by Jones, K. J.
Twin-sized air mattress made, as good as they could be, and laid next to Phebe, Peter took off his boots. “Yeah. Give us some time to get right.”
“You tell me when you’re ready for the hordes of family to come. They all are gonna want to see you. And meet your bride there.”
“Oh, God. All of them?”
“Yeah.”
“Even the shady ones?”
“Even them.”
“Even the people I don’t like?”
“Hey,” said Tim. “They’re family. Gotta love family. God said so.”
“You don’t like them all,” Peter said. “Who you kidding?”
“I don’t have to love my former in-laws, Petey.”
Mike chuckled. He leaned against the counter separating the kitchen from the rest of the room. It was a broad counter like the Molly had, begging for bar stools.
“You rest,” said Tim. “Later, I’ll tell ya about my most recent arrests of your cousins.”
Peter pulled the blanket over himself. “Oh, good times.”
“Good night, sleeping beauty. Want me to tuck you in like when you were little?”
Peter laughed with his eyes closed. “Tell me a bedtime story, Uncle Timmy.”
“You want some scary stories?”
“Not about people I’m blood-related to.”
Caitlyn laughed.
Mike said, “Well, that limits your material there, Tim.”
“I know, right?” Tim responded. “Half the vice squad is dedicated to them.”
“Let’s go,” said Mike. “Hey, Petey, we’ll get the front door. I am leaving the keys on the counter here.” He moved to the door after Caitlyn and Tim. “I thank God you made it back, son.”
“Thanks,” Peter mumbled, sleep approaching.
“Welcome home.”
Day 9
Chapter One
1.
They remained asleep. Peter made some eggs and bacon for himself and Pez. They guzzled coffee and orange juice.
“We should go to Goodwill with Cate this morning,” said Peter. “Get everybody clothes.”
“We ain’t gonna get hand-me-down underwears, are we?”
“Shit. I forgot underwear. We’ll have to go to a real store then, too.”
The bell rang, indicating someone was at the front of the apartment house. A second, and they heard the door downstairs open and close. Loud footsteps on the stairs. A knock on Door B, and it opened. Only family would be so assuming.
Pez’s face brightened into a goofy smile at seeing Caitlyn. She wore a blue sweater that brought out her eyes if that’s what he was looking at.
“How ya doing?” she acknowledged him.
“Good. And you?” He used his best manners.
Peter’s face screwed up at watching the Marine. New friends always did this, but it never grew less annoying. And they never had a snowball’s chance in hell with her. At least his sister obeyed bro code about a guy’s sister even when the guys didn’t.
“You still look like shit, Petey.”
“Thank you.”
“I fucking hate that haircut.”
“It was involuntary.”
“You’re getting skinny. Eat more.”
“Thank you, Mother.”
Caitlyn cringed. “Don’t call me that. I’m not the one breeding.” She looked over at sleeping Phebe. “Wow. Really crashed hard.”
“We haven’t slept in days,” said Pez. “Not really.”
“Why you awake then?”
Peter said, “Because we’re manic and have to keep guard over the others.”
“You already were kinda off, little brother,” she said.
“Then I’m good.”
“Except for that fucking hair. C’mon, let’s go shopping. Get you a ballcap to cover that shit. People will think you’re getting chemo. Hey, we’ll get good coffee on the way. We got good coffee places.”
“Yeah,” said Pez. “Cos it’s SoBo.”
“Watch it. That’s only allowed to be said once a week at max. Uncle Timmy said it last night. Go beyond the quota, we pound you.”
Pez looked at her as if she was serious. Peter laughed.
“So good to be home,” Peter said.
“Love you too, reta’d.” his sister said.
“You’re such a spaz, Cate.”
“Not half as much as you. Get in the cah. What are you waiting for? Do you gotta put on your faces, boys?”
She led the way out.
“Wow,” said Pez. “She sounds like a Marine with all that crap she says.”
“Yeah. She does that. But, um, Pez, man, if you look at my sister’s ass one more time, I’m throwing you down these stairs, Italian stallion guy.”
“Fair enough. I’ll try my best, brother. Hey, I gotta find my family and fiancé. Is there a church here? A Catholic one?”
Peter stopped on the stairs, turned, and looked up at him like he was crazy. “You got no idea where you are, do you?”
“Guess not.”
“C’mon. We’re notorious. It’s Southie.”
“No clue. Let’s go. I need a coat that doesn’t smell like other people. I keep finding hairs that don’t match nobody in our group. We got civilization. Let’s exploit this to the fullest.”
“I’m with ya, man.”
2.
POTUS used executive orders to force his agenda through, pissing off Congress in all their many locations around the country. Oil reserves were to be used for not only the diesel generators of the cooling pool diesel generators but also for the military vehicles transporting the fuel and supplies to them. Where trains could not go all the way to where these were needed, trucks were necessary for the rest of the journey, which meant fuel for them as well.
Since the depot for so-called rescued refugees had been nuked, rescues had ceased. Turned out, a lot of people remained in the Carolinas red zone, where a hell of a lot of nuclear power plants and their cooling pools were. There had been civilian attacks on the trains. Wild West had reached the South. Train robberies for food and supplies rather than gold and money. Marines were ordered in to protect the supply trains and truck transports, a much better job for them than their previous role. Their gone-dark rates dropped.
They were also given spare food and supplies and told to distribute them from the trains and transports. Not to stop, or it could go into one of those situations of civil war in Africa with war gangs. Just toss it off the trains and transports for anyone to pick up. The best they could do in places so violent and desperate.
The zom rate in these places had cut down tremendously. Now, it was healthy, organized groups, the likes she had seen in Charleston. Except perhaps worse, based on the info she overheard.
POTUS and the Cabinet argued in the next room. It was getting very late in the night. Everyone else, except Julia the alpha secretary, had left. Mazy and the SEAL sailors waited in the office, drinking coffee and listening to the voices they heard radiating through the closed double doors of the meeting room. Still, the SecDef lead the opposition. POTUS and JCS were on the same side.
“Amazing SecDef doesn’t get punched by one of the generals,” said the warrant officer. “Or the admiral.”
“I know,” said the lieutenant. “I would not be able to restrain myself.”
“Dude clearly has no idea what it’s like for us.”
Just the three of them, the sailors had resorted to ‘dude’ and ‘bro.’ They called her this too. She took it as a compliment. None of them would ever speak so casually and familiar with the outsiders. They even dropped F-bombs.
Secret Service guys were outside the doors of the office, possibly saying dude and bro and dropping F-bombs as well. They guarded the Presidential Suite, which included the First Family sleeping in their beds in another section. Most of the suite looked like a lavish suite in a four-star hotel. Not bad. The family had moved up in the world from their old, shared quarters elsewhere in the mountain.
POTUS dismisse
d his Cabinet and requested JCS to join him in the office. The double doors opened. Mazy and the sailors jumped to their feet with smart salutes. The full-star generals and admiral returned their salutes. They all wore ZBDUs, as battle dress uniform was customary for everyone in the military to wear in times of war. JCS consisted of six men, all present and accounted for. Why the Chief of the Space Force was there for this conversation was a question Mazy would like to ask. She’d had a hankering to get that man drunk and ask him about aliens ever since she learned he was here. There were a lot of rumors after all.
“At ease,” POTUS said, being the chief over all the chiefs in the room.
Mazy and the sailors went into an at-ease posture, boots apart, hands folded behind their backs, staring straight ahead. POTUS sat on the loveseat, which he occupied alone, and JCS filled in around him, most having to pull chairs over so that no man touched while seated. Though the sailors and Mazy would normally go for the chairs and not stand there watching their superiors dragging furniture around, their duties were clear: they protected POTUS because everything was weird and POTUS was freaking out a little. Getting a chair for an admiral was not part of their duties in the acting Oval Office. There were normally civilian peans to do these chair moving things. But where they went, Mazy did not know. They should be here, existing to serve.
To-Do: Find the peons when JCS leaves the room.
The important men began discussing the situation. More of the same stuff.
While standing there in rigid at-ease, Mazy felt something give in her hair. Of all times, a hair clip just failed. “Shit,” she thought loudly. She could feel a long lock of hair softly fall against her neck.
The lieutenant motioned with his eyes where he spotted the clip fall. Under the desk. She backed up to get parallel to where he spotted it and bent at the knees with eyes forward to search for the clip with her hand.
Damn it, she could not feel it. A glance to make sure no one noticed her doing this, apart from the sailors. The warrant officer slightly smirked at her distress.
Mazy backed up, got behind the desk – still standing as if she was doing nothing – and disappeared behind it. On hands and knees, she searched for it.
The damn thing was on the floor under the drawer part of the desk. She flattened to reach it and saw something which should not have been there.
A bomb was stuck to the underside of the bottom drawer of the desk.
“Holy shit.” She yelled, “Bomb!”
Her head banged on the desk’s underside as she tried to quickly stand up.
Once standing, she rushed to POTUS where the sailors already had him sandwiched between them. She pulled out her 9 mm sidearms and clicked off the safety.
“With me, sir,” the lieutenant told the President.
“Damn it,” said POTUS. “Get everyone out. My family.”
The Chief of the Air Force opened the double doors. He yelled out, “Bomb!”
No one responded in any way at all. A situation that should have everyone burst into activity; it was dead silent.
Giving POTUS no time to protest in his concern for others, the sailor pair moved him out of the office. Mazy jumped ahead, lock of hair free, and led the way out of the office with her pistol readied.
“Julia,” she yelled. No response.
The secretary’s desk chair was turned with its back to the door. Mazy reached out her left hand and turned it. Julia stared unblinkingly. A hole in her forehead.
“Shit. We’re under attack!”
Mazy rushed ahead. “Marines?”
Both door guards were crumpled on the ground. Secret Service on the floor beyond them. They breathed.
“We got a gassing and a shooter with a sound suppressor in here.”
The sailors used their bodies as shields around POTUS while they moved him rapidly forward and towards the stairs. The stairwell where the Speaker had died.
The Chiefs were on their own.
Mazy opened the stairwell door. She aimed up, then down. “Clear.”
Secret Service caroled the acting First Family and all the other people to get off the floor. All the noise bombarded Mazy’s ears, preventing her from hearing within the stairwell.
The sailors stepped out with the President sandwiched between them.
Shots hit the metal railing from above. Mazy ducked and returned fire, hitting concrete stairs as the assassin dropped to his side.
“Chief,” she yelled for the warrant officer.
The lieutenant and POTUS descended to the next landing.
“We got him. Keep –"
The explosion.
The warrant officer slammed the metal stairwell door shut with JCS and the First Family on the other side. The lieutenant grabbed POTUS and dropped him onto the landing floor, his own body on top of him. Mazy ducked and squatted against the wall. The metal stairwell door blew out, instantly killing the warrant officer. She saw him fly backwards with orange flames pushing at the unanchored door. The entire stairwell filled with smoke and gases. Fire alarms wailed.
A tap on Mazy’s left shoulder. It felt like being hit with a BB pellet. She moved her left shoulder, not knowing what the weird feeling was. But her left arm dropped, useless, unresponsive to her mind’s commands.
The shooter came down the stairs. She found herself on the floor, choking and eyes tearing. Poor visual, but she saw him enough.
Adrenaline surging, the old feeling of being back in the Zone. Mazy rose from the floor using her right hand. She swung her legs horizontally, catching his legs and knocking him down. Where her handgun was, she did not know.
“Break their necks with your thighs,” the memory from Charleston flashed.
Mazy lifted her legs and wrapped her muscular thighs around his neck.
“Die, fucking zom!” she roared in a husky, deep voice.
A twist of her hips. He strained against it, grasping the bottom of the metal railing as a counterforce.
Pressing harder, now choking him. His free hand tried to hit her in the groin. Not so effective on a woman. He must not have realized his attacker was female.
She lifted her back, using her shoulders as a base. He frantically tried to grab anything he could with his free hand. She slammed him down. Jarred, his grip on the stair rail broke.
With the floor as a stabilizer, her thighs to either side of his chin, she jerked her hips to the left.
Snap. A terrible sound. He fell motionless. It worked.
Panting. She muttered, “Be dead, asshole.”
Mazy pulled her legs away from the assassin.
“I gotta tell Pheebs. Did it.”
Mazy tried to crawl, to move away from the dead man, and check on the others. Something slippery under her hands, causing her forward movement to slip. Her lungs wheezed with every breath. The smoke-clouded stairwell rocked up and down at a crooked angle.
“You’ve been shot, lieutenant,” a voice said. He sounded so distant as if he stood at the end of a long tunnel.
“Medic!” a voice yelled very loudly.
There were a lot of noises in the smoke, growing more numerous yet increasingly faraway. The shrilling fire alarm droned in and out.
“Ben?”
Her throat burned. Weakness and fatigue slithered around her body, tightening on her, tempting her to sleep.
“POTUS,” she thought she was yelling. “Where’s POTUS?”
A blurry face appeared over hers. “Lieutenant?”
“Ben.”
“Stay still. The medics are coming.”
The world darkened. Noises receded for quiet calmness.
“Lieutenant,” a male voice yelled. “Stay with me. Lieutenant?”
“Just a nap,” she muttered, feeling the coolness of the concrete floor soothing.
Book Six, Clash ...
The ELE Series continues
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Credits
28 Weeks Later,
Film directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, released 2007, by Figment Films, Sogecine, Koan Films, distributed by 20th Century Fox (UK), Fox Atomic (US).
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
"Alice in Wonderland," novel written by Lewis Carroll, United Kingsom, McMillan (1865).
Aliens,
Film directed by James Cameron, released 1986, by 20th Century Fox, Brandywine Productions, distributed by 20th Century Fox.
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
Novel written by George Orwell. United Kingdom, Secker and Warburg (1945).
Black Hawk Dawn,
Film directed by Ridley Scott, released 2002, by Columbia Pictures, Revolution Studios, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Scott Free Productions. Based on the novel Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern Warfare, by Mark Bowden. United States, Signet Books (1999), distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing.
Dunkirk,
Film directed by Christopher Nolan, released 2017, by Warner Bros. Pictures, Syncopy Inc., RatPac-Dune Entertainment, Canal, Ciné, StudioCanal, distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.
Exorcist, The,
Film directed by William Friedkin, released 1973, by Hoya Productions, distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. Based on the novel of the same name by William Peter Blatty. United States, Harper & Row (1971).
First Blood