Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass

by J. L. Bourne

  Huck’s unsuppressed pistol discharged with a loud bang as the creature ripped the radiation mask and NODs from his face. The massive ghoul fell to the dirt, its clenching jaws chewing Huck’s radiation mask.

  “Goddamn it!” Huck screamed, wrapping his shemagh around his face and head.

  The rest of the undead reacted instantly to the pistol noise, converging from hundreds of yards all around. Huck tore his goggles from the fat thing’s clutch, giving them a cursory wipe before putting them back on his head. The others covered him. The semi-auto M-4 shots sounded like automatic bursts as the vast numbers of undead came for their late dinner.

  “That fat fuck ripped my hood!”

  “Adapt and compartmentalize, brother; we gotta keep moving. Bite that rag in your teeth and spit on it. It might filter the fallout particles better,” Rex suggested calmly between carbine bursts as they moved on, bearing to the objective.

  Rex knew the truth, but blocked it out.

  For now.

  Huck was clearly a goner. Rex had paid attention during the briefings on the submarine given by the reactor officers and even read the Hiroshima after-action report archived on the sub’s LAN. The radiation dose this island received had devastated the local environment, indicated by the absence of most of the wildlife that once flourished here.

  Rex knew, by his observations, that the Kunia tunnel had had no rats, that the situation was bad, and that Huck was likely overexposed. It was now an exposure race for all of them to get off the island and away from the dead—each one a walking Fukushima.

  Huck’s eyes burned and watered as the team sprinted to the shore. Their weapons were searing hot from the ejection ports all the way to the suppressor tips. They handled the guns like red-hot branding irons, avoiding negligent gun contact with one another. They dodged the undead, crawling under arms and behind backs, playing London Bridge with the creatures. They dove under radiated cars to escape the dead that chased them from all directions.

  Rico ran dry and dropped his carbine, letting it hang slack at his side. Another obese creature advanced on him, not as big as the sumo one, but close. Rico reached for his personal backup, his sawed-off pump. Positioning the shotgun almost vertically under the creature’s jowls, he depressed the trigger, blowing brains up into the sky, decayed chunks raining down all around them.

  “Fuck Rico, I’m not wearing a mask!” Huck said, wiping gray matter from his hair and face.

  “Sorry, brother, no choice. Dry gun.”

  The radio cracked and beeped, signaling USS Virginia’s incoming transmission.

  “Hourglass, adjust three four zero degrees, you are three hundred yards out. You should hear the surf now,” Kil’s voice relayed over the radio.

  “We can’t hear the surf because Rico’s shotgun deafened the whole team, but we’ll take your word for it, Kil,” Rex said, checking his wrist compass and adjusting their magnetic course over ground. “Make sure you put hands on your frags so you know where they are,” he said to his team.

  All four of them checked their vest and pockets to make sure they knew where to get their grenades if the need should arise.

  Rico prayed as they fought for the coast that he wouldn’t need his like Griff did.

  They could smell a hint of the surf through their mask filters. Looking up, the team noticed simultaneously that they were much closer to the water than they had suspected; they were just too busy to look beyond the red-dot optics of their carbines. The IR strobe was pulsating—the boat was only a hundred yards or so down the beach.

  Who says you need GPS to navigate over ground? Rex thought as he mentally thanked his low-tech wet compass for getting them to the boat.

  • • •

  Huck was having trouble breathing, his throat raspy from the fallout dust mixed with the lead and barrel blast he’d inhaled. He lagged behind the rest, stuck in the goon squad. This ain’t Coronado Beach, he mumbled quietly through his shemagh. The others ran ahead for their lives. Huck lagged behind; the full moonlight reflected off the water and beach sand, revealing the team to the undead. Nearly out of breath, Huck pressed on. A creature in swim trunks gained to within a meter of him when its head exploded.

  There was no instantaneous gunshot report.

  Dazed by his condition, Huck was about to curse at Rico for the latest dose of brain chunks on the back of his head when the shot’s sound caught up with the bullet.

  • • •

  Saien lay prone, just forward of the sail, on the deck of the USS Virginia, with a 7.62 LaRue battle rifle he’d borrowed from the SOF armory. He took shots at the creatures through the sensor-fusion night-vision scope. He could clearly see the white thermal signature of the team moving through the crowds of darker-shaded undead; Huck lagged behind.

  Captain Larsen risked running the Virginia aground in bringing her closer to the beach, allowing Saien to provide sniper support. With seventeen rounds left in his magazine, Saien drew and held his breath in time with his shots. The pitch of the deck was a problem, but not enough to sway Saien’s hit count too far from 50 percent or so.

  • • •

  The RHIB was prepped and shoved off into the surf. The team onboard fought off the advancing hordes in knee-deep water; they waited for Huck.

  “What the fuck is he doing?” Commie asked. “Is he playing around? I don’t get it.”

  “Shut the fuck up—didn’t you notice his mask? He’s probably dead already,” Rico snapped, still in shock brought on by Griff’s selfless heroism back at the cave entrance.

  Huck kept moving to the RHIB with an undead army in tow. Rex nearly jumped out of the boat, but Rico restrained him. To leave would prove more than foolish.

  • • •

  Saien’s sniper shots rang true, leaving a trail of pieces and piles of radiated corpses parallel to the waterline behind Huck. Saien was careful to shoot around Huck, the lone white figure inside his thermal/IR hybrid optic.

  • • •

  Rex and Rico took their shots. Using their lasers, they knew that the submarine sniper would pick other targets, maximizing efficiency. Rex ordered Commie not to shoot; he didn’t trust Commie’s marksmanship with Huck mingled among the mob of undead. As far as Rex knew, Huck hadn’t been bitten. Yet.

  “I’m out!” Rico yelled, again grabbing for his pump shotgun.

  Commie tossed a full mag at Rico. “Take mine, it’s full.”

  Rico slapped the mag in the mag well of his M-4 and released the bolt, driving the 5.56mm round into the carbon-caked chamber. Huck reached the water line when his legs failed, causing a perfect face plant into the water.

  “Grab him, Rico!” Rex ordered, engaging the undead that chased just behind Huck.

  • • •

  Despite thruster control inside the conn, the Virginia’s deck angle shifted with the current, making additional shots from the deck too dangerous. The risk of friendly fire was severe. Saien watched through his fusion optic in horror as Rico jumped overboard after Huck.

  • • •

  Feeling sunken bodies in the surf beneath his boots, Rico moved quickly, hoping that none of them was still animated enough to bite through the leg of his exposure suit. Reaching Huck, he slung him over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and slogged back to the rocking RHIB.

  With all four onboard, they raced back to the Virginia. The beach behind them boiled over with the walking dead, seeming somehow outraged that they had allowed the last living humans on the island of Oahu to escape their unholy grasp.

  • • •

  Huck was dead when they boarded the submarine. After Rex reluctantly ensured Huck wouldn’t come back, the boat’s chaplain administered a prayer on the bow of the ship as they wrapped Huck in a clean sheet, sewing it shut with a sharpened marlinspike and some paracord.

  The team gathered around Huck’s burial shroud to pay their last respects to both Huck and Griff.

  The boat shifted positions away from the shoreline so that the team could
discard their exposure suits in the ocean. They stood naked on the bow as the ship’s decontamination crew scrubbed them down with large nylon brushes, soap, and cold potable water. The team was administered radiation medication and monitored closely for signs of sickness.

  A short, modest announcement was made on the 1MC before getting underway: “All hands not on watch, muster abovedecks for burial at sea.”

  One of the enlisted men—a high school brass player—played “Taps” as they lowered Huck into the deep. They all said nice things, platitudes like His death will not be wasted and He served his country heroically.

  Rico didn’t care for the words. He’d lost two friends in twenty-four hours and wished he could trade places with either of them right now.

  As dawn kissed the once beautiful Oahu horizon, USS Virginia was underway. At a depth of one hundred meters and a speed of thirty knots, her bow now pointed to China, minus two Hourglass Operators.

  Remote Six

  Today

  “Sir, I’m sure you’ve heard, but the checklist says I need to inform you anyway,” the technician said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “We observed a team at our crash site. There is a possibility that—”

  “Yes, I’m aware. Get on with it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  God sat in his chair in the middle of the operations center, staring at the center screen that streamed a realtime feed of Hotel 23. Hours before, he’d monitored the team as they moved about the C-130 crash site, where one of his Project Hurricane weapons now resided. They were smart in remaining in emissions control status, as God had no idea what their intent might be.

  He had tried to eliminate them by remotely activating the Hurricane Device that jutted from the open cargo door, but it failed; it must have been damaged in the crash. He’d even scrambled an armed Reaper but it was delayed by bad weather and had to divert around a storm cell. The only aircraft in God’s inventory certified to deploy the Javelin was one of the modified Global Hawk UAVs that was now only a charred crater in the ground—shot down by an F-18 weeks ago over Hotel 23. The C-130 Project Hurricane experiment had failed.

  He sat in his chair, pondering the problem. How do I get inside? he thought. How the hell do I get inside?

  47

  Four days had passed since USS Virginia departed Hawaiian waters, four days since Huck was honored by a burial at sea. The bow still pointed westward to China as Larsen paced the submarine conn.

  Larsen dialed up the radio room, speaking into the intercom system. “Kil, any change in comms status?”

  “Negative, Captain. Still no contact with the carrier. We have solid comms with Crusow, but he says that he lost comms with the boat on the same day we did. I’m working the problem. The closest thing I have to family is onboard that ship and I have a vested interest in getting back to them,” Kil responded over the tinny intercom system.

  “Come see me.”

  “On my way, Captain.”

  • • •

  Kil departed radio and practiced a ladder slide on the way to the conn. His theory was that the reason for lost comms was atmospherics. Optimistically he called on his Occam’s Razor thought process to loop back to the most likely reason: local interference or a comms hardware problem. Nothing of grave concern. Still, the fact remained that Crusow was also unable to establish contact from his shortwave transceiver inside the Arctic Circle.

  Kil made a quick stop in the head before reporting to Larsen. As he washed his hands, he took a look at his reflection. He had grown a respectable beard. Not Afghan tribal chief mojo, but still respectable. The captain said it would be good for morale to let the men grow beards; his goal was a Grizzly Adams beard, fame or bust. He’d shave it before going home. Tara would kill me if I came back with this, he thought as he left the head, making the last turn to the conn.

  “Reporting as ordered, Capitan,” Kil said, trying to force a smile on the old man’s face.

  “Kil, pour yourself a cup of mud and come over here,” Larsen growled.

  He walked over to the mini Bunn and poured himself a cup. He took it black and was damn happy to have it. Kil didn’t mind the burn as he took a large gulp of the gut-eating standard navy coffee.

  “All right, Captain, what can I do for you, sir?” Kil said, adding the respect to the end for the enlisted men within earshot.

  “Give me the worst case.” Larsen didn’t waste any time.

  “Well, sir, I was really enjoying this coffee before you said that, now you’re asking me to throw all that away,” Kil said, taking another sip.

  “Goddamn it, Kil, I’m serious.”

  Kil stood a little straighter in response to the captain’s minor lash. “I assume you mean what’s the worst case onboard the carrier. I can tell you that they are overrun by the undead. Now that I’ve answered that, I’m going to further assume that you might want the best case?”

  Larsen nodded.

  “We’re experiencing atmospherics that are blocking communications or possibly they are having comms difficulty with equipment on the distant end. We know our gear is good. Every time we surface, I’ve been able to hail Crusow and he can hear me five by five.”

  “Go on.”

  “This is what we know. We lost communications with the carrier and we’ve been unsuccessful in using any of our tertiary HF freqs. We can prove that our comm gear is a known good quantity.” Larsen nodded in agreement. “We know that Crusow’s comm gear is working. One other thing we know, but that you might not be thinking about, is that Task Force Phoenix at Hotel 23 is part of the effort in some way. The only long-range comms capability they have is with the carrier. If the carrier is overrun or has bent comms, Phoenix is a mission kill. What we don’t know is the status of the carrier at this time. What I think is the simplest reason for the comms blackout is the most likely and that is atmospheric interference. Sunspot cycle disturbance is most probable.”

  Larsen sat back in his chair, mentally processing what had been said. “What do you know about Phoenix?” Larsen asked reluctantly.

  “I know that I was ordered by the admiral to provide information to support them before coming on this little field trip, leaving what’s left of my family and my girlfriend, a woman pregnant with my baby, onboard a carrier that’s gone dark in the last forty-eight hours. I also know that I had to surrender my ID card, the only card capable of launching the last Hotel 23 nuclear weapon that still remains secured in its vertical launch bay.”

  “Noted,” Larsen said. “Follow me.”

  Kil followed Larsen to his stateroom and the captain closed the door. “I’ll just skip to it. Phoenix was initiated to provide a kill switch for the Hourglass mission. If things were to go terribly wrong at the Chinese facility, Hotel 23 could initiate a launch against it, effectively destroying any dangerous materials or biologics.”

  “What?! Didn’t the leadership learn anything the first time, Captain?!” Kil yelled. “You saw on Oahu what radiation does to them and to us!”

  “Relax, Commander. Phoenix would not be ordered to launch with the goal of undead attrition. We all know that won’t work. The Phoenix directive would be to completely destroy the Chinese facility, rendering it neutral, if we are not successful.”

  “Okay. First, why didn’t you tell us that before, and second, what do you define as success?” said Kil.

  “I didn’t tell you because I had orders otherwise. Secondly, I define success as the location and extraction of a Patient Zero, also known as CHANG.”

  “But why? I don’t understand the significance of retrieving the . . . whatever it is, assuming the fucking thing even exists. So far all I’ve seen are a bunch of old black and white crash photos and a few hundred top-secret PowerPoint slides and other heavily redacted classified documents.”

  “That’s a fair question, Commander, but the COG communications I’ve received, coupled with previous fireside radio chats with military leadership, have made me somewhat of a believer. If
we can retrieve the specimen, we may be able to engineer something, a vaccine, some COG scientists say. That won’t solve any immediate problems, but it sure would be nice knowing that a scratch or minor bite might not be a death sentence.”

  Kil was frustrated with Larsen; he avoided asking about CHANG. He didn’t want to know. The thought of John’s cryptic last message almost changed his mind, but he held back, biding his time. He waited for Larsen to finish so he could get back to radio for more troubleshooting.

  “You know we lost two special operators in Hawaii?” said Larsen.

  “Yes, of course I know. I watched one of them blow himself to pieces and the other dropped into the ocean, wrapped in a sheet. Why?”

  “I’m just saying that the team is down two men and we’ll be in the Bohai soon, heading upriver,” Larsen declared reluctantly, as if easing into his point like it was scalding bathwater.

  “No!” Kil said sharply.

  “Hear me out.”

  “Fuck, no. I’m no special-ops guy and I barely survived the past year on the run, bumbling about like an idiot on the mainland. If you’re asking me to go feet dry with Rex and Rico, you’re asking too much. Didn’t I just tell you I have a woman who I love and a child on the way a few thousand miles east?”

  “You did.”

  “Did it ever cross your mind that I might want to make it back to see them?!” Kil yelled.

  “Keep your voice down, Commander. Just think on it for a minute. Do you want your child growing up in this shit world? Ask yourself this: Would the child be better off growing up without being afraid of the undead the rest of its life? I’m not saying we are going to fix all this, I’m just saying that there may be a chance. Think about it—a chance.”

  “Is that—”

  “Yes, that is all. Dismissed.”