Kingdoms of Sorrow

by JK Franks

  Scott knew there was an abandoned hydroelectric dam less than twenty miles away. The power lines still connected Harris Springs to the dam, but so far, neither Scoots nor anyone else handy with that stuff had come up with a way to engage the generators. The damn things needed electricity to operate the spillway gates, and a lot of it.

  They had some solar power and lots of batteries, but nothing strong enough to get those gates moving. The AG itself had massive AC generators hooked directly to its behemoth diesel engines. These generators could easily produce the current, but the voltage, phasing and other issues rendered it impossible to transmit that electricity back to the dam.

  There was a solution though, and Scott was going to keep working until he found it. If they could generate power, then in time, that would be an asset they could sell or trade as well. That would truly be a step in the right direction. Until then, they’d scavenged every large diesel and gas generator they could find, mainly from old hospitals and industrial buildings. These were being used in a variety of ways, including to break down saltwater to make chlorine bleach which they were using to sterilize the water supply. Simply running an electrical current through normal water would produce hydrogen and oxygen, which eventually might also be useful. The geek side of Scott loved this stuff, and for the thousandth time since the blackout, he wished he had become an electrical engineer or something more practical than his job as a computer security analyst had been.

  Many of the items in the Catalyst documents and related texts had been lifesavers. Thank God someone had contributed a complete set of the Foxfire series of eBooks on an old iPad that still worked. These collected relics from Appalachia were used by the community at large; the knowledge of how to survive without electricity had not been totally lost after all. Angel encouraged several people to learn how to make soap and candles from rendered fat and boiled wood ash. Kaylie and others from the medical team were re-learning valuable first-aid and diagnosis from hundred-year-old manuals. Others learned how to raise chickens and did the preserving and canning.

  There was so much they still didn’t know, so much they needed. But they had turned a corner. Scott knew that the town of Harris Springs would not have survived if he and his friends had not reacted as fast as they did in the initial days of the crisis. They had secured food, seeds and medical supplies, collected fuel, weapons and ammo and then gone out on recovery missions to clean out stalled trucks, train cars and abandoned homes. All of this had been locked down for the community’s benefit. Soon after, they had fought with their lives to defend it. They had set up a system of latrines to keep the water supply mostly clean and later, secured the cruise ship and settled it as a sanctuary. They did all this because they had understood quickly that this was the new world. No one was coming to make it all better.

  Now, all of this was under new threats. Scott was under no illusions; there would always be people out there who would prefer to take rather than to contribute. There would always be some form of threat, and there would be losses. He may not even be around to benefit from what they were trying to rebuild, but someone would. Maybe Kaylie, or Angel, or DeVonte and hopefully, many others in the community. Catalyst protocols, for all the good they contained, wrote all these people off. They were good people, unexceptional to the state. Theirs were valuable lives that Todd, Bartos, Jack and himself had vowed to protect. But can we do enough? he wondered.

  Chapter Sixteen

  September, the previous year

  Pakistan

  Skybox and Genghis had been overruled by Praetor Command. As ground commander, Skybox had failed to come up with a military option, so Praetor had made the call. They dropped the thermobaric bombs from an extremely high altitude. The massive bombs made the napalm bombs of the Vietnam War look like toys: the new, precision-guided volumetric weapons worked by dispersing an explosive element or fuel to create an enormous aerosolized cloud on impact. The weapon's explosive then ignited the cloud, producing a powerful shockwave and high temperatures. The heat and pressure of the blast were felt to be the best way to eliminate the pathogen they had named Chimera.

  Talon Battlegroup was over seventy-five kilometers from the site already, but the scenes of destruction were still a horrific sight. Skybox had moved the unit twice in the last week to comply with the evac orders. Even from here, they could see the flames and feel the heat. The sky itself seemed to be on fire. All Skybox could think about as he watched the devastation was the legion microscopic pathogens being blasted high into the atmosphere where the wind would drive them far beyond the current hot zone. He knew Genghis had been right; what had been a problem for a remote part of Pakistan would now become a global issue.

  Those idiots have killed us all.

  Skybox heard shouts followed by the unmistakable sound of the big man, Hooch, yelling orders: “They’re out, they . . . weapons!” The last word was a screech.

  Then the gunfire started, tentative at first, but quickly gaining in intensity. Pulling on his boots, Skybox raced from the tent, grabbing his M4 as he did so.

  “Oh shit—” His remaining forces were setting up a defensive perimeter while firing at their fellow soldiers: guys they had bunked with, eaten meals with only days earlier. The infected troops had broken out of Q-hut and were now loosed on the rest of the camp. Most ran erratically in hospital gowns, trailing IV lines behind them. Skybox could tell his men were aiming to wound rather than kill. Some seemed to be intentionally missing.

  Skybox yelled orders loudly as he stepped to the firing line. “Shoot to kill. These are not our brothers. End them now. That is an order!”

  The shots grew more accurate, but the dozen or so infected ignored all but the most brutal of shots. In a bid to stave off the fast approaching attackers, Diesel, Sky’s second-in-command, yelled: “Headshots only!” The infected soldiers were moving so fast—too damn fast. Skybox could see they were already close to breaking through the firing line. Immediately in front of Diesel and coming fast were two of the infected, whom he recognized as close friends of the man. Skybox, still firing at his own targets, watched horrified as Diesel recognized them, hesitating only briefly before firing.

  It was a second he couldn’t afford to take. He went down under the weight of both of the infected. They tore at his skin with bloody hands and bit at his throat. Hooch dropped both with headshots before they could do more harm. All the infected were down within minutes, but it had seemed like an eternity.

  The men were in shock. Skybox watched as one soldier looked down at the bite marks on his arms. Slowly, he removed his sidearm and fired a bullet into his brain. As Skybox ran to the fallen man, several others followed suit. There was no way to stop the wave of soldiers each dropping by their own hand. He could not blame them. He would likely have done the same.

  Hooch walked over to Diesel who lay moaning softly. “I’m sorry, brother.” His hands shook as he fired a single shot into the man’s bloody and battered head.

  Chapter Seventeen

  November, the previous year

  Pakistan

  The days and the failures since that day had all run together. Genghis never came up with an explanation of how the Q-hut breach had occurred, nor did he learn else about Chimera. Skybox looked up into the bright blue sky. No passenger jets had flown since the solar flare three months earlier, yet curiously, those contrails still crisscrossed the sky. He laughed, knowing that the ‘chemtrails’, as they had been named, were often not the exhaust gasses of commercial jets but more clandestine atmosphere dispersal systems. Mostly they were used for benign purposes such as inoculating an unwitting and possibly unwilling populous. The chemicals could be delivered by drones, ultra-high spy planes . . . even satellites in low orbit.

  At “The Ranch,” a remote training ground in Nevada for Praetor commanders, much had been discussed about the spray. What they were releasing in the skies above him now was the latest pesticide: an aerosolized antibiotic designed to limit the spread of the plague. It wasn
’t working. Just like the bomb had not worked, nor the suits, nor the inoculations, nor any-fucking-thing-else they had tried.

  Most of his men were gone. Talon Battlegroup was no more. Comm links with P-Command had been severed, and his last orders had been unclear. The man that stumbled across the desert toward the truck in the distance was a shadow of the man who’d been known as Skybox.

  He read the text again just to make sure he hadn’t missed some important part of the message. Praetor Asia Station was reporting that the United States, as well as Russia, Great Britain, Japan and a dozen other former world powers, had now been officially declared ‘failed states.’ Without functioning governments, working economies or domestic or even border security, the countries had effectively ceased to exist. He had been in failed states before, lots of them: Somalia, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan. But those countries were not like his country, his America. Failed states were weak countries, countries that could no longer perform the basic functions of governing their people.

  Who the fuck am I fighting for now?

  Tommy was over there, as well as nearly everyone he had ever known or served with. Skybox looked around the arid desert landscape. The cluster-fuck this mission had turned into was likely being duplicated back home, just in different ways. Skybox laughed grimly at the irony: simply losing electricity had been all it took to set the US into a downward spiral.

  Here in the sandbox, where electricity was far less common and nonessential, the CME had not been a real problem to civilians’ daily lives; not to most villages, anyway. But it had set in motion the catastrophe that would now destroy the lives of every person on this part of the globe.

  Most of Skybox’s squad had been American, and those still alive would all have gotten copied on the broadcast. Command structure in Praetor did not compartmentalize information in that way, other than for mission briefings with sensitive intel. He was unsure how they would react, unsure of his own reaction, still. What was the mission? What were they protecting now? Everyone knew: Asia was lost; Europe would be next. The mission was a failure, and there was nothing they could do now but run.

  Chapter Eighteen

  December, the previous year

  Pakistan

  He looked down at the dust covered combat patch. The gray scorpion insignia was barely visible on the black patch. He added a few more shovels of dirt to the hole, and the patch and the man were erased from the miserable view. Skybox thought he should say a few words, but the gesture would be meaningless. The dust was in his eyes, his nose and his mouth. It was everywhere. It wasn’t just dust either; the plague was there, hitching rides on tiny microbes. It was in him, too.

  The airburst had vaporized the valley and everything within ten klicks had been obliterated, but it had been pointless. The pathogen had already been outside the containment zone. As feared, the bombs had effectively dispersed it farther and launched it higher into the atmosphere. Some of the Chimera organism was likely picked up by the jet stream and pushed onward to new homes and new host bodies in distant lands.

  Hooch stood to the side at a respectable distance. Skybox eventually raised his eyes from the grave and acknowledged the man. “Sir, the survivors are loaded and prepped for evac. All other troops are already on station.” The man’s deep southern drawl was very out of place in this land.

  ‘Survivors’ was a loose term. Every member of the remains of Talon Battlegroup was infected, but a small percentage, including him and Hooch, seemed to be asymptomatic. While that did not necessarily mean they couldn’t be infectious, so far, they weren’t. As Genghis had said, a small percentage would not be significantly affected. Genghis . . . the man with the brilliant mind now lay under the sand beneath his feet. He had known he was dying, but he kept working on trying to find a solution to the problem right up until the very end when he went berserk and clawed the eyeballs from the other remaining med tech before trying to eat him.

  “Mount em up, Hooch. Let’s get the fuck out of this sandbox.” Hooch was only level 3, but now he was Sky’s second-in-command. He hurried off to give the signal. The convoy headed due south. They were to reposition 100 kilometers downrange, near the Pashtun village of Kohat. Skybox and the forty-seven remaining men and women of Talon knew it would not be far enough.

  “Chief,” Hooch said, “Reaper said there are zero contacts ahead.”

  Not zero hostiles, but zero contacts. Skybox knew what that meant: the Chimera Pox had already arrived. The village ahead would be the sixth one they had gone through with no remaining signs of life. Four more of his company had died in the last six hours. It seemed that most of those who had been given the original antiviral injection had succumbed quickly. The latest rounds of inoculations seemed to be holding the disease in stasis at least. Some of those were near death with respiratory distress, multiple organ failures and the fever, but so far without the rage. Something had changed, some were indeed hanging on.

  Skybox had been reviewing the last of Genghis’ notes. Before he died, he had mentioned that he’d discovered something, but Skybox had not been able to meet with him to learn more before they were attacked by infected. By the time the last skirmish was quelled, Genghis was already fevered and delirious.

  Reading the medical notes was a nearly pointless task. The language and the science they referenced far exceeded his understanding. The bouncing vehicle and the hot, dry air filled with sand added to his general fatigue and increasing feeling of hopelessness. He closed the folder and set it aside. “Hooch, let’s pull over when you find a good defensible spot. I want to get those bodies buried. We’ll make a cold camp until midnight and move out again.”

  “Hooah, sir,” Hooch drove on for a few minutes then pulled the heavily modified Joint Light Tactical Vehicle to a stop.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Present Day

  Little Rock, Arkansas

  He passed by house after house sporting crudely painted signs. Sometimes the pleas were on the house itself. ‘Send Help!’ ‘Please help.’ ‘Pray for us,’ they said. The houses were all empty now. He had seen many of the people killed. They had been his neighbors, people he saw at church and ball games. Sometimes they would get together for a cookout or a birthday party. Now they were gone; all of them likely dead.

  The smell was not as bad as he had feared, but even after all this time, it was still unpleasant. The battered motorcycle he was on picked this moment to die. He suspected that the fuel had been bad: it had sputtered since he had borrowed it. He dropped the old Harley unceremoniously and began walking. These streets were so familiar and yet so damn alien to him. He was uncertain, confused, lost even . . . every step he took seemed to take him deeper into his own darkness. He knew his mind was mostly gone; in its place was cold-rage and bitter hatred.

  The man knew that coming back here was not smart; he had done so much to get away, to bugout. His plans had been well thought out. Not that it mattered one fucking bit. It hadn’t made a difference; his wife was dead, lying in a shallow grave, forty miles back in the hill country. Ahead was his house—or more accurately, the structure that used to be his house. The useless, burned-out hulk of his near-new Ford pickup was sitting right where he left it. It hadn’t moved since the day of the Big fucking Crunch.

  He looked at the burnt and ragged sign still clinging to the door of the truck. ONTGOM CONTRA NG was all he could make out. Smiling slightly at better memories, the thin, bearded man ignored his old house and headed for the backyard. He had to get something, something he knew would still be there.

  Chapter Twenty

  Harris Springs, Mississippi

  Kaylie looked down the beach towards what looked like a person standing in the gray mist. It was not even 6:00 am, but the night sky above the ocean was giving way to orange and blue on the horizon. She jogged in the figure’s direction but saw nothing when she got there save for a large branch of driftwood. The girl turned and looked out to sea. The normally breezy, white-capped ocean was calm. The salty sm
ell of decay seemed commonplace to her now. Her toes dug into the sand and the coolness they found transported her to another time, a happier time. A gull shrieked as it flew overhead, shattering the fleeting memory. Finished with her morning run, she began making her way back to the house, her feet squeaking in the damp sand as she walked.

  She was excited and nervous. Today she would talk to her boyfriend, DJ. She had not seen him since leaving him at the college last August. Todd and her uncle had managed to get the big radios on the AG working, and now she could speak to him. They had set up a new schedule, and so far, they had managed to keep it. Today would be the fifth time they spoke. Two weeks ago, he had sounded nervous, said something was up with the paramilitary group, the Praetor 5 or whatever, that had shown up on campus so soon after the CME.

  That didn’t surprise her; she did not trust them at all. The Praetor teams were a paranoid, brutal bunch, but DJ had chosen to keep helping them. The engineered virus someone had concocted had evolved and taken over much of Europe and Asia DJ had informed her. He was a brilliant researcher trying to help them find a cure, or at the very least some treatment to slow it down.

  She was aware from her uncle that the remnants of the US Navy had been waging a limited war on Praetor units. No one seemed to know how large either force was, but the Navy appeared to have the upper hand, at least in the coastal areas. They had all also heard about the Protected Zones, also referred to as Reserves: pockets of civilization that still had power, water and food. Supposedly, this was where the brain trust of the US was deposited after the solar flare: engineers, doctors, scientists and surprisingly, even artists. She also assumed lots of politicians. It was all speculation, but they knew it had been the plan. Uncle Scott had a document with the possible locations of some of the planned reserves. Occasional radio reports also came in: someone seeing an armed convoy on a highway or even a jet flying in the direction of one of the camps’ likely locations.