Scorched Earth: Book 2 in the Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series: (Zero Hour - Book 2)

by Justin Bell

  “Why’d you have to say that, bro?” asked Garza from the back seat. All three men were dressed in their military uniforms, camouflage BDU’s, strapped up with tactical vests, M4 automatic rifles and kevlar composite helmets. Anyone who was watching from the side streets would find it a strange sight indeed, a full-blown military unit deployed in the middle of downtown Boston. Considering what had gone on in the city over the past forty-eight hours, however, the vision of the Humvee screaming through the city streets was probably the least concerning thing they’d seen.

  “So what are our orders?” asked Garza.

  “Way to pay attention, Lex,” snapped Smith.

  “Cut me some slack, Smitty, I’m the one who used to live in this stupid city, remember? I might have been a little overcome with emotion.”

  “Man, the only time I ever seen you overcome with emotion was that time we went to Club Rhino—”

  “Zip it, Dougie, I don’t want to hear how that story ended.”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure, Smitty, huh?” Garza chuckled in the back seat.

  “Anyway,” Smith continued, “we’re on the hunt for a downed Blackhawk. Supposedly an advanced team was here when everything went down; they think the Blackhawk might have gotten caught in the middle of it.”

  “So we’re just driving around looking for a wrecked helicopter?”

  Smith hauled the wheel to the right, bringing the military vehicle around in a tight right turn, curling around the corner of a building littered with broken windows and shattered brick. Smoke was thicker and the heat that permeated the air grew hotter and more oppressive with each street taken deeper into the city.

  “Man, this is worse than Iraq,” Garza mumbled from the back seat. “What is it, like ninety out here?”

  “No big thing,” Douglas replied, “just the corpses burning.”

  “You’re sick,” hissed Smith, hauling the wheel left, taking the Humvee around another building. As they made the corner, they could see the smoke growing thicker and more substantial up ahead, they could feel the hot air and see the vague orange glow of active burning deeper into downtown. Boston was a city on the edge of apocalypse and the three soldiers felt like they were driving straight into the belly of it.

  “This is some crazy crap,” whispered Douglas, leaning to the right and glancing up toward the tops of the buildings, disappearing up into a darkened fog.

  “City will never be the same, that’s for—”

  “Watch it!” screamed Garza from the back seat, snapping Smith to attention. Up ahead, through the windshield, Garza saw the yellow blur of motion, a wide streak surging ahead of them, cruising down a perpendicular street several yards ahead, the vehicle lurching forward out of control. With a shattering bang and smash, the yellow streak slammed into a building headlong, the blunt nose of the vehicle disappearing in a cloud of rolling dust and splintering glass.

  Smith slammed on the brakes, pulling the wheel sharp left, bringing the Humvee into a tight sideways skid, tires catching pavement and screaming, leaving darkened smudges along the smooth paved surface of the road. The Humvee shuddered to a shaking halt, several feet away from where the yellow vehicle had collided with the building, the slow, light ticking of both engines sounding above the post-collision silence.

  “What is that?” asked Garza, leaning to look out his rear window.

  “Is it a fire truck?” Douglas asked.

  “Yeah, looks like a fire truck,” Smith agreed.

  “That driver’s going to be one hurting unit,” said Garza. “Should we go check it out?”

  Smith twisted around in the driver’s seat, looking at the man in the back. “Get the rifles ready,” he said. “We’ll go check it out, but we’re going to go prepared.”

  Garza nodded and stepped out of the back seat to retrieve the rifles.

  ***

  Agent Craig leaned back against the smooth wall of the narrow hallway leading deeper into Fort Detrick from the Team Ten Command Center. It was quiet out here, a strange serene peace at stark opposite to the crazed near-chaos of the square room beyond. Even operating in the small conference room as he had been with his intelligence cohorts, there had been an overflow of nervous energy that permeated through the walls, threatening to consume all four of them even as they worked so hard to separate themselves from it.

  He slid his cellphone from his pocket and thumbed it awake, holding it there, looking at the screen as if it might actually blip to life and speak to him. It had been silent for thirty-six hours and nothing in the Command Center had convinced him that was going to change any time soon. The Team Ten response had focused purely on Boston, a directed and concerted effort on that small market in Quincy, and for good reason, but while they had been honing in on that, the rest of the country was crumbling apart at the foundation. Even if they managed to get rudimentary cell service back online in Boston, Craig had doubts that it would hold up under the strain of nationwide calamity.

  A single, dull throb ran through the flat surface of the device in his hand. His eyes narrowed at the notification screen, a tiny, distinct icon floating near the top where there’d been only empty space for a full day and a half before.

  This wasn’t his personal device, this was a specific agency-supplied phone, a direct line of communication to the intelligence boots on the ground in Boston, and since things had truly gone sideways, it had remained completely and frustratingly silent.

  Until now. The phone pumped again, a jolt in his fingers. It wasn’t a fluke. It wasn’t a low battery alert. They were trying to reach him.

  Craig pushed himself up from the wall and turned toward the Command Center just as the door slid open, seeing Agent Wakefield practically leap in the entrance.

  “Did you get it?” Wakefield barked, holding his own phone up. “Did you get the notification?”

  “I got it!” Craig replied.

  Wakefield gestured toward him to follow him and slipped back into the bustling room, Craig hot on his heels. Immediately they hit the wall of noise, a clattering cackle of voices over the persistent underscore of computer chimes and mechanical wizardry. Bodies dashed back and forth, as if the command center was some high-tech demolition derby, each participant glancing off each other shoulder to shoulder as they moved from one side to the next, jumping from console to console. Just beyond the throng of military personnel, they both spotted Colonel Reeves, still standing by the communications station as he had been for nearly forty-eight hours. He seemed to sense their presence and turned toward them, his eyes pinning them with his intense stare. It was as if he was a bull and their suits and ties were red capes, a trigger to his immediate rage.

  “I told you I don’t want you in here,” he hissed, stepping through a trio of collected green uniforms, sending them withdrawing before him. “I’ve got hard working people in here doing tough work. If you’re not a technician, a comm specialist, or a geneticist, get the hell out—”

  “Colonel, you’re going to want to hear this,” Craig said, trying to get the word in before Wakefield could.

  “I sincerely doubt that,” Reeves replied.

  “We got a ping,” Wakefield interjected. “Both of us.”

  “A ping?”

  “A signal. From Boston. On a top secret frequency,” started Wakefield.

  “It’s from the Blackhawk,” Craig continued. “It’s gotta be.”

  “Give me one good reason why I should buy this garbage.”

  They both flipped their phones around and showed him their screens, each one opened to the unique back-channel communications app that was loaded on them. A distinctive Department of Homeland Security watermark was carved into the slate backdrop of the application, and a tiny green pin prick slowly throbbed at specific coordinates within a satellite view of the city.

  “It’s a locator beacon,” Craig said. “We both believe it’s where the Blackhawk went down. Team Ten could be there right now, and even if they’re not, their data could be.”<
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  Reeves glared at their phones, his jaw set firm, the thin tufts of gray beard scattered throughout the ridges of his jawline. He didn’t speak to either of them, but he turned toward Lieutenant Hayes.

  “Get Chicopee Air Force Base on the horn,” he said. “I want a UH-60 and an MH-6 Little Bird in the air in ten minutes and on their way to—” he stopped speaking for a moment, whirling back toward the two intelligence agents. With a sweep of his hand, he whipped the phone from Wakefield’s hand and offered it up to Hayes. “I want both helicopters to these coordinates pronto. We believe Team Ten’s transport went down in this area, and they should be prepared for rescue and recovery operations. Give the order!”

  Hayes nodded and spun back to her comm station, opening the channel to Chicopee.

  “If they have the free birds, they’ll get them there,” Reeves promised. “Now, the two of you just better hope that you’re right.”

  Craig and Wakefield looked at each other, both of them feeling relatively confident, but with the way things had been going for the past forty-eight hours, neither one of them could be certain of anything.

  Chapter 3

  Smitty moved around the left side of the fire truck, lifting his M4, letting the barrel drift rear to front, his knees bent and arms locked. His limbs shifted in steady, calculated motion underneath the camouflage, moving quick and quiet across the rough pavement of the Boston city street. Around the other side of the truck, Douglas moved in a similar manner, hugging the right side of the long vehicle, letting his shoulder touch the bolted metal.

  The squared-off front of the truck was buried in an already ramshackle building, the concrete wall broken open and caved in, chunks of rock and spray of glass scattered over the surface of the rescue vehicle and the pavement itself. Douglas’s boots cracked over broken glass as he moved toward the front, which was invisible amidst the shattered rubble.

  “Driver’s side is empty!” shouted Smitty.

  “How the heck was the truck moving then?” asked Douglas from the other side. Lexington Garza came up on Douglas’s flank, his own rifle pointing back behind him. He glanced up along the straightened edge of the top of the vehicle.

  “Says this truck is for Logan Airport,” he said. “We’re a ways from Logan Airport.”

  “They probably called in all the reserves,” said Smitty. “Nobody had an off day this time.”

  “I get that,” Garza replied. “But wasn’t Logan the most hard hit? The plane crashes and all that stuff? Seems to me, they’d be calling reserves to Logan Airport, not from.”

  “How the heck are we supposed to know?” asked Douglas.

  On the other side of the truck, Smitty took a cautious step on top of a pile of broken rock and concrete, trying to get a closer look at the front of the firetruck. The driver’s side window had been shattered by flying stone, and he could tell nobody was inside, but something didn’t smell right about this situation. Something smelled very, very wrong. Something besides scorched earth and rotting bodies.

  “I don’t like this, man,” Douglas said from the passenger side, repeating precisely what Smith was thinking.

  “Driving past a few dozen corpses on the way in here, and this is what you choose not to like?” Garza asked.

  “Hey, at least I know the corpses aren’t gonna jump out at me,” Douglas replied, glancing around.

  “And what the heck is going to jump out of here?” Smith asked from across the way. “Firetruck nosedived into a concrete building. Pretty sure there’s nobody ducking around inside waiting to attack us.”

  “Besides,” Garza said, “why would they? We’re just a bunch of scrubs followin’ orders.”

  “Scrubs following orders with automatic rifles and a Humvee,” Douglas said. “When the world is going to crap like it is, those are some valuable commodities, right?”

  “I suppose,” Garza replied. He drifted left toward an alley a short distance away from where the truck collided, his eyes focusing on the Humvee about thirty feet away. Smoke and soot settled down on top of the vehicle, and the air was thick with the smell of smoke. It was humid, as if mid-July, though they were not even yet in the throes of spring, and there seemed to be this ever-present flickering of light from all around them. Even forty-eight hours after the plane crashes that brought Boston to its knees, fires continued to rage. Day by day the men and women available to fight the fires went down instead of up, more and more abandoned fire trucks and emergency vehicles littering the narrow streets that sliced through towering buildings. Smith, Douglas, and Garza had noticed the growing congestion within the valleys of the Boston skyline and wondered just how long it would be before the city was completely written off.

  Maybe it already was.

  “This truck is empty. One hundred percent,” said Douglas, looking into the passenger window, holding his weapon close to his chest. “Nobody home.”

  “So who the heck drove it into the dang wall?” asked Smith.

  “That’s the million dollar question,” Garza replied, drifting farther away, walking to the left of the Humvee, examining another side street.

  Over by the driver’s side window, Smitty stepped down from the rocks, shaking his head. His rifle dipped slightly, the barrel pointing toward the ground, and when he saw the figure peel away from the shadows, his first reaction wasn’t danger or alarm, it was concern.

  The man approached, taking careful steps, wearing a full firefighter’s kit, thick jacket with reflective stripes and dark colored pants, but it wasn’t his outfit that drew Smitty’s attention, it was his face.

  Although he was dressed as a fireman, he wasn’t wearing the firefighter’s helmet or mask, he simply walked out from behind the building, his head a coiled and twisted mass, burnt dark and knotted into a shape barely resembling human. The majority of his hair was burnt away, but the bare minimum facial structure remained, a lumpy oval shape perched on his padded shoulders, the shining skin split where his mouth was, yellow teeth revealed in a parted smile. His eyes were completely visible within the ruined flesh of his eyelids, and the bulbous shape of matted flesh passed for a nose.

  Smith gaped, his mouth hanging open, moving slightly as he tried to form some words.

  “Okay?” he finally stammered. “Are you okay?”

  The man took a few steps and Smitty walked toward him, releasing his left hand from the foregrip of the M4 and reaching out to help. With a swiftness that betrayed his injured appearance, the burned man charged forward, thrusting his hand out and wrapping it around the thick body of the tactical rifle, pushing it up and back, pointing the barrel toward the sky. Smitty’s fingers twisted around the handle as he pushed, his thumb actually popping out of its socket, and he was just about to yell in surprise and pain, but the man continued his forward charge, barreling into him and shoving him back into the metal hide of the firetruck. His back struck with an echoing bang and the burnt face man wrenched the weapon free of his hand. Still trying to recover his voice, Smitty leaned forward, but the strange man kicked him full in the stomach, then torqued his waist, slamming the bridge of his nose with a swift, rigid elbow strike.

  Bone shattered and cartilage popped, Smitty’s eyes rolling up in his head, looking comically at the underside of his kevlar helmet, and the man swiveled away from him, letting Smitty’s body topple forward onto the pavement where it lay still.

  “Smitty?” Douglas called from the other side. “Was that you?” He turned and started around the rear of the truck, looking over toward Garza who was still several yards away. “You hear that, Lex?” he asked.

  Garza nodded from the side street and started moving toward him, weapon at the ready. Douglas rounded the flat shape of the rear of the ladder truck, bringing his weapon around, just to be on the safe side.

  The man with the burnt face was right there, moving forward, in on him, and Douglas stumbled backwards surprised.

  “Holy—” shouted Garza from a distance away and he lifted his weapon, drawing aim on the
man charging toward Douglas, but his fellow soldier was too close and he held his finger on the trigger guard, hesitating.

  An arm shot out, the burnt man slamming Douglas’s gun arm into the steel corner of the firetruck. With an audible pop, his arm snapped, both bones in the forearm shattering, and Douglas screamed loud and long, the weapon falling from splayed fingers, clattering onto the street.

  “I’ve got you dead to rights!” screamed Garza, his weapon moving with the motion of the man with the burnt face. “I will take you down!”

  A sound escaped the strange man’s lips, or what used to pass for lips, and for a moment, Douglas thought he just might be laughing. Then he was moving forward again, wrenching down Douglas’s broken arm, jamming his shoulder into the specialist’s chest, then lifting him up off the ground over the top of his arched back, and slamming spine-first to the unforgiving pavement. Pain ratcheted through his shoulders and raced down his spine, his legs shooting out, a splash of numbness flooding them. Even as Douglas went down, the man with the burnt face was moving forward again, ducking right, a trio of rifle shots echoing from the Humvee where the soldier fired. Sparks jetted from the metal skin of the firetruck as the disfigured man just snaked out of the way of the bullets, snatching up Douglas’s rifle as he did. More gunfire exploded, and the burnt man remained crouched behind the vehicle, holding his M4 in combat ready position, waiting for a slight break in the action.

  Four more shots blasted, two more sparks shooting from the truck, while the paved road chunked up shrapnel at his feet, and the scarred man shoved forward, sneaking between the smashed road and the firetruck, keeping himself pinned to it as tight as possible. Coming around the corner of the vehicle, he adjusted aim swiftly, seeing the flash of motion by the Humvee as Garza was coming up from behind it, readying his own weapon.

  The burnt man squinted over the iron sight on the M4, barely able to close one eye with his wrecked and melted flesh, but he brought it on target quickly and even as Garza was adjusting his own aim, he fired three quick times, the weapon barking and kicking in his hands.