Pete looked at Rick and shrugged. “Don’t worry, bra.” He tossed him the REAL-Pro. “I tell you how to use it on de way. Just strap it on. We don’t know wat comin down dat road next.”
The sounds of gunfire echoing in the hills around them intensified as if to prove his point for him. Doomsday had arrived, again.
CHAPTER NINE
Dennis Gets Ready
Dennis Hernandez tossed lightly under his silk sheets, slowly opening his eyes to the rays of the new morning sun. Mornings on Guam were a peaceful time. It was time for him do some reflecting, take a few deep breaths and enjoy a cup of herbal tea. He usually woke up early to experience his time of solitude with ample minutes remaining before he had to be at the office. Dennis was a very punctual man, a slave to the clock. He couldn’t blame this trait on his time spent in the U.S. Navy. He had spent a lifetime running his days by the ticks of the minute hand long before he joined the Navy. It was just the natural thing for him to do. It was, therefore, fortunate that he usually slept alone.
He yawned and stretched, allowing the blood and energy to flow back into his small frame while simultaneously spying the digital alarm clock by his bed. Once again he prided himself on waking at exactly fifteen minutes before the alarm was set to go off. He had done the same thing for the past 32 years. The clock was his friend, not an enemy.
He pushed himself out of bed, in his Egyptian cotton tailored pajamas and set his feet on the half plush gray carpet of his bedroom floor. He liked to sit there for a minute or two each morning moving his toes back and forth through the fibers of the soft carpet while he adjusted himself to being vertical again before slipping his pedicure feet into his house shoes that were sitting perfectly side by side awaiting the arrival of his neatly maintained feet. Normally that was the sign that it was time to make his way to the kitchen and put the kettle on for his tea, which would give him time to go to the bathroom, have a quick, light shower, before exiting in his designer robe to find the kettle whistling and ready to pour. He used the steeping time to get dressed and prepare his hair and teeth. However, this morning, as he slipped his right foot into its comfortable home in the house shoe, an unsettling noise caught his attention. It was coming from outside, from his neighbor’s yard. He leaned over, still seated, and looked out the window of his bedroom. His neighbor was not that far distant, a retired policeman who liked to drink a little too much on weekends but otherwise was friendly and helpful. Parting the curtains he saw, in his neighbor’s yard a giant reddish brown spider, about the size of a Saint Bernard dog, attacking the retired cop and biting off his head. Dennis observed this with a profound sense of regard that was totally void of any emotion. He uttered a barely audible. “Huh” before getting up and making his way to the kitchen to turn the stove on under the brass tea-kettle.
Dennis was a man who was deeply invested with a natural sense of emotional control. He was not callous, nor did he ignore the emotional needs of others. He just simply possessed very little need to express his emotions and, as such, could appear to those who knew him more like a machine than a man. He liked rigid adherence to schedule and routine. He felt a man’s life should be ordered and structured. These traits made his time in the Navy very productive and his superiors very happy with his performance. He joined the service from San Diego California, where he grew up, and where he was impressed with the highly respected and well-trained special-forces he saw there at Coronado. It was no surprise to his family that he would choose that same path in the Navy, applying for BUDS training when he was first eligible, getting accepted and making it through the brutal course. Once Dennis set his mind to do something it was as good as done.
He completed his bath without incident, briefly distracted by what he thought was the scream of someone at his door, before proceeding to the whistling kettle to pour his custom imported herbal tea. Allowing the proper steeping time was the key to the art of good tea brewing. That’s why he had built his morning routine around the minutes necessary to prepare it right. When he reentered his enormous bathroom with the marbled raised tub, the separate glass shower with eight-way water massager and the marbled vanity with hand carved Italian stone reliefs, he was about to blow dry his hair when the power suddenly cut out to his house. He stood momentarily in the darkness with the useless white blow dryer in his hand listening to the faint sound of gunfire coming from somewhere not too distant. He mumbled a “huh” to himself, relieved that he had already heated the water for the tea before the power went out.
Dennis had a total Navy career time of eight years, one month and six days. After the first two years of, he spent six years with the Teams in a variety of capacities. He absorbed training like a parched Death Valley road bed. He immersed himself with everything he could find and everything the navy could throw at him. But, when the eight years were done, it wasn’t the operational tempo that drove him out, nor the brutal nature of the job, nor the endless hours spent in cold North Atlantic water rehearsing for sub egress a thousand times over. These were discomforts that he could casually dismiss. What finally pushed him out was his lack of time and how he never had enough of it to enjoy the higher things of life that he so thoroughly enjoyed before the Navy. He was a man that was fond of better living, the kind that afforded itself to billionaires and worthless movie hacks with too much money and time. He was a man that respected the finer things, not to a point of flaunting or bragging but for the sheer nature of what they meant to him. He left the Navy to enjoy these things before some son of a camel herder in some remote desert piss mound put a bullet between his eyes.
Dennis decided to forego the usual sitting on his back porch that overlooked the crystal blue waters of the Philippine Sea for a few solitary moments with his tea and the Guam Daily News edition from the day before. He was only briefly interrupted from this slightly altered routine when the power momentarily flickered back to life before cutting out again. This wasn’t an unusual thing on Guam. The power could come and go at any time, the result of an antiquated utility system that seemed as finicky as a Japanese tourist on Friday night. He paid no attention to it. Nor did he allow the giant spider that tried to gnaw its way through the living room window to dislodge him from his morning peace. He finished his tea with relish smiling thankfully at the cup as he slowly set it down, folded the paper neatly, put on his suit coat and tie and holstered his Colt 1911 underneath. He grabbed his keys, cell phone, and a Glock before exiting his front door.
Dennis didn’t have much of a front lawn. It was about ten feet of manicured grass before it gave way to the red bricked driveway. But, he was proud of how well it was maintained and watered and how lush and green it was. He was, therefore, understandably upset when he closed his front door, stood on his front stoop, and looked out on a scene of complete havoc and devastation. The grass was torn to shreds, deeply gouged by the sharp talons on the giant spider legs, the fence was broken and lying in pieces, and the shrubs were uprooted. Branches from the small Australian cedar were everywhere. And also, people were running around yelling for their lives in a panic of blood and destruction while hordes of giant invading spiders ate anything they could catch. He watched as his other next door neighbor’s pet Russell-terrier wandered past his front yard in a vigorous trot trailing a bloody leash behind him as he went. Dennis reached into his breast pocket, pulled out his very expensive Oga designer sunglasses, placed them over his eyes and then glanced down at his cell-phone. There were no messages from Pete. He mumbled a very quiet “huh” to himself before he chambered a round in the Colt and began to fire at targets in a tactical move to get to his car.
The distance to the Honey Pot was not very far. He had to do a little defensive driving along the way, down the hillside where his small upscale community was located and then down to the lower streets where he could approach it from the backstreet. There were obstacles along the way, a few things on the road, i.e., dead spiders, dead people, live spiders, live people running from live spiders and so forth. But, h
e was comfortably in the zone now, the zone of death and destruction and was not unsettled by a few bloodied limbs and severed heads. By the time he pulled into his parking space, he had checked his watch and smiled. He was fifteen minutes early, despite the defensive driving along the way. At this rate, he was destined to be employee of the month again and, most likely, employee of the year. He didn’t let the fact that he was the only employee distract him from this sense of accomplishment. Some day he would hire an assistant, someone he could yell at and monitor their arrival times. Once again he glanced at the cell phone, but no messages were there.
When he made it to level one control room, the generators were humming and cranking out amps and the lights were bright and steady. They were all on a timer and managed by a computer system that allowed him remote access at his house but which he had never had to interfere with before. Dennis laid the spent Colt on the nearest console and set about turning other systems on. Obviously, something major was occurring, but he wasn’t exactly sure how many defensive parameters he should activate. He needed Pete’s input on the matter. He flipped the row of switches for the positronic shield, and it hummed to life around the building. This was as far as he was comfortable going without some word from Pete. He lifted his cell phone and was about to call the diner when he saw the red light blinking on the communication console. A call had already been placed. He pressed the blinking button, and the speaker next to it erupted in Pete’s voice shouting for him to crank everything up and get ready to…the call was interrupted by gunfire and loud crashing noises before it went dead. He looked at the time for the message. It was only about ten minutes ago. Strange he hadn’t received notice on his cell phone. It was designed for that. But, there was not a peep or a blink or zip. Pete’s last words had been cut off. What was he saying? Dennis decided not to speculate but started the activation series for the remaining defenses. He methodically went through each inventory, as he had done every morning since taking the job two years ago. Everything checked out. As he proceeded to the ancillary power requirements, Dennis sat there for a moment before realizing that he had better get eyes on the situation. He flipped on all the auxiliary cameras, the ones placed around the building and in a radius of about two miles. Pete had refused to allow any cameras on his house or the diner. The old cantankerous conspiracy nut was consistently anti-new tech. He liked the old school stuff, almost in a steampunk kind of way. But, he still owned a building that was, technologically speaking, the most sophisticated privately owned reality warping location in the world. It was also designed to repel everything from an invasion from space to a wave of ugly time-traveling robots from the future.
Most of the video feeds revealed scenes of horrific death and terror. It was time to roll out the bigger guns. He began first by putting the building’s entire defense grid into function, minus the four giant plasma cannons that drank up nuke juice like a cold lemonade on a hot afternoon. From outside he began to hear the sounds of thunder rolling in the distance. It sounded like bombs going off. It was an odd coincidence that he was now the safest person on the island even though he was standing just one hundred and twenty feet above a nuclear reactor. This building was a marvel of safety. The only thing it wasn’t guaranteed against was an 8.5, or higher, earthquake. Pete had overseen the design and the construction of the building, pulling in family assets from as far away as the Philippines and California. Construction had taken two years, getting backlogged by the secret permits needed to put a nuclear reactor in downtown Tumon. But, in the end, with enough money to grease several small third world countries, he got it built. The main control room was located on the first level, accessed by a secret door in between the two plastic palm trees that were so prominently displayed in the lobby. There were 10 levels below the building that sat on the surface. The only thing lower in the structure was the series of escape tubes that led directly to the Philippine Sea. Besides the main control room, there were four auxiliary control rooms at various levels below, where Dennis could easily maintain complete control over tactical and defensive structures for the whole building if the the levels above were compromised. There was an enormous amount of redundancy in every level to facilitate rapid backup of failed systems. This meant everything from the positronic grid that covered the outside of the building to the automatic machine gun mounts on the roof capable of tracking and destroying up to fifty targets at a time by infrared, thermal and ultraviolet sensors as well as an assortment of smaller missile launchers and two armories stocked with an array of guns that would make the NRA president envious were managed, powered and controlled by multiple systems. It was a gigantic display of steel, concrete and armor designed for defensive and offensive activity. But, that wasn’t its only function. It was also an ark, a refuge capable of housing up to 10, 000 people and defending them against World War III. It was designed by Pete with refuge in mind. He conceived of it after the last big rupture, the Arachnid War as it was called, which Dennis hadn’t been around to participate in. The technology that ran the whole thing was similar to what the Company used in the much smaller platform as the REAL-Pro 9000. Except this one came with a lot of things that went pow and zap and boom. Dennis fancied that if he could manage to get the thing airborne, he could invade medium-sized countries with it.
The idea of refuge and defense defined every floor and every room. Located in the levels below were rooms with massive water storage tanks, tanks for sewage and sewage processing, storerooms with foodstuffs for a least ten thousand people for a month or more as well as sleeping quarters, living spaces, a full cafeteria, two recreation rooms, a full theatre, swimming area, various stock rooms, ammo rooms and missile silos. And that was just the lower part of the structure. The upper part was four stories composed of various office rooms and additional primary spaces and control centers that could be, in a pinch, quickly converted to additional living spaces. And with the nuclear reactor, it became entirely self-sustaining, capable of being operated and managed by a single person, if necessary, almost indefinitely.
While Dennis set the mechanical parts of his readiness plan in motion, which he had long ago committed to memory, his mind mulled over the very real possibility that he might have to port down to the diner and assist his boss. It was against the plan they had agreed on. Once a disaster was clearly under way he was supposed to activate the building and stay close to its operations. He wasn’t supposed to go anywhere beyond the immediate parameter so he could be ready to assist in phase two of the operations, which was organizing and rescuing citizens. But, he couldn’t help but feel he was needed at the diner. His operative days in the US Navy triggered these thoughts. He tried to tell himself that Pete would be okay. He had the shield protecting him, as did Rick and Mel and Roger, and they also had Mel’s port device for a handy emergency evacuation if it was needed. His sense of duty told him to concentrate on his tasks at the Honey Pot. Phase two was about to commence. He pushed several buttons on the communications console, and automated phone calls began to go out to people all over the island telling them all the same thing: a disaster was under way, and they needed to get to the Emporium immediately.
After the calls had started, he began to grow frustrated with the limited views he was getting from the outside cameras. He couldn’t get a sense of the proportion of the invasion. He needed to get to a vantage point where he could see more and take in a greater tactical view. So he headed to one of the two small elevators that spanned the building from top to bottom so he could get to the top floor. He pressed the button and waited for the doors to close. It was slower than it needed to be and he had time to tap his foot vigorously to the elevator music before he reached the top. By the time they opened again, he was on the top observation deck located fifty feet above street level. Only the roof of the building was above him now, but he had nearly a 360-degree view of the island through thick reinforced sheets of glass that were full sized windows set side-by-side on the full length of each of the four walls. He went over t
o the southern side, looking out in the distance to see who might be approaching. Instead, he saw nothing but tiny pockets of rising smoke. Every village within eyeshot was ablaze, and he could now clearly hear explosions coming from all directions. Smoke billowed up and began obscuring the sun, casting a ghastly ominous glow on everything. In addition to this, the powerful rays of daytime were growing dimmer for some strange reason, even though it was still morning time. He noticed the sounds of car alarms and shrieks of terrified people. Here and there, in various congested areas he could see the legs of the spiders as they attacked anything that moved. To his complete surprise, as he was watching the terror unfold on the streets below, several propeller powered aircraft came out of the darkened sky and buzzed the building. He heard the loud sound of heavy weapons fire as the aircraft pounded the building with 20 mm fire. He instinctively crouched before he realized he didn’t need to. Even 40mm machinegun fire wouldn’t penetrate the shield. Before he could make out the giant red meatballs on the wings of the Japanese fighters the rooftop air defenses keyed up and in a second of rapid return fire the three fighters fell into pieces, raining burning debris down onto the buildings around. He nodded in satisfied approval.
The activity suddenly seemed to draw the attention of the spiders in the area. He saw several dozen spiders approach the base of the building from the west. They all tried to get a foothold onto the outside of the building, but the shield fried them before they could come within ten feet of it, just like a big bug zapper. He realized it was time to get down to the street level and start getting people inside.
Rick Carter's First Big Adventure (Pete's Barbecue Book 1) Page 19