Arisen : Nemesis (the Special Ops Military Apocalypse Epic): ARISEN, #8.5

By Michael Stephen Fuchs

Readers call the ARISEN series: "the wildest and best rollercoaster I've ever been on" … "Pulse-pounding action at a relentless pace" … "THE ABSOLUTE BEST FREAKING SERIES IN THIS GENRE" … "the most unputdownable military zombie apocalypse arc ever" … "for adrenaline junkies only" … "A full-on express elevator to hell!!!" … "A one-of-a-kind ZA opus. The indomitable warrior spirit shines through from start to finish" … "the best I have ever read in apocalypse fiction of any kind" … "Riveting. Full of horror and beauty" … "the best of the best! Sweeping, epic, engaging, and thrilling" … "keeps on delivering action, thrills & destruction at every turn" … "Just one more page, I say, then it's 2am again" … "Another literary heart attack"

When a lethal viral outbreak turns humanity into flesh-eating abominations, a team of elite special operators takes refuge in the lawless Horn of Africa to survive the apocalypse. Joined by Kate, a veteran female soldier attached to the unit, and led by their seasoned team sergeant, Jake, this group of outrageously skilled but all-too-human warriors must defend their hidden bush camp from the undead horde, as well as relentless attacks by a murderous jihadist warlord. Outgunned and outnumbered against an enemy bent on their annihilation, Team Triple Nickel will fight with desperate grit and valor to carry out their mission, while holding on to their humanity. But when a rescue operation into the impenetrable al-Shabaab Stronghold goes bad, decimating their ranks, those still standing must attempt a last desperate bid to save one of their own held captive, before an unstoppable swarm of millions of ravenous undead descends upon them all.

Salvation. Vengeance. Vanity.
NEMESIS

With over 1.5 million copies sold, the world's most thrilling and best-loved military ZA series returns to the fall of man – and the war after the fall.

ARISEN : Nemesis is an Amazon #1 bestseller in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction and #1 in Dystopian. Can be read as a standalone novel, an intro to the series, or at any point alongside the main series.

ARISEN
Hope Never Dies

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Stephen Fuchs
• Release date: Feb 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224010349

Michael Stephen Fuchs

Michael Stephen Fuchs is the author of the acclaimed philosophical cyber-thrillers THE MANUSCRIPT and PANDORA'S SISTERS, both published worldwide by Macmillan, in hardback, paperback, and Kindle edition. His collection of tales of action and technology, DON'T SHOOT ME IN THE ASS, AND OTHER STORIES is available worldwide on Kindle for $2.99. His new book is the forthcoming high-concept special forces military techno-thriller D-BOYS. He is represented by Robert Gottlieb at Trident Media in New York. He lives in London and at www.michaelfuchs.org

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ARISEN

The 25 books in the bestselling, top-ranked, and fan-favorite ARISEN series have repeatedly been Amazon #1 bestsellers in Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction, #1 in Dystopian Science Fiction, #1 in Military Science Fiction, #1 in War Fiction, and #1 in War & Military Action Fiction, as well as Amazon overall Top 100 bestsellers. The series has sold over 1.5 million copies and the audiobook editions, performed by R.C. Bray, have earned more than $5 million in sales.

Readers call ARISEN:

★★★★★ "a hell-fire white-knuckled rampage ★★★★★ edge of the seat, nail biting, page turning mayhem ★★★★★ totally stunning in its originality ★★★★★ Riveting. Absolutely riveting. ★★★★★ beyond intense ★★★★★ painfully good ★★★★★ spellbinding ★★★★★ relentless ★★★★★ jaw dropping ★★★★★ Pulse-pounding action at a relentless pace ★★★★★ I keep repeating myself, but this is the best series of books of any genre I've ever read ★★★★★ A full-on express elevator to hell!!! ★★★★★ the best I have ever read in apocalypse fiction of any kind ★★★★★ You have to remind yourself to breathe ★★★★★ Just sheer unstoppable awesomeness ★★★★★ easily ranks in the top tier of all modern thriller fiction ★★★★★ eternally stamped in my memory"

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ARISEN

ARISEN : Nemesis is the bestselling, fan-favorite, and pulse-pounding prequel to the epic series, with 10,000 reviews across Amazon, Audible, and Goodreads, averaging 4.7/5 stars. Grab it for free RIGHT NOW. (Punk out and unsubscribe anytime. Keep your free asskicking book.)

ARISEN

LAST STAND

MICHAEL STEPHEN FUCHS

PART ONE

Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.

- Heraclitus

The first half-dozen enhanced-fragmentation grenades went into the open ground exactly between the weapons squad in the rear and the two rifle squads up front. I figured this was either incredibly good luck – nobody got splashed with shrapnel, despite having no time to cover up – or else it meant we were all completely screwed. Because we were facing an auto-grenade-launcher team capable of getting their weapon online and engaging, with that degree of precision, in exactly two seconds.

Which was how long it took the op to go completely to shit.

Then again, two seconds is a long time in a combat situation. So now the men of Two Bravo – 2nd platoon, B Company, 3rd Ranger Battalion – were hand-paddling at high speed up the old proverbial creek of feces. And the culprit was the usual one: fucked-up intel. Really, I should have known.

Donkeys are almost always bad news.

And I realized that to fix this, I was probably going to have to go down there into the killzone and hang my ass out in the steel wind. And for some reason – the mind does funny shit in combat – I remembered someone once saying that courage in war simply is love, nothing more or less, for the man on either side of you.

At least somebody got something right.

* * *

Two minutes earlier, I’d been telling the men to cut the chatter and stay off comms. I didn’t mind the junior enlisted, E-3s and E-4s, making the new guy eat a little shit on his first rotation. But what I didn’t want was my Rangers getting complacent. The enemy sure wasn’t. They had continued to learn and adapt across almost two decades of the Global War on Terror. I was in a position to know.

I’d been fighting them the whole time.

On the day of 9/11, I was working as a pipe-fitter’s apprentice in New Jersey, from which location I could actually feel the Twin Towers come down. I walked out, went straight to the nearest Army recruiter, and enlisted on the spot – then did well enough at Basic and AIT that I was invited to RASP (the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program), followed by Ranger School. And I’ve been in the 75th Ranger Regiment ever since – probably the best-trained and most professional light infantry force in all of world history, with the possible exception of the Roman Legions in Gaul.

Ultimately, I rose to the rank of Sergeant First Class, or E-7 – and platoon sergeant of Two Bravo.

Tonight, I got my tired old platoon-sergeant ass up out of my fighting hole, and drifted like lethal fog across our ambush lines, weapon at low-ready, sinking down again when I reached the new guy in question, one Specialist Smith. He’d been shuffled into Two Bravo from RASP 1 basically just in time to catch our deployment flight out – if he ran down the tarmac screaming with his head on fire – and had been given the usual new-guy role of assistant gunner in the weapons squad. His job as AG was to hump a thousand rounds of belted fuck-shit-up, and try to stay alive long enough to take over if his gunner went down. But he was a good kid – he did his job and kept his problems to himself, and had spent the whole flight over practicing clearing and reloading drills with his Mk 48 Mod 2 machine gun, laid out right in the goddamned aisle.

Smith, I breathed. Get on the gun.

The two men in the fighting hole wordlessly switched places behind the weapon. If Smith felt any anxiety about firing his first rounds in anger, at targets who bled instead of tore, he didn’t betray it.

Two Bravo from Hotel X, how copy?

Hotel X, this is Two Bravo Actual, solid copy, send it.

That was our JOC-side mission commander, exchanging pleasantries with Two Bravo’s actual ground commander, one Captain Darby – who was nearly as new as Smith, and sometimes seemed as young. Like most officers in Regiment, he’d come here after leading a platoon in a conventional infantry unit. After a couple of tours with us, he’d go back to one. But senior NCOs like me are the Illuminati – eternal and unchanging, running things from the shadows.

Be advised, Two Bravo: aerial ISR shows approx two-zero foot mobiles moving into your AO from the south. All are military-aged males, armed with AKs and RPGs. Range two-hundred, time ’til contact approx two mikes, how copy?

Two Bravo copies all.

The Tier-1 guys from JSOC, Delta and DEVGRU – who we sometimes worked with, and who all the young Rangers idolized and wanted to grow up to be – usually gave themselves badass call-signs like Homicide One or Broadsword Two Zero. And in any normal battlespace, conflicted and crowded with multiple operational units, Two Bravo would have been given a mission-specific call-sign. But tonight we got to go out as ourselves – because we were just about the last American boots on the ground in the entire Syrian civil war.

Two Bravo, be additionally advised: enemy element is rolling with a donkey cart, over.

Yeah, roger on the donkey. Interrogative: what’s on the cart?

I just shook my head. This kind of command douchebaggery didn’t bother me, just as I rarely worried about the larger political picture. We had a job to do here in theater, and it was a righteous one: protect Kurdish civilians and fighters from the large variety of people in the region who wanted to kill them – Syrian regulars, pro-Assad militias, Iranian Quds Force, Russian advisers. We now had the first combat veteran since Bush the Elder as commander in chief, and he had chosen to honor America’s goddamned commitments for once – in this case, to the world’s largest stateless people, and our steadfast allies, the Kurds.

Of course, Rangers don’t do guard duty, and we couldn’t realistically fight the Russians or Iranians, so instead we were going out every night and fucking up ISIS remnants before they could get anywhere near a Kurd. This was an outstanding mission, and it got me out of bed with a bounce every morning. Like most 9/11 veterans, I signed up to make a difference. Life, especially the austere life of a Ranger, goes down better with some meaning and purpose.

Now I watched as 36 green IR lasers flicked on and shot out from our prepared ambush positions – shifting, self-organizing, dividing the ground – then flicked off again. Night-vision gear had gotten so cheap and widespread we could no longer assume the enemy didn’t have it. And, much like tracers, aiming lasers work in both directions.

Two Bravo, the cart’s covered with a blanket or something, but shows no heat signature. We’re thinking supplies. Possibly hay. Over.

I shook my head again, but wasn’t too worried. Any halfway decently organized ambush, like the one we had – with security teams to the rear and sides, a killzone trapping the enemy force and covered with interlocking fields of fire, and escape routes mined with claymores – ought to result in a very short, sharp, one-sided firefight.

Yeah, solid copy on the hay. Going dark now. Stand by.

And that was the last calm thing anybody said for a while.

* * *

It takes a certain level of liquid nitrogen in the veins to stay upright and switched on in the middle of a balls-out grenade volley, which was probably why I was the only one doing it.

I quickly worked out the first failure of intel: namely the stark absence of any hay on that cart, and the presence instead of two guys with a Russian AGS-40 auto-grenade launcher. Designed to murder the shit out of Chechen rebels dug into hardened urban positions, it boasted better range and accuracy than its predecessor – but, hilariously, also had an attached seat, which its operator was currently using to kick back in ergonomic comfort while raining down exploding death and hate on my Rangers’ heads.

I went ahead and killed the AG, four rounds to center of mass, mainly because he exposed himself. Then I traversed to the gunner and continued taking rapid, aimed, single shots with my M5 battle rifle, chambered in the new 6.5mm Creedmoor round – which not only had better range than 5.56 and less recoil than 7.62, but was said to be boringly accurate. Right this second, though, its accuracy didn’t matter a sweet rat’s, because the gunner was completely covered behind a combination of the weapon itself, its side-mounted 40-round drum mag, and the side wall of the cart.

While I had nothing like an open look at him, I also remembered, as he may have not, the critical lesson that concealment isn’t the same as cover. But when I poured the rest of my own 24-round mag into that flimsy-looking wooden cart wall, absolutely nothing happened. The cagey fuckers must have bolted steel plating or something on the inside of it.

An up-armored fucking donkey cart. But