by J. L. Bourne
Doc held down the bottom wire with his boot and pulled the second wire up with his fabricator-gloved hand—no point in risking tetanus or even a simple infection. Billy quickly ducked between the sharp wires and held them wide for Doc. They both continued to move.
“What’s your pace count, Billy?”
“About six hundred, you?”
“Yeah, about that.”
Moving east they noted possible shelters and egress routes in the event they were swarmed or stalked by any foe, dead or otherwise. Thinking back to the briefing, Doc remembered, Stay off the roads. It’s okay to use them as a guide but remain offset at least twenty-five meters. The roads just aren’t safe. The dead congregate there.
The intel report from the former Hotel 23 commander was useful as hell. Some of it was common sense but Doc was fine with that. There was valuable intel in the reports that he was glad to have for his team, like the detailed written account of the base commander’s helicopter crash and subsequent journey back to the compound. In reading the reports, Doc could not help but notice interesting patterns of thought in the man’s mind-set and methods of survival.
It was nearly midnight. They stuck to the preplanned route. Doc didn’t want to risk detection by whatever it was that had attacked Hotel 23; this meant that radios were out, no omnidirectional RF communications. The burst unit set up back at Hotel 23 would evade detection if proper comm discipline was observed, but their Motorola brick units could easily be intercepted and were subject to direction finding (DF) by the most rudimentary SIGINT collection capabilities.
This was Doc’s reasoning for religiously sticking to the planned route. If Doc and Billy didn’t return by daybreak, Disco and Hawse would lock up and search for them at next nightfall, following the trail.
Doc wasn’t thrilled about being clueless about the contents of this airdrop or the other drops marked on the map, but mission was mission.
“Shhhh!” Billy said.
Using hand signals he told Doc to take cover behind a huge pile of storm debris. Doc did so without hesitation and Billy followed, walking backward in a crouch. The instant they were hidden, the howling and moans commenced. Like a night chorus of demons on Halloween night, they bellowed.
Billy whispered to Doc, “At least a hundred.”
“No way, Billy, I’d say about a hundred and four.”
Without thinking, Billy punched Doc hard in the arm, causing Doc to bite his tongue to keep from yelping out.
“Thanks, asshole.”
“No problem, prick.”
“We’re about a mile from the drop,” Doc said.
Smiling, Billy replied, “Naw, more like a mile and a quarter.”
They remained behind some cover until the mini-swarm of creatures passed by. When they were far enough out, Doc broke cover and crossed the road where the creatures had just been. The wind blew fading sounds of the creature’s hunger about.
USS Virginia
The only man onboard who is aware I keep a journal is Saien. Even so, I feel apprehensive in documenting some things, in the event my journal is lost or stolen. Not long ago, Saien and I were told of certain historical facts as well as current events that if true, at least for me, forever change everything. I’m told that the United States has in its possession a large portion of a space vehicle recovered in the forties as well as the cadavers of four extraterrestrial beings. First thought, total and complete bullshit. Second thought, pretty clever to stage the weather balloon debris at the Roswell crash site to divert attention away from the true crash site in Utah.
The vessel was allegedly held and studied by government scientists until they reached a technological barrier in the 1950s. They were unable to exploit the tech beyond basic circuitry, lasers, and low-observability characteristics. Knowing that they had only unlocked a small fraction of what the hardware’s true capabilities might be, they turned to the military-industrial complex.
According to what I’ve learned today, Lockheed Martin has possessed the vehicle wreckage for over sixty years and made quantum advancements in the technology, resulting in the development of a particularly secret U.S. aircraft known as Aurora. I remember hearing about flying triangles in the newspapers and all over the online video-sharing websites before all of this. It wasn’t often, but every now and again someone would catch a triangle flying silently through the night sky on their night-vision cameras and upload it to the Internet.
Although no one could prove this was Aurora, the aircraft’s existence was almost an open secret in the halls of the Pentagon. Despite Aurora being disclosed to me today, no one was to ever know or would ever even believe that this Skunkworks project was a result of Lockheed Martin’s reverse engineering of advanced alien technology.
Intelligence obtained from Aurora is what led to the formation of Task Force Hourglass (the operation that Saien and I are now in the middle of). Since before the anomaly in January, Aurora had overflown China forty-seven times conducting sensitive reconnaissance operations. She had taken thousands of extremely high-resolution photos of a crash site discovered by the Chinese military only weeks before the anomaly took its first communist Chinese victim.
In the very early days of crash-site reconnaissance executed by the U.S. intelligence community, Aurora’s hypersonic propulsion and extreme altitude saved her from being shot down by the still-operational Chinese SA-20 Gargoyle surface-to-air missile battalions.
The HUMINT reports coming out of the PRC combined with Aurora imagery and SIGINT capability gave the U.S. intelligence apparatus a pretty good picture of the situation on the ground around the Mingyong glacier crash site.
The Chinese had discovered their own “Roswell” crash site and were well into the process of excavation by December of last year. The information is incomplete (or withheld) as to the relationship between the anomaly (that’s what everyone keeps calling it) and the Mingyong crash site. Commander Monday purports that we’re headed to China to study the source of the anomaly to see what might be done about stopping it. I’d be a liar if I said I trusted him and I still don’t believe half of what was briefed to me today.
The government and its elected representatives have had their fair share of diplomatic flaps as a direct result of being caught in bold-faced lies. The Gulf of Tonkin, Operation Northwoods, Watergate, WMD in Iraq, and other blatant Constitution burning brought on by the Patriot Act are a few examples from memory. Hey, I don’t have the benefit of a Google search to dig up the hundreds, maybe thousands more. Guess what, the lies were the same after all this shit went down.
“Stay in your homes, the situation is under control.”
Same story, different lie.
If this ancient Chinese secret turns out to be true (a long shot), I can safely add it to the long list of conspiracy facts.
—A cynical naval officer
16
U.S. Outpost Four—Somewhere in the Arctic
“I read you Lima Charlie. George Washington, where are you?”
After a minute of static the ship responded, “Sorry, OP4, we can’t disclose our exact operating location on this net. I’m authorized to tell you that we are operating somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, over.”
Both Mark’s and Crusow’s hearts sank. The ship might as well be light-years away. They were using atmospheric bounce to communicate, a phenomenon that was intermittent at best. Mark continued his dialogue with the first living Americans he had spoken to since Crusow’s wife last winter. He didn’t know how long the atmospheric HF bounce might last.
“GW this is OP4, understood. We are an Arctic scientific research station. Our situation is dire; we have less than sixty days of fuel and food. We have five souls onboard, some are not in good health, over.”
“OP4 this is GW, roger that, I’ll be passing your situation report up the chain to the highest levels immediately, over.”
“GW this is OP4, you do that, please. What is the situation on the mainland, over?”
“OP4 this
is GW, situation really bad. The mainland United States has been deemed uninhabitable. Nuclear detonations have destroyed many overrun cities to no measurable advantage. The undead continue to dominate in the lower forty-eight. No word on Alaska.”
“GW this is OP4, roger that. Winter has set in here pretty hard and heavy. The worst of it is in front of us. You might like to know that the creatures don’t fare too well up here. The cold freezes them up pretty good. They can’t move if exposed longer than a few minutes, over.”
“OP4 this is GW, acknowledged. There will be folks interested to hear that. Before we lose connectivity, recommend we set up a radio contact schedule with times as well as primary, secondary, and tertiary frequencies, over.”
“GW this is OP4, sounds like a damn good plan.”
Mark continued his back and forth with the ship, exchanging common High Frequency Global Communications System frequencies as well as contact schedule times based on Greenwich Mean Time. Mark had finished establishing his comm schedule and started exchanging news when the transmission faded to garble.
“Damn it,” Mark said angrily.
“Buck up, little camper, this is the best news we’ve had in months. If that boat is up and running then maybe more might be. Maybe something that can help,” Crusow replied.
“Don’t even try to be optimistic. We’re well over a hundred miles from thin ice and even so, the weather is so fuckin’ bad, no ship captain in his right mind short of an icebreaker skipper would risk it. Even if they did, how the hell are we going to hike a hundred miles over chasm-filled and unforgiving terrain in negative-fifty conditions, Crusow?”
“We have the Cat, right?”
“Yeah, I guess we have that.”
“It’s something. I am not giving up. If anything this makes me at least a little more hopeful. I’m not dying at the top of the world. I’m staying at ninety-eight-point-six degrees and you are, too. Neither one of us is headed to the bottom of the gulch and I’ll be damned if I’m not off this ice cube before I die. We will see the sun again. There’s a lot of work to do. Write out three copies of that schedule you just made with the ship. You keep one, give one to me, and post one at the desk, under the glass top. We need to call a meeting to let the others know.”
“All right. Okay. I’ll start now,” Mark said as he sat up straighter in his chair, with just a little more focus, a little more hope.
17
It wasn’t long before Tara and Laura found their way down to the sick bay, and to Jan. Laura missed her mother and wanted to know why she was down with the sick people all the time. The moment Jan saw Laura, she peeled off the blood-stained lab coat and gloves, removed her face shield, and picked Laura up, squeezing her tight.
“I’m sorry, baby, Mommy’s got to be here, it’s important.”
“Mommy, I miss you. Can’t you leave? You’re gone all the time.”
“I know, baby, Mommy is trying to figure out a way to stop the bad people. Mommy is tired of the monsters and wants them to go away.”
“I want them to go away, too,” Laura said, frowning.
Putting Laura down with a grunt (she was getting bigger), Jan asked Tara how she was holding up with Kil being away.
“I’m all right,” Tara said. “To tell you the truth, being able to babysit Laura keeps my mind off of him being gone. I’m helping out Dean with school lessons and that keeps me busy during the day. Did you know that Dean has nearly one hundred students now? It’s practically a full-time job.”
“Yeah, you won’t believe this, but Dean came down to sick bay after teaching classes yesterday and helped to get this place back in order. I have no idea where she gets her energy to teach kids all day and then volunteer down here.”
Tara laughed at this and without warning, broke down into tears.
Jan comforted her. “It’s going to be just fine, he’ll make it back, I promise.”
“It’s not that, Jan. It’s something else.”
“Well, honey, do you want to talk about it?”
“I’m pregnant,” Tara blurted out as more tears started to meander down her cheeks.
“Oh boy,” Jan said with eyes wide open.
“Yay!” Laura appeared from under the lab table.
• • •
Danny hated the monsters. All the grown-ups looked at it much differently than he did. His whole family except for his granny had been murdered by the monsters—that’s what his friend Laura called them. Being a little older, he knew they weren’t real monsters, but it didn’t matter. They acted like monsters and they chased you like monsters and they ate you like monsters. The grown-ups treated them like snakes or spiders—avoiding them and smashing them and shooting them only when they needed to. For Danny, it was personal. Danny knew that he wouldn’t be alive if it were not for his Granny Dean. She flew them both away as far as she could.
Danny had been trapped on a water tower and peeing off the top of it onto the monsters’ heads when Kil found them months ago. Before the tower he remembered the propeller incident. His Granny had to land to get gas for the plane. They were running on fumes when she touched down at the airfield. He thought he might have remembered the engine sputtering. They were about to be taken by monsters just before Granny decided to chop them up like vegetables with the plane. She took out a whole bunch, Danny thought. The monsters trashed the plane, sending Danny and his grandmother to the tower in exile and away from the safety of flight.
Then Kil came for them.
• • •
Danny was done with school for the day and had permission to roam about until dinner as long as he stayed on the 03 level, off the catwalks and out of the way. Danny loved to hide and listen to everyone as they passed by. He thought he needed the practice. He hadn’t spied on grown-ups since before his parents became monsters. That didn’t bother him much anymore unless he thought about it too long. No one but him knew how tough his granny was. She saved him and smashed them. He never heard Granny tell anyone about that so he didn’t either. She was tough, maybe tougher than Kil, he thought.
Danny was in one of the less-populated parts of the O3 level; he noticed the painted number on the wall was 250. Hearing someone stomping over a knee-knocker up ahead, Danny hid beside a firefighting storage locker and behind an open hatch.
As the sound grew louder, he overheard one of the men say, “How long are we going to hold those things onboard? They creep me the fuck out.”
“I’m with you. I want to jettison the things ASAP. We are not getting a damn thing from them. We don’t have the equipment. The admiral wants to hold on to them until . . .”
Their voices faded quickly after they passed Danny’s hiding spot. He thought about following them for a moment but then decided against it and headed down the passageway from where the men had come.
• • •
There were benefits to being small; it was a lot easier to hide. Danny had shown Laura all the secrets behind hiding like a boy. After being found a few dozen times when it was Danny’s turn to seek, she had picked up some tricks of the boy trade.
Danny would tell her, “El, you gotta pick less easy places. I found you in two seconds.”
Laura would pout and stomp off and begin counting to thirty, a bit faster than was fair. She was tired of being it. Danny was a hiding ninja and was rarely found, unless he was trying to boost Laura’s self-esteem.
Danny had just overheard a curious conversation between what he thought were two soldiers—not knowing the difference between soldiers and sailors—about holding things onboard. His eavesdropping was abruptly cut off as the men kept moving down the passageway. Danny had never been farther aft than where he was hiding now.
. . . “Things onboard . . . creep me out . . . jettison” . . . The conversation between the two men kept repeating in his mind. Danny hadn’t yet learned what jettison meant, thinking it might mean to fly away or something like that. He would ask his English teacher at the next class. She is the best, he thoug
ht to himself. He kept moving to the back of the ship, scouting hiding spots, jumping at every sound of footsteps.
He was far back in the ship when it came time to make a decision . . . go down the ladder or go back to his room. Danny didn’t even think. He quickly and quietly scurried down the ladder. It was dark and unfamiliar, and it smelled funny. Reaching the last step, the sterile smell intensified. As his eyes slowly adjusted, he recognized the red night-lights that were sometimes on in the sleeping areas of the ship.
He could see a fan room just up ahead—his healthy young eyes could make out the label on the hatch clearly. Adjacent to the fan room was another door marked Restricted Access. There was a little box next to the door where he had seen soldiers enter codes before—not here, but where John worked—in the radio shack. With no one in sight he sprinted for the fan room. His heart thumped faster as he closed the distance . . . only one knee-knocker to hurdle before reaching the door.
In midair jump, he heard the metallic sound of the door handle from the other door turn. Quickly, he slung open the fan-room hatch and dived in under the air circulator; he didn’t have time to shut the hatch behind him.
The mold was a quarter-inch thick under the circulator; the rapid transition from the hospital-like aroma to the mildew stench caused his stomach to turn just a bit. The light from the passageway spilled into the fan room but was broken by a silhouette of legs. He could see only the outline of boots from his vantage point.
“Has maintenance been here today?”
“No, but we’ve hit some heavy seas in the last few hours. The hatch probably flew open in the chop.”
The hatch slammed shut, leaving Danny in darkness; the voices slowly trailed away just like before. Inside the black of the cool steel around him, Danny’s mind wandered into equally black parts of his imagination. He thought of the monsters and for a second imagined that they might be in this dark place with him. Rolling into the fetal position, he squirmed in fear on the damp and moldy floor until he was certain no one or thing was near.