Canticum Tenebris (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 2)

by John Triptych

  Half an hour later, Oliver stopped his vehicle just behind the second delivery truck as the whole convoy was now going through the third and final military checkpoint. As he looked out of the truck’s window, he could see the gigantic igloo-like entrance leading into the Cheyenne Mountain Complex. It had been almost a decade since he had last set foot in this area so Oliver was momentarily distracted as he reminisced about old times until he heard some faint rapid panting just below him. Looking down at the road beside his truck, Oliver had a momentary fright as he saw a fully-armed MP soldier leading a military working dog around the idle trucks. As he wiped away a single bead of sweat from his forehead, he realized his fear was misplaced since these bomb-sniffing dogs were trained to detect common explosive materials like dynamite, TNT, C-4 plastic explosives, chlorates, and smokeless powders while the explosives he was carrying were polymer-bonded. Nevertheless, Oliver carefully took out a Glock that had been taped from underneath the truck’s dashboard and checked it to make sure there was a round in chamber before tucking it into a concealable holster at the base of his spine. The one thing that worried him about this final checkpoint was if the guards decided to use handheld Geiger counters. Even though the technicians he talked to prior to the mission assured him that they took precautions to shield the device that was in the back of his truck against that kind of detection, he wasn’t so sure so he had decided right then and there to ram the truck through the North Portal and detonate it in the access tunnel the moment they detected what he was carrying.

  A loud thump on the side of the vehicle door made him jump and his head almost hit the cabin ceiling. As he turned and looked down his window, the solider with dog was signaling to him so Oliver lowered the window as he reached for the Glock behind his back.

  The soldier with the dog was pointing ahead of him. “You can go in now.”

  Oliver turned to look at the front. He realized that the two LMTV trucks ahead of him had already gone ahead and he was holding up the rest. “Sorry, I zoned out for a minute there,” Oliver said to the MP as he restarted the truck and drove it into the access tunnel.

  The Cheyenne Mountain Complex was an incredible feat of military engineering. Just a few years ago, it had served as the headquarters for the United States Space Command as well as for NORAD, but it had recently been deactivated as priorities prompted a shift in assets and air defense was shifted to Peterson Air Force base, just a few miles away. But just a few months ago, the complex became fully operational once more as the Glooming began and it served as a heavily-guarded home to both the president and the Secretary of Defense while the rest of the United States government were dispersed in similar bases in the Virginia countryside. Built under 2,000 feet of granite into the heart of Cheyenne Mountain, the complex itself was designed to withstand a nuclear attack from the outside since the underground city within was shielded by tons of rocks. The foundation of the buildings even had gigantic springs to prevent the structures from shifting a single inch in the event of a direct attack against it.

  Oliver smiled to himself as he carefully parked the LMTV truck along the sides of the central access tunnel just behind the other trucks of the convoy. While the complex itself was designed to protect itself against an outside nuclear attack, it would not fare very well against an attack from the inside. As he got out of the driver’s seat and made a short jump onto the pavement, Oliver walked over to the back of his vehicle and started unlatching the sides of the truck bed. The back of the vehicle contained boxes of peppers as well as hot pepper sauces; this cargo was carefully chosen by their head of operations because it would partly throw the scent of the military guard dogs as an added precaution. But what he really wanted was the vending machine sitting in the middle of the truck bed, so he looked around until he saw another soldier manning a forklift and was slowly driving it towards the lead truck.

  Oliver ran over to her. The soldier looked like she was working at the commissary department as she got out of the forklift and started to unlatch the back of the lead truck.

  “Hey,” Oliver said to her. “Could I borrow your forklift for a minute?”

  The soldier was a young black woman who wore US Navy fatigues. She turned and looked at him blankly. “I’m sorry but I’ve got to get the boxes off of this truck right away and bring it over to the kitchens, the crew will be starting lunch very soon and there’s a shortage of fresh vegetables. The Defense Secretary is on a restricted vegetarian diet because of his heart trouble so he wants to be served first.”

  Oliver grinned sheepishly. “I hear you. I have the same problem- only this time they told me I have to get that vending machine over to the executive dining hall ASAP. I’d like to move it myself, but the damned thing’s too heavy and all I’ve got is a dolly. You don’t suppose I could just borrow it for a minute and then bring it right back to you?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry, I can’t right now.”

  Oliver bit his lip before smiling again. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll haul a couple of boxes of veggies for you using the forklift- I’ll just stack it on top of the vending machine and I’ll make the trip to the dining area first then to the kitchens and be back as soon as I can, okay?”

  The soldier hesitated. Oliver knew he almost had her. “Look, I don’t wanna get into no trouble, Sergeant.”

  Oliver winked at her. “You won’t. The third box at the back of my truck has got nothing but chocolate bars on it and it’s not on the inventory manifest. I was gonna give it to a friend of mine who is assigned here, but I’m gonna give it to you instead as a favor. You can do what you want with it.”

  She looked around to see if anyone was listening, but nobody was since everyone else was in the process of bringing their own supplies to their designated locations. “Okay, but show me the box first.”

  Oliver trotted along with her as she drove the forklift until it was behind his truck. He grabbed the designated box from the back of the vehicle and handed it to her. Taking out a small box cutter from her uniform pocket, she sliced a small part of the top of the box and peered within. She could see the plastic wrapped chocolate bars as well as the other assorted candies inside.

  She turned to look at him. “Lemme see the manifest list.”

  Oliver took out a clipboard from the truck’s cabin and handed it to her. “Check the serial number on the box,” he said.

  She did. After a minute, she pulled out her own copy of the manifest from her pocket and checked to see if it was there. It wasn’t. “Okay, you got a deal,” she said before she pointed to the forklift. “The boxes that need to go to the kitchen are on the lift right there. Take them to Corporal Miller at kitchen five. I’m giving you twenty minutes before I alert the MPs in case you don’t come back.”

  Oliver grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”

  As she walked away with the box of candies, Oliver brought up the forklift ramp until it was parallel to the height of the truck’s rear bed. Using the manual dolly, he was able to get the vending machine onto the forklift. The boxes of vegetables would probably fall off if he started driving the machine with any kind of speed so he placed them on his lap instead. Oliver then drove the forklift through the opened blast doors and into a subterranean cluster of buildings. As he was moving along the narrow underground streets between the three-story structures, he noticed the Secretary of Defense along with his staff walking slowly towards Command Center. The day was extremely fortuitous because the president was over at nearby Peterson Air Force Base and would not be affected by this phase of the operation. Oliver made a silent prayer to the Lord, thanking him for all the lucky breaks so far.

  The commissary area was a small grocery and clothing store located close to the side tunnels that housed the underground reservoir. With its own water and air filtration system, the people in the complex were prepared for any eventuality. Well, almost everything, Oliver thought as he opened the side doors of the store with his key.

  A soldier assigned to the commissary walked
over to him and Oliver handed him the orders that was on his clipboard. This particular soldier seemed bored and merely glanced at it, telling Oliver to carry on with a wave of his hand. Oliver carefully maneuvered the vending machine until it faced the empty wall where it was assigned to and he lowered the lift until it was now on the same level as the floor. He got out of the forklift and then crouched down while plugging the vending machine into the wall socket. Oliver quickly realized his mission was now done. Pastor Erik had told him that if there were no problems he could even get away by slipping past the convoy and perhaps hitching a ride with someone else but Oliver said no, he would be there when the device was activated. His task on this Earth was now finished and he was ready to join his daughter in blissful eternity. Taking the box of fresh vegetables with him, Oliver headed over to kitchen five to fulfill his last promise.

  The moment the vending machine was plugged into the wall socket, a coded transmission was relayed through the underground cables of the complex and a tiny FM burst over the airwaves was noticed by a team sitting in a nondescript house just a few miles east of the city, past Schriever Air Force Base.

  A radio technician looked up. “The device is active.”

  General Chuck Teller of the SOL Army stood over the radio operator and crossed his arms. “What’s the status on the Peterson team?”

  “They’re good to go as well, sir.”

  “Very well, initiate detonation of Weapon One and put Weapon Two on standby.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The vending machine contained a modified W87 warhead. Once created to be used on the MX Peacekeeper ICBM, all the remaining W87s were to be retrofitted into the Minuteman III missiles since the termination of the MX missile program. A few months ago, the Soldiers of the Lord were able to capture over three dozen of these thermonuclear warheads in an ambush conceived by General Teller. They had spent months carefully placing one of the warheads into a vending machine. The bomb was two stage radiation implosion weapon that consisted of two spheres, the larger of the two was a layered ball of polymer-bonded chemical explosive that surrounded an inner layer of beryllium and plutonium-239. The balls were themselves encasing a central core of deuterium-tritium gas. As the vending machine’s internal timer wound down to zero, this explosive ball immediately imploded in on itself, causing a fission explosion that in turn compressed the second sphere that contained a thick layer of uranium-238 surrounding a smaller core of lithium deuteride. With the first sphere detonating, this caused the second sphere to immediately chain react into an even larger fusion reaction.

  Within a split-second, the entire subterranean complex underneath Cheyenne Mountain was completely obliterated as a force with the equivalent of 475 kilotons of TNT vaporized everything in its path. The whole mountain shuddered as the entire cave complex collapsed in on itself and an initial radioactive pressure wave blew past the North and South Portals of the caves before collapsing them as it entombed only the shadows of all the people who were once inside of it. The focused shockwaves that reverberated from the tunnels and out into the open smashed through cars that were on the roads like dust motes in the wind. The men, women, and children who were instantly killed by the blast were the lucky ones while those that were somehow still alive were horrifically burned as their clothes, skin and hair melted away almost instantly from the onslaught of kinetic energy, searing heat, and intensely lethal gamma radiation.

  6. Clues

  Greater Boston

  Dr. Paul Dane couldn’t help but be amazed as he watched the boy eat. Troy was around eleven and short for his age, but he wolfed down five whole pancakes with lots of maple syrup and was already working on his sixth. The poor kid must have been starving for days, he thought. Troy’s older sister Kim had only eaten two of them before she got up from the dining table and took her plate to the sink.

  Paul placed two pancakes on his own plate while standing in the kitchen counter before looking over at the young boy again. He was thankful for the suggestion Valerie’s mom made about attaching a couple of propane fuel tanks to the gas stove, now he had a few months of stove top usage until he had to resort to the Dutch oven in the fireplace. “You want some more, Troy?”

  Troy said nothing but he shook his head before downing a glass of melted ice water.

  Kim stood beside the anthropology professor as she used a damp sponge to clean her plate in the sink. She was thirteen and maturing rapidly. “He stopped talking when our parents didn’t come back. They’re never coming back are they?”

  Paul looked at her. He needed to reassure the child. “Sure they will, maybe you just need to give them more time.”

  “It’s been over six days now since they left,” Kim said as she dried off the plate with a cloth towel. “I hope they died quickly.”

  “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

  “I know they’re dead. Otherwise, they would have come back already. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions as of yet,” Paul said. “Did they take the car when they left?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “A maroon colored Beamer.”

  “You remember the license plate?”

  “No, but I think the paperwork for it is probably in our house somewhere.”

  Paul started eating while standing beside her. “Okay, let me finish this plate and I’ll bring you both back to your house and we’ll have a look around.”

  Kim bit her lip. “Um, is it okay if we just stay with you?”

  “I guess you could, I’ll just have to clear one of the other rooms out,” Paul said. “Did my neighbor Clint talk to you at all? He’s been quite helpful to me since I got back here.”

  Kim shrugged. “He was okay. A couple of days ago, he gave us a couple of cans of beef stew and suggested that we could stay at his house, but we said no.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Every time we walked near his house, we could hear a woman scream, that’s his wife, I think. Troy didn’t want to move in with them because he was scared of her and so was I so we just stayed put in our house until the last of the food and the candles were gone.”

  “When your parents left to find food, did they say where they were going?”

  “Not really, no. They just told us that they would be back. I didn’t think it would be that important, I figured they were just running an errand since we were running out of food.”

  “Well, Clint told me there was a food bank set up near the medical school so I guess I’ll drive over there in a bit. Maybe the people who run that place saw them.”

  Kim sighed. “They say the whole world is ending. Is that true?”

  “Well, we’re still here,” Paul said. “Everybody just needs to stick together and we ought to be okay.”

  “Other than your neighbor, we’re the only ones left on this whole street,” Kim said. “Is it like that in the other parts of the country?”

  Paul looked at her. Kim seemed pretty philosophical about the whole thing. He figured it best not to sugarcoat the truth. “A lot of people have died and if the Aztec gods decide to attack across our southern border, we’d all be in even bigger trouble.”

  Kim looked down. “So it’s just a matter of time then till we all die then.”

  “I’d like to think that there is still some hope left in the world,” Paul said. “When I was in New York for the past few months, I thought we were doomed when an American Indian god of evil tried to enter into our world, but something or someone stopped it at the last minute. I’m not sure what it was, or who it was that saved us, but it gave me some much needed optimism to keep on living. Maybe we just need to hold on a little bit longer and so we can come out of this alright.”

  “Do you think it was Jesus that saved us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If all these other gods just reappeared then why didn’t Jesus come back too?”

  “I don’t know that either
.”

  “What do we do then?”

  “Well, one thing at a time,” Paul said as he placed his now empty plate in the sink. “Let me wash these plates and then I’m heading over to the food bank to ask them about your parents.”

  The drive to the food bank took less than fifteen minutes. Paul had suggested that they both wait for him in the house so it would be safer, but Kim insisted they tag along and so all three of them stood outside of the old Harvard Medical School’s main building. The structure always reminded Paul of the Capitol Building due to its Greco-Roman design, although the medical school’s columns and facade was that of a deep grey color rather than the white-painted front used by congress in Washington DC. As the three of them came out of the car and walked around the compound, they noticed that it was mostly deserted. A number of wrecked and abandoned cars were nearby while a small group of people were near the entrance. The trees that once adorned the sides of the building were now gone and heaps of garbage were all over the area.

  As they walked into the shattered lobby there were long folding tables spread out with piled boxes of foodstuff. A few civilian volunteers were distributing the boxes while being watched by a small group of National Guardsmen. Paul was surprised there weren’t more people around.

  Paul walked up to a black middle-aged woman in a fake fur coat who was writing on a clipboard. “Excuse me, are you the one in charge here?” he asked.

  She barely glanced at him while continuing her scribbling. “If you want a box of food, you’re gonna need to register first. Fill out that form by the table at the right and I’m gonna need to see some ID.”

  “Sorry, but I’m not here for a handout. I’m looking for two people who are missing and I wanted to ask you if you’ve seen them at all, we believe they might have come here about six days ago looking for food,” Paul said as he took out a picture of Kim’s parents and showed it to the woman. He had made a brief stop to the kid’s house to get the photograph.