by J. L. Bourne
“I know how this made it to the admiral,” Jan blurted out. “A week or so ago I was in sick bay with Dr. Bricker. Danny came in needing stitches and mentioned that he thought that there were zombies onboard, and that he was playing zombie with the other children. After Danny left, Dr. Bricker told me that he’d sometimes receive tissue samples for analysis, and that he was suspicious of where the samples came from.”
“That doesn’t really mean anything, Jan. Besides, do we really want to jump to conclusions and get ourselves all worked up over tissue samples?” Tara asked.
Jan frowned and began to explain: “It’s not just some tissue samples. Bricker said they were highly radiated brain-tissue fragments. He stressed that no reconnaissance or salvage missions occurred in the two weeks prior to receiving the samples.”
“Jan, I’m not doubting you . . . I just don’t think I’m ready to think about those things being on this ship with me and . . .” Tara put both hands on her belly, rubbing it softly, and began to sob.
“Tara, it’s okay,” said John. “If they’re onboard, at least we’ll know. We’re all armed despite what we thought might happen when we got here. Instead of disarming all of us, the military required we have weapons at all times onboard the ship; this plays to our advantage. The only thing left to do is prove that the undead are here with us.”
John stood up from his desk and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “I think I may just have the perfect undead detector, batteries not included.” He looked down at Annabelle as she chewed on her rope, tail curled and wagging.
“Those hackles saved Kil and me more than once.”
ZAAUZYUW RUEOMFC7685 1562255-TTTT—RHOVIQM
ZNR TTTTT ZUI RUEOMCG340X 1562254
Z 042253Z
FM USS GEORGE WASHINGTON
TO RHOVNQN/COG MT W
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T O P S E C R E T N//002045U
SUBJ:/SITREP CAUSEWAY—DOWNTOWN
RMKS:/FINAL PHASE OF EXPERIMENTATION ON SPECIMENS CAUSEWAY AND DOWNTOWN WILL BIGIN IN THE NEXT 24 HOURS. IAW COG DIRECTIVES, PLANNED AREAS OF BRAIN WILL BE LOBOTOMIZED, ONE EYE REMOVED FOR TESTING OF SUSPECTED THERMAL SENSORY PERCEPTION. THIS STATION WILL SEND UPDATE SEPCOR.
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* * *
BEGIN TEXT TRANSMISSION
KLIEGLIGHT SERIAL 209
RTTUZYUW-RQHNQN-00000-RRRRR-Y
T O P S E C R E T//SAP HORIZON
SUBJ: NEW ORLEANS SPECIMEN RADIATION EFFECT FINDINGS
RMKS: THIS STATION HAS COMPLETED INITIAL EXAMINATION ON SPECIMENS CAUSEWAY AND DOWNTOWN (LABELED IN REFERENCE TO NEW ORLEANS EXTRACTION AREAS). DURING THE INITIAL TESTING, BOTH SUBJECTS DISPLAYED CONGRUENCY WITH HAND EYE FUNCTION, SIMILAR TO A YOUNG CHILD IN ABILITY TO MANIPULATE SHAPED WOOD OBJECTS INTO SHAPED HOLES. DURING MORE ADVANCED COORDINATION TESTING, DOWNTOWN POSSESSED ABILITY TO MOVE AT TEN MPH BURSTS. CAUSEWAY COULD ATTAIN SIX MPH. DOWNTOWN ALSO POSSESSED SIMPLE PROBLEM SOLVING ABILITY AND WOULD CHOOSE CERTAIN TOOLS TO ATTEMPT TO BREAK GLASS TO GAIN ENTRY TO WHAT IT PERCEIVED MIGHT BE LIVING PREY BEHIND BALLISTIC GLASS. DOWNTOWN DISPLAYED ADVERSARIAL BEHAVIOR TOWARD CAUSEWAY WHEN FOOD WAS IN PLAY, AND WOULD SHOVE CAUSEWAY AWAY FROM FOOD SOURCES AT TIMES.
BEHAVIOR OF NOTE: DOWNTOWN WAS OBSERVED WATCHING RESEARCHERS ENTER AND LEAVE AND WOULD MIMIC THEIR HAND MOVEMENT WHEN THE RESEARCHERS WOULD THROW HATCH LEVERS TO THE OUTSIDE, SUGGESTING AT LEAST RUDIMENTARY LEARNING ABILITY. BOTH CAUSEWAY AND DOWNTOWN POSSESS SPEED AND AGILITY NOT YET OBSERVED IN CREATURES UNEXPOSED TO RADIATION BOMBARDMENT OF PREVIOUS NUCLEAR DETONATIONS.
SUMMARY: USS GEORGE WASHINGTON WILL CONTINUE TO OBSERVE THE SPECIMENS. WILL ADVISE COG ON ANY DESTRUCTION INTENT. FIVE SUBJECTS IN VARIOUS CONDITIONS FROM DIFFERENT GEOGRAPHICAL SECTORS REMAIN ONBOARD. THIS STATION IS SKEPTICAL AT THE POSSIBILITY OF EXTERMINATION OF THE AMERICAN POPULATION OF UNDEAD. RADIATED UNDEAD ARE AT THIS TIME SHOWING NO INDICATIONS OF DECAY. HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI ARCHIVE DATA INDICATES SOME PRESERVATION OF THE DEAD BY RADIATION BUT NOT TO THIS ORDER OF MAGNITUDE. WE SPECULATE THAT HIGH ORDER RADIATION HAS FORMED A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP WITH THE ANOMALY ON A LEVEL WE ARE UNABLE TO VERIFY OR MEASURE AT THIS TIME. GOOD LUCK.
GW CHIEF SCIENTIST SENDS . . .
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Tunnel in the Sky . . . I was so caught up with the mission, I had no clue what John meant. He’s been including extra codes with his chess moves for well over a week now. I wrote them down without thinking, as they were basically gibberish to me at the time. John sent the encrypted messages using our twin copies of Tunnel in the Sky. He’d sent page, paragraph, and sentence cipher codes referring to specific words and letters that matched my copy of the text, forming short sentences. I discovered this after Crusow’s last transmission relay from John. Although I informed John that I finished the book a while back, he still asked again after the most recent set of codes. “Read Tunnel in the Sky yet?”
I sat confused in my rack for a while, flipping through the pages, waiting to hear an update from the team coming back from Kunia. I looked for something that John may have written inside the book, something I may have missed.
I finally pieced together the message. The gibberish code hidden in plain sight with the chess moves referred to specific sequences that could only be deciphered if the recipient had the exact same key as the sender. In this case an uncommon and out of print book. It took a few minutes, but his message was clear.
“1947 NEVADA CRASH SPECIMEN JUST EXPOSED TO ANOMALY . . . VERY STRONG . . . GUNS INEFFECTIVE, FIRE NEUTRALIZED . . . MEAN ANYTHING?”
I am of course surprised and confused as to how John came across this information, but it is starting to make more sense, considering he’s the acting communications officer onboard the carrier. The navy always seems to operate on two primary working principles. One of them is the fuck up move up rule, wherein the more fucked up you are, the higher chance of your promotion. The other principle that has held true in my time in service is curse of the competent. John falls into the latter. The more competent you are, the more uncompensated responsibility you are given, and the more work is expected of you.
Without fail, the ones that ruled the competent typically fell into the first category. I suspect John has been given full access to the ship’s communication networks because he’s the only one that can do the job. Either way, I won’t be revealing this message to the captain until I’m very sure what side he’s on. I’ll tell Rex and company when the time is right; they are the operators, and deserve to know. China will be problematic at best.
This encoded message from John would have sounded pretty damn strange if I had not been briefed on what our government had been hiding all these years in the mountains out west.
43
USS Virginia—Hawaiian waters
“Kil, when will they be back?” Saien asked.
“They’re leaving the cave an hour after sundown. The creatures seem to be a little calmer then. Why do you ask?”
“I just wanted to see if we had some time to chat before you went back to work.”
“Yeah, I guess. Whatcha got on your mind?” Kil said as he slid off the top rack and sat down in front of Saien.
“I don’t think I believe in what we were told on the way over here. I’ve thought about it for many days. At first I thought some of it might be true, but after going over it again in my head it seems ridiculous. I wanted to know how you felt about this, this wild story?”
Kil took a deep breath and sat back in his chair for a moment, pondering the question. After some time, he spoke. “Well, I think I’m with you on this one. Someone close to me used to say: ‘Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.’ ”
They shared a laugh even though Kil wasn’t sure that Saien understood the intended meaning.
“Now that we’re on the same page I think I need to tell you something,” Kil said with a conspiratorial whisper. He stood up and walked over to his rack, reaching under the pillow. Out fr
om underneath he pulled a worn paperback novel. “Remember this book John gave me before we left?”
Saien nodded.
“Well, I just found out that John has been passing a message to me using the pages of this book, embedded in his chess moves. You know, with the normal message traffic and such.”
“Are you going to tell me what it says?”
“The basic message was that the Roswell specimen had been exposed to whatever this shit is.”
“What? When did this happen?”
“I don’t know the when or why but the results, according to John, were that it was pretty damn mean. Only fire stopped it. Small arms had no effect.”
They both sat there and chewed on that for a moment, until Kil said, “Now we just established that both of us think that this is some crazy tinfoil-hat bullshit and probably not true. All that aside, even though we don’t believe any of it, it might be a good idea to get ahold of a Molotov cocktail or two for the team. I think you should make friends down in engineering and see what you can come up with. If asked, tell them I requested it.”
“Sounds good.”
“As soon as the team gets back, I’ll focus on telling Rex what we know. I don’t want to get John in any trouble. I don’t think Rex and his folks will be a problem, but the stress of all this . . .”
“Yes, the stress in all this can turn friends to enemies and enemies to friends. I know this firsthand.”
“Yes, I’ll bet you do. Don’t think I’ve forgotten our travels. You’re pretty damn good with the long gun, something that most civilians are not. I’ve taken notice of the rug and of your fire kindling. We’ve never talked about it before, but then again, I was pretty sick of war even before all this went down. I think this, whatever you call it, ended a few longtime feuds, and abated some hatred. Don’t worry, Saien, I think Homeland Security is gone for good. I don’t know what I despised more, their airport naked-body scanners and grope-downs or the dead walking. I doubt any database is left powered up with your name on it.”
Taking a long breath, Saien sat back uncomfortably with arms drawn in close to his body. “Kil, I was to meet up with a member of my cell in San Antonio. We were to . . .”
“Don’t bother, Saien. I don’t need to hear it. Don’t forget I’m a commissioned military officer and wouldn’t have hesitated before,” Kil replied, emotion showing through.
“I need to get this off my back. I have no one left. That’s the only reason.”
“Saien, remember what they told us before we learned about what we’re going after? ‘What was told could not be untold.’ Before you keep talking, make sure it’s something you won’t regret. We survived some pretty close calls, but I wouldn’t expect you to be asking for my autograph if I told you what I did back before all this. I chose to keep my mouth shut about it for a reason. We’ve gotta survive, that’s all—nothing more.”
Both men sat in their chairs across from each other in the small stateroom. Kil imagined that he could hear his wristwatch tick—but it was digital. Saien began to speak again—his eyes focused far behind Kil through the bulkheads, through the ocean, beyond Oahu.
“We were to meet in San Antonio. I only knew the codename and email drop of one member of my cell, by design. We communicated via online dead drop box, but used off-the-shelf encryption. Your military uses much inferior communications encryption to what is available off the shelf. I used two-hundred-fifty-six-bit AES. That’s not important, I’m sorry. I’m rambling.”
“Don’t worry about it. Go on, I guess,” Kil said reassuringly, more curious than anything else.
Saien took a drink from an old disposable water bottle he’d been using since they left Panama and continued. “It was a week before the dead walked when I received my activation orders. The target was a shopping mall, peak shopping season. I was to be part of a five-man kill squad. We were only one team, but I believe there were more, maybe twenty more teams. All ordered to attack simultaneously in different cities. The goal was to drive the death nail into the American economy and solidify the ongoing economic collapse. Your economy was seventy percent consumer based. If people were too afraid to spend money, it would be the end of the American system. Your money supply would be hyper-inflated, and with that, your wars overseas would end. We also knew that the sheepdog could not guard all the sheep and could not lessen their fears. When the dead walked and the infrastructure collapsed, I suppose we got what we wanted. Seeing a man who had been shot through the chest with a sniper round get up and come after you will change your ideology. This is why I do not pray any longer. I resent what I was before, and what I was planning to do. Though you do not ask, I will tell you. Most every American is dead now, as you know. If you were in a cave in Pakistan a year ago having a conversation with leaders of the base and you were to ask him, ‘Would the mass death of Americans be good in the eyes of Allah?’ he would have no doubt responded as you would imagine. Now look what we have today. America is dead and so is everyone else, Allah is nowhere to be found. God is dead upon the Earth, who could argue this?”
“So you were going to go Mumbai crazy and shoot up a shopping mall?” Kil asked, almost rhetorically.
“That was the plan. I have woken up and I am ashamed,” Saien declared sincerely.
“Well, can’t say I like you more after hearing that . . . but I ain’t perfect either, I’m a military deserter. I disobeyed orders after my boss told me to return to base. I never reported. I stayed behind in my home. John was my neighbor across the street. Look at it this way: At least you didn’t carry out the plan. It’s only thought crime at this point.”
“Yes, for this, I’m thankful. I would be a tortured soul otherwise.”
“Yeah, you’d be pretty messed up right about now, no doubt. And as far as God goes, there’s a lot of what you have going around. You ain’t the only one questioning their faith. I’m sure all that alien bullshit isn’t helping anything.”
A knock on the door made Kil jump; he reached for his pistol instinctively.
“Come,” Kil said.
The door slowly opened, revealing the petty officer of the watch’s pimply young face. “Sir, sun is down and we’re getting radio chatter from Hourglass. They are asking for you. Scan Eagles are already en route.”
“Roger that. I’m on my way,” Kil said.
44
Oahu Interior
The sun was down; a purple glow from the west glimmered and danced on the Pacific waters. Task Force Hourglass had been at Kunia cave for twenty-four hours. The Hawaii mission had so far been assessed as a failure. Unable to gain control of the satellites to support the Hourglass incursion, the submarine would be alone, the crew afraid and vulnerable to any remnants of Chinese military that lurked in the Chinese waters. Commie’s pack was full of papers and disks. Papers with lots of secrets—information that had never been transmitted from this facility, long ago abandoned by the cryptologic group that worked here.
Rex was the last up the ladder to the top and last to close the lid on this place forever. Years from now, someone will find a nest of mutant squirrels living in there, he thought as he slammed the access hatch down. Rex, Huck, Rico, and Commie stood atop the mesalike formation; it was too difficult to tell if it had been built around the tunnel or if the tunnel had been built through it. To the south was a large group of undead creatures; to the north, a sheer cliff face that dropped about seventy-five feet to the jungle below.
Huck found the anchor point for the ropes. They joined the ropes together via a double sheet bend knot. He secured the rope to the anchor near the knot and yelled over to Rico, “Throw it over, Mexican.”
Grumbling in Spanish, Rico tossed both ends of the doubled rope over.
“Commie, get over here, this is important,” Huck said over his shoulder, careful not to speak loudly toward the south, where the creatures might be frenzied by his drifting voice. Huck stood near Commie, about six feet from the north-facing edge, as he explained. “Now we’re abou
t to go rappelling down this here face. What you’re going to do is put this double rope through your legs from the front, then you’re gonna go around your right leg and pass it across your chest and over your left shoulder like this. Then it’s gonna go across your back and under your right arm and you’re gonna hold the top with your left and pay out the rope with your right. You sit here and practice a bit while I make sure the Mexican secured it right.”
“Oh, fuck you, redneck,” Rico retorted, slapping the back of Huck’s head.
“Easy there, wouldn’t want to slip down there and break a leg, would you? Those things would make short work once they found you, and they always find you,” Huck teased.
Huck yanked on the rope and put all his body weight into it to make sure it wouldn’t slip anchor. They wouldn’t have the luxury of a top-rope belay tonight. “Okay, this bastard is secure, Gibraltar solid,” he announced, propping his leg on the anchor point.
Rex made the required radio calls to the USS Virginia while Huck and Rico set up the descent. He could barely be heard over the ocean breeze coming in, seemingly from all directions.
“Virginia, we are Oscar Mike, over,” Rex transmitted.
Commie looked like a cat trapped in a bowl of spaghetti—the rope was twisted every which way across his body. “Why didn’t you guys bring a harness?” Commie complained to Huck.
“Because, dipshit, take a look around. Where do you think the nearest open REI might be?”
“Good point. Will you show me again? I think I twisted it the wrong way.”
After a little more instruction, Commie seemed ready to make the descent.
The doubled-up rope pulled against Rex’s leg, back, and arm. Commie was right—a harness would have been nice, he thought to himself, releasing the slack, the friction warming his hand through his gloves as he descended. As Rex neared the jungle floor, the temperature changed and he could smell the rot, not unlike descending into a basement and being hit with the musty odor of old canned fruit and decaying wood. The south face blocked the breeze. Just over six feet off the ground Rex felt the scrape of a branch on the bottom of his leg.