My voice cracks a little as I whisper, “God bless America.”
΅
:::16:::
JACK BENSON FOUND the job on Monster just two months before the world began to collapse around him. $14.50 an hour, with a bump to $21.25 after six months as long as he got a basic passing grade on all eight of the training modules. He’d never be a millionaire, but it beat the crap out of the $9.25 minimum wage he’d earned as a greeter at the Walmart back home in Fallon.
Munitions Handler also sounded a lot cooler than Walmart greeter, and for a 25 year old kid that was almost as important as the wage, even if it meant he had to spend his weeks in a small town of three thousand in the baking desert five hours from Vegas. Come the weekend he could make the long drive into the city with a couple of buddies and blow his wages at the tables, and in his uniform the girls seemed to respond to him a little more readily than they had when he was wearing a blue vest covered in pieces of flair. Things had been going pretty well, all told, and the move down to the Hawthorne Army Depot had finally given him something vaguely impressive to write on his resume.
If he’d known when he took the job that three months later he’d find himself firing a Stinger missile at a DC10, though, he might have preferred to stick with the blue vest.
For hours after he’d taken the shot people slapped him on the back and called him a hero. He tried to believe it, but he’d seen the wreckage. He’d seen the scorched path of destruction the plane had carved through the north wing of the Mandalay Bay before exploding into the ground floor of the Delano, bringing most of the hotel down on top of the twisted remains of the plane. Both hotels had been packed well beyond capacity. Hundreds of refugees had been killed in the wreck. Dozens more were probably still trapped beneath the rubble, alive but injured, but they’d never reach them before they died.
But Jack was a hero, apparently. That’s what everyone kept saying, at least until he stopped responding.
He’d been six weeks into intensive training when the infection had arrived in the US, and for two weeks after that he barely slept. Seven day shifts, fifteen hours on, nine off. He spent every waking moment prepping mothballed vehicles and testing outdated ordnance that had been crated up and stored in the underground bunkers years ago, but there weren’t nearly enough staff to get the job done.
The problem was that few had ever seriously considered the prospect of a war on US soil. For decades the military had been shaped around the Two-War Doctrine, a defense strategy designed to prepare US forces to fight two simultaneous Gulf War sized ground campaigns. A big part of that doctrine was the assumption that both wars would be overseas, and in recent years the unspoken addendum to that was ‘and they’ll probably both be in the Middle East.’ With the hot, arid climate of Nevada, Hawthorne had been the ideal location to train soldiers bound for Iraq and Afghanistan, and later Syria, so after 9/11 the base had been repurposed as a training facility while its previous purpose, the storage and deployment of weapons and ammo to front line forces, was sidelined. When Jack got the job he became one of just a dozen munitions handlers on the whole base.
If Hawthorne had already been understaffed before, the infection only made things worse. Hawthorne personnel never deployed overseas, so when it all went to shit the Depot was one of the few places the military could look to bolster its numbers in the east. Jack had showed up for duty one day to find the place virtually deserted. He was suddenly one of the most senior men on the base, and he wasn’t even enlisted, never mind an officer. He was just a civilian kid who wanted to put aside enough money to buy a car that had more than one working tail light.
For a couple of days he’d been at a loose end. Communications with military command became erratic and confusing and then, suddenly, just stopped. It was only by watching the TV news that the remaining personnel at the Depot learned that the entire military command structure had collapsed after some kind of rebellion against the emergency government at Raven Rock. Suddenly Hawthorne was stranded, with fewer than one hundred men in charge of the world’s largest ammunition and ordnance storage depot, but they didn’t have any orders to follow.
The decision to deploy a team to Las Vegas had sprung out of nowhere, without a single person seeming to come up with the idea on his own, but after a little thought it started to make more and more sense. Those left behind at the depot were aimless and confused but they had access to the sort of weaponry that would fuel the wet dreams of any tinpot dictator. They might as well at least try to do some good with it. If they could just defend this little part of the country from the worst of the disaster they could be proud of a job well done.
Even in peacetime Vegas had always been an impossibly chaotic city, a gaping neon-lit drain into which countless tourists poured each day to lose their money and pick up a nasty case of crotch rot, but now – according to the sporadic news reports, at least – it seemed to be tearing itself apart at the seams. They say that any society was three square meals away from anarchy, but Vegas had always been just a steak dinner and a light snack from collapsing in on itself.
When air travel had been grounded on the day of the New York and D.C. attacks hundreds of thousands of tourists had suddenly found themselves stranded in the city, but there wasn’t any sort of guiding intelligence to manage the refugee situation beyond the overworked police force and a handful of casino security guards who stayed at their posts. Overnight the city became little more than a neon lit riot, on one side thousands of terrified citizens desperate to find food, water and shelter from the scorching sun, and on the other side hoteliers who weren’t eager to hand over their fortunes to a bunch of freeloaders.
And so it was that Jack rolled out of Hawthorne with around fifty men – the last three remaining officers, a small handful of enlisted men and the rest on-base civilian support – loaded down with anything they thought might be useful for crowd control and refugee support, along with a bunch of weapons they didn’t expect to need but didn’t feel all that comfortable leaving behind with the forty strong skeleton security team. It took nine hours for the convoy to reach the city, and when they arrived they found the tension palpable. The entire city was engaged in a tense standoff, just waiting for someone to light the fuse and set the city aflame.
Almost as soon as Jack’s team established its base at McCarran Airport the refugees began flooding in looking for help. They mistook the ragtag squad from Hawthorne as part of a major disaster relief effort rather than just a handful of guys who wanted to lend a hand, and that first night they were almost overwhelmed by the demands of the needy. Every last one of their MREs had been handed out before dawn, and everyone woke up with hunger pains stabbing at their stomachs. That first morning they all suspected that leaving the relative safety of Hawthorne may have been a terrible mistake.
Within a few days, though, they began to turn the situation around. The hoteliers trusted the military and felt better for having them patrol the streets in front of their multi-million dollar properties. They knew they couldn’t win in a fight with thousands of rioters, so with the Hawthorne contingent acting as arbitrators they each agreed to take in a certain number of refugees – perhaps more than they’d have liked, but the implicit threat that the military would happily withdraw and allow the people to loot hung heavy over the negotiations, so they didn’t dare to press the point.
After two weeks the small but effective Hawthorne squad, against all odds, had the maddeningly complex city running like a well oiled machine. As vulnerable as Las Vegas was to any sort of instability, being as it was a remote desert outpost completely reliant on the outside world to survive, they managed to get by after a fashion. The food stored in thousands of restaurant deep freezes and dozens of warehouses was organized and rationed by volunteers. The water kept flowing from faucets thanks to the near endless supply from Lake Mead after a harsh winter and a spring with plentiful snow melt. They even began to make provisional plans to convert the four 18 hole golf courses within a couple o
f miles of the Strip into farmland, just in case the crisis wasn’t resolved as quickly as they hoped. The climate wasn’t particularly crop friendly, but with enough irrigation they figured they could tease out a few meals.
Most importantly, Jack’s team managed to dispatch a handful of civilian engineers to assist the few staff who hadn’t abandoned their posts at the Hoover Dam, where they helped balance the power load to prevent the city’s grid from frying. That was what really saved Vegas. People will do anything for AC in the middle of a desert.
In peacetime the hydroelectric power generated by the dam was distributed to three states and supported almost eight million people, but now the population of Vegas had ballooned to almost two million, and the national power grid had been almost irretrievably damaged thanks to weeks without proper maintenance. The inexperienced engineers didn’t dare attempt to regulate the power production at the source, so in a bizarre twist it was now necessary for the residents of Vegas to use as much power as possible to keep the excess load from being dumped onto the grid and blowing transformers all the way to California.
With the government AWOL, fear and confusion rife and the infected hordes growing closer with each passing day, Las Vegas was a pleasant oasis of ice cold air conditioning, chilled water and electric light. They even ran the power hungry, blindingly bright beam of light from the top of the Luxor every night to drain the excess electricity when demand dipped. The gaudy, over the top shaft of light was now a beacon of civilization to everyone from miles around. It was a comforting sight, and a welcome reminder that not everything had been lost.
For two weeks life in the city had been running remarkably smoothly. The news coming in on the radio from the rest of the country – even those areas in the west as yet unaffected by the infection – painted a picture of a crippled nation, lurching from crisis to crisis thanks to the lack of leadership, and quickly descending into chaos. In comparison Vegas felt almost as if life was continuing as normal, after a fashion. Jack felt like he and his team had really achieved something worthwhile. They’d dragged the city back from the brink, and they’d done it without firing a single shot. Everyone from Hawthorne walked tall through the streets, and they were greeted at every doorway with smiles.
And then the news reports suddenly began to pour in.
Last night Jack had been roused from sleep a little after midnight by a young volunteer who’d been monitoring the shortwave radio stations in neighboring states for news. The kid was panicked, and it took a sharp slap to get him to calm down enough to make sense. He said there were reports of sudden outbreaks in cities in the western states, dozens of them, flooding the airwaves from Texas to Montana. The news was confusing, but it seemed as if there had some kind of aerial assault on the cities before the outbreaks began. Maybe someone was airdropping infected and letting them run free? It didn’t make any sense. Nothing about it made a lick of sense, but something was clearly going down.
Within minutes the team had fired up the computers in the air traffic control tower at McCarran, and the controllers they’d managed to corral were manning the radar desks, yelling instructions to each other as they scanned the skies for a hundred miles in every direction.
And then they found it. The plane had its transponder switched off so they couldn’t identify it though the radar beacon system. There was no answer to hails, and the only information they had came from the primary radar. They didn’t know the size or type of aircraft. They didn’t know its altitude, and they could only guess at its speed. All they could see was a green blip on the radar screen, an unidentified threat approaching on a direct bearing to Vegas.
In the confusion nobody had been able to reach any of the three officers from Hawthorne, and all of the enlisted men were scattered across the city. Jack looked around the tower as the blip continued to approach and found everyone looking at him. Looking to him, expecting this 25 year old kid to make a decision based on nothing more than the fact that he’d told them he was in charge, and they’d been desperate enough to believe him.
He felt like he was in a trance as he walked down the corrugated steel staircase back to ground level. He drifted in a daze across the asphalt to the secure garage they’d set up to house the trucks and ordnance, and he searched through the stacks of hard shell olive green crates until he found the one he was looking for.
The Stinger missile system in the case was a simple tube around two yards long. It had a defective S&R switch and had been returned to Hawthorne to be safely destroyed, but Jack had decided to load it on the back of the truck all the same. In the month since it had showed up on his decommissioning roster he’d often dreamed of firing it, but now he was actually pulling it from the case he didn’t feel the same enthusiasm.
For ten minutes he studied the weapon and tried to remember the firing sequence from the literature he’d skimmed weeks ago, and it was only when he heard the drone of an aircraft – the first time he’d heard a jet engine in a month – that he snapped out of it and dragged himself back to the moment. He hefted the tube onto his right shoulder and awkwardly lurched back out onto the apron in front of the garage, tugging his radio from his belt as soon as he stopped.
“Tower,” he said, breathlessly, “have you raised the plane? Any word?”
The radio crackled for a moment before the reply came through. “Negative. They’re still not answering our hails, and their transponder is still inactive. What do you want to do?” Even with the bad reception he could tell the voice was edgy and nervous.
Jack didn’t know what to say. He still didn’t know the answer to the question even as he raised the tube and snapped the chunky nickel cadmium battery into place, hearing the low hum from the targeting speaker as it locked on to the engine noise.
It was a moonlit night with just a light dusting of low cloud, and in the distance the enormous plane was clearly visible even without its strobe or navigation lights activated. Jack had been an airplane nut as a kid, unsurprising for someone who’d grown up a stone’s throw from Nellis AFB. He’d spent his childhood watching in awe and wonder as everything from F22-A Raptors to the Super Hercules to tilt rotor Ospreys roared over his house on their way to the base, shaking his windows as they passed, and as soon as he saw the distinctive third engine at the base of the vertical stabilizer he knew the approaching plane was a DC-10. He also knew that the USAF had decommissioned its remaining DC-10s in 2017, as had FedEx in 2018. The only ones still in operation in the States were three tankers leased to the US Forest Service, which still used them to fight forest fires up and down the west coast.
Suddenly the high pitched sound of an actuator rang from the Stinger’s targeting speaker. The plane was losing altitude quickly, dropping towards the deck for its approach, but it didn’t look like it was coming in to land. Its heading would take it across the runway at a sharp angle, west towards the Strip. In the moonlight Jack saw the belly of the plane begin to open, and suddenly he realized what was about to happen.
The hulking DC-10 was about to dump something from the tank in its belly. It would swoop down over the most heavily populated part of the city and drop its cargo, and if the news reports were to be believed it wasn’t going to be a pallet of MREs.
There was nothing else he could think to do. No other way he could stop whatever horrors had befallen the other cities from reaching Vegas. The very thought of it bore an acid hole in his stomach, but he knew he had to bring down the plane. Them or us. It was just that simple.
He whispered a prayer – more for himself than for the people in the city or those approaching in the plane – and raised the tube until he could sight it through the reticle. With a squeeze of his left hand he uncaged the targeting system, and when the DC-10 looked to be around a mile from the runway he squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened.
The plane was fast approaching, and in the bright moonlight he could see that the doors in the belly were almost fully open. Jack felt the panic grip him tight around the
throat as he pressed the cage/uncage button once again, and once again felt the whir of the machinery as the targeting system moved freely. He sighted the plane once more, waiting an agonizing few seconds for the target to lock in the canoe of the reticle. He went for the trigger once again, but before squeezing this time he toggled the defective S&R switch that had sent it back to Hawthorne. Somewhere deep in the mechanism he felt a jolt as something clicked into place. He pulled the trigger, squeezed his eyes tightly closed in prayer, and three seconds later the SAM shot from the tube with a jolt, pushing the cushioned rest back against his shoulder with bruising force.
For a moment the missile seemed to hang motionless in the air before the primary motor kicked in and sent it screaming towards the target, trailing a fine line of gray vapor that drew a curved streak from the ground to the sky. In the blink of an eye the missile found its target, exploding through the left wing of the plane in a dull orange burst that looked almost dainty and weak compared to the size of the plane.
As the hulking DC-10 continued its approach it looked for a moment like it might shrug off the impact. It continued straight on course towards the Strip as if the explosion had dealt it little more than a mosquito bite, but as it loomed overhead it suddenly began to bank wildly to the right, one wing scything down towards the roof of the terminal building. Jack threw himself to the ground as the pilot struggled to pull the enormous craft back into the air, but it was clear it was going to crash. As it vanished from sight behind the terminal the engine tone rose to a scream so loud it became almost a physical presence, shaking the windows of the terminal and forcing Jack to clamp his hands over his ears to block out the pain, and then with a deafening roar the thin, wispy clouds hanging over the city glowed orange for a brief moment with the reflected light of the explosion. The terminal windows burst outwards as one, showering the asphalt below with countless glittering shards, and after what felt like an eternity the roar faded away to an eerie silence.
Last Man Standing Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 35