Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass

by J. L. Bourne

  After the coordinates were entered, the pilot altered course a few degrees starboard and maintained heading.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “My friend back there calls me Kilroy, Kil for short. What’s yours?”

  “I’m Sam. Pleasure to meet you, even though this may be the first and last time.”

  “Well, Sam, you sure know how to keep spirits high.”

  Sam reached up, tapped the glass on the upper gauge panel, and said, “You know the risks, Kilroy. There ain’t no tellin’ where you’re goin’ in your little black submarine. Wherever it is, you can bet it will be just as dangerous as right below us. There ain’t no safe zones anywhere.”

  2

  A United States aircraft carrier, one of the last fading symbols of American military might. There were others, but those had been anchored offshore months ago, abandoned. One carrier was even reserved as a floating nuclear power plant, providing gigawatts of electricity to withering military island outposts and some remote coastal airstrips. Previously known as USS Enterprise, she was now officially renamed as Naval Reactor Site Three. A small contingent of power plant engineers was all that remained of her former five-thousand-sailor crew. Not all of these behemoths were accounted for. A handful of the steel giants had been trapped overseas when the alarms sounded and society collapsed. The USS Ronald Reagan sat at the bottom of the Yellow Sea with most of her crew undead, still floating through the black compartments of Davey Jones’s locker. In the beginning, there was blame to cast and throw about like blacksmith anvils—that is, while men still lived to cast it. There was chatter via classified cables that the USS Ronald Reagan had been brought down by simultaneous attacks from several North Korean diesel submarines in the days just after the anomaly. No one really knew for sure. The USS George HW Bush was last seen dead in the water near Hawaii. Visual observers from a nearby American destroyer reported that the undead creatures swarmed her decks—she was now a floating mausoleum and would remain so until a rogue wave or super typhoon sent her down to Poseidon.

  Some of the surviving crews from the remaining carriers had been recovered and consolidated onboard the USS George Washington, still on active service in the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. military diaspora continued.

  • • •

  The hundred-thousand-ton USS George Washington cut through the Gulf waters, maintaining a patrol box ten miles off the infested Panamanian coastline. The Continuity of Government still remained, its primary orders clear and concise. Recover Patient Zero by any means necessary.

  Admiral Goettleman, Task Force Hourglass commander and acting chief of naval operations, sat in his stateroom eating breakfast, watching the ship’s cable TV network. A loop of The Final Countdown had been playing over and over again for the past week. He’d need to call someone about that, or maybe he’d let it go. Perhaps the crew enjoys watching an aircraft carrier travel back in time with the opportunity to change history. A loud knock on his door signaled Joe Maurer, a CIA case officer and his aide since the beginning of this mess.

  “Good morning, Admiral,” Joe said cheerfully, but somewhat insincerely.

  “Mornin’, Joe. Our boys make it to the Virginia?” Admiral Goettleman asked, chewing his final bite of powdered eggs.

  “They will shortly, sir. The radio room reports that they are over the Pacific and zeroing in on Virginia’s beacon now.”

  “I wouldn’t be an admiral if I didn’t worry about the weather. The helo reporting any bad chop?”

  “No, sir, smooth waters, good air. Got lucky today, I suppose.”

  “We’re going to need to save some of that luck. Hourglass has a long way to float. I’m deeply concerned at how all this is going to play out. Despite that I’ve asked you a hundred times, what are your thoughts? Ground truth, no bullshit.”

  “Admiral, they’ll need to get there first. Assuming they survive the transit to Pearl, the Kunia operation in Hawaii, and the long transit to Chinese waters, the worst will still be in front of them. The lights are out around the world and we’ve received no communications from any of the Chinese Military Regions since last winter. The country has gone dark. We don’t have the HF radio operators to monitor the band. We could have missed their transmission a dozen times and not known. We’re short on Chinese linguists. If our people did receive their transmission, we have maybe five folks onboard that could interpret. Let’s say it’s a given that the team makes it across the Pacific to the Bohai and up the river. Then what? You know how bad it is in the continental United States. We had maybe three hundred twenty million people a year ago. Kinetic operations up to this point have attrited some creatures, but the nukes didn’t exactly help the cause.”

  Listening to Joe’s commentary, Admiral Goettleman went back in time for a moment, to the decision to nuke the population centers. At the time, even he had agreed with that decision. From the bridge of his ship, he had heard the cheers from the crew as the nighttime fireballs lit the sky and rocked the targeted coastal cities. Hell, he’d clapped and yelled, too. The great mushroom plumes differed vastly from old nuclear-testing stock footage. All colors of the rainbow coursed through the pillar below the massive mushroom cap. Great blue lightning beamed and zapped throughout the thrown vertical wall of city debris, dust, and human remains.

  “How’s our research into the New Orleans specimens progressing?” asked Goettleman.

  “Well, sir, you read what happened on the Cutter Reliance. We have SIGINT cuts from overhead with good geolocs of hundreds of radio transmissions out of New Orleans and other nuked cities I can brief you on. The transmissions originated after the detonations occurred. All intelligence indicates that those bastards are just about unstoppable in moderate numbers. Higher cognitive function, agility, speed. It’s not only their bite or scratch that can kill you—it’s the radiation from those high-yield nukes shooting from their corpses. The Causeway and Downtown specimens are no different.”

  “I was hoping for a little good news, you know,” Goettleman said, almost sadly.

  “We still have propulsion, fresh water, and some food, sir.”

  The admiral forced a smile. “I guess that’s something.”

  Joe took a drink and coughed, saying, “The men on that chopper getting ready to bungee into the drink don’t even know what they’re going after.”

  “They soon will. The intelligence officer on Virginia will see to that.”

  “Sir, I know we’ve discussed this but my stance has not changed. Telling them everything could complicate things on some level. Patient Zero, if they can even locate it, may not be worth retrieving to them. They may perceive it as a waste of time and resources.”

  “Joe, Patient Zero may be the only key to unraveling this mess. I’m willing to sacrifice a multi-billion-dollar sub and every man on it for a chance at that . . . and then there’s the tech.”

  Joe walked over to the bar and poured himself another finger. “We’ve had tech for seventy years with no vast leaps forward except maybe solid state, some low observability, primitive maglev, and lasers. It took decades to reverse engineer our laughable and oversized jury-rigged versions. Besides, what good is the tech against seven billion walking predators?”

  “Those are compelling points, but what else is there?”

  “Admiral, we could gather survivors and head for an island. Secure it and live out our days at least a little safer than we are here.”

  “Abandon the U.S.? Leave it for those creatures?”

  “Sir, with all due respect, there is nothing left on the mainland but millions of those things. Many are radiated to the point of a zero decomposition rate. Even if none of them were exposed to the radiation, the analysts predict they’d still walk around for another ten years or more and be a threat for even longer than that. There is truly no guess on how long they might last. Some are saying thirty years or more.”

  The admiral looked through Joe to the wall behind him. He appeared to be in a trance repeating to himself .
. .

  “Thirty years. Thirty years, my God.”

  Joe continued: “Unless we launch a coordinated pincer assault on both coasts and give ’em what for with every man, woman, and able child, we will not take back the continental United States anytime soon, if ever. So that’s it. We are dealing with something that not only infects the dead, but the living as well. We all have it. The only humans left not carriers of the anomaly are the poor bastards on the ISS. We haven’t received burst comms from the station in weeks.”

  The admiral’s eyes moved away from Joe to a lit corner of his cabin, where a very old painting of General George Washington prominently hung on the bulkhead. “What would General Washington do?”

  “Probably defend Mount Vernon by cutting, shooting, blasting, and cursing. Fisticuffs, if it came to that.”

  “Exactly, my boy. Exactly.”

  3

  Task Force Phoenix

  A four-man special operations team sat in the back of the C-130, flying angels twenty-two over southeast Texas. The men stared at the light near the cargo door, tugging at their chute straps, willing the light to turn steady. They sucked on pure oxygen through the aircraft’s O2 system, attempting to remove nitrogen from their blood and maybe avoid potentially deadly hypoxia. They were five minutes out.

  The men were not strangers to jumping out of airplanes, but there was something to be said about doing it in the cold dark of night, twenty-two thousand feet over an infested area, with no ground or close air support. You just never convinced yourself that it was a good or worthwhile endeavor. Every man’s extremities shook so hard they could barely connect to the static line. It wasn’t the jump; it was what happened after their feet, knees, ass, back, and then shoulders absorbed the impact of their twenty-foot-per-second descent after hitting the ground. Many of their comrades had completed similar essential jumps to retrieve items or information deemed crucial to the survival of the remaining U.S. civilian population and infrastructure. Some jumpers extracted items like insulin formulas, manuals, and machinery; some were sent into big-box hardware stores looking for lithium battery–powered hand tools. Some went into abandoned fields. Some landed on the roofs of buildings in high-density infested areas. Many jumped into the waiting arms of the dead or incurred a simple broken leg on impact—forcing them to take homemade suicide capsules, pills that didn’t always work as intended.

  According to airborne infrared cameras, many were still alive when the creatures found them, although stunned and slowed by the poison. Ironic . . . every jumper packed their own chute and every jumper cooked their own capsules. Better not to think about that sometimes.

  His fellow operators called him Doc. A year ago he was eating sand and 7.62mm in the mountains of Afghanistan, hunting high-value targets. That was before the worldwide troop recall. Only 35 percent of the military forces spread across the globe made it back to the mainland before things went stupid. Doc and Billy Boy, his longtime friend and fellow SEAL, were the last men out of the southern Afghan provinces. They fought hellishly south across Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, where they caught a ride back stateside onboard the supply ship USNS Pecos waiting offshore. It was a long swim that day.

  Doc sat swinging on a cargo net near Billy Boy and the C-130 shitter curtain. Wearing a puke-green David Clark headset, he listened to the pilot chatter up front.

  The pilot keyed the mic and said to the copilot, “These guys have some balls jumping out into the shit below in the dark.”

  “Ain’t no fucking way I would volunteer for that shit. Hell, flying this deathtrap is dangerous enough. How many we lost in the past three months? Four? Five?”

  “Seven.”

  “Shit, seven? We never recovered even one downed aircrew. I wonder if any of those poor bastards are down there somewhere, alive and on the run.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Me too, man.”

  Doc interrupted the chatter: “Can I get an inertial position check?”

  The internal communications system from the flight station crackled, “You got two minutes to go time, Doc.”

  “Roger that, flight. You guys have a safe RTB, we’ll catch you on the flip side.”

  With the lack of available personnel, the four-man SOF team had to hit the wind with no jumpmaster. As each of the four checked the others’ chutes, Doc punched the actuator on the cargo ramp, allowing the icy medium-altitude air to rush into the cargo bay.

  After checking his watch, Doc looked directly at Billy Boy just before the light above turned steady. The air was thin and cold as Billy Boy pulled himself out the door into the open sky over Texas. The two other members of Task Force Phoenix, Hawse and Disco, were next. Hawse joined the team after surviving a particularly harrowing escape from D.C. Disco, a Delta operator, was the newest member, reassigned after Doc lost a man in the highly radioactive zones of New Orleans.

  Doc saw Hawse disappear out the door and keyed the mic to the flight station. “Last man out in ten.”

  He tossed the headset to the front of the tube and shuffled back to the door, his portal and one-way elevator to hell. Looking down at the landscape miles below, he saw the pinpoint evidence of fires, but no clear sighting that the power grid ever existed; it was that dark. While he jumped from the cargo door into the night, he thought of the unstoppable waves of gruesome creatures below. Doc’s parachute deployed, jolting him into focus.

  He checked his throat mic and yelled over the wind, “Billy?”

  “Right here, Doc.”

  “Disco?”

  “Check, boss.”

  “Hawse?”

  “I’m fuckin’ here.”

  Doc grunted into the mic, “All right, everyone snap two-ninety, gogs on, IR beacons, too. Let’s try to find each other.”

  Through the night-vision goggles, Doc could see the curvature of the earth below. He was well above ten thousand feet and could feel the subtle onset of hypoxia as he descended. Under normal circumstances, jumping out this high, he would be on a portable oxygen bottle. But that was a luxury of the past. Doc hoped that because his team had sucked a little O2 in the aircraft before the High Altitude–High Opening jump, they could avoid some of the side effects.

  As Doc shot a glance down to the compass mounted on his wrist, he saw a faint flash below him, then another in a different location.

  “I see two fireflies—is everyone flashing?”

  “Disco flashing.”

  “Billy flashing.”

  Breathing a sign of annoyance, Doc said with disdain, “Hawse, goddamn it. What’s the fucking problem?”

  “Uh . . . I . . . uh, can’t find my firefly.”

  “Did you bring your compass, dumbass?”

  “Yeah, I’m on two-ninety. I’m gonna flash my torch a couple times. If I burn you out, you’ll know it’s me.”

  “That’s cute, Hawse.”

  “I thought you’d like it.”

  Doc scanned his field of view and checked his altimeter—eighteen thousand. “I see you, Hawse. Turn off the torch—you’re fucking up everyone’s gogs.”

  “Check, man . . . what’s your angels?” Hawse asked Doc.

  “’Bout seventeen, why?”

  “I got seventeen and a half.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Hawse.”

  The men continued their parachute glide descent. The temperature was getting noticeably warmer, at the rate of about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit per one thousand feet. At angels 15, Doc called for a hypoxia check.

  “Pox check.”

  “Disco up.”

  “Billy up.”

  “Hawes up.”

  “Good to go, guys. We’ve got about twelve minutes until we hit dirt. Intel says that the swarm has moved west a bit, in the direction of what’s left of San Antonio. That doesn’t mean that we’re dropping into a tropical resort down there. You can bet that those dead claws will be reaching for your ass before you touch your harness release. Get ’em ready. I want M-4s tapped, racked, quiet, and lasers on.”


  The men didn’t speak it aloud but they were petrified as they fell to earth, pondering the worst-case.

  What if we’re dropping into a swarm? Smack dab in the middle, undead for a mile in all directions.

  No amount of training and operational experience would prepare them for that.

  When their boot soles hit angels 10, Doc again transmitted, “Pox check.”

  “Disco still awake.”

  “Billy up.”

  “Hawse cold.”

  “Say again, Hawse.”

  Hawse said slowly, “I’m gold, er, I mean cold.”

  Doc began to ask the standard medical questions. “Hawse, we have eight minutes till feet down. Start saying the alphabet backwards.”

  With a bad slur Hawse throated, “C’mon, man.”

  “Do it,” Doc insisted.

  “Rogerrr. Zee, Y, double U, Vee . . . Shit man, sorry. I can’t.”

  “Hawse, you’re getting hypoxic. We’re below angels 10—you should be okay by the time we’re on deck. Disco, Billy, rally on Hawse as soon as you click out of your chutes.”

  Disco responded quickly, “Wilco.”

  Billy muttered, “I’m on it. Wait, how are we gonna know where to rally? Hawse forgot his firefly.”

  Doc snapped back, “Good point. Hawse, turn on your IR laser. It’s the only way we’re going to find you. When you hit the deck, wave it around as soon as you’re out of your harness.”

  No response.

  “Hawse, goddamn it, acknowledge!” screamed Doc.

  A faint, slurred voice uttered, “Raaajer.”

  Angels five.

  “Pox check.”

  “Disco fivers.”

  “Billy up.”

  Nervously, Doc relayed over the radio, “We better be on Hawse ASAP. We’re just below five thousand and I can smell them already. Four minutes!”

  Both Disco and Billy simultaneously transmitted, “Roger that.”

  They strained to look for any sign that creatures might blanket their landing zone. They were not yet low enough to see the ground in any detail with their optics.