastworks and out into the fallen world. The men undid the chains and swung the gates open while a gunner in Thierry’s VBL covered them with a heavy, ring-mounted machine gun. The gates screeched open slowly, and Caitlin felt her flesh crawling.

She imagined she could hear the howl of a million infecté beneath the rusted metal scream of the hinges. She couldn’t, of course. They were mostly gone now, but there were other monsters outside.

The convoy rolled forward.

Mercier and Roche insisted on driving and riding shotgun, respectively. Caitlin and Juliette sat behind them in the second row of seats, with Wales taking the whole back seat for himself and his improvised prosthetic leg.

Even though she had done her fair share of time on the patrols into the surrounding

arrondissement, it felt weird to be passing through them in the Land Rover, knowing they would never return to Noisy-le-Sec. The fortress had been their home for a long time now, the world beyond its walls a hostile country.

There was little to be seen from the road, the buildings looming over them on both sides long since fallen to wreck and decay, their rooftops blanketed in ivy and moss. Green tendrils and vines wrapped tightly around every window and door frame. Ivy, thick and heavy, climbed every stone facade and wall, heedless of gravity. Wherever she looked closely at a building, it seemed to be sinking into the earth. Shadowed doorways were black holes in their flanks, waiting to swallow and consume.

Caitlin recalled when she’d first arrived at the fort; she would sometimes climb the battlements in the evening to look down on the gray slate roofs of the old tenements and factories and wonder what lives had been made and unmade there. Now she just looked out the window, scanning for targets among the ruins of what had been. Here and there, they rolled by the desiccated corpse of an infecté or two, even bumping over one shot down by a recent patrol. But it was nothing like the mad, horrific race against spreading carnage and collapse that she had run from the hospital to the fort on the first day of the Fall in Paris. Time and decay had worked the magic trick of cleaning much of the city—or at least this part.

Mercier cut the wheel back and forth to weave through a tight barricade at the edge of their patrolled area. An armored truck marked “UN” had turned over in front of a bridge over a small canal, thick with fetid green water and floating rubbish, probably washed into the system by yesterday’s brief morning storms. The driver started to say something about having to get out and move the wreckage, but the armored car ahead of them geared down and crashed into the hulk at a low enough speed to push it aside without injuring anybody on board the VBL.

“Goddamn,” Wales muttered from the back seat at the crunching, grinding shriek of metal on metal.

The truck toppled into the canal with an almighty splash and a deep belch of dark, rotten water, settling into its watery grave with a series of dull groans and watery farts.

Such a racket would have brought hordes of the infected racing down on them once upon a time. Thousands, even tens of thousands. Now?

Nothing.

The Defender’s engine seemed dangerously loud.

The VBL pulled to a stop at the foot of the bridge. Caitlin leaned forward between the two front seats, but Thierry was too good at his job to order anybody out into the open. The ring-mounted machine gun

traversed the ground ahead of them.

His voice crackled through the radio.

“Anyone see anything worth shooting?” he asked.

“Negative,” Roche replied.

Caitlin held her weapon close, but there was no sign of movement anywhere other than the slow, dreamy wake of the poisoned canal. The sloping concrete sides of the watercourse were painted with streaks of rust. Dead fish bobbed on the surface, disturbed by the roiling waves of the truck’s impact. Even with the windows rolled up, it reeked of stagnant water and rot.

A new voice crackled over the radio net.

“Infecté. Onze heures.”

They all turned, craning around to eleven o’clock.

A single rifle crack, more of a pop, really, dropped a naked scarecrow shambling out of an alleyway across the canal.

They waited.

Again.

Nothing.

After three minutes, Thierry announced they would push on.

The VBL led the way across the canal.

* * *

The run to Orly Airport was more of a stuttering crawl. There was an airstrip much closer to the fortress, of course. Charles de Gaulle, a few miles northeast. But the instructions from the Emergency Government at Castle Saint-Ulrich were explicit. They were to convoy overland to Orly, where they would rendezvous with other survivors and await extraction by elements of J-Mops, the Joint Military Operations command improvised by British and French airborne units in the chaos of the Fall.

The chopper flight to Castle Saint-Ulrich from Orly was just a few hours.

It would take longer to get to the rendezvous point twenty-five klicks away than the castle five hundred kilometers away.

If they made it at all.

Sitting in the back of the Land Rover, threading slowly through the chaos of the traffic jams which had strangled the city in her last hours, Caitlin

had her doubts. The road network of Paris was choked with vehicles. The main thoroughfares were great frozen rivers of rusted steel, impassable with the skeletal remains of millions of cars, trucks, and bicycles. Duval took them off-piste. Navigating a backstreet path they had plotted over months.

But, of course, that led them to dozens of dead ends, impasses and diversions. Sometimes the VBL was powerful enough to force a way through. More often, they would have to backtrack and work around the delays. By late afternoon they had progressed less than half the way to their objective.

The fog of morning had burned off for an unseasonably warm afternoon, but nobody appreciated the good weather. They could be seen from much further away.

They had just crossed the Marne River, heading south on the Avenue de la Republique, when they got swarmed. Caitlin had been dozing, head propped against the window. She came to in a rush when her ears popped with a heavy, concussive blast. A grenade launcher on the VBL. Instantly she was awake and alert—surrounded by the sporadic crack of gunfire and the deeper rumble of vehicle-mounted weapons.

“The fuck is going on, Roche?” she shouted.

The former paratroop sergeant turned around and stared at her as if she were crazy.

“The fuck do you think, Caitlin? Infecté. Fucking everywhere.”

The four-vehicle convoy was strung out along a narrow road crowded with breakdowns. The biters, perhaps a hundred, were shambling at speed out of a school building to the east. It had been so long since Caitlin had seen a horde up close that she froze and gawked at all the arms and legs twisted hideously or entirely missing. Some appeared to have limbs knitted back into their bodies with a sickly, pulsing scar flesh. Limbs to replace the ones they had lost, sometimes two or more sets, jutted out of their shoulders or even their hips. They came on with that terrible hive-mind focus, clumped wracks of twisted bone and flesh, human spiders of fleshy ruin moving with dread and stilted determination.

Mercier shouted over the engine and the noise of gunfire.

“There’s hundreds of the fuckers!” he cried out.

They had blocked the road ahead of them. A seething mass of le infecté, shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the road, stared at the convoy with dead eyes and gaping mouths.

A single gunshot, way too loud, right next to Caitlin shook her out of her reveries.

Doctor le Marjason fired into a crowd of shambling husks coming at them from an avenue to the west. Wales joined her, tossing off round after round from the shotgun he carried.

Violent contrary needs flayed at Caitlin. She wanted to drive. She wanted to shoot. She needed to flee. And she had to fight.

But she had the worst tactical position of everyone in the Land Rover. She was just a passenger in the back on the wrong side of the vehicle.

The machine gun on the VBL hammered out a long burst, a heavy industrial clatter that drowned out the growl of the Defender’s engine. She saw the rounds hit home, removing limbs, toppling infecté.

Behind them, someone fired a grenade launcher. There was a long, hollow WHUMP and a great cloud of white smoke mushroomed up into the air. A few of the zombies blocking the road ahead of them exploded in a spray of gray, syrupy fluid and pulverized bone. Others fell backwards and struggled to get up again. One of them seemed to have a pair of spade-headed excavator claws grafted onto its torso.

“What is this?” Juliette whispered in horror, over and over. “What the fuck is this?”

The VBL reversed back and forth, muscling aside the burned-out hulk of a minibus. The gun turret swiveled and roared again.

In the brief pause between fire bursts, Caitlin heard the grating scrap of teeth on the metal skin of the Land Rover. She jumped to find an infecté at her window, the lines of rot and necrotic flesh running

 out of the corners of its eyes. Cancers or tumors? Clumps of shriveled black tissue hung from the hairless, shriveled head.

She didn’t scream.

She didn’t shoot through the window glass.

She checked her primary weapon and waited.

Slowly the convoy organized itself into a mobile fortress with interlocking fields of fire. Even more slowly, they beat back the rotting tide. The biter, chewing at her door handle, went under the wheels of the Defender. A wedge of attackers hit the Land Rover with a sickening thud. Caitlin felt her teeth rattle in her jaw, but shooters in the other vehicles carefully picked them off.

It was a drill they had practiced many times, and it was over a minute later.

Ticking stillness descended on the cabin.

“My god, what were they?” Dr. le Marjason gasped.

“Hungry,” Caitlin said.

“No, I mean, did you see them? What had been done to them?”

Caitlin had.

They all had.

The radio crackled again.

“Proceed to the route,” Thierry said.

* * *

Nobody spoke for a long time. They remained vigilant, on edge. Everyone had seen larger hordes of the infected, naturally. But not for a long time. It was Wales who finally broke the silence.

“Somebody’s been playing God,” he said.

They had crossed over the Seine at Alfortville and into an industrial neighborhood on the other side of the river.

With fewer people having lived here, the roads were more easily navigated, and the ruins seemed merely bleak and abandoned instead of actively malign. Some of the newer warehouses evoked the neglected foundations of a lost future, ...