“We’d be liable to run aground. Not the way I want to go out, honestly.”
“I heard that,” Coop agreed.
“I’m shaking the trees as best I can. Things get too bad, we’ll use the FireStorms to fall back on the SEALs’ position. It’ll be a little cozy up there, but I doubt zulu can mound up high enough to get to us there.”
Don’t tempt fate like that. Rather than voicing that uncomfortable thought, he settled for, “Roger that. LoPresto out.”
October 18, 2026
Taum Sauk Mountain, eastern Missouri
Z-Day + 3,287
Molly’s story reminded Miles that his own survival experience had been atypical. They’d had their share of horror, to be sure, but they hadn’t had to deal with heavily-armed marauders, even if they’d been working for the GenPharm doctor.
He took a look at Pete and couldn’t keep the grin off his face. Probably because the bad dudes in our neck of the woods were afraid of Pete and Larry. The lifelong friends had opened a gun shop and surplus store after retiring from the Marine Corps, and their stock had served as the cornerstone for the residents of Hope.
If Pete noticed the expression, he didn’t show it—he was too busy scowling at the ground. After wrapping Moore’s body in a tarp, they’d opened the rear cargo hatch and begun the process of sorting and staging their equipment. Settling into a circle, they tended to their bumps and bruises while Molly spun her tale and Hatcher poked through the contents of a spaghetti and meatballs MRE.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, girl. But blowing up the generators throws a big-time monkey wrench in our plans.”
Miles winced, but Molly seemed to take it in stride.
“Whatever you say. In my book, you don’t get to show up to the party nine years late, then bitch about how big a mess the place is.”
Pete stared her down before letting a smile crack his face. “I like your spunk, kid.” Turning, he continued, “Doc, what are the chances we can run the ELF transmitter off the solar panels?” Their original plan of using the generator on the Orca to supplement any on-site power equipment was out, for obvious reasons.
Sandy spread his arms wide and pitched his voice lower. “Damn it, man, I’m a doctor, not an electrical engineer!”
About half of the group broke up in subdued laughter. Hatcher wore a bewildered expression. The young boy’s companion smiled and said, “TV show, Hatch. Star Trek.”
“Is that like SpongeBob? I remember SpongeBob.”
“No, not really.”
Hatcher shrugged, returning his attention to his spaghetti and meatballs.
Molly sighed. “Whatever.”
Miles pointed out, “If they were going to put the kill switch on a timer, they had to have some sort of dependable power source. Even generators wouldn’t last that long, sitting in the open without maintenance. The solar panels have got to put out enough power—why put them in, otherwise?” He turned to Molly. “The exclusion zone was only until Henry was able to cure his infected men, right?”
She cocked her head to one side as she thought. “He said something about the panels being barely enough to keep the safe zone going, so I guess it makes sense that they weren’t intended for that.”
“There we go,” Miles said. “Now for the question of the hour.” He scarcely made the prompt before there were nods all around. Enemy fire hadn’t been a major concern for years.
Darnell voiced the mystery at the back of everyone’s mind. “Who shot us down?”
Pete’s frown returned, and he nodded to Molly. “You said the mercenaries had Humvees up there—did one of them have a surface-to-air-missile mount?”
With a baffled expression, Molly said, “I don’t know what that looks like.”
Byers chipped in, now. “The rear half would have looked more like a pickup truck bed, with a large central, pillar I suppose you’d say, coming up out of it. There’d have been big boxes on either side of that.”
She started nodding halfway through the description. “Yes, okay, I remember seeing something like that.”
“Sitting out in the open for nine years would explain why most of them missed,” Guglik said. Her broken arm hung from a makeshift sling, the bones splinted with cut-down branches. “Which begs the question—who fired them?”
“Henry?” Miles guessed, then remembered the tracks worn through the middle of the camp. “But, no, it couldn’t be—could it? Were there enough supplies up there for one man to hold out that long?”
Molly had gone pale. “Look, we stay as far away from the top of the mountain as possible, and I’d suggest you do the same.”
Pete frowned. “Have you been back since the two of you escaped?”
“Just once, but it was a mistake. If I hadn’t come at it from the safe zone, I don’t think I would have made it out. It’s suicide to use the road.”
“We should have most of the traffic cleared out,” Miles said, trying to keep from using the voice he reserved for his daughter during night terrors. He suspected the young woman might find it insulting. “It’s not like we haven’t done this sort of thing before, and we have the specialized weaponry to level the playing field.” I hope, he thought. If Henry Schantz wasn’t alive, that pretty much implied that an alpha or something more had fired on the blimp, and if zulu had achieved that level of tool use, he didn’t like the implications for the future.
“I—” her voice shook, and she hugged herself and squeezed as if to compress herself into a ball to avoid the questioning stares of the crew. “I don’t think you’d believe me even if you saw it.”
Miles took a look at Pete and raised an eyebrow. His uncle gave him a minute shrug, then said “Molly, I’m not asking you to go back. You can stay in the safe zone. Just, I don’t know, give us some directions, or something.”
She composed herself before replying. “I’m not afraid to go. It’s just—fine. It’s your funeral.”
Pete pulled out a printout of some of their more recent overhead. “The camp is on the summit, but what’s this building here?” He pointed to a square construction northwest of the old parking area. If not for the high-resolution photo from the drone, Miles doubted they’d have noticed it. In the older satellite overhead, it blended into the surrounding tree cover.
She didn’t need more than a glance at the picture. “It’s a fire lookout tower. We went up once, looking for supplies, but we didn’t hang around long. It’s outside of the exclusion zone and I didn’t want to risk getting stuck up there.”
He nodded, then turned to address Byers. “Sergeant, I’ll provide overwatch and sniper cover. From there, I should be able to range most of the camp with ease. The stairs might be a trick, but I think I can manage.”
Byers kept his face expressionless, but Miles could tell from his tone that he didn’t like the idea. “Major, I’d like to detail a few men to provide security.”
Pete shook his head before Byers finished. “With Guglik’s injury, she’s a scratch from the mission. She’s my spotter, and can watch my back.” He looked over their headcount, then added, “Darnell, too.”
The pilot nodded. “Works for me, Major.”
“Even if they can manage those switchback stairs, it’ll bottleneck them. If we can’t stymie them until you complete the mission, I guess we’re waiting for evac. We should be able to broadcast from the top.” Once they’d defused the standoff with Hatcher, they’d put the antenna up, but were unable to receive any confirmation that command had received their broadcast. If nothing else, the lookout tower was significantly taller than the trees at the edge of their clearing.
Pete surveyed the group. Miles found it more than a little ironic that he and Hatcher were the only ones who didn’t wilt under the intensity of his glare. Try growing up with it, people. He managed to keep a grin off his face. Assessment complete, his uncle nodded and said, “Load up. We’re going in.”
May 7, 2018
Taum Sauk State Park, Missouri
Z-Da
y + 201
His undeniable brilliance undone, his master stroke derailed—by, of all things, a high school girl—Henry Schantz ran for his life.
Per Connelly, less than half a dozen of his men were possibly infected. From the speed at which things outside seemed to have gone to hell, that estimate seemed low. He’d half-hoped that switching the power back onto solar would have activated the exclusion zone, but the blast must have damaged the antenna—the infected in the camp remained unaffected.
No matter. If he could survive the next few minutes, the girl had actually solved a problem for him. With the concern for his security detail removed, he now had more than enough neutralization doses for his personal safety, and the ELF antenna was far enough removed from the blast area that it had avoided any damage.
He locked the exterior door and tried not to wonder how long it could withstand a determined assault. Henry would have preferred a solid steel barrier, but the crew assigned to construct the facility seemed to have cut corners. The door was aluminum-sheathed, but it had a hollow core filled with insulation for weather-proofing. At once, a minor annoyance turned into a potential threat to survival. Millions of dollars spent on this project and some ingrate picked up an ordinary door at Home Depot.
The lab doors were much more solid, and he let out a sigh of relief as he passed through each in turn. If necessary, the buffer zone could serve as an airlock, with the air pressure in the lab lowered to prevent the escape of airborne contaminants.
The nanomachines, by design, weren’t transmittable that way. While it complicated the logistics of the initial spread and contamination, Henry’s goal was sprucing the world up a bit, not wiping the slate clean.
He’d done another thing right, he noted as he stepped into the lab. His work at the electrical switching panel had rerouted the supply from the solar panel inverters to the lab. “Things are looking up,” he said to himself, putting a little tune to it. “Antidote, gun, timer, run for it.”
The construction crew had mounted a small safe in one of the wall cabinets. Kneeling, he tapped the combination in and pulled the door open. A neatly-piled stack of injectors sat next to a Scorpion automatic pistol. He grabbed the top injector, flipped the cap off, and jabbed it into his thigh. The sting and ensuing burn were surprisingly intense. No wonder the damn monkeys yelped about it.
Considering the reduced stack, he decided to use a second. The counter-nanos could generally take out an equal number of their murderous counterparts, but the safety in using them now came at the expense of longevity. The miniature machines he’d just injected himself with had no facility for self-repair, protein consumption, or reproduction. Even with the gun, it was impossible to guess how many bites or scrapes he might suffer in the process of escape. Better to be safe than sorry.
He jammed the remaining injectors in the pockets of his lab coat and retrieved the Scorpion. He didn’t have any extra ammunition for it, but the curved magazine in front of the trigger guard held thirty brass-and-copper projectiles. More than enough to get me from the door to a truck. After that, he’d be home free. Make his way off the mountain, down to the river, find a boat, and head to the island. A bit of sailing would be a nice distraction after six months of hell, a return to something approaching normalcy.
Firearms were tools for the weak-minded, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t studied the weapon Connelly had given him in detail. Mechanically, the design was simple enough. He pulled the charging handle back to load the first round, then flipped the safety switch off. Satisfied he was ready, Henry looped the weapon’s strap around his neck and across his chest and headed back to the lab doors. All that remained for him to do was to set the kill switch timer, and he could make his escape.
The pounding from outside became audible as he passed through the first door. By the time he got through the second, it was even more pronounced, and urgency lent a speed to his steps as he turned left and trotted down the hallway. The interface for the ELF transmitter was in a small room at the center of the rear corridor tracing the building’s perimeter. He cursed the design now—there was no reason they couldn’t have put an access door at the back of the lab or even more than one exit door. His anger at the cabal members detailed with the construction was a waste of time, he reminded himself. Even if he’d taken sole responsibility for this aspect of the project, even he wouldn’t have anticipated the issues that stranded him here.
I should have been lying on the beach, not stuck in the middle of nowhere! Grimacing, Henry turned the first corner, but the cracking sound of wood brought him to a halt. He turned in time to see the upper half of the door fold in, pressed out of the frame by a mass of groping, blood-streaked arms.
“Shit,” he said. “Looks like the gang’s all here.”
Fair enough, he supposed. Take care of the infected now and he could set the timer at his leisure. He took hold of the Scorpion and trained the barrel down the hall. The sights were simple. A white-painted notch on the front lined up with a small circle at the rear, and when the two lined up, the barrel pointed at whatever the shooter was aiming for. Hardly rocket science.
The door gave way, and his lip curled in disdain as Connelly and his men rushed the corridor. Blood streaked their tortured forms, many of the men bearing visible indicators of the wounds that had brought them to this state. Wait till you see the gray of their eyes, he thought, and his sneer turned into a raucous laugh.
Once the approaching mass reached the halfway point, Henry called out, “Connelly, you sanctimonious prick! You’re fired!”
He took aim at the lead infected and pulled the trigger. Despite his assurance, he wasn’t ready for the sudden storm of light and sound that poured from the gun. Hot brass spat from the Scorpion’s receiver, and the gun twisted in his hands until it fell silent. Echoes of the gunfire bounced around the hallway, though for a moment he couldn’t hear it for the ringing in his ears.
Henry stared at the gun, dumb-founded. He’d expected it to fire a single shot, but when he’d turned the safety switch, he’d set it fully-automatic—a mode he hadn’t even known the Scorpion had.
Connelly and his men didn’t care for his plight. He’d managed to plant several rounds into one of their fellows, but none had been a headshot, and the group surged forward with renewed vigor, spurred into action by the light and sound in front of them.
Shaking off the surprise, Henry turned to run, throwing the gun on the floor behind him as he ran.
His hesitation had been too long, and even as he sprinted forward, fueled by terror and adrenaline, the leading wave of his creation reached out for him with grasping hands, pulling him to the ground and burying him under a mass of gnashing teeth and rending hands.
Some might have called that irony or even justice, but all Henry knew until everything went black was soul-searing agony and the hot, red wash of blood.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
October 18, 2026
Taum Sauk Mountain, eastern Missouri
Z-Day + 3,287
Negotiating the stairs with his prosthetics was a stone bitch, but Pete pushed through. If anything, the recognition that Darnell was huffing and puffing just as much put the ghost of a smile on his face.
Guglik, broken arm and all, didn’t strike him as bothered in the least.
That’s one hell of a woman, Pete marveled. “Get the antenna up,” he ordered Darnell. “I want to get on the horn with base and get evac headed this way as soon as possible. If this goes more sideways than it already has I want to get the hell out of Dodge.”
If the Navy pilot had a problem with a Marine ordering him around, he didn’t let on. Pete reminded himself that Fleet had had nine years to polish away most of the surviving rivalries between the branches. He slipped the straps of his rifle case off of his shoulders and unpacked the Savage. His first look at the big, bolt-action .338 Lapua drew him up short. He’d hauled it to California and back, but the last person to fire it had been Charlie. What had he told his friend? Ah,
right—scratch it and I’ll kick your ass. As last words to one of his oldest friends, they lacked a little something. The weapon wouldn’t fit in the case with the suppressor attached, but there was special cut-out in the foam made for it. Pete pulled the big can out of its slot, gave it a once-over, then engaged it to the quick-release mount threaded on the end of the barrel. The rifle was now nearly as long as he was tall.
God help me, we’re going to make it worth it, brother. The rail at the top of the tower was just a bit too low to be a perfect support, but he’d survive. He laid the rifle in place and found the camp before glassing it with the scope.
Between the overgrown hulks of housing trailers, the shredded, rotten remains of tents flapped in the breeze. There were still visible scorch marks around the rusting metal wreckage of the generators at the rear of the camp. He couldn’t help but admire Molly’s mentor—the old boy had taught her well. Even if he hadn’t made it himself, he’d passed enough of his expertise on for the youngsters to make it. In his book, that was mission accomplished.
The perimeter of the camp was overgrown, the grasses and weeds fighting for supremacy, but the interior was relatively clear. That wasn’t all that surprising given the obvious path that they’d seen on overheads. The cleared areas simplified his search, and for a moment, he allowed himself to hope that they had, indeed, drawn away most of the infected in the area.
And then he saw it.
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