“Drones.” Bryan replied.
“You think they’re going to send out drones to look for us? I don’t think that convoy’s planning on stopping to do all that.” Kelly said. She wasn’t sure what Bryan was talking about, but she was happy to argue. The more time they spent arguing the more time Randy had to pull himself together.
“It was drones that blew up the two trucks. I’m talking about the big military drones. Not the ones people use to spy on their neighbors. They must have drones flying air support for the convoys. If they have drones over the roads, they could have them over the woods to look for snipers and guerillas.” Bryan said. A second later he barked out an involuntary chuckle. Kelly and the girls were all staring fearfully up into the sky.
“You won’t see them before they see you. They fly too high to make them out. They’re small and some of them are loaded down with tech to see heat signatures and track people.” He explained.
Randy had sat up at some point during the exchange and was listening to the conversation. His face clearly showing how sick he must feel. Kelly knelt down and forced him to drink some water. He made himself choke the water down. Everyone held their breath when the water started to come right back up a minute later. Randy fought down the waterspout threatening to erupt from his mouth and worked himself back to his feet.
“Let’s get away from here before we find out they have freakin’ dragons and werewolves working for them too.” He gasped out trying to be funny. No one laughed so he shrugged and took off running.
“Wrong way honey!” Kelly said loudly enough for him to hear. He turned around grinning sheepishly at all of them. Bryan and Kelly both looked at him with concern then slowly started moving out again.
They were moving as quickly as they could through the woods when loud explosions sounded from the direction of the interstate. Bright flashes of light popped off in the sky. Fighter jets dipped and swooped out of the clouds before disappearing to the south. Bryan let out a whoop before he could stop himself.
“Hell yeah. That’ll teach them to blow up my ride.” He said. Kelly smiled sadly remembering that Frank had been in that first truck that’d been blown up. Blown up because an evil man was preying on the survivors of a mass extinction event to seize control of what was left of the eastern United States. So much pointless death at a time when they should’ve all been pulling together to keep humanity moving forward. Instead they were regressing right back to the old ways.
“You think those flashes in the sky were the drones getting shot up?” Caitlyn asked.
“No real way to tell but I hope so.” Phil answered shifting Doreen around on his shoulders. She appeared to be a little sick of the novelty of riding the large man like a two-legged horse. Probably from being bumped around all over the place and constantly getting smacked in the face by branches. She was still wearing the headsets from the truck. For some reason that made Kelly tear up. She had to turn her head away to brush off the tears that appeared on her cheeks.
“After those explosions, we need to keep going. There’s going to be Zombies running this way from all over now.” Bryan said to a chorus of groans as everyone loaded back up following the brief victory break.
Chapter 18: Bits and Bytes
“I can’t ping the IP address they were calling us from before.” Tom enunciated slowly. Krantz was staring at him like he was speaking Greek. He supposed in this case it was more like he was speaking geek.
“What. Does. That. Mean.” Krantz said. His patience was eroding quickly. His frustration rising up to block the explanations Tom was desperately tossing at him. They were both speaking English but there was a definite jargon issue.
“It means the video unit they were calling from isn’t there anymore. We’re just basically doing H.323 calls so if you can’t ping the IP address then that unit must be shut down for some reason.” Tom said. He was using the tone of voice you’d normally reserve to explain to a toddler why they shouldn’t stick a fork into an electric outlet.
Evidently all the toddlers Tom knew had a working knowledge of standard networking protocols. Krantz ignored the pinging and the weird combination of letters and numbers Tom had been spouting off about. If he understood correctly then the unit the Senator and Sam had been using had been shut down for some reason. That didn’t make a ton of sense. Even if the Senator had moved to a new base why bother shutting down the unit at the old base?
“Thank you. I think I finally get it. I was already technologically illiterate before this all happened. Never in a million years did I think I’d need to brush up on my IT skills to survive the end of the world. Anything else going on?” Krantz asked.
Tom had called him in his room right as he was about to take a nap. Krantz had agreed to the quick meeting leading to all the computer nerd talk. Tom’s answers had really just raised more questions. Questions Krantz was hoping wouldn’t keep him awake since he badly needed to get some sleep. Especially now that all their troops were beginning to move into position. He didn’t want to have to yawn his way through the opening moves of the life and death chess game they’d be playing soon.
“The convoy you ordered the drones sent out to protect got hit pretty hard. The carrier’s launching strikes farther inland now.” Tom said.
“How many strikes?” Krantz asked.
“Just the convoy and a couple of other targets of opportunity. They took out a bridge with some of our guys on it and a couple other big rigs hauling tanks. They might be targeting our armor, or it could be that those are just the easiest things for them to find to attack.” Tom said. There weren’t a ton of ways to transport the massive tanks they were hoping to deploy. At this rate they’d be lucky if any of them made it close enough to the enemy to fire a round or two. Luckily, they’d counted on that in their planning. If any of them did make it through it’d really just be a bonus.
Krantz dismissed Tom and pulled a bottle of whiskey out from under his bed. He poured a generous portion into a glass with some half-melted ice cubes in it. He was getting spoiled living at the base. Here he was sitting on a soft bed in an air-conditioned room in a safe and secure bunker with a full stomach from his three meals a day and he was feeling upset because the ice cubes in his glass were starting to melt. The majority of people left alive in the country were wondering if the mud hole they were drinking water out of was going to kill them or not. Deciding he’d probably survive the horror of the diminutive ice cubes he dumped a generous portion of whiskey into the glass and swished it around.
They’d made the call to start deploying the drones. Considering two of them had just been shot down over North Carolina it was safe to assume those were no longer a secret. The people in the settlements would be readying countermeasures now. That was going to make them need to rethink how they were planning to use the drones in the attack.
That didn’t concern Krantz too much since they’d never planned on using the drones to take out the carrier anyway. The air defense systems on board the carrier would shred the drones to pieces. They needed to force the people from the settlements to retreat to the shelter of the big ship. Hopefully they’d get everyone aboard and depart on a nice long cruise to wherever. The goal was for the Brotherhood to take over the land. Krantz hoped they could accomplish that without having to go head to head with a floating fortress that could deploy fighter planes like candy popping out of a Pez dispenser
Of greater concern to Krantz was the news that the fighter missions were starting to range deeper inland. Unbeknownst to pretty much everyone not directly involved in the project a lot of work had gone into repairing the railway system. A lot of manual work like clearing off fallen trees and other debris from the tracks. Multiple looting groups had been repurposed to carry out the cleanup projects.
Personnel who had experience working on trains had been sought out from the survivors. One of the great strengths of the Brotherhood was the Senator’s compulsive need to catalogue everything. Out of that desire had been born the c
lerical corps who were responsible for data gathering. They went around with laptops interviewing survivors to get their former occupations. The information they collected was transmitted via the rudimentary networks they’d setup where available. In most cases the info was just dumped onto a flash drive and sent to a command location to be manually added. They’d gone back to the days before AOL dial-up from a networking perspective at this point and it sucked.
These databases allowed them to find experts in solar power, electricians, skilled soldiers and the other skilled manpower that helped the Brotherhood grow and thrive. There’d been a whole crop of people who’d popped up when they began the search for people with experience working on trains. That was a popular pre-apocalypse profession in the south it seemed. Or for some reason the people with that particular background had just out survived people involved in other occupations. It’d be interesting to sort by profession and see which ones tended to survive the apocalypse better.
You’d think that professions like soldiers and the police would have the greatest chance of surviving an apocalypse. The problem was those were the people who ran towards the danger to fight it. First responders took a massive hit to their life expectancy when the danger they were running towards was also running at them full speed with hunger radiating out of merciless red eyes.
Whatever the reason Krantz was just thankful they’d been able to locate so many people who had a background working around trains. It’d enabled them to get the trains online and ensure they had all the fuel required to do what they planned to do with them. The original plan had been to have one train coming up the tracks on the coast and the other coming up from the mountains. They’d decided not to use the one on the coast because of the danger posed by the carrier. It’d validated that was the right approach when Krantz had seen all the attacks lighting up their men on the coast.
Now that he was hearing the planes were flying farther inland it worried him that they may see the train. The Brotherhood had a lot of their eggs in the train basket. One missile aimed at the tracks and they were pretty much screwed. The only way the train idea worked is if it didn’t occur to the settlement folks that a train was even an option. If they suspected the Brotherhood might be moving supplies via train it was a quick combat flight to knock out the tracks or the bridges they needed. They could even follow the tracks until they got to the actual train and blow it to hell.
Compartmentalizing the plan to use the trains had been deemed vital. Krantz hoped everyone’s fear of being called out as a spy would help keep their mouths shut. The Senator had succeeded in making everyone paranoid. Everyone knew that if anyone in their group was found out to be a spy then they’d all be considered spies. They’d all be executed without a second thought. This led to several incidents of groups self-policing suspected spies in their midst. Self-policing being a euphemism for stabbing suspected spies in the back and leaving them to bleed out in the woods.
Krantz sat up in bed. He’d just realized he needed a distraction. He needed the enemy to focus on the coast and turn a blind eye to what may be happening on the other side of the state. They’d been shifting their troops away from the coast since that’s where most of the attacks had been coming from. He got out of bed and grabbed the bottle of mouthwash by his sink. He swished it around as he pulled on his rumpled uniform. Spitting out the minty mixture he hoped would help conceal his raging alcoholism he purposefully walked out of his room.
Upstairs he had the communications officer jot down some notes so that the next time Forrest made contact they’d have a message for him. He needed Forrest to make some noise on the coast and start pressing the carrier sooner than planned. That should hopefully get the settlements to focus on what was happening close to them and quit having fighter jets waste fuel flying all over the damned state blowing up his tanks.
That order given he asked the communications officer to get Sam online in the conference room. He needed to let her know they needed to get moving on the train. All communications concerning the train funneled through her to help maintain secrecy. Outside of Sam and Krantz no one else was supposed to be in the loop on the train. Krantz assumed the Senator was in on it as well. The Senator hadn’t made their last meeting though, so he wasn’t sure. He went and sat down in the secure conference room and waited for the screen to light up. One of the benefits of the expensive phone system was that they’d made it simple enough for a general officer to figure out.
A cup of coffee later the screen lit up and the touch panel displayed a large green icon with answer me written on it. Krantz pressed the button and Sam’s face appeared on the screen. Her make-up and general appearance were as perfect as always. There was the hint of puffiness around her eyes though that made her look like she needed some more sleep.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of being dragged out of bed?” Sam stated by way of greeting.
“We need to move up operation choo.” Krantz said. The code name for the operation was a present from the last field commander. Krantz assumed it was short for ‘choo choo’ since it revolved around trains. He hadn’t been about to try and change the operations name though.
“Move it up to when?” Sam asked.
“Immediately would be good.” Krantz responded. He knew the logistical hurdles with moving up the schedule. He also knew the whole track hadn’t been inspected yet. He also didn’t care. If the train didn’t leave now, they might as well not even have it as an option. The idea was to be able to insert a large force complete with armor faster than anyone on the other side of the no man’s zone expected. It should give them the path to victory they needed to avoid a slug fest. There was only about a million things that could go wrong with the train plan.
“Stand by.” Sam said. Her camera went dark.
Krantz went and got another coffee to fight the exhaustion starting to settle in around his neck like a cheap tie. He looked up when the camera flickered back to life revealing Sam sitting back down at the conference table on her side. He noticed she had a Diet Mountain Dew can in her hand. She must’ve needed to grab some caffeine as well.
“It’s done. Anything else?” Sam asked.
“They’re sending their fighters farther inland now.” Krantz said. “I’m going to start hitting them harder closer to the coast.”
Secure room or not he didn’t like explaining any more than he had to in case someone was listening in. Tom had told him it was possible but highly unlikely someone could be snooping on his calls. That answer had not given him the warm fuzzies. Sam was smart. She got it and a minute later Krantz was heading back down to his room. He was going to need some more whiskey to counter all the caffeine he’d just consumed. He knew what it said about him that he didn’t go to sleep anymore so much as pass out drunk in bed every night.
Chapter 19: All Aboard
The last Zombie in sight fell over with the shaft of an arrow sticking out of its eye socket. The patrol Kyler and Ritz were riding with walked out into the open with weapons held up in the air as nonthreateningly as possible. They wanted to avoid looking like either Zombies or a group of raiders. Dying from friendly fire was an all too common occurrence in a world where paranoia was a dominant survival trait. The patrol leader and a man standing on the top of the train exchanged a few sentences with the pass phrases in them. An officer stepped out of a door on the side of the train and walked over. The officer talked briefly to the patrol leader before sending that group towards the back of the train where the livestock cars were located.
Kyler and Ritz started to follow the rest of the patrol to the designated train. The officer asked them to stop before they’d walked more than a few feet. Glancing nervously at one another Ritz helped Kyler get down off the horse. One of the patrol members grabbed the lead to their horse and took it away. The officer had Kyler and Ritz follow him aboard one of the cars closer to the front of the train. Once on the train the officer took them to a sleeping car that’d been transformed into an office. He got them
both a glass of water from a small fridge in the corner then invited them to sit down while he typed his password into a laptop.
“What happened to your arm?” The officer asked. He sounded genuinely curious.
“We were assigned to guard a base near here that came under attack. I took a round to the shoulder while we were fighting off raiders.” Kyler said.
“I didn’t know there was a base near here. Not that I necessarily would know if there was. There’s a lot of secrets floating around. The name of the game seems to be compartmentalization. Did you two know about this train?” The officer asked.
“No clue sir. The first we heard about it was when that patrol rode up on horseback and told us we’d be meeting up with a train. I guess they couldn’t think of anything else to say since they were guarding train tracks at the time.” Kyler answered. Ritz was keeping quiet. Amongst the Brotherhood Ritz was very much the low man on the totem pole. Kyler was Brotherhood and there was about a ninety percent chance the officer on the other side of the desk had an identical brand on his back.
Zombies! (Book 7): Still Standing Page 15