“It must be hard for someone like you to think people are telling the truth.” Drew parroted innocently.
“Blaze told me that you’re an excellent candidate for field work. He said it was like you’d been made for it. I’m assuming Agent Flanagan is going to echo that eval in his brief. You’ll be a central part of our operations moving forward. Especially with the field experience you’ve already racked up.” Leander said. He was careful to ensure he didn’t let a note of condescension creep into his voice.
“He did good sir. We can all learn a lot from him and his brother.” Flanagan echoed his earlier comment. Coming from Flanagan it sounded much less patronizing.
“Thank you, gentlemen. For the work you did today and for the work you’ll keep doing to reclaim this land. Hopefully in time you’ll be able to see why you were separated from your sister. Incidentally there’s a letter from her in your barracks. I left it with Blaze to give to you when you got back today. Hopefully it makes you feel a little better about everything. Dismissed.”
Drew forgot to even say anything passive aggressive to Leander in his haste to get up and go read the letter from Yue. LeBron managed to snap out a quick thanks before hustling off after Drew.
“Give me an army made up of men like that and we’ll reclaim this country in a few months.” Leander said after they’d left.
“Agreed sir.” Flanagan said before taking his leave.
Leander opened up the folder he’d been carrying with him and pulled out a packet filled with aerial photos and reports. Sighing he spread everything out on the table and began going through the intelligence trying to figure out the best way to go about accomplishing the impossible.
Chapter 3: Knowing is Half the Battle
Drew and LeBron restrained themselves from physically sprinting down the hallway. They didn’t want to be seen as trying to escape or anything. The men guarding this base typically saw things in black or white. If they saw what you were doing in that black category there’s a good chance the next color would be red. For that reason and to avoid giving Leander too much satisfaction they constrained themselves to walking very quickly. That didn’t stop them from ripping the letter away from Blaze the second he produced it out of his coat pocket. He was grinning as he watched his two protégées walking quickly to their cots while carefully opening the envelope.
Drew started reading it silently and LeBron punched him in the arm.
“Read it out loud.” LeBron made a face at Drew showing what he felt about his older brother being a selfish moron.
“Right. Sorry. Yeah so she says…”
Dearest Brothers - How’s that for a fancy salutation? This letter will be far shorter than the rules I was given around writing you a letter. Suffice it to say they don’t want us giving away our location. However, they’re letting us write this letter so we can let you know that we’re in a safe location. With our government providing that sort of excellent guidance I don’t understand how we ever got in this mess in the first place. If that sounds a little condescending, you should’ve seen what I wrote in the letter they just made me toss out.
Life’s great here at Camp Icanttellyouwhere. They have lots of games and I’ve met plenty of new friends. I miss you both though and hope to see you soon. Although I’ve been told that’s not super likely to happen. The place we’re at is probably about as safe as you can possibly get. Definitely safer than what they tell me you two will be doing. In short don’t worry about me. I’m going to be fine and I’m going to be looking forward to seeing you again at some point. Hopefully not too far down the road.
I’m sick of having to toss these letters out because I accidentally say something to give you a clue where I’m at so I’m going to close this one out now just to make sure I actually get something out to you before the mail leaves. I know I’d be worried like crazy if you two had been taken away like I was. I’m even more worried that you’ll get hurt. From what I understand you’ll be in the thick of it. Take care of each other. Remember what dad told us. LeBron make sure you write me if they let you! (I know Drew will never get around to it)
Love you to the moon and back!
Your Sister!
Yue Tang Clan Forever!
“Well it’s definitely her that wrote it.” LeBron said chuckling at the Yue Tang reference. He was sitting on the cot with his brother. Both of them were struggling to hold back their emotions. Drew’s voice had cracked a few times reading the letter. LeBron had been glad Drew read it instead of him because he was losing it just listening.
“How’s she doing?” Blaze asked. He’d strolled over after giving them a respectable amount of time to get through the letter and pull themselves together.
“Better than us from what I could tell. Any clue where they’re actually at?” Drew replied.
“Nope. All the letters everyone got were pretty cryptic. My guess would be on a cruise ship turned into a refugee ship or an island the government took over.” Blaze said thoughtfully. They all nodded. Given the crawlerz wouldn’t cross water those two options made the most sense. Anywhere in the continental US was a tossup at this point as far as survival.
“Well as soon as we get a chance, we’re getting her back.” Drew announced.
“Agreed. We just need to bide our time until we get that chance. When we finally do get it, we’ll need to be ready to strike fast and hard though. You two get a good night’s sleep. It wouldn’t surprise me if our esteemed dictator has a new mission in store for you by morning.”
Blaze wandered off and Drew and LeBron sat on their cots wondering what was next. Exhausted from an extremely intense day and riding a welcome wave of relief brought on by the letter from Yue they both relaxed. Drew amused himself with a battery powered blackjack game while LeBron cracked open a bioweapons manual Flanagan had given him to read. The manual had the words confidential stamped in red on each page. Flanagan had told him none of the information was really all that secret though. The military just liked putting stamps on everything.
“Wake up.” LeBron and Drew both shifted around as Blaze poked them each in succession to try and get them out of bed. They may be a couple of hardened apocalyptic warriors, but they were still teenagers. Teenagers aren’t known for their ability to wake up on demand. Drew was actually famous in the Russel household for being almost impossible to get out of bed in the morning. Their mom had discovered the best way was to make pancakes and bacon and then wave it around in his room so he could smell it. If only Amazon sold some sort of breakfast smell creating alarm clock.
LeBron sat up sleepily on his cot watching Blaze vainly attempt to rouse Drew. LeBron fumbled around under his cot until he found his canteen. He shook it to determine he had plenty of water left then took a big gulp out of it. Before sealing the canteen back up he splashed some on Drew’s face. That did the trick.
“What the hell. We under attack?” Drew asked sitting up and looking around for the weapons they didn’t get to keep on them anymore.
“I don’t know. Leander sent Flanagan to come grab the three of us for a consult.” Blaze answered in a hushed voice to avoid disturbing the men sleeping nearby.
“What do you mean a consult?” LeBron asked. He may have been sitting upright before Drew, but he was struggling to regain full wakefulness. That government authored scientific manual he’d read before falling asleep hadn’t exactly been the Lord of the Rings. It’d been a lot more like the Silmarilllion. A book that even a Tolkien fanboy like LeBron had a hard time beating his way through.
“No clue. Let’s not piss him off though. I’d rather have him send for us this way than drug us and have us dragged there. You guys ready?” Blaze asked standing up. LeBron noticed the shadowy figure of Flanagan standing a few feet away for the first time.
An obstinate Drew insisted on taking his time. Flanagan didn’t seem overly concerned with how long it was taking them to get up and moving. Of course, Flanagan wasn’t the type who got overly concerned about much of anything
. Once they were finally ready, he led them down the hall back into the administrative area. They walked to a door that none of them had seen before. He stuck his pointer finger on the biometric reader and the lock disengaged with a snapping sound.
They walked into a room crowded with video screens and people. Looking around LeBron saw that the infrared and video surveillance he’d guessed was there had definitely been implemented as part of the base build-out. It looked like they had visibility up and down most of the roads in the area as well as into the woods surrounding the base.
A large screen in the middle of the massive video wall showed a green tinted dirt field LeBron recognized as the field adjacent to the barracks. A small pack of crawlerz was sniffing around in the area. LeBron almost jumped when Leander came up from behind and tapped him on the shoulder.
“They showed up about an hour ago. They were coming down the road then they turned into the woods. We saw them on infrared climbing the trees. They jumped right over our twenty-foot-tall fence like it was nothing. I wanted to see if you three had any opinions on this from your experience out in the field.” Leander stopped and looked towards the three of them. He hadn’t called out LeBron specifically, but everyone was pretty much waiting for LeBron to kick off the conversation.
“Where does the power for everything come from?” LeBron asked. He had a specific reason in mind for asking. He’d been curious since they’d gotten here. He saw this as a good time to get his questions answered. Especially since that answer may be relevant to the question Leander was asking them now.
“We have camouflaged solar arrays that generate most of our power. We have diesel generators that kick on to support us when the solar gets low.” Leander answered quickly.
“Ok. If the generators kicked on when the crawlerz were anywhere around that could’ve attracted them. They’re super sensitive to noise and vibration. We shot a surger earlier today on the road clearing mission. It took two shots to put it down. That noise could’ve attracted the pack out in the yard. They could’ve just been randomly wandering by and sensed us over here. There’s lots of evidence out there that they have some telepathic capabilities.” LeBron stood there staring up at the monitors with Leander staring back at him incredulously.
“I get the generator and the rifle shots. We’ll need to talk some more later about where you’re getting the telepathy angle from. What do we do about them?” Leander asked.
“Kill them or hope they leave. If they can’t get in here, we could just let them wander around, but they may decide to hide out in the bushes somewhere you don’t have cameras and it could get dangerous hunting them down.” Drew answered.
“If we shoot them won’t more just hear the noise and show up?” Flanagan asked.
“That’s why we drove around in trucks. If you sit in one place for too long, you’re going to be covered in those things. Once you can’t go outside, you’re stuck sitting inside this hill until you run out of food or die of boredom.” Blaze said.
“We could always make a break for it during the day.” Drew added. Blaze and LeBron both nodded along with that assessment while Leander shook his head in bafflement. This new world was full of contradictions. Thinking it through he realized they were going to need to come up with a massive amount of new protocols to be able to use this base as their main area of operations.
“Ok. Lots of work to do moving forward to make it so that we can utilize this place the way it was intended. We can meet up and talk through that tomorrow. In the meanwhile, I’d like to go ahead and get those things out in the courtyard taken care of.” Leander said.
“Why don’t you just get them some pizza and beer?” Drew said snarkily referring to the way Leander had duped all of them and taken them prisoner. Leander didn’t appear put off by the idea in the slightest. He actually looked like he was considering it.
“Do they eat pizza?” Leander finally asked. He was genuinely curious. He also thought if he could just drug the crawlerz life would be a million times easier.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you go ask them?” Drew asked back.
“Can we go shoot the monsters now?” Flanagan asked in an attempt to break the tension.
Leander was stuck on the fact that if they walked outside and blew away the seven crawlerz currently walking around they’d just attract more. In order for them to complete their primary mission of resupplying groups of survivors in the southeast they needed to be able to operate freely out of this base. They couldn’t operate freely out of the base if they were constantly under attack.
“Do you have stadium lights?” LeBron asked. He was thinking back to a blood drenched living room where they’d opened the curtains to distract the crawlerz so they could easily kill them.
“You mean like they used in the UK to keep the crawlerz out?” Leander asked.
“Exactly. We could install those to keep the crawlerz out at night. If nothing else, it’d make it easier for us to kill them. I don’t know if they’d just keep coming or not though.” LeBron stopped talking and looked again at the large monitor on the wall. The crawlerz skittering around in the courtyard in their weird way was one of the most terrifying things about them. They looked completely demonic. The inhuman bursts of speed they could achieve in that awkward crawling position wasn’t the slightest bit natural.
Leander opted to kill the crawlerz before they could burrow in somewhere on the base. He sent Flanagan to put together a team to clear the field. There were two main buildings in use on the base. The barracks which they were currently in and the hangar which they’d never been in. The hangar sat on top of an enormous underground warehouse according to the rumors they’d heard. Giant warehouse or not the hangar was where the clans weapons were all being held. That simple fact excused them from the four in the morning crawler hunt. Leander seemed to think it’d be a great chance to get his teams bloodied without putting them in too much danger.
Less than twenty minutes after he’d walked out of the room Flanagan was on the overhead speakers giving his status. LeBron watched the monitor in the middle of the wall as Flanagan and a group of men in full battle rattle stacked up on the door leading out to the field. That was ten fully armored and armed men going up against seven crawlerz. At least two of the crawlerz looked to be under twelve years old. One of them was an older woman in a badly stained dress. LeBron and Drew were both worried the fire team was going to underestimate their opponent.
“Any tactics you normally use when fighting crawlerz?” Leander asked while they were waiting for the action to start.
“We normally try to be hidden in our trucks way before the crawlerz show up. I’d suggest you advise your men to be on their toes. Those things are wicked fast.” Blaze warned Leander. Lebron and Drew nodded their heads in full agreement. The best way to fight a crawler was to figure out where they were hiding at in the daylight and toss a grenade on top of them. Facing them in an open field was not a good idea.
What really worried Drew was that every time him and his family had fought the crawlerz it’d been in tight confined spaces. It was one thing to blast away as they came at you in single file through narrow hallways or up a staircase. Out in the open would be a lot trickier. The crawlerz were a lot more self-aware than the surgers so you couldn’t just expect them to come running straight at you. Drew found himself wishing his weapons were in this building. He felt compelled to go outside and help the men who were about to learn firsthand how dangerous these beasts could be.
“Locked and loaded and ready to engage.” The voice of Flanagan came out of the overhead speakers.
“Free to engage.” Leander authorized the attack.
They watched the monitors showing the team approaching the pack of crawlerz. The men moved forward in a wedge formation to give them each an unobstructed field of fire into the crawlerz below. They kept moving forward waiting on the order from Flanagan to open fire. Flanagan was at the tip of the spear.
“Fire at will.” Flanagan annou
nced clearly over the team comms link that was being played on the overhead in the command center. The fire team immediately engaged the crawlerz. Flanagan had told them about his experience with the surger so none of them fooled around on single shot mode. They were going to make noise regardless, so they opted to go big and get it done.
Five of the crawlerz were cut to pieces before they had a chance to do much more than notice they were being shot. The remaining two sprang high in the air and came down right beside the wedge of fighting men. The watchers in the command center gasped in awe at the supernatural seeming leap. The two crawlerz had leapt higher than they’d have considered possible if they hadn’t just seen it. They’d tracked it because they were looking down on the battle from cameras suspended off rods high in the trees. The men in the patrol Flanagan had taken out were looking around wildly trying to see where the remaining crawlerz had disappeared to. Most of them were leaning forward assuming they were going to have to chase down the monsters.
Crawlerz | Book 2 | Batten Down The Hatches Page 3