Horrific yells ripped through the air along with the sound of automatic weapons firing. Blaze pumped his arms and really built up some momentum. Drew was surprised to find himself having to really pour on the effort to keep up with the older man. Whatever sweet nothings the command center was whispering in Blaze’s ear must be extremely motivating. Based on the screams and erratic gunfire Drew could guess where all that motivation was coming from.
They sprinted down the short dirt road leading to the warehouse. Up ahead a group of Marines had come out of the warehouse and were waving them forward. The Marines were sporting some high-tech looking weaponry. The scared looks on their faces showed they were ready to pull the trigger the second they saw anything that looked the slightest bit dangerous. Drew slowed down to pass through them and into the large open door leading into the hangar that covered the underground warehouse.
The SEAL team was already inside waiting for them. Blaze ran up to Zimmerman and asked where Harley’s team was. The SEAL team leader shook his head. He’d seen Harley and his men running for the hangar ahead of them. A couple of surgers had come out of nowhere and hit them hard. The SEALs had come and put down a few of them as they were turning into surgers. The rest had disappeared.
Blaze pressed the send button on his headset and asked for a status on Harley and his team. Everyone stood around as the Marines slid the big door closed waiting to hear what’d happened to the rest of their group. Blaze and the others with headsets got intense looks on their faces as they listened. Finally Blaze pulled his headset off to talk to Drew and the others who’d gathered closely around him.
“They’re dead or turned. Harley fought his way to the other side of the hangar and snagged a bike. LeBron opened the gate for him and he’s currently hauling ass down the highway away from here. If he’s smart, he won’t come back.” Blaze told them what he knew then continued trying to catch his breath. That run had been the most exercise he’d gotten in years.
Drew let out his breath. He was saddened to hear about the men Harley had been leading but immensely cheered up to hear Harley had made it. The only people he’d really become close with from the clan had been Harley and Charani. He was slowly building up some respect for Blaze. Other than that, most of the circus freaks were people he just didn’t click with. A lot of that was his lingering resentment about how they’d been captured by Blaze and company to begin with. Regardless he was glad to hear Harley had made it out alive. If anyone was going to survive this mess it was him.
Fists slammed into the doors they’d just come through. Drew was worried for a second. He felt much better after looking around the hangar and seeing that it’d been built to withstand pretty much anything. The outside of the building had been camouflaged to look like a rundown rusty hangar. The inside was state of the art. There were several vehicles parked inside the large building as well as a couple of small planes. The middle section of the hangar was fairly open as if it were missing a large piece of gear. Drew figured that’s where the plane normally went that’d taken Yue away.
“Well. What we’re doing obviously ain’t working!” Zimmerman announced to no one in particular. He looked pissed. The other SEALs didn’t look happy either. The Marines who’d come out to let them into the warehouse had done so against orders. Leander had told them to keep the doors locked so as not to risk the warehouse being breached. The Marines had replied with colorful language and faked their communications system not working right. Now they were in a feud with the officers over in the barracks.
“It’s cool.” The lieutenant in charge of the force recon Marines shared once the cat was out of the bag on what was going on. “They can’t stay ticked off for too long. We have pretty much all the food and ammo. Worst case they demote us and take half our pay. I can live with that.”
Chapter 5: Life Aboard the Neverland
The Gerald Ford was built with two nuclear reactors to power it. She could operate continuously for at least twenty years without the need to refuel. The only thing the crew and passengers on board the state-of-the-art vessel needed was food. They’d shipped out over-provisioned with enough supplies to last six months with limited rationing. A lot of that food being dehydrated. The reverse osmosis desalination plant could keep them supplied with fresh water basically for forever.
Yue had learned way too much about the huge ship in the orientation course she’d taken along with the other ladies from the clan. For one thing, she now knew the Navy was infatuated with training handouts and quizzes. She’d never suspected that before. She supposed it made sense considering all of the things on board that could kill you. She’d happily completed the required orientation courses to get her badge laminated yellow instead of red. The yellow tint earned her a little more freedom to move around the ship. It also made her eligible to get a job.
Floating around on what was arguably the safest place on the planet came at a cost. It’d been emphasized in the orientation that this wasn’t a cruise vacation. They were fully expected to pull their weight whether they opted to join up or remain civilians. The ship now served under the command of the Department for the Continuation of the United States Government. It’s mission had changed from leading battle groups across the globe to shuttling supplies along the east coast of North America. The ship also served as the working capital for the United States government. Yue had just about peed herself when she ran into the President and his entourage one day on her way to lunch.
Since Yue didn’t want to join up and she had experience waitressing she ended up assigned to the galley. The regular crew all went through a line to get their meals. The VIPs on board were way too important to carry a tray around themselves. They also got to pick the food they wanted versus being served what everyone else was eating. There was an entire section of the galley partitioned off just to serve the handful of executives. Yue noted early on that unlike the politicians the ships officers ate whatever the crew was eating. Even if they did eat it in rooms with a nicer ambiance.
Seafood was a pretty big deal on board. There was an officer in charge of fishing. Considered a recreational activity in the past it’d quickly become a vital part of their food supply now. It wasn’t like they could just pull into a port and have supplies delivered by the pallet. The fishing officer was working on being able to run nets instead of just using rods to fish with. If that project was successful it could make the floating island pretty much self-sustaining.
Making the ship self-sustainable was vital for the protection of the government on board. They may be a useless bunch of overly talkative old people, but they represented law and order. They represented the American dream. As long as the members of that hierarchy stayed in place people could keep lying to themselves that this wasn’t the end of the world. It was just a temporary setback. Democracy would rise again and all of that.
Serving them their meals Yue often thought the food could have been better used as bait to catch fish. They needed a leader like the President in the Independence Day movies. A man who’d rise to the occasion and inspire. A man who had no problem flying a fighter plane into a gigantic alien laser beam. Instead, they had the cast of Grumpy Old Men insisting on steak and the finest wine while the sailors on board ate oatmeal. The men didn’t even finish the steaks most of the time. Yue was ordered to throw them out secretly so that the crew wouldn’t see how well the privileged old farts were eating.
Disgusted by the hypocrisy of it all and fearful for the safety of her brothers Yue spent a lot of her free time on the flight deck staring out at the ocean. She wondered if this was how the world ended. People surviving off the fish caught from the back of the carrier until the reactors eventually failed. At least the ship they were on would have the longest life since it was one of the newest ones.
She’d heard the sailors start calling the carrier the Neverland one night as she was watching a group of men fishing off the stern. Once a fun recreational activity it was deadly serious now. Every fish hooked was a meal ser
ved. Every meal they could rip out of the ocean was a little bit longer they could put off venturing onto land to gather supplies. Everyone knew once your feet hit solid dirt your life-expectancy dropped exponentially.
There was a chill in the air. It felt like they were somewhere off the coast of New England. Yue kept hoping they’d post up one of those video displays like they have on the cruise ships that’d tell her where the hell they were. It was annoying because there were monitors scattered around that were obviously for those sorts of purposes but for operational security, they weren’t showing their location. At first, she wondered what exactly the admiral thought the zombies were going to do with the information. Then she realized that the other countries out there were all trying to survive too. Capturing a warship that’d make its own water and power for at least the next twenty years would definitely get whatever country did it to the bonus round.
Yue wasn’t just hanging out on the flight deck because she liked looking at the ocean. She was going everywhere her limited access badge would take her trying to figure out how to get off of the floating behemoth. Charani and the other women told her she was crazy. It wasn’t like they could overpower the guards and force a pilot to fly them back to the base. The base that was guarded by heavily armed special forces warriors who could easily shoot them when they landed. A few of the women had already volunteered to join up. It was the path of least resistance for surviving the end of the world in the most comfortable way possible.
The only way Yue would consider joining up was if she thought it’d help her make it ashore. There were missions launched almost every day. Yue wasn’t privy to what the missions were being launched for, but she listened hard to the rumors. The sailors called gossiping scuttlebutt and it was a major pastime onboard. Whether sitting in the galley playing cards or outside fishing the crew had a hard time not talking about whatever happened to be on their minds. Especially if a pretty girl like Yue asked some innocent leading questions.
An overly handsy Marine who thought he was going to hook up with Yue was a major source of information. He’d been out on multiple missions and liked to talk about what he’d seen. He was under direct orders not to talk about what he’d seen. Yue knew that because he started every other sentence by telling her he wasn’t allowed to tell her whatever he was about to tell her. He tried to be cagey but reading between the lines with the lovestruck jarhead was child’s play for Yue. She made sure to accidentally bump into him anytime she suspected he’d been on a mission.
The Marines were utilized to shore up the defenses around important warehouses and for rescuing people deemed essential to the continuation of the government. Essential people were those who could either help fight the threat directly or would be needed to rebuild the country once the threat was eliminated. The Marine described how they’d swoop in on Chinooks and pluck scientists off roofs. He mentioned several times how all of the bases on the mainland were constantly being overrun. Establishing a beachhead appeared to be a losing proposition.
That last bit of information was what frightened Yue the most. Her brothers were stationed at one of those bases her want to be lover kept telling her were constantly being overrun. That news reinforced her drive to figure out how to sneak on a plane heading for the shore. Unfortunately, she had no clue where she was or where the planes were headed. From everything she was hearing she guessed they were somewhere off the coast of Connecticut, but she didn’t know for sure.
She needed to be off the coast of South Carolina when she went ashore. It was going to be hard enough finding the hidden base for a second time without having to commute from New England. She didn’t see a lot she could do about it. The captain wasn’t going to pull the ship over so she could hop off wherever she wanted to. If she even mentioned wanting to leave, there was a decent possibility her yellow badge would immediately be revoked. Without that badge she’d be virtually imprisoned in her berthing area. For now, she saw nothing for it but to keep her ears open and wait for the right opportunity.
The conversations she heard around the fine tablecloth of the President’s table didn’t fill her with a lot of confidence. After a few bottles of wine and some cognac the mix of flag officers and American royalty liked to talk about the future. The conversations went off on multiple tangents with a lot of them running straight into brick walls. Once powerful senators and governors no longer had states to preside over. The balance of power was obviously shifting. The men at the table desperately trying to hold on to the limited influence they had left.
Arguably the most powerful person at the table was a tall skinny man with big glasses that everyone called Jeff. Despite his obvious power and influence he didn’t seem to have a problem with everyone from the server to the President addressing him by his first name. Jeff showed up for some dinners but not others. In a world where most of the survivors were holed up in one place or another Jeff got around. As the head of the Department for the Continuation of the Government he spent a lot of time in the air. He liked to check firsthand on how different approaches were working. He was a hands-on scientist who’d been hidden away for decades in the bowels of an obscure bureaucracy dreaming up ways to foil the end of mankind.
Jeff had never anticipated the survival of humanity actually depending on him. It’d been mostly intellectual exercises to him. Due to the nature of his job he was considered a conspiracy nut by the scientific community as well as the military. Most politicians had disregarded his numerous reports over the year. His department had begrudgingly been provided funding because people believed someone in the government should be ensuring the country had a plan to deal with every eventuality. A career spent investigating the improbable had led to quite a few discoveries the government wanted to keep under wraps. Throwing a few hundred million a year at the skinny geek in glasses to keep him locked up in the basement with his nerd friends had seemed like a small price to pay to ensure the status quo.
Jeff’s star really started to rise when his department flagged the archeological excavation in Egypt as a potential cataclysmic event within ten minutes of the live feed starting. No one ever bothered to inform the President that most of the documents Jeff’s team filed were stamped with that same ominous cataclysmic warning. They assumed no one was going to read them anyway. It didn’t matter if the title of the document referred to an asteroid that may strike the earth in two hundred years or warnings about viruses and eventual climate change. It didn’t help that they’d published quite a few plans on how to deal with alien invasions. These tended to read more like a Hollywood script than a government action plan.
No one cared that a solar flare may wipe them off the planet one day. At least not once the politicians read the need to invest every bit of the country’s resources for the next hundred years into building gargantuan underwater cities to mitigate that threat. Jeff and his team had developed plans to cope with political, ideological, natural, alien, and even multiple supernatural scenarios. If an army of bigfoots ever decided to take over towns in Alaska, Jeff had a plan for handling that.
No one else had a plan. Jeff’s well thought out strategy for dealing with a pandemic that mutated people into zombie like creatures was well researched. It’d been carefully written in small enough words for the average politician to grasp. There were even graphs showing how the spread would impact certain areas. Nothing says official plan like a multicolored pie chart. A lot of the research was screen grabs off various internet pages. Years of not being taken seriously had led to a very contagious outbreak of laziness within the small department. Jeff was immune to the outbreak. He’d spearheaded using a portion of their funding to sponsor research by the CDC into possible rates of infection. At the end of the day Jeff’s team had been the first to run up a flag about the Egyptian contagion. On top of that they were the only ones to have a comprehensive plan sitting on the shelf in a binder as to how to deal with it.
Floundering around like a drunk trying to ice skate for the first time the Pr
esident grabbed the one man who seemed to know what the hell was going on. He’d been impressed enough after talking to Jeff to put him in charge of the whole fiasco. Jeff had gone from the basement to the penthouse overnight. He’d been granted the kind of resources he’d only ever dreamed of. He very quickly transferred large groups of special operations teams to his department and set them to establishing massive hidden warehouses all around the United States. Jeff was the one who made sure the power plants and other critical infrastructure were shut down in an orderly manner. Last but not least before infection was even an issue, he had the nuclear-powered ships from the fleet stocked up and put out to sea. The rest of the ships were used to transfer supplies to secret caches around North America. It was a herculean logistical task that created an army of paper pushing bureaucrats overnight.
Jeff’s political star was shining brightly. It was so high that Yue could easily see the danger the oblivious scientist turned leader was in. Snippets of the conversations she heard around the tables revealed several of the elected leaders had been digging into Jeff’s past. They’d started sniping at him and asking him if the aliens could be expected soon. One staffer had managed to uncover the report on the potential bigfoot invasion in Alaska. That one trumped even the millions of dollars Jeff had poured into investigating things like the possibility of a Vampire Illuminati. These men were aiming to take him down by painting him as a crackpot conspiracy theorist instead of the whiz kid the President thought he was.
Crawlerz | Book 2 | Batten Down The Hatches Page 5