The civilian snickered. “China? Don’t be so naïve. I seriously doubt any human was behind these attacks. In many ways, meteorites are worse than nukes. The ground impacts toss up far more ash into the sky than any airburst thermonuclear detonation. Even if some foreign power had targeted America exclusively with these rocks, the effects would still rock the world. We all share the same atmosphere. No way to escape. If the strikes are wiping out entire cities, like you say, then each blast must have kinetic energy in the double-digit megaton range. That’s far more powerful than your typical nuke. Only a few dozen going off would haze out the sun for days, worldwide. A few hundred, weeks likely. A few thousand and… well, look what happened to the dinosaurs.”
Kat turned up her nose and fiddled with her bayonet hilt. “You seem to know a lot about this. Are you CIA as well, Mr…?”
“Ha! Hell no. Name’s Brian Jenkins. I’m an archeologist. I was leading a team excavating the ruins of a lost city-state in southern Oman when the terrorists attacked. The SOB’s slipped over the border in the middle of the night and hit our camp in a supposed secure zone. They just walked in and killed everyone. With guns, knives, sometimes bare hands, like it was a contest to see who could be more creative…”
His eye twitched a little. “They only spared me for the ransom money. Must have assumed ‘Doctor’ in my title meant I was rich. I can’t thank you folks enough for getting me out of there. Compared to that hellhole, this new world is a walk in the park.”
Jenkins closed his eyes, beating down some memory. “Anyway, the place we were studying died out during the last such atmospheric event the planet witnessed. Have you ever heard of the ‘Year Without Summer,’ back in 1816?”
Blank faces stared back at him. Jenkins had never given a lecture to a more attentive audience. “Something similar happened. The sky, worldwide, was greyed out for months. In the northern latitudes, nothing but a light haze, even at noon, hinted that the sun was still there. We’re talking stuff straight out of the worst parts of the Bible. Global temperatures plummeted. There were widespread crop failures throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Rapid climate change too, with dry areas experiencing sudden flooding and the tropics suffering extensive droughts. The mini-apocalypse lasted for over a year, spawning famines, pandemics, riots and even a few wars. Historians say a 100,000 people starved to death in Ireland alone. Millions died around the world. And you know the craziest thing? The whole disaster was caused by a single volcanic eruption far away. Mount Tambora in Indonesia, to be exact. The only difference is that this time nature isn’t our enemy. I’m willing to wager that not even the worst elements of mankind are behind this calamity. Which leaves only one logical explanation.”
All three gazed out the window at the panicked refugee storm below. Jenkins pointed up at the cloudy sky. “The whole planet is going to suffer the consequences of this bombing. Whoever or whatever did this doesn’t care about money, politics, religion or any of that nonsense. They clearly have a beef with the entire human race.”
Kat guffawed. “What are you saying? You think we’re at war with alie—”
The sun came out. An artificial one, at least. Michaels whistled. “Holy shit! I guess we aren’t completely defenseless!”
The southwestern sky lit up in an ever-expanding supernova. No mushroom cloud; this was clearly an exoatmospheric nuclear detonation. The expanding fireball cycled between shades of yellow and orange before settling on crimson. The blood red nova kept racing out until it smothered the entire horizon.
Michaels whooped again. “Hell yeah! Whoever the enemy is, looks like we nailed ‘em. One ship down, five to go!”
Kat cheered out the window like everyone else. Jenkins nudged her shoulder, waving a finger at the shapes falling from the red sunburst.
“Damn. How big do you think those chunks are?” She couldn’t begin to guess how large the falling objects burning through the atmosphere were. The fact that any debris could survive a nuclear blast shook her world.
“Hell if I know, but if we can see them a couple hundred miles away… well, I’m just glad we’re not the only ones left in this fight!”
The pilot’s voice buzzed over the intercom. “We’re thirty minutes out from Camp Arifjan.”
Michaels shot Kat an exasperated look. “He didn’t say if they’re expecting us. Have you had any luck on the net? We should be close enough by now.”
Kat played with her worthless radio yet again.
“No go, but that’s probably a side effect of the nuke. With all the electromagnetic interference, I’m surprised we can even communicate with the next chopper.”
She forced herself to believe her own excuse.
Day Two
Unknown County Road
Somewhere east of Gainesville, Florida
“Can you fix it?”
Rachel held up a chunk of the Humvee’s fiberglass hood. The rest of the battle-scared cover had fallen apart as soon as she lifted the lid. Dixon tossed aside his half of the hood and knelt under the smoking engine block. He shined a military flashlight in the fading twilight, careful to insert the red lens first and avoid white light.
“Son of a…” Dixon lifted his oil-soaked hand up to Rachel’s face and worked his jaw.
“Nah. Even if I could plug the leak and find more oil, we’ve been running the engine dry for far too long. Not much you can do for a 30-year-old, hand-me-down Humvee. I say it’s high time to put a bullet in this old horse.”
Rachel didn’t waste a moment crying over spilled milk. With a simple nod, she grabbed her left leg with her right hand and stretched it towards her butt. Ten seconds later, she repeated the process with the other leg. “How much farther until Gainesville? Five miles? I’ll race you.”
Dixon stared at the girl, trying to absorb some of her resilience. After beating his head against one lost hope after another all day, he needed the boost. He couldn’t avoid her mother’s visage in Rachel’s eyes, but for the first time, Katherine’s strength shined through his shame and worry.
“Honestly, I’m not a hundred percent sure how far. I haven’t been out this way in years. Could be five, could be fifteen miles. I’m a friggin’ idiot. If we’d stuck to the main highway, we would have been there by now.”
Rachel slapped a bare aluminum pole jutting out of the ground. The locals had torn down every road sign for miles along these backcountry roads. She surprised herself as much as him by putting her other hand on Dixon’s shoulder and flashing a smile.
“How could you have known that everyone would get so paranoid so fast? It doesn’t matter. What’s important is, for the first time all day, we aren’t running for our lives. Can’t you be satisfied with that?”
“Fair enough. Well, no matter how far it is, we need to bunker down here for the night. We’ll hoof it at first light. Whenever that is.”
They both craned their necks to the ashen sky. Sundown should have been another two hours away. Not any minute as the strange new sky promised.
Rachel fidgeted, but moved slowly back to the Humvee and opened the cab door. “I don’t know if I can sleep, but I guess it wouldn’t hurt to stretch out.” She rifled through the Humvee’s cargo bay.
“Guns, ammo, medical supplies, but not a single damn can of bug spray?”
Dixon rooted around the littered truck bed as well.
“Ah, jackpot.” Dixon flipped out an Applegate-Fairbairn combat folder. He even found a whetstone in a separate pouch.
“A knife, seriously? What’s that going to do? What we need is a bazooka!”
“No honey. This,” he jerked his thumb at the distant flashes and krumps on the coastal horizon, “is not our war. Our struggle is to survive and rebuild. Maybe one day we can pay back whoever did this, my money’s on a Russian-Chinese alliance, but until then—”
Rachel shivered. “What about all the dead? You just want to turn your back on them? I had friends back in Jacksonville! What about mom?”
Dixon held her quaking
hand in the dark. “Maybe the city is fine. As for your mother, I’m sure she’s safe. She’s surrounded by other soldiers. Baby, the big picture doesn’t matter right now. All that’s important is us, the living. How can we make the sacrifices so many have made count for something? Kat knows that better than most.” He rubbed his neck. “We can go on and on about this, but not now. We need to get some sleep. We’ll hammer out a plan in the morning, okay?”
Rachel managed to snag a few hours of fitful rest, full of dark dreams of revenge. Dixon tried closing his eyes once, but awoke screaming five minutes later. He spent another hour fashioning crude rucksacks out of a frame of palm fronds and scraps of the Humvee’s tarp. With nothing else to distract him from the sandman and his dream demons, he spent the rest of the night sharpening his new knife. He had lied to Rachel about one thing though.
As long as his wife was still out there, this was most definitely his war.
***
“Don’t bother taking a bunch of weapons. You can only shoot one at a time. Here, try this on.”
Dixon handed Rachel one of his crude rucksacks. “Take three MREs and four bottles of water. That should be more than enough to get us into the city. Fill the rest of your sack with ammo. If things are as bad as they seem, then bullets are worth their weight in diamonds. I’m sure we can trade them for whatever else we need.”
Rachel planted both hands on her hips, but bit off her attitude with a sigh. She didn’t even complain about the poor weight distribution on the rucksack. He’d done what he could to lash a decent frame together for the pack, but there was only so much he could do in such a hurry. At least the flexible palm frond stems absorbed some of the shock with each step. She probably wouldn’t start feeling the load for at least a mile.
“So you ready? All stretched out?” Rachel hunched slightly forward under the forty-pound load on her back and rifle in her arms, but she flashed him a world-beating smile. Dixon opened his mouth to give a pep talk but thought better of it. Why spoil the moment?
He set off at a brisk pace, hoping to cover as much ground in the cool, post-dawn greyness as possible. Despite the ash weakening the sun’s rays, the humidity would only climb as the day wore on. The greenhouse effect would sap their strength in a few hours no matter what.
Rachel’s patient silence ended a half mile later, when the county road met a busy state highway. Dixon lusted at the stream of vehicles whipping past without a care in the world.
“Huh. This is more traffic than I ever expected. Almost like a normal day. We’ll have to follow the grass easement on the side of the road. I don’t trust walking on the shoulder with so many panicked folk flying by.”
Rachel cracked open a water bottle, her second so far in their short trip. “Why do things the hard way? Let’s try to hitchhike.”
Dixon adjusted the sling on his liberated M16. “Not a good idea. I doubt anyone would pick up a couple of armed vagrants anyway. Even if they did, I’m not sure I’d want to get in a car with someone who isn’t afraid of us. Know what I mean?”
Rachel tsked and jumped on the road’s shoulder. “Oh, don’t be so paranoid. It’s just a war, not some zombie apocalypse. Check it out. Hey, taxi!” She flailed both arms over her head.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” Dixon instinctively brought his weapon up to the low ready, but dropped it quickly and slapped on his poker face. A yellow taxi van rolled to a stop by Dixon. Some Hispanic woman in the passenger seat rolled down the window.
“Excuse me. Do you know how to get to the interstate from here?”
Dixon studied the family inside. An old woman in the back clutched three young children tight. The man in the driver’s seat laid a reassuring hand on the passenger’s shoulder. His other hand trembled on the steering wheel. Dixon noticed the dashboard meter was locked in at $999.99.
This wasn’t their taxi. No one displayed an obvious weapon though.
“I take it you aren’t picking up any fares?”
The middle-aged Hispanic man muttered something in Spanish and put the taxi back in gear.
Dixon raised his empty palms. “Hold up! The interstate’s about half an hour or so west. On the other side of Gainesville. If you let us ride with you for a bit, I’ll show you. Just drop us off on the way. Once you get into town, I’m sure they’ll still be signs left standing. We’ll guide you until then. Fair enough?”
The older man eyed the rifle on Dixon’s back.
“Is there fighting in town? Where exactly do you want to go?”
“I don’t know for sure. I guess to the FEMA camp just outside of Gainesville. At the racetrack, so we heard. We ran into a National Guard unit that claimed it was a safe zone. Shouldn’t be too much farther.”
The family suddenly lit up. The woman in the passenger seat crossed herself. “A camp? The National Guard? Are you sure? The government’s still running?”
“Some of it, at least. You didn’t hear about the coastal evacuations?”
The driver slapped his dead dashboard computer. “How? Nothing works. No phones, no radios, hmm…”
He jabbered in Spanish to the women in the car. He waited until they chirped something in agreement before unlocking the doors. “That’s the best bit of news we’ve heard all day. We haven’t seen a single living cop or soldier in a while. It’s total anarchy down south. I suppose we’ll check this camp out as well. Beats living like gypsies. If you don’t expect comfort, then feel free to hop on in.”
Rachel climbed in before Dixon could object. Dixon wedged inside after her, squatting with one butt cheek on the backseat and the other on a suitcase. He awkwardly leaned over and shook everyone’s hand.
“I’m Peter Dixon and this is my stepdaughter, Rachel.”
“It’s a pleasure and all. I’m Miguel Romero. This is my wife, mother in law and children.” He was so focused on dodging traffic that he didn’t bother giving names. Rachel broke the silence as they raced along the blacktop.
“So, where are you folks coming from? We came out of Jacksonville. It was… uh, bad. What have you seen?
The old woman narrowed her eyes and squeezed the kids. The youngsters began sobbing uncontrollably. Miguel dug his fingernails deep into the steering wheel.
“We were down in Orlando, at the airport, and about to board a flight for Mexico when everything happened. I’ve been saving up for that trip for years!” He punched the wheel and laughed without mirth. “Well, who am I to whine about money? God spared my family. At least we got out of there in one piece.”
“Wait, was Orlando hit?”
“You mean with whatever blew up Tampa? Jesus Christos! We could see that mushroom cloud from a hundred miles away. No, but Orlando might have had it worse. We were stuck waiting at security when the power went out. Thank God for the long line. A few minutes after the power outage, all hell broke loose. Jumbo jets just started raining from the skies. If we’d been only a few minutes faster, we would have been in the terminal when it was annihilated. I’m talking like a dozen 9/11’s.”
Rachel chewed her lip and whispered at Dixon. “Mom’s always riding in a helicopter.”
Dixon focused his attention out the window so she couldn’t see his misting eyes. “Don’t worry. Military aircraft are hardened against EMP blasts. Civilian airliners, though…”
Miguel’s wife reached back and hugged the smallest child close. She squeezed her husband’s hand. He choked back the tears.
“That’s not even the worst part. As we escaped the airport, or stole this abandoned taxi to be honest, there was a burst of light over downtown Orlando. After that, there was nothing left alive.”
“You mean like a nuclear bomb?”
“No, no. More like God just flipped the off switch. We took the turnpike straight through the city during rush hour, normally an hour drive, in only fifteen minutes. Everything was dead, even the birds, but there wasn’t the slightest physical damage. Well, aside from thousands of driverless vehicles crashing all over the place.”
He slowed and made an illegal U-turn over the divided highway. Plenty of traffic streamed in both directions, but no cops were around. Miguel pulled to a halt on some side street. A white emergency evacuation placard, no bigger than a yard sale sign, pointed up the winding road. Not a single vehicle came in or out.
Miguel twisted around in his seat. “Are you sure about this?”
“Of course not, but it’s worth checking out. What else are we going to do? Look at all these people pouring into the city. Could you imagine how much a hotel would cost?”
Miguel waited for some silent signal from his wife before finally turning right. They drove a speechless mile through the pines until they came across a sprawling parking lot.
The horrors of yesterday had steeled Dixon’s soul for everything except the insanity before them.
“Uh, am I missing something?”
Miguel found an upfront parking spot with ease. The lot couldn’t have been more than 10% full. An elderly but cheerful old woman greeted the refugees at the racetrack’s concession stand by the gate.
“Hi-yah, there! What can I do for you? Does anyone in your party require medical attention?”
Dixon glanced past her and ogled the rows of spotlessly clean white tents on the racetrack. Volunteers in khaki-shorts and navy blue polo shirts buzzed around a line of waiting semi-trucks. They calmly offloaded endless pallets of bottled water and other supplies. Soft music played over the humming generators. Dixon followed the sound, completely mesmerized. A tiny crowd milled around a large central tent in the middle of the camp. The sweet tang of barbecued ribs wafting over was too much.
The Caliphate Invasion Page 6