by Mike Kraus
Chapter 12
The Waters’ Homestead
Outside Ellisville, VA
Dianne and Mark spent the night sitting in the upstairs hall near the stairs, taking turns dozing, watching the cameras and listening for signs of intruders. Dianne had insisted more than once that Mark needed to sleep in his bed but she was tired enough that she nearly nodded off while talking to him so he took it upon himself to ensure she got a few hours of sleep. The night passed uneventfully and when the morning light broke over the horizon Dianne and Mark slowly trudged downstairs and sat at the kitchen table.
“I can’t believe your brother and sister are still asleep.” Dianne looked at her watch and put her head in her hands. “Ugh. I’m getting too old for this.”
Across from her, Mark took his mother’s coffee cup and sniffed at it before taking a sip and making a face. “How can you stand that stuff?”
Dianne looked at her son through a crack between her fingers and snorted. “Believe me, when you reach my age you’ll learn to love it.”
“Yuck. I hope not.” Dianne and Mark sat quietly for a few minutes while Dianne sipped her coffee, then her son spoke again. “The windows look good. I don’t think anyone will be able to get in very easily.”
Dianne turned around in her chair to look at the dark space in the wall that used to offer a view out onto the lake behind the house. Only a few cracks of light were visible through the boards covering the window. “Yeah it does look good. I wish we didn’t have to do it but it’s safer this way.”
“Should we board up the windows upstairs?”
“Nah.” Dianne shook her head. “If we’re worried about people scaling the house and coming in through the upstairs then I don’t think a couple boards will stop them.” She took a long sip from her mug and set it back down on the table.
“There is something else we need to talk about, though.”
Mark looked at her warily. “What did I do?”
“No, nothing you did. It’s about the tunnel.” Mark stayed quiet as Dianne continued. “I’ve been thinking about this since we opened it up and I decided that we need to make it more than just a storage area.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the house is a bit more secure now but there’s always the chance that one or more people could get in. If something like that happens, and something happens to me, you’re going to be in charge of taking care of Jacob and Josie.”
Mark shifted in his chair, clearly uncomfortable about where the conversation was leading. “Mom, nothing’s going to—”
“Just listen up, kiddo.” Dianne’s expression grew serious. “If something happens, you’re in charge of your brother and sister. If we’re inside the house and you can get them to the basement, I want you to get them into the tunnel. Lock the door and haul ass down through the tunnel to the other end.”
“Are you sure it comes out in the shed in the woods?”
“Yep. I went out there a few days ago while you were all inside and checked it out. It looks clear. The tunnel’s a bit iffy at the end but we’ll get it shored up enough that it’ll function as an emergency escape should the need arise.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you, though.” Mark insisted, declaring it a statement of fact.
“You’re darned right.” Dianne smiled and stood up, holding out her arms. Mark stood up and gave her a hug and she held him tight. “I’m sorry about all this, kiddo. I never wanted you to grow up so fast.” Dianne whispered and closed her eyes, holding her eldest son for a long moment until she heard the clatter of feet on the stairs. She stepped back and clapped Mark on the shoulders, noticing but not mentioning the tears she could see him trying to hide in his eyes. “Chin up. We’re going to be just fine around here, okay?”
Mark nodded and turned away, wiping his eyes while Dianne greeted Jacob and Josie with a big smile. “Hey you two! Finally up?”
***
After breakfast, a stroll around to check on the outbuildings and animals and a brief slushball fight with the last bits of melting snow, Dianne decided it was time to get back to work. She and Mark worked on carrying lumber up into the house, down into the basement and through into the tunnel while Jacob and Josie were put on house-cleaning duty. Floors were swept, bathrooms were scrubbed and toys were put away while Dianne and Mark sweated it out hauling building supplies.
Lunch came and went and Dianne got to work on assembling the aquaponics stands in the basement while Mark worked in the tunnel, cutting the boards down to size. Once they were done Dianne planned to fix them to the sides and ceiling of the tunnel every ten feet or so to help stabilize the passage and keep it from suddenly collapsing should they need to use it. Every so often Mark would trot up the passage stairs and help Dianne with her work and she would head down into the passage to take new measurements in the tunnel for Mark to use for his sawing.
By the time it started to get dark Jacob and Josie had long since abandoned their cleaning tasks and were instead running full-tilt around the house getting into trouble. Dianne decided that it was time for another break and made dinner before surprising the children with a movie in the living room while they ate. While Mark, Jacob and Josie ate and got lost in an animated film on the couch, Dianne sat at the kitchen table and kept an eye on the security camera feeds on the tablet.
Dianne’s habit of watching the security cameras whenever she could had become so routine that it was blending into the normalcy of everyday life. After the first day of the event, when she realized what was going on, she had desperately tried to make life for her children as normal as possible but the more time that passed the more she realized that “normal” was forever gone.
When the movie was over Dianne gathered up the dishes and sent her children upstairs to play and read while she cleaned. Once done, she sat on the couch and opened a notebook to write out the day’s activities. She had started the journal a few days after the event in an attempt to chronicle what was undoubtedly the most unusual part of her entire life.
After Jacob and Josie were asleep Dianne and Mark resumed what was beginning to become their nightly watch. Mark slept for the first few hours before Dianne roused him, then she sat up against the wall in the hallway with her gun at her side and her eyes closed while he flipped through the security cameras and padded softly between the windows.
Dianne was woken an hour into Mark’s watch by him tapping on her shoulder. “Mom. Wake up.” Mark’s voice was quiet but urgent.
“Hm?” Dianne rubbed her eyes and sat up. “What is it?”
“There’s movement out back.”
Dianne grabbed the tablet from out of Mark’s hands and stared at the screen. One of the cameras on the back of the house pointed out at the barns and lake, offering a wide—if slightly blurry—view of the entire back property. Even with the distortion and pixilation caused by the camera’s night vision mode Dianne could make out a dark figure moving around in front of the barns. The sight of the figure chilled her and she dropped the tablet into Mark’s lap and stood up.
“Stay here and keep watch. If things go bad you need to do like we talked about before, okay?” Mark nodded and Dianne put her hand on his shoulder. “Mark, I need you to do this, okay? If someone comes in the house and they aren’t me, you need to shoot them. Aim for the chest and don’t stop pulling the trigger until it clicks, okay?”
Mark visibly gulped as Dianne picked up her rifle and headed down the stairs. She muttered to herself as she went, trying to psych herself up for whatever confrontation lay ahead and steel herself for what she suspected she might have to do. Killing another person, no matter the situation, was not a choice she wanted to make lightly.
When it came to protecting her children and her home, though, there was no “lightly” about it. The choice would be swift, decisive and permanent.
Chapter 13
Somewhere in Utah
Thirty minutes later, after Rick filled and secured both fuel cans and his sipho
ning hoses, loaded the water into the back of the Humvee and packed one of the back seats full of as much non-perishable food as he could find in the storeroom of the gas station, he got back into the driver’s seat and nodded with satisfaction. “Now all I need is some clothing.” While he had no objection to scrounging around in an open, obviously empty gas station, the idea of searching through people’s houses made him extremely nervous and he decided to continue driving rather than risk being shot in the face by someone who had stayed cooped up in their home.
After sitting still for a moment as he drove slowly down the street, though, Rick realized just how cold he had become during the refueling process. Even with all of the exertion he put out he felt very cold and knew he needed to do something about it. A small diner on the side of the road caught his eye as he was driving past and he pulled his vehicle up to the front door and looked inside. The windows in the front were all smashed in and the interior looked like a tornado had blown through but the one thing he was looking for—a series of red and white checkered pieces of cloth—were still there.
Wielding just his pistol this time Rick jumped out and ran inside the restaurant. He went around to each table, tugging the tablecloths off of each table and draping them over one arm. Once all sixteen cloths were in his possession he hauled them back out to the car, threw them into the passenger’s seat and got back in.
“There.” He looked at the cloths with a squeamish expression. A handful of them were relatively clean looking but most had a variety of stains on them of all different shapes and colors. They smelled vaguely of smoke and old sandwiches but there were enough that he could easily use them as blankets or fashion them into horrendously-colored ponchos. “It’s better than freezing to death, I guess.”
Rick looked out at the sky, noting the rapidly encroaching darkness. With a full tank of fuel he figured he could make it north on Interstate 15 and east on Interstate 70 all the way to Green River—another small town off the Interstate—without having to stop for fuel or use any of his reserve. If he wasn’t able to get any more diesel there then he would have to start searching at every rest stop, town and big city he could come across. Unfortunately there didn’t seem to be any more big cities until Grand Junction, Colorado and he hoped he’d be able to find some more fuel before getting there.
“Assuming I can find diesel for this guzzler I’ll go over the Rockies, bypass Denver and keep going across the plains.” Rick shook his head and looked back at the sky. The weather didn’t look friendly and with as cold as it was getting he started wondering if snow was in his future. The Humvee was capable of handling just about any terrain but he wouldn’t want to be stuck driving it over the Rocky Mountains in a snowstorm.
An hour later, as Rick was nearing the turn-off from Interstate 15 to Interstate 70, his fears came true. The flakes were light and soft at first, making him think that they were just flurries. When they started sticking to the ground instead of melting, forcing him to slow down to avoid slipping on the slick roads, he realized that the snow was accumulating in a frighteningly rapid manner. In the time it took for him to get a few miles through Fishlake National Forest on Interstate 70 a full six inches of snow had fallen on the ground, covering the Interstate and disguising the obstacles in his path with a dangerous—albeit beautiful—coating.
The Humvee had a surprisingly powerful air conditioning system with enough coolant in it to keep the interior of the vehicle in the eighties even in the heat of a Middle Eastern desert. This had surprised Rick to no small degree when he had turned it on after leaving Nellis as he had assumed that military vehicles lacked such amenities. While the air conditioning on the vehicle worked well the heater was, sadly, not up to the same standards. Rick could barely get a trickle of warm air out of the vents and he found himself wrapping his legs and torso with the tablecloths from the restaurant to try and keep warm.
Rick tried valiantly to press forward in the snowstorm, but the lack of visibility became too much for him to handle after he lost track of the number of times he had a low-speed collision with the remnants of a burned-out car in the middle of the road. “Dammit!” Rick squinted as he looked through the windows looking for a place where he could seek shelter. There were no buildings nearby, no underpasses to stay beneath and the only place he could see that would help protect him from the driving wind was parking next to an eighteen-wheeler along the side of the road.
Rick pulled up next to the massive truck and shut off the Humvee, concluding that it was probably better to save some fuel given how little heat was getting into the passenger compartment. He moved the food and supplies in the back seats to the floors and crawled into the back, curling up against a backpack pressed up on the door and covering himself with layer after layer of the tablecloths. He wasn’t tired in the least but with nowhere to go and nothing else to do he figured that rest was his best option.
Rick’s mind wandered as he stayed still in the back of the Humvee, the swirling snow and biting wind cutting through the imperfections of the Humvee and bringing the chill outside to the interior. With no distractions to occupy himself he started thinking about home again.
The level of destruction, both of things and of basic humanity itself, terrified him. Not because he feared for his own safety or the safety of those he had met, though he worried about those people and himself as well. It was his wife and children who he felt the most concern over. If the smallest of towns in the middle of Nowhere, Utah could be burned half to the ground and look like a horde of zombies came through, what did that mean for Ellisville?
What did it mean for the few neighbors near his house? Would they have turned hostile as well? What about the people from town? Would they have sought refuge—forcibly, perhaps—farther out in the country? How long would it take, he wondered, for friends to become enemies? Rick closed his eyes and pictured his wife and children seated in the kitchen the morning he left on his business trip. He refused to believe that they had been killed or injured, for their survival was the only thing keeping him going. He said a quiet prayer for them, hoping against all hope that they were alive and well and continuing their fight against the encroaching darkness.
Chapter 14
One day after the Event
Deep in the Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia
Deep beneath an isolated mountain, far beyond the reach of conventional and non-conventional weapons, sits a massive bunker that covers over five hundred square miles of real estate. Built as part of a decades-long project involving tens of thousands of workers, the bunker beneath Mount Yamantau—known as Mezhgorye—is the lynchpin in the Russian continuity of government plans.
While Russian intelligence services detected the Damocles infiltration of networks external to their own, they—like most other countries—did not realize the threat it posed to their own internal networks until it was too late. Most government systems were affected by the virus and were quickly shut down and destroyed along with many civil systems as well.
Inside Mezhgorye, however, life for the twenty thousand government employees and support staff goes on as normal. The only portion of the Mezhgorye network that is infected by Damocles is an isolated and air-gapped system used to communicate with the outside world. The rest of the site’s systems are left untouched, including the three dozen ICBMs, the massive generators that power the complex, the bunker’s computer systems and the pair of satellites used by the bunker for specific spy operations.
After being evacuated to Mezhgorye, the senior Russian leadership set to work analyzing Damocles and attempting to discover both its origins and how to disable it. Each attempt to study the virus ends with yet another infected system, however, and by the second day after the Event they are forced to admit that there may not be a way to analyze and disable the virus through traditional means.
This revelation paves the way for discussions about non-traditional means of disabling the virus. Based on a flawed analysis of the way Damocles operates, the technical ex
perts performing an analysis of the virus believe that it is being controlled by a central system somewhere within the United States. The fact that the USA is being ravaged by the virus as much or more than the rest of the countries across the world is the only thing keeping Russia from launching missiles in an attempt to destroy what they believe to be the nexus of the virus’s control systems.
With communications channels down across the globe, though, there is no way for the Russian government to contact their American counterparts to discuss the situation and find out more information about what is going on. Arguments in favor of the nuclear solution are strong and persuasive and as the days go by and the situation in the country worsens it begins to look more and more like the solution that they will be forced to attempt.
Chapter 15
The Waters’ Homestead
Outside Ellisville, VA
The grass was still damp from the melted snow and Dianne headed quickly down the slope towards the barns. She kept low, crouching to try and avoid being seen, though she needn’t have bothered. By the time she got halfway between the house and barns she could see the shadowy figure in front of the closest building kicking at the barn door and talking.
“Dammit open it up already!” The voice belonged to a man, and she recognized it as the man who had approached their house previously. Not taking any chances she stayed quiet as she snuck up behind him, stopping when she was a little over thirty feet away.
Dianne stood up and flicked on the flashlight attachment on her rifle, sending twenty-five hundred lumens of blinding, flashing brightness at the man. He turned and raised his arms in surprise, shielding his eyes from the unexpected blast of light. With the light at the end of her rifle set to rapidly pulse the light on and off, the man was disoriented by the beam. He backed up, keeping his right hand over his eyes while his left felt along the face of the barn for support.