Wasteland

by Noah Mann

  “Filled with sand and sealed at both ends with blast resistant hatches,” he said. “All the crew down there has to do is open the lower hatch and the sand spills out into a dump pit through a grate in the capsule floor. They climb up, drop the upper hatch, and dig through three feet of Wyoming topsoil to freedom. Or whatever the hell on earth created up here resembles.”

  It was a simple, even elegant concept. With one flaw as I saw it.

  “We’re not down there to dump the sand,” Neil pointed out, noting the same limitation I’d seen.

  “Missile crew gone rogue,” Ben said. “They somehow got the codes. They’re going to launch. Don’t you think there’s a contingency to get access? Our people have thought of every insane scenario you can imagine.”

  “And some we haven’t,” I said.

  Ben nodded and reached to my pack, the compact shovel still lashed there. He opened it and locked the blade in place.

  “Three feet,” he said.

  I shed my pack and rested my AR atop it before taking the shovel from Ben.

  “Guess I’m digging,” I said, then jabbed the blade into the dry, packed earth.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later I hit something solid and metal. With Ben and my friends watching, I expanded the hole and cleared the remaining dirt clear of what was easily describable as a three foot diameter hatch. With no handle or apparent means of opening it.

  “Only supposed to be opened from inside,” Ben said, then pointed to the wall of dirt on the south side of the hole. “Two feet down, dig horizontal for about a foot.”

  I began scraping the dirt away on that side of the hole, adding it to the mound I’d made with what I’d removed already. Twelve inches in, almost exactly, it seemed, was a small plastic tube with screwcap ends.

  “In that tube is a contact transmitter,” Ben explained. “You put it against the metal hatch, enter a code, and both lower and upper hatches open. The sand drains away and we’re in.”

  I looked to the plastic tube and was about to unscrew one end of it when the calm desolation surrounding us erupted.

  Thirty Eight

  Apropos to the hole seeming like a foxhole, the dirt twenty feet away began to dance from dozens of impacts, the crack of automatic fire following almost immediately. I crouched in the hole and grabbed my AR from where it lay near the mound I’d created while digging, more rounds striking, more fire sounding, my eye catching glimpses of muzzle flashes from multiple weapons near the farm to the north.

  “Take cover!”

  It was instinct that made me shout the unnecessary command. Elaine and Neil were already pulling Ben behind the wrecked HUMVEE, good leg pushing to assist, the other mostly dragging a line in the dried earth. More rounds chewed at the dirt around us. Separate streams of fire, some automatic, some single, rapid shots from semiautomatic weapons, came from directions that did not create a crossfire, but that did pin us down.

  “They’re firing from both sides of the farmhouse!” Neil shouted.

  Several bursts of fire peppered the side of the HUMVEE facing the farm, outbuildings scattered about the property allowing separated points of contact. Tiny showers of sparks erupted from each impact on the vehicle’s upgraded outer skin. While the incoming fire was focused on the HUMVEE I took the opportunity to roll out of the hole and position myself behind the mound of excavated dirt. I pressed myself close to the right edge of the earthen barrier and removed the suppressor from my AR, then attempted aimed fire at the farmhouse. Even at a two hundred and fifty yards distance I could see at least some of my rounds impact, puffs of dust blooming near the door and windows facing us.

  But almost immediately the return fire drove me back to full cover behind the mound. I pulled myself into the smallest ball I could, feet and arms curled, making me almost fetal. That was when I heard Neil fire.

  He tapped off single rounds from his AK, leaning around the back of the vehicle, then quickly taking cover once again. A few feet away Elaine kept Ben shielded, the MP5 she wielded no more than a nuisance if fired at this range.

  “That might be useful,” Elaine said to Ben, eyeing the Dragunov.

  “If it wasn’t empty,” he told her.

  “We can keep trading fire like this all day,” I told my friends. “But I’m betting they have more ammo to sustain them.”

  “Then we have to make a move,” Elaine said.

  Rounds whizzed overhead. Elaine and Ben instinctively ducked lower behind the HUMVEE, watching the charred rubble surrounding the elevator shaft dance with bursts of black as dozens of rounds landed long.

  “Over open ground,” I reminded her.

  “I know!” she shouted back, holding her submachine gun above the hood of the vehicle and firing blindly, an expression of defiance as much as it was rage.

  “We don’t have a lot of options here,” Neil said.

  I rolled, squeezed off some more rounds, then returned to cover and looked to Ben.

  “Is there anything down there that we can use against them?” I asked him.

  “If you’re talking about guns, nothing more than a few sidearms and rifles,” he answered.

  Then, in the instant after he replied, the look about him changed. He turned to the small hole we’d dug, then toward the unseen farmhouse, and finally lifted his face to the nearly cloudless sky above. Some thought had seized him. Some possibility.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. His gaze just kept shifting, from the hole to the sky, ignoring the farmhouse in the distance now.

  “Dammit, Ben! If there’s something we can do—”

  “There isn’t!” he cut me off. “I have my mission. It has to take priority. I have to...”

  He stopped. As if the argument he had to make was suddenly unworthy. Or unworkable.

  “Ben,” Elaine said, as gently as she could considering the situation, reaching to his face and turning it toward her. “There is something we can do, isn’t there?”

  He shook his head.

  “If we go down there and do what he needs to do, then we’re stuck here,” I said. “They can bury us. Just fill the hole in and push the wreck on top of the hatch and we die down there.”

  Neil looked to Ben, wanting him to say that what I was describing could not happen. But the man stayed silent.

  “Christ,” Neil said, poking his AK around the back of the armored vehicle and firing a burst toward the attackers. “I’m not leaving everyone to die! Not when we have the key to survival!”

  I poked my head just clear of the mound and drilled a half dozen shots at the muzzle flashes sending rounds our way. Neil pulled back behind cover and checked his weapon, feeding a fresh magazine in, pulling more from the pack he’d shed and shoving them into the cargo pockets in his pants. Ammo to be at the ready while...

  ...moving.

  “What the hell are you doing?!” I screamed at him.

  “You said it,” Neil reminded me. “We stay here, we die. I’m going to rush them. You cover me.”

  “That’s suicide,” Elaine told him.

  “So is doing nothing!” Neil fired back at her.

  He chambered a fresh round into his AK and shifted position toward the front of the HUMVEE, crouch walking past Ben and Elaine until he was just short of the twisted bumper.

  “You can’t do this,” I said.

  “I have to,” my friend told me, gripping his AK tight as a volley of machine gun rounds jolted the lightly armored vehicle.

  If he was going, I couldn’t stop him. All I could do was what he needed—provide cover. Useless cover. If he made it twenty yards it would be a miracle.

  But that was what we needed. A miracle. One right here, right now.

  When it came, there was no way I could have imagined the form it would take.

  “Wait!” Elaine shouted, grabbing at the back of Neil’s coat.

  He reached back to forcibly remove her hold on him but stopped with his hand wrapped around her wrist and hi
s gaze fixed on Ben, as was hers.

  “Just wait,” she repeated, glancing to me behind the mound. “There’s something he can do.”

  She looked away from me and focused on Ben.

  “You can do something,” she said. “Can’t you.”

  “Look, I told—”

  “I know what you said before, but you were lying,” Elaine told him, the accusation delivered so mildly that it seemed almost soothing. “Weren’t you?”

  The fire quieted and I looked past the mound. In the distance I saw a figure run from one building to the next. Then another. And another. By the time I brought my AR around to send some rounds their way, more than a dozen had crossed to cover.

  “We’ve got a lot of company out there,” I said, and the fire began again, tearing at the pile of earth and the exposed side of the HUMVEE.

  “You were lying, weren’t you?” Elaine asked again.

  With some clear resignation, maybe relief as well, Ben simply nodded.

  “What the hell can we do?” Neil demanded, staying low as he spun to face the man.

  Ben looked to Neil, then to Elaine, and finally to me across the small patch of open ground that separated us.

  “OMP,” he said.

  “OMP?” Elaine puzzled. “You mean EMP? Electromagnetic Pulse?”

  Ben shook his head. More rounds whipped over us, and another weapon opened up, firing slow, loud single shots that slammed into the HUMVEE, sending sharp jolts through the armored skin. The heavy vehicle seemed to lurch with each impact.

  “They’re firing a fifty at us,” I said, the power behind the shots leaving no doubt that they’d brought a .50 caliber rifle into the mix.

  I slid from behind the mound and rolled back into the hole. A second later the pile of earth that had shielded me erupted into a shower of dirt and rock as a devastating round from the .50 breached the makeshift barrier, cleaving a ragged valley through it.

  “Eric!” Elaine screamed out to me, terrified.

  I poked my head above the rim of the hole, a natural rise in the terrain shielding me just enough from the fire.

  “I’m okay,” I said, my heart thudding, the miss way too close for comfort.

  Relieved that I was still with them, Elaine turned to Ben again, more drive about her now. She took a handful of his collar and leaned a bit toward him.

  “What the hell is this OMP thing?” she pressed him.

  “On My Pos,” Ben said, receiving only puzzled looks in reply. “On My Position. It’s a last resort in defense of a position. Not even danger close. It means you’re calling down a strike, artillery or air, right on top of you because the enemy has already breached your lines and is knocking at the door.”

  “What the hell are you babbling about?” Neil asked harshly. “There’s no damn artillery unit. No aircraft waiting to save our asses. We’ve got...”

  Then it came to Neil. And to Elaine. And to me. At almost the same instant that my friend listed what we didn’t have available, we all realized what we did have available.

  From the stunned look we all shared, Ben knew we finally understood.

  “It was a last ditch protocol that the missile crews could use to prevent enemies from getting control of the launch control center, or one of the missiles. The mindset when this was conceived was all about invasion. Some sneak airdrop by Soviet forces during the Cold War when things turned suddenly hot. Something that would overwhelm the security forces normally tasked with defending the missile wings.”

  “You’re saying...”

  Elaine couldn’t finish her thought, her read of what Ben was beginning to explain.

  “Yes,” Ben confirmed. “One missile in the flight can be fired to detonate overhead. It rises to ten thousand feet and the warhead detonates. Everything below that isn’t under some sort of blast and thermal protection is wiped out.”

  A .50 caliber round ripped through the near side armored window of the HUMVEE, blasting bits of thick glass after having drilled through a weakened spot on the opposite side of the vehicle. Elaine and Neil covered Ben, like surgeons shielding their patient in a war zone.

  “Can you do what you just described?” I asked.

  Neil and Elaine eased back from where they’d hunched over Ben.

  “I only have one code,” Ben said. “Just one. If I initiate an OMP, I can’t fulfill my mission.”

  “To hell with your mission!” Neil cursed. “You need to clear your head of that duty crap and think for yourself.”

  “He’s right,” Elaine said.

  Neil looked to her, almost surprised at her concurrence. But also pleased. Visibly, as the quick nod of thanks toward Elaine demonstrated.

  “If you complete your mission, you kill a lot of people,” Elaine told Ben. “Probably everyone who deserves to die. But if you save us...”

  “If you save us,” Neil took over, “we can save a whole lot of people. Maybe everybody who’s left.”

  “That’s a big maybe,” Ben said, a hint of disdain in his words.

  “That’s all we’ve got,” Neil said.

  Ben thought as more rounds slammed into the HUMVEE and the ground around us. We were trapped. There was no way we’d be leaving this site with our attackers out there. Getting away from here, surviving, meant eliminating them.

  “Sledgehammer versus flea,” Ben muttered.

  “What?” I asked.

  He looked to me, some certainty about him.

  “Four-eight-four-two,” he said. “That’s the code.”

  I took the plastic tube from where I’d dropped it atop the hatch and opened it. A slender metallic cylinder slid out as I tipped it, a series of four notched and numbered wheels set into it, almost laughably similar to what I’d seen on bicycle locks in my youth.

  “Enter the code in order,” Ben said. “One number at a time. Four-eight-four-two. Don’t make a mistake.”

  A new stream of fire opened up on us, from a distance away from the farm now.

  “They’re flanking us!” Elaine shouted.

  Both she and Neil opened up on a trio of attackers setting up a new position in scant cover, driving them back toward the buildings at the edge of the farm.

  I tried to ignore the new assault, and the continuous rounds impacting all around. I focused on the contact transmitter and put my thumb to the first wheel.

  “Do not make a mistake,” Ben reiterated.

  “Why?”

  “A wrong number left in place for more than two seconds initiates a detonation,” he told me.

  I stared at him from the hole.

  “It will explode in your hand,” he explained.

  I looked back to the device and steadied myself. All the wheels were set to zero.

  “Okay,” I said, and rolled the first number.

  “They’re on the left now!” Neil shouted, another flanking attempt drawing fire from him and Elaine.

  I rolled the second number. Then the third.

  Attackers moved on both flanks now, two hundred yards out, with steady covering fire streaming from the farm.

  The fourth number spun into place. I held my breath for one second. Then two. Then three.

  “What now?”

  “Press the end nearest the first number against the hatch and hold it there,” Ben instructed.

  I did, holding the cylinder of metal hard atop the hatch, waiting for something to happen. For anything to happen.

  Only nothing was happening.

  “Ben...”

  He looked to me, as perplexed as I was.

  “It should have initiated,” he said.

  At the rear of the HUMVEE, Neil retreated, hugging the side of the vehicle.

  “I can’t hold them off!” he yelled as dozens and dozens of rounds tore into the battered vehicle.

  “It’s in contact with the hatch?” Ben checked.

  “Yes!” I told him, agitated. “My hand is—”

  I felt it before I heard it, a fast rumble beneath my feet, followed by
a whooshing whistle, like air being displaced. Then a terrifying BANG shook the hatch as the round of steel shifted, one edge rising slightly with the whole of my weight atop it.

  It was open.

  “Come on!” I called to my friends.

  “Is it open?” Elaine asked, hopeful verging on desperate.

  I grabbed my pack and AR from the edge of the hole and wedged myself to the side, slipping the fingers of one hand under the edge, lifting, pulling until the hatch stood vertical, dark shaft below angling down into the earth.

  Neil fired off a long burst of covering fire and grabbed Ben, dragging him across the short swath of open ground to the hole. I pulled him into the hole and he slid down into the shaft, grabbing handholds that were mounted to the surface like rungs of a ladder. Elaine followed, nearly diving into my arms as I guided her through the opening. Neil came last, emptying his magazine at the attackers closing in before jumping into the hole next to me.

  “That was my last mag,” he said.

  “So I timed that right?”

  He put a friendly slap across my cheek and dropped past the hatch. I was right behind him.

  “Seal it up,” Ben said from his position, ten feet down the severely sloped tube.

  I looked to the hatch, a handle prominent among other fittings on its underside. I gripped it and pulled, swinging the cover down into place.

  “Four pins to throw,” Ben said.

  Emergency light strips glowed dimly on the hatch and the surface of the shaft, allowing just enough light to work with. I found the locking pins and shoved each into receiving holes in the thick shaft wall. There was no mechanical way to open it from the outside now. Only by force would someone be able to penetrate the hatch.

  I had no doubt those now racing toward it would try.

  “Work your way down,” Ben instructed.

  The last in, I watched as the others began climbing down, handholds and footholds on the rungs easing the descent. In under two minutes we were inside the nearly dark LCC. With Neil’s help, Ben swung the lower hatch shut and sealed it. Then he threw a nearby switch and filled the space with light.

  Thirty Nine

  “We have ten minutes,” Ben said as he walked unsteadily past equipment consoles and racks of darkened electronics. “That’s how long the entry batteries will last.”