The Revered

by Terrance Mulloy

“Programmed to hunt and kill anything larger than a Woodchuck,” Ally replied. “For years, they’d been keeping Afflicted populations low in that area, so we never tried to dismantle them. Until recently, they were an effective means of pest control.”

  “Why, what happened recently?”

  “They started avoiding the area.”

  Matt shared a knowing look with Wainwright and turned to the screen, itching the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin. “What about Pennsylvania Avenue and down through Hillcrest Heights? We could cross somewhere at Newburg,” he said, pointing to another area of the map.

  “Afflicted hives everywhere,” Wainwright added. “You’d have more luck sailing down the Potomac in a rubber lifeboat.”

  “And why can’t we do that?” A welter of soft laughter broke out around the room, but Matt didn’t get the joke. “What am I missing?”

  “The Potomac is heavily mined,” said Wainwright. “A fortified warship wouldn’t make it a hundred meters before getting blown into oblivion.”

  “What about a chopper?”

  Ally shook her head. “For short-range supply runs, they’re fine. But anything long distance, we’d be shot down. Basically, anything south of Springfield is a wasteland filled with nomad tribes and marauders.”

  Again, Matt turned to the screen and blew out a defeated sigh. “Well, I’m afraid our only option is to figure out how to get past those drone moats near the Pentagon.”

  “There’s no getting past drone moats,” Trey said. “We’d need to trigger one first, then destroy it before we could pass through. Maybe we’d get lucky with minimum casualties and pull that off, but that’s a big fucking maybe.”

  Matt turned to Wainwright. “You have any EMP grenades?”

  “A few. But probably only enough to take out one moat.”

  “One is better than none.”

  “We also have a larger grenade that can be fitted to the end of a harpoon device.”

  “I’ll take whatever you can spare.”

  Wainwright took in the faint glimmer of hope in Matt’s eyes. “You also need to keep in mind the Scourge is still out there, Matt. The entire country is still classified as a hot zone. If one infected cell gets into your bloodstream, you’ll be contagious within minutes. Never take off your mask while being outside the shelter of your vehicle.”

  “Yeah, it’s a little late for that,” Matt said, leveling a disapproving glare at Ally and her team.

  Ally gave no response. She simply rose from her chair and signaled for her team to move out. They all stood and followed her out of the room.

  Matt caught Wainwright’s look and raised his eyebrows with exhaustion. “Kids these days, huh.”

  Wainwright said nothing, but she gave him a sympathetic smile.

  Wainwright stood in a small enclosed balcony that overlooked the staging area, watching maintenance technicians dart across the apron below, assisting the convoy with the last of their supplies. As usual, everything was bathed in the iridescent glow of ultra-violet light.

  She sighted Matt, now wearing combat armor and a gas mask, mounting the lead Humvee with Ally, Dan, Jensen, and Trey. The convoy was about to roll out.

  She looked out over the greater sprawl of the base. The cool air felt electrically charged. Although they would never be able to reverse the devastation Cromwell had brought upon the planet, in finding Matt, Wainwright was giving the Renewal their last shot at hope. If he could somehow find a kernel of Rossiter’s original data, perhaps one day they could create a vaccine. Her eyes always stirred with tears whenever she imagined a world without the Afflicted.

  But she knew this was all wishful thinking. Folly even. After all these years, the Scourge was a biological weapon they still did not fully understand. Perhaps they never would. Either way, the Scourge would soon consume the entire planet, and Cromwell would have his Legion. That much she did understand. And hearing the same warning from a time traveler only confirmed her worst fear: they were running out of time.

  Arms folded, she turned and headed back into the ops center as the convoy took off and raced through the heavily fortified gates and into the wasteland of Washington D.C.

  The convoy trundled along the windswept area that was once Logan Circle, weaving around a maze of abandoned cars. Many of the heavy tanks and police vehicles that barricaded parts of the street were skeletal husks of charred steel, entangled in tentacles of weeds and ivy.

  Suddenly, a lone Afflicted emerged from a dilapidated building and lunged at the lead Humvee, only to get struck down like a bowling pin. The convoy was now hauling ass and in no mood to slow down. To stay mobile out here was to stay alive.

  Inside the lead Humvee, Matt sat in the back again with Jensen and Trey, although this time he had a window seat. They all held their sleek assault rifles between their legs.

  Trey noticed Matt’s right hand was resting on the door latch. A cautious move which indicated he was ready for anything to go down. Trey casually raised his left hand and did the same.

  Ally sat up front, with Dan driving. After collapsing the buttstock of her crossbow and folding the split-limb, she sheathed it inside a custom-made holster affixed to the inside of her door.

  As they turned onto 16th Street from the Northwestern end of K Street, Matt looked out his rain-streaked window to see a bald Lafayette Square. Its beautiful trees and manicured shrub were long gone. At the edge of his vision, he could just make out the remains of White House’s North Portico. The rest of the structure appeared to be a hillock of crumbled white sandstone.

  “What happened to the President?” Matt asked, sadness now washing over him as the ruins of the White House disappeared.

  “No one knows,” Jensen said. “That was a long time ago.”

  “He was probably taken to Cheyenne Mountain, but that’s only speculation,” Trey added. “There was never any emergency broadcast or anything. One morning, the government just went dark.”

  “All of them did,” Ally added. “The entire world has been on its own ever since.”

  Matt kept his eyes on a narrow pathway that had been trodden out of trash and debris. It snaked unevenly between two ruined residential buildings. His eyes brightened when he spotted what he thought was the faint glow of fire from somewhere within, suggesting that people were in there. Was it a mirage, or a trick of light? He would never know.

  He looked away, deeply saddened by the world he had failed to save.

  Eleven

  Wainwright sat quietly in front of the operations hub’s giant wraparound screen, chewing her bottom lip nervously as the convoy cut through the ruins of D.C. on her drone feed.

  The convoy turned onto the Rochambeau Memorial Bridge, slowing to needle its way through another traffic jam frozen in time. The drone was orbiting at ten-thousand feet, and from this height, the feed made the vehicles look like a thin bead of foreign anti-bodies, coursing along a clogged artery.

  When the screen started flashing red, one of her technicians turned to her. “Ma'am, they’ve just crossed our perimeter into the no-go zone.”

  Wainwright nodded solemnly. “Disengage.”

  The drone went off-target, banking away into darkened clouds.

  She took a deep breath, trying to keep that small inkling of hope inside her from being completely snuffed out. “Godspeed and good hunting, Matt,” she whispered. “Bring me back something… anything.”

  Matt looked out his window at the bald fringes of the Potomac zipping by. Much of the trees and dense foliage that once hugged this part of the river had long since rotted away, with only blackened trunks now visible. Any passengers crossing the 14th Street Bridge had an exposed view in all directions. Across the river, on the opposite side of the bridge, was the looted remains of a military staging effort. Fallen crowd control bollards lay in twisted heaps around abandoned tanks and rusted Army trucks.

  “There she is,” Jensen said with a lacing of quiet awe.

  Matt turned to his right-side to see the di
stant remains of the Pentagon jutting out from a forest of weeds like the ruins of some giant religious edifice. “My god…” he muttered vacantly. The sight was breathtaking. The powerful heart of America’s defense establishment had been rendered into a grimy stone mesa, entangled in thistles and crabgrass.

  Ally swiped the comms unit on the dash. “Anything?”

  “Still looking clear,” one of the rear gunners replied. “Nothing behind us.” There was a nervous clip to her voice.

  Dan crouched over the steering wheel, his eyes scanning the skies above. “The wind has stopped. We must sound like a freight train coming through here.”

  “Perhaps we should scout ahead on foot before we go any further,” Matt suggested. “Get a lay of the land. See if we can get eyes on one of these moats.”

  Ally allowed Dan to drive for another hundred meters before signaling him to stop.

  As the convoy squeaked to a halt on the bridge, Matt cracked his door open. The sound of silence flooded in.

  When Dan went to hop out of the Humvee, Ally gently touched his arm. “I need you here, behind the wheel.”

  Dan shook his head in protest. “Ally—”

  “Listen, two of the grunts in the rear Humvee are still greenies. This is the farthest they’ve ever been from base. Someone needs to keep an eye on them. Someone I can trust.”

  Dan worked his jaw before nodding. He wasn’t too thrilled with that order. “I don’t like this. I don’t like any of this.”

  “I know.”

  Dan’s eyes probed his rear-view mirror to find Matt further along the bridge, checking his gear over with Trey and Jensen. “And what about him?”

  “What about him?”

  “You trust him?”

  Ally hopped out of the vehicle without answering the question. She slung her crossbow over her left shoulder. “We’ll try not to be too long. No chatter on comms either, unless you see a cloud moving in a way it shouldn’t be.”

  “Just make sure you keep your eyes on the sky,” Dan said, trying to mask his annoyance at her decision to move without him.

  Ally gave him an affirmative nod. “You too,” she replied.

  Matt felt the heat from Dan’s glare as he brushed past the driver-side door to join Ally.

  Most of the men and women from the other vehicles had already jumped out to set a security perimeter around the convoy. The two rear pickups were armed with a large plasma cannon, as well as a high-powered javelin gun that could fire an EMP-tipped harpoon over two-thousand yards. Both weapons were on a constant swivel, angled up at the sky.

  Matt slung his rifle strap across his chest-plate and calmly made his way to the edge of the bridge’s safety barrier, eyes narrowing as he took in the bleak view.

  From his vantage point, the remains of the George Washington Parkway could be seen across the Potomac, its severed concrete columns towering into the air like lopsided tombstones. There was only one path around Pentagon City, and they were standing on it. Every other bridge, underpass, boulevard, and freeway out of the city heading south, was either shattered to pieces, flooded, or partially collapsed.

  “Here, take these.”

  Matt turned to see Ally holding out two EMP grenades. He took them and opened a Velcro supply pouch attached to his combat vest. “Thanks.”

  “We think there’s a moat somewhere around the off-ramp that connects this bridge to Boundary Channel Drive,” Ally said, pointing to the curved road ahead of them.

  “Wainwright’s own scans never picked it up?” Matt queried.

  “They’re extremely hard to see,” she replied.

  “What will I be looking for?” he asked, slipping the two grenades into his supply pouch.

  “Anything moving in the sky that’s not a bird,” Jensen said from behind.

  “Then what?”

  “Then, we toss those grenades and run like hell.”

  Matt stood aside and waited for his daughter to take point. She signaled to the convoy that they were moving out, then brushed past him. Trey and Jensen trailed behind as they followed her along the bridge. Everyone had their weapons raised to their eye-line, sweeping over the four-lane bridge.

  As Matt began to move with them, he became awed by the quiet sense of desolation that surrounded him with each passing second. There was just a slight breeze in the air, but nothing else. No birds or wildlife. Nothing.

  Everything felt dead because it was.

  After cautiously proceeding down the off-ramp’s slope for another ten minutes, they came to a huge sprawl of abandoned cars. It radiated out from two major side exits. One exit led directly to Boundary Channel Drive. The other to Pentagon North Parking. As they drew closer to the exits, Matt started noticing things.

  Tattered laundry and bedsheets swayed in the breeze, some of it drooped between cars to form makeshift clotheslines. Some of it was also duck-tapped and pegged together to create shelters.

  Further along the road, clumps of burned luggage were also piled atop circular smears of black ash, suggesting there was once campfires. It was obvious the large group of people who had been here tried to stick it out for a while.

  Matt pushed deeper into the encampment where it took on a grimmer appearance. The charring on the vehicles was darker, the asphalt rougher, much of it Swiss-cheesed with what looked like small, yet powerful projectiles. The scene was almost reminiscent of some war-torn hellhole in the Middle East he remembered reading about when he was a teenager.

  Weapon raised; he slowly approached a vehicle. It was some type of eclectic Sedan. He leaned in and glimpsed the blackened skeletons inside. Hard to tell exactly how many occupants, but it looked to be a family. They were all slumped over, their skulls leaning against the frosted smart-glass windows that were caked with ash. Although he’d seen plenty of death and carnage before, it was never easy to absorb. There was always a tragic story behind it. “These people died waiting in their cars. Waiting for help that never came,” he muttered.

  Ally leaned in closer to one of the vehicles, assessing the remains of its passengers. She then turned and studied the jagged line of vehicles that had approached the bridge’s on-ramp from the adjacent exit. Many of them had crashed into each other and were scorched black, creating a gridlock that would have been impossible to escape without cresting the concrete barriers and driving directly into the Potomac. Some of the cars had been flipped onto their sides, but the formation of the line was still visible. She then looked out beyond the cars to see a sprinkling of human bones along the banks of the Potomac. This was the site of a massacre. “Not these people,” she said. “They weren’t waiting, they were fleeing.”

  “How far do you think it is to this moat?” Matt asked, noticing the concern that was now riddled across Jensen and Trey’s faces while they waited for her to answer.

  Ally’s expression was subdued as she stared at the ground, clearly distracted by something. It wasn’t a lingering thought, more like a sudden realization of horror.

  “Ally talk to me,” Jensen nervously blurted, craning up to scan the sky through his tactical scope.

  Trey did the same. “How far?” he said, scanning the sky as a fresh surge of panic flooded into his chest.

  Finally, Ally looked up at them, her face now paled from shock. “I think we’ve already passed it.”

  Dan looked out over the dashboard, scanning the sky of any sign of unnatural looking cloud formations. From the various reports he had been privy to over the years, these drones were apparently tiny, with each one being no larger than a silver coin. However, if a moat were to be triggered, a swarm of millions would autonomously coalesce within minutes, creating a black metallic cloud that would be visible for miles as it moved through the sky.

  The two rear gunners standing in their truck beds began to bristle with tension. There was something in the still air that did not feel right. It went beyond the rattled nerves their sentry positions often carried by default. It was the impending feeling that something was coming fo
r them.

  Those fears were confirmed the second they heard it.

  It was almost inaudible at first. A faint muffle, which steadily grew into a frantic buzzing sound, like flies swarming a putrefied corpse.

  The gunner manning the plasma cannon white-knuckled his triggers as he swung the huge weapon around with a metallic creak, searching for the source. “Anyone else hearing that?”

  The gunner on the EMP javelin nodded her head, beaded sweat glistening behind her protective visor. “Ah, huh.”

  Dan heard it too. He tapped the comms unit on the dash while keeping his eyes glued on the road ahead, hoping to see three figures crest the curvature of the bridge any second. “Ally, you copy?”

  Static crackled in response.

  He cursed under his breath and twisted in his seat to see the growing uneasiness in the men and women outside, holding their perimeter around the convoy. All of them were looking around, waiting for what they knew was about to come. He barked into his comms unit again. “Ally, you need to haul ass back here with those grenades. We have something incoming… Ally, do you copy?”

  Nothing.

  Dan cracked his door open and hollered at the kid who was their scans operator. He was a good fifteen yards away along the bridge. “What’re you reading?”

  The pimple-faced grunt was no older than seventeen. Dan only knew him as Slim. He looked terrified. The buzzing sound was nearly on top of them now. “Got a mass of incoming blips, sir, but I can’t get a lock on them,” he yelled back. “I can’t see their position—"

  At that very second, Dan heard the faint sound of a whistle, and within the blink of an eye, Slim had disappeared into a red mist as something smoked through him like a rod of lightning. Half his vertebrae ejected, hitting the ground with a meaty clack before skidding along the road.

  As Slim’s deflated remains crumpled to the ground, the others all began screaming and shooting at the sky, but the drone swarm had already flanked their left side. It came up from underneath the bridge in a surprise attack, swirled high into the sky like the tongue of a massive tornado, then corkscrewed down onto the convoy, pulverizing the fighters.