Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass

by J. L. Bourne

  Fifteen minutes went by before Kil gave an update. “Hourglass, the creatures are not concentrating on the door. No increase in activity or intensity right now.”

  • • •

  “Roger that, Kil, good to know. Thanks for the overwatch,” Rex said, briefly letting his comm discipline slip. “Griff, you stay near the door and relay any radio traffic down the tunnel to us. We won’t be able to pick up Virginia’s transmission as we move farther down this tunnel.”

  Griff nodded in compliance.

  “I’ll lead. Commie, you stay between me and Rico. Huck, you are welded to Commie. Rico, you have our back.” After he was certain that everyone understood what was happening, Rex began to advance. “Have a good ’un, Griff.”

  “You all too,” Griff replied without looking back, fixated on the door and the undead outside.

  The creatures had been screaming since the group entered the tunnel. The men blocked the noise as best they could. There was no getting accustomed to it. Moving deeper into the tunnel, Commie began to remember his time stationed here at the cave.

  The walls were covered in artwork on either side, all created by military personnel stationed here over the years. One mural depicted a skeleton marine sitting in a chair, wearing a headset in front of some radio equipment. It seemed to listen to some unknown transmission. The quarter mile of murals was an odd visual representation of the loose history of this facility. Some of the details depicted in the art could only be understood by a former spook like Commie. Some renditions were hints of highly classified real operations that occurred here. Commie smiled as the team moved by pieces of art he had contributed to before being transferred to his next assignment.

  “We’re about halfway down the tunnel now,” Commie told the others.

  “Shhhh! I hear something up ahead,” Huck whispered.

  The men brought their weapons up to their shoulders in anticipation.

  “Commie, stay back here with Huck. Rico, you’re with me.”

  • • •

  Rex and Rico moved ahead a few meters.

  The slight curvature of the tunnel straightened, revealing the last-stand barricade. There were dozens of the creatures, mostly in hibernation, standing on both sides of the makeshift barrier. A few of the undead moved about, triggered awake by the noises made near the cave entrance.

  “There’s too many for just us to handle—they’ll wake up any moment and fuck us up,” said Rico.

  “Yeah, let’s go back and get the guys,” Rex said.

  The two hoofed it back to the others, relaying what they had just witnessed.

  “Okay, we’re gonna need everyone. There are maybe fifty of them sleeping near a barricade a hundred yards up the tunnel. Some of them are waking up.”

  A crashing sound in the darkness interrupted the silence. A creature must have knocked something over near the barricade.

  “Let’s go take them out. Walkers first, then the sleepers. Commie, I don’t want you near them. If they start rushing us, you run your ass back down the tunnel to Griff, understood?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I have a gun you know.” Commie’s ego was clearly stung a little in being told to flee.

  “Yeah, you may have a gun, but none of us know Chinese,” said Rex. “What happens if you get infected and we’re forced to kill your ass? Ever think about what might happen if we can’t communicate with the Chinese when we reach their waters? What if part of the Chinese General Staff and civilian leadership have survived and we can’t tell them that we come in peace? One submarine versus the Chinese North Sea Fleet? Get the picture?” Although Rex couldn’t see Commie’s eyes behind his goggles and mask, he could tell by the body language that Commie understood.

  After taking a Geiger reading, Rex gave everyone the option to remove his protective hood before laying out the plan. “This is how it’s gonna happen. We’re moving up just enough to start taking shots at the ones that are active. Then we’ll start picking off the sleepers. No one shoots unless in self-defense or until I shoot first. These carbines are going to be loud in this tunnel, suppressed or not. Be ready for that, Commie.”

  Commie nodded at Rex.

  “Okay, let’s move.”

  The four advanced down the tunnel until Rex held up his fist to stop the group. Rex readied his gun and took the first shot, signaling everyone else to start dropping the undead.

  They began with the active creatures first, missing some; the shots sparked off the concrete walls, jolting the sleepers. The entire barricade area buzzed with movement, making the follow-up shots more difficult. The tunnel distorted the sounds, sending the creatures in all directions. Some of the undead walked at the group, but were quickly destroyed. The team managed to drop all of them except for a few stragglers on the other side of the barricade.

  The radio crackled: “Guys, things are degrading fast back here,” Griff said, as the others were taking care of the creatures on the other side of the barrier. “Virginia says that they’re massing at the front of the cave and I believe it. The doors are buckling.”

  “Hold the fucking line!” Rex radioed to Griff.

  The four jumped the barricade, gunning down two more creatures before advancing on the turnstiles ahead. Without power, the badges were useless for accessing the secure areas of the cave.

  Rex thought he could hear the suppressed action of Griff’s carbine a quarter mile down the tunnel—it sounded like a real gun-fight. Rex pushed Griff’s problems out of his head and pulled out his pick set for the side handicapped access that bypassed the electrically dependent turnstiles. Without graphite lube to spray into the lock, he knew it might give him some trouble.

  A suppressed shot rang out five meters away.

  “What the fuck, Rico?!” Rex exclaimed, dropping the pick on the floor.

  “One of them was still moving, man, crawling! I had to dust it before it crawled over here and bit your ass!”

  Rex nodded his thanks in response, felt for his lock pick, and went back to work on the lock. He used the tweezers from his Swiss Army knife, bending them into a torsion wrench, and began to rake the pins. He worked the lock for five minutes; drops of concentration sweat hit the floor as he struggled. The lock finally gave and Rex wondered if he had bested it or actually stripped out the internal pins. He pushed the door open and moved a nearby corpse in place to prop it open, careful to avoid the creature’s slack mouth.

  They were now technically inside the secure area of the cave.

  Rex herded everyone in and keyed his radio. “Griff, we’re in! All tangos down. Move your ass!”

  There was no answer on the other end. Rex repeated his broadcast down the tunnel.

  “Maybe we should go back and check?” Commie suggested.

  “It’s too risky,” Rex snapped. “Once I shut that goddamned gate, we’re secure inside here. A lot can happen on the half-mile round trip getting down to the door and back. I saw a lot of maintenance access doors on the way here. There could be dozens of them inside those unsecured rooms. Not all of them were closed.” Rex was shaken at being forced to leave Griff to his own fate. This was not something acceptable in the special-operations community.

  The gate shut with a metallic clank and the four men waited. Ten minutes passed before the radio keyed again.

  “They broke through and I’m nearly out of ammo,” came Griff’s voice. “If I don’t go out there and close those doors we’re all dead. Now or never, man, about to be too many outside to reach the crank. Good luck . . . out.”

  Rex stood for a few seconds frozen in shock at what Griff had just said. He was sacrificing himself to save the rest of them. “Griff, thanks. SAR dot bravo, twenty-four hours, IR strobes. Make it if you can. Good luck.”

  There was no response.

  • • •

  Onboard Virginia, Kil focused intensely on the Scan Eagle UAV feed. He’d transmitted warnings in the minutes leading up to Griff’s decision to leave the cave and secure the door by way of manual hand
crank. He’d heard Griff’s radio message to Rex a minute before and watched the IR signature of his carbine shooting out the large steel doors.

  The UAV cameras detected something small fly out of the open steel doors and into the mass of undead that congregated nearby. About four seconds later an explosion, likely a frag grenade, rocked the gaggle of creatures, sending them in all directions. Chunks of flesh flew against the steel doors and the guard shack in black splats. Immediately following the explosion, Griff sprinted through the opening and to the manual control crank to close the massive steel doors. Kil panned the UAV camera out a bit and noted the creatures’ reactions to the explosion. The parking lot below the stairs was teeming with undead activity, polarized like iron on a magnet, all converging on Griff. Panning back to Griff’s immediate area, Kil called in the SITREP.

  “Griff, strength fifty, about twenty meters right behind you. I’ll call out when danger close.”

  No response.

  Although Kil could not be sure from the feed, it appeared that Griff was ignoring everything and resigned to the prospect that nothing mattered but getting the door closed. Kil watched the video feed as if it were a rerun; he had seen this play out before, but not in the black-and-white monochrome of the IR video on screen before him—he’d witnessed it in living color. It never ended well. The creatures moved, frenzied—they didn’t know where Griff was in the darkness, exactly. He zoomed in on the door, just as the UAV orbit shifted to allow a good look angle. Six inches of gap. Too small for any undead to fit.

  “Griff, danger close, danger close! That’s enough! They can’t fit through that gap!” Kil exclaimed.

  • • •

  Griff gave the crank another full turn and looked over at the door, verifying Kil’s report. Jumping to his feet he pulled his back-up weapon, a Glock 34 pistol. His rifle sat empty, propped on a wall inside the cave. Griff began working the crowd. With only a single magazine remaining, he thought of saving one round for himself.

  His decision was made when he slammed the full magazine into his handgun, slapping the slide forward. His ears rang from 9mm reports. The final round from his last magazine dropped the nearest threat—but there were hundreds, possibly thousands more coming. He re-holstered his sidearm, reaching for his tertiary weapon. In his right hand, wrapped with a paracord lanyard, was a large, razor-sharp, fixed-blade knife; in his left was another frag. This was Griff’s life-insurance policy, payable in death to any undead thing within fifteen meters.

  Another frenzied creature wandered too close and sensed Griff in the darkness. Swinging his knife from far right to left he beheaded his attacker, dropping the severed head and body to the ground at his feet. He reached over with his knife hand and pulled the pin on the grenade in his left, leaving the spoon in place—dead man’s switch.

  Hundreds more poured up the steps like a bizarre reverse-flowing waterfall. There was nowhere to flee, and Griff was so tired of running anyway.

  • • •

  “Griff, I’m sorry, man,” Kil transmitted, watching the last stand play out from above.

  Griff looked up into the sky, waving his knife, and then did what only a few men had the fortitude to do in past wars fought over land, freedom, or money.

  He charged.

  Griff picked the largest group and ran screaming and slashing at their heads in a bid to kill every creature on the island. Kil could not see what was happening beneath the maelstrom of flailing undead appendages, but many of the undead fell before Griff’s insurance policy was paid out in full. In a white flash of frag and guts, Griff held the line to the very end.

  36

  Arctic North

  Making biofuel was a gruesome and nauseating effort. With Kung’s help, Crusow hacked away at the half-frozen bodies, removing the precious fat. The skin was freezer burned and blasted by the Arctic wind. Kung was at first confused by what Crusow needed during the butchering process; he had too much muscle in his first lops of flesh.

  Crusow explained what he needed by grabbing what little fat he had on his midsection and pointing it out to Kung.

  “This here, Kung, not this,” Crusow said, now pointing at his bicep.

  After harvesting a couple hundred pounds of fat from the bodies, Crusow began the tedious chemical process of converting the fat into biofuel. The smell was abhorrent and took some getting used to. Careful heating of the fat was required to properly process the fuel. Crusow wore a mask and goggles to protect him from the boiling fat. His first few batches turned out well and seemed to work fine when tested indoors.

  Crusow brought a small amount outdoors, away from the heated lab, to test it on one of the generators modified to accept alternative fuel. After leaving the fuel in the generator shack for half an hour, he returned to find that it had solidified to a gel-like consistency inside the container.

  Crusow brought the fuel back in, placing it near a heating vent. The fuel eventually returned to a liquid state. Crusow’s solution to the solidification problem was to use the Sno-Cat’s primary diesel tank to start the engine and mount a secondary tank near it. He installed heating coils on the secondary tank to keep the fuel in a liquid state. It wasn’t ideal, but he didn’t have access to a full-on refinery or the luxury of complaining about it.

  Crusow and Mark had kept a close eye on Larry the past few days. He was bedridden, teetering closer to death since Bret was killed at the bottom of the gulch. Despite the encouragement of the other three, Larry was giving up. They moved Larry’s quarters near the radio room, where he could be monitored more conveniently. As a countermeasure, they leaned chairs and other things against his door—they would not be surprised if he returned from death. This made the watches interesting, when their improvised warning devices fell unexpectedly.

  The odd-hour radio watches were necessary, resulting in several successful communications relays from USS George Washington to USS Virginia and vice versa. Arctic Outpost Four was now an information nexus between the warships.

  Via shortwave radio, Crusow was becoming more familiar with John as well as his friend Kil. He even started his own chess game with John after learning of the ongoing matches. It was a good way to pass the time; Crusow was anxious to make radio contact at every opportunity. With the extra chessboards from the outpost game room, Crusow was able to follow John’s game with Kil while he played his own game. It was surprising the lengths a man went to in the attempt to fight boredom.

  Crusow had already seen every movie at the outpost several times; at least the ongoing games were fresh content. If you included the players, these radio-broadcast games would have the highest per-living-capita Arbitron ratings in broadcast history.

  Chess and military communications were not the only things being passed via shortwave. News from the outside was always good to hear, no matter how bad. In the past week, Crusow learned that Oahu, Hawaii, was a nuclear wasteland, that America still had aircraft flying in limited capacity, and that the Virginia was continuing her rescue operation west after leaving Hawaii. Some of the military brevity made the messages unclear in meaning but Crusow and Mark were able to put most of it together when it wasn’t encoded.

  Now that the Sno-Cat had been modified with dual tanks, they could make the trip to the thinner-ice zones to the south, where an icebreaker might be able to rescue them.

  Eventually, Crusow distilled fifty-five gallons of biodiesel, a convenient amount, as the modified heated tank installed on the Cat was a fifty-five-gallon steel storage drum salvaged from the outpost dump.

  In Crusow’s dealings with Larry, Kung was a valuable ambassador. He felt bad for Kung, realizing that he had been dealt a bad hand. Although he was improving, English was still a distant-second language for him and he found it difficult to communicate his thoughts and feelings to the others. He was truly a stranger in an odd and unforgiving place.

  The stress from the encroaching cold was causing a group mental breakdown. There was a clock ticking down to the date they would run out of f
uel and freeze. This date could not be slid to the right, rescheduled, or put off any longer that the time the generators would run dry. To Crusow, spirits seemed to be crumbling fast.

  Since his horrible but necessary trip to the bottom of the Gulch, Crusow’s nightmares had returned in full force. The long darkness of the winter north only fueled the feelings of fear and hopelessness that heaved him into torturous and unrelenting dreamscapes. He would not soon forget the hand-to-hand combat with Bret or the other creature with a face that was familiar but forgotten—wiped from memory by the horrors endured since his incarceration on this ice rock.

  USS Virginia—Hawaiian waters

  I’m off duty for the moment. The shore element of Task Force Hourglass is still inside the cave facility. I’ve instructed the watch to wake me if they hear or see anything on the Scan Eagle picture. Another UAV launch is scheduled soon to relieve the bird that is airborne. We haven’t heard from the team in six hours since Griff—

  Well, since he fought to the death; I suppose that’s the best way to put it. Saien and I have been discussing the current situation on the ground and thinking of all possible outcomes.

  One possibility: We never hear from the team again and proceed to China without a SOF team, or Chinese interpreter. Saien and I know the second and third order effects of that; neither of us are fans of that outcome.

  Another more favorable possibility is that they make it out of the cave, reporting that it’s secure, well stocked, and operational. Saien and I have already given a warning order for a ready boat.

  With the sun high in the sky earlier, we went topside with the binoculars to check the beach.