by Jason Winn
“Huh?” I can’t say I was that shocked. The man couldn’t even put on a safety harness, but he handled a weapon well enough. A month ago, if some kid wearing a dead marine’s uniform had told me this, I would have grabbed him by the ear and drug him to the nearest MP. I would have recited every speech I‘d ever heard about how sacred the eagle, globe, and anchor were. How it was an honor to wear the uniform and serve my country; and how his violation is disgraceful. When I handed the punk over to the MP I would have asked that he be given the most severe punishment allowed for impersonating one of America’s heroes.
“Up these stairs. I just work here.” We hiked up two flights of stairs. “When everyone started dying I put on a uniform. They gave me stuff to do instead of just shuffling me off to the side like the other civilians.” Taking initiative, that’s commendable.
I stopped. “So you actually volunteered for this detail?”
“Yeah, I mean, yes sir. Please don’t tell anyone.” Gun fire roared from a hallway. People shouted. He didn’t flinch at that gunfire, he’s got some grit.
“Staff Sergeant, there may not be anyone left to tell. Is your name at least Lewis?”
“Yes.” He might be honest.
“Lead the way, Lewis. We’re checking the SOC and that’s it. If they aren’t there, we’re getting the hell out of here.” I grabbed his arm and locked my eyes onto his, “you disobey me just once, and I’ll either turn you in or put a bullet in you. You read me?”
Lewis gulped, “Yes sir.”
“You pull your weight and your secret’s safe with me.” I let him go and we kept walking.
Two more hallways and we hit a locked door. “It’s about twenty yards on the other side of this door.”
I kicked it. Nothing. “Hey, open up. This is Major Brielander!” I kept kicking. The door opened. A gun barrel poked out. “Hold your fire, soldier!” A scared kid poked his face around the corner. “Open up, I’m here for the president’s evac.”
He opened the door slowly and Lewis gasped when we saw the nightmare on the other side.
Up Next… Get to the Bunker.
PART 5
Get to the Bunker
Twitching, blood-soaked corpses lined the hallway I’d walked down earlier to tell the remaining U.S. government that the president had turned into a zombie aboard his helicopter. Two young guards leaned against the walls, their chests huffing for air. One, in an Air Force policeman uniform, ignored me and wiped sweat from his forehead with the edge of a Marine Corp flag.
Shell casings stuck to pools of coagulating red and black blood. Drywall and ceiling tiles stuck out in jagged chunks. The air was thick with dust, death, and gun smoke. A light flickered from the SOC. I didn’t hear the fans and equipment humming anymore.
“Where’s the president?” No one answered. “Where the fuck is the president? We’ve got to get out of here. We can’t hold out much longer.”
The kid who opened the door pointed to the pile of bodies. “He’s in there I think. We couldn’t…”
I walked over to the SOC doorway and looked in. The flat screens were pockmarked with bullet holes. The southern guy who wanted us to march to the sea sat in a chair, his head in one hand, a cigarette in another.
“Hey! Hey there,” I shouted.
He looked up. “Name’s Tom, Tom Beaumont.”
“Mr. Beaumont, we need to get out of here. I guess you’re the president now.” Succession is a bitch.
He nodded his head. “Yes sir, yes sir, but I’m not elected. I’m Air Force,” he whispered.
“Fine whatever. Staff Sergeant Lewis.” Why not promote the kid into the Corp? I thought. We’d all be dead soon. Let him die a Marine if he wants to be one so bad, “Distribute the weapons and ammo, make sure Mr. Beaumont here and those kids in the hall are carrying everything we’ve got.”
“Yes sir.”
The clatter of magazines and small-arms came from the hallway. Lewis walked back into the SOC and handed Tom a pistol. He took it and flicked his cigarette into the corner. Lewis reached in for spare magazines and shrieked.
“What?” I asked. “What?”
“It…it felt like a hand,” Lewis said.
“Give me that.” I grabbed the black bag and stabbed my hand inside. Lewis shined his flashlight on me. I pulled out a hand with a Texas A&M ring turned inward. The gold glinted in the Mag-Lite’s beam. “This is the president’s hand.”
Tom perked up. “What was that?”
“This is the hand they had to cut off him. It must have landed in here before they kicked him out of the helicopter. We should…”
Tom grabbed the hand. “Oh my. Oh my. This could be it. The last option to launch the nukes is biometrically locked. Only the president’s fingerprints, combined with keys, can unleash the nukes. If we can get this hand to the reader, we might be able to launch and turn the tide on this thing!”
We walked back into the hallway. “Where are the launch consoles?” I asked.
“They’re in the basement,” Tom said.
“In the bunker?” Lewis asked.
“Correct,” Tom said.
“Can you get us inside it?” I asked them.
“I can,” Tom said.
The tremors rolled through the building. I looked over at the two kids in the hallway. “What are your names?”
“Holtz.”
“Conner.”
“You two are with me now. You will stay with us and protect Tom here,” I said.
“Yes sir,” they said in unison.
I stepped close to Lewis and whispered into his ear. “Things are about to get dicey. Watch where the hell you shoot.” I squeezed his arm tight enough to let him know I was serious. He just stared back with wide eyes. That was good enough. “All right Lewis, get us to this bunker.”
“It’s this way.” Lewis swung his head back toward the staircase we came up on.
All the halls look the same when there’s no light. Your flashlight just points straight ahead. Paintings of dead soldiers in colorful uniforms are a blur. Closed doors fly by. I looked past banker’s boxes of files, stacked like sandbags in front of vacant corridors.
We rounded a corner on the first floor and met the thunder of gunfire. People shout all the time in firefights. Outside you can sometimes hear them. Indoors, forget it. The popping of weapons fills every crevice of your ears. The ringing is terrible. I fell to the ground. The radio on my belt jabbed into my hip. I yanked Lewis to the ground. He fell hard on his ass. Looking back, I could see Holtz pushing Tom back down the hall we came from. He took up a post at the corner, aiming his rifle toward the gunfire.
Looking up, I saw two gray and black uniforms of the Pentagon police. Their wide backs faced us. Several metal desks jammed the hallway in front of them. They were shooting at something down the hall. They stopped shooting.
“Was that one?” One said.
“Aw, shit, man, I don’t know,” the other said.
“Officers!” I shouted.
One turned back and aimed his gun at me.
“Whoa, whoa, easy, easy.” I showed him my hands.
He tugged on his partner’s shirt. “Sheldon, hey man, look, look, man.”
The other turned around, saw me and fired his pistol into the ceiling. The first guy grabbed Sheldon’s pistol.
“Sheldon, be cool. He looks okay,” the first one said, pointing at me.
“You two okay?” I shouted.
“Aw, shit, I don’t know.” His baritone voice filled the hall. “Those things are all over. Chief said they broke inside a few minutes ago.”
“Yeah, we saw a bunch already.” I stood up, confident they weren’t going to shoot us.
“We’re headed down to the bunker. Can you lend a hand?” I asked. We could use all the help we could get.
“We’re supposed to stay here,” Sheldon said.
His sentence was punctuated with a group of disheveled, bloody people turning the corner, growling and jogging toward their de
sk ramparts.
I charged forward. “Get down!”
The men turned around. I threw a shoulder into the defenseless Sheldon, to get a clear shot. I dropped the flashlight and squeezed the trigger. The MP-5 sent three-round bursts into the group. Shadows of dancing limbs crawled across the walls. Bodies stammered and dropped between muzzle flashes. Thirty rounds go quick when you’re being charged. I pulled twice on the trigger, nothing.
To my left the nameless officer cursed and fired pistols from two hands. He transformed from a bored night watchman to a gunslinger in a fight to the death. Something pulled at my hip. I reloaded and kept firing.
The hall blurred with people. Sheldon started shooting on my right. Muzzle flashes lit up the narrow space, revealing a grizzly show of living corpses trying to step over a pile of bodies. Clouds of blood hung in the air, spilling from open head wounds. Wide eyes reflected light like a wild animal in the night. Lips curled back, framing teeth ready to cut flesh.
They kept dropping, some backward, some forward. I saw fire right next to my eye. The floor shook from the discharge of weapons. Pops became muffled thuds, finally transforming into dull throbs. Smell and sight took over for my blunted hearing. Gun smoke choked the humid air. Someone coughed.
At the end of my second clip, the wave stopped. Sheldon rummaged his hands across my belt, looking for another magazine. I pushed his hand away and pointed down the hall.
“I think we’re okay!” I shouted. I felt more gunfire vibrations through the floor. These were further away, somewhere else. I reloaded. I patted the other officer, to my left on the shoulder. He felt like a wet bronze statue. “We’re still alive.” He looked over and nodded.
I looked back to see Holtz behind the cover of the corner, pointing his rifle down range. He raised a thumb. I replied in kind.
“Everybody good?” I shouted.
All around, heads nodded and voices answered, “Yeah, yeah.”
“You two still want to stay here?”
“Hail no!” Sheldon said.
“Come on then,” I said. “Lewis, let’s go!” We moved out, jogging down the halls. The run-in with infected motivated everyone to get this done. Down a flight of stairs, we were met with a secure door.
“I got this,” Sheldon said. He produced a plastic card and held it to a reader. The door beeped and disengaged the locks. In a secure building, the card readers and locks run on batteries for a few days in case the power goes out.
At the other side of a space crammed with support columns, thick pipes, and a few puddles, we came across a pair of reinforced steal and concrete doors, the bunker. Built as the Pentagon’s last hold-out in case the Russians decided to level D.C., it could sustain life for months in the event of a nuclear or biological attack. If we were lucky we’d be in and out in five minutes. I had no intention of living with the dead walking over my ceiling until we all starved to death.
“We gonna hole up in here, sir?” Sheldon asked.
Tom punched in a code and held up his plastic card to a small panel. The heavy, rocket-proof doors clicked a few times and he pulled with all his strength to open them. Holtz and Conner jointed him and the doors swung open.
“No sir,” I replied. “We’re going to launch the nukes and kill as many of these things as we can.”
“Oh, okay…wait, what?” Sheldon gasped. He looked like a deer about to be hit by a car.
There wasn’t any time to comfort him, tell him this was all for the best, incinerating millions of people. “Tom, you said that we still have contact with some carriers?”
“Correct.” Scratching his scraggly beard, Tom flipped a switch and lights flickered on. The small room housed desks, elaborate consoles with rows of buttons, and slots for missile keys. A glass plate sat under a small plastic box in the center of a row of computers. A simple sign marked “Executive Authorization” was posted on the top of the protective box.
“Where are the carriers?” I asked Tom. Tom counted keys on the rings in a staccato whisper.
“Hey sir, hey, hold on a second,” Sheldon begged. “We can’t do that. I got a family out there. Shawn has family out there.” He pointed to the other officer.
I put my hand on Sheldon’s shoulder. “This is going to happen—” I looked at his nametag “—Officer Morton. You can either stay here and get infected, wandering the halls of your new home, shitting you pants and moaning, or you can get with the program and stand a post outside while we nuke the eastern seaboard. Your call.”
“Where you want me to stand?” Shawn asked.
“For real, man?” Sheldon looked at his partner, mouth open.
“Fuck yeah. Those things brought he bitch out in me. I hate being scared. Dude here wants to kill ’em all. Go ahead.” He turned to me. “You want me over by the big doors?” He pointed with a pistol.
“That would be great,” I said. He gave a Sheldon a “don’t be a dumbass” look and joined Conner and Holtz by the door.
“The Truman,” Tom said as he opened a small locker and pulled out more rings of small keys, “and the Reagan are holding at sea, probably one or two hundred miles out of Norfolk. The Stennis is somewhere in the Pacific.”
“So, the Stennis is out.”
“Out for what?”
“My aircraft’s range. If it’s still intact, it can get us anywhere within six hundred miles. We’ll start the launch sequence and try to raise them in the air.”
“What happens if that doesn’t work?” Lewis asked.
“Improvise, adapt, and…?”
“Overcome, sir. You want me out there?”
“No, stick around. Tom is going to need a hand.” The words hung for a minute and we grinned at each other. Yeah, that was a little funny. “See if there are any more weapons down here, but stay close.”
“Yes sir.”
I didn’t ask how Tom knew how to do all of this stuff. The Air Force is the branch that controls the nukes. He said upstairs that he was Air Force, so hopefully he knew what the hell he was doing.
“Okay, we’re just about ready.” Tom inserted and turned keys into the rows of slots.
“How does this go down?”
“In a minute, I’ll need the former president’s hand. First I have to enter in the target packages.” He typed away at a keyboard. “Once they are coded in, we’ll authorize the target packages. The plate there just needs to be able to read two or more finger prints to verify executive launch approval. From there we push the go button.” He pointed again.
“Once the system processes everything, it is all automated. The birds are sent the initialization sequences, and in about ninety minutes they’re in the air. After that…maybe two minutes before impact.” He turned his head and squinted.
Christ, he sounded nonchalant about ending the world. That’s what the military can do to a man. You’re faced with a horrible task and you do it, because you’re either ordered to or you have no other choice. I doubt a civilian could understand this sort of thing. Sheldon didn’t, but I had a feeling he’d come around.
“Um, sir?’ Lewis piped up. “What about nuclear winter? We set off all these nukes we’re going to have problems.”
“Staff Sergeant, we already have problems.” Tom said without looking up. “This action gives us the possibility of returning to the country at some point.” Lewis decided not to argue with a man three times his age and started wandering around.
Tom’s console beeped as he punched in the coordinates. He didn’t sit. He bent over with a pen in his mouth. The bunker had a comforting strength to it. I couldn’t hear or feel gunfire anymore. People had to be dying up there, screaming for their lives, a couple ten thousand people with no where to run, hundreds of armed, leaderless soldiers.
“Jackpot!” Lewis said as he found another weapons cabinet. I could hear him loading up. We’d need a fucking arsenal to get back to the courtyard.
“Shawn, Holtz, Conner, get over by Lewis and load up. We’re outta here in…” I looked at
Tom.
“Five minutes,” he said.
“We want to include Washington?” Tom looked at me. I wished he was talking about the state, but he meant D.C. Did I want to tell him to incinerate the capital? In the blink of an eye I was handed the most incomprehensible decision of my life. There were still civilians on the ground. I had seen them. No one was going to come and save them, though.
“May as well,” I said quietly. I looked at the floor and felt cold sweat soak my t-shirt.
“Okay. Almost ready.” Tom said.
“Lewis! Get over here with that hand.” I shouted.
Tom lifted the protective box. The green glass plate started to glow. Tom nodded to Lewis, who pulled the stiff hand out of his ammo bag.
“Oh, damn!” Sheldon shouted. “Oh shit, whose hand is that?” He looked sick, like a kid being forced to eat cold oatmeal.
All eyes fixed on the hand as Lewis placed it, palm down on the glass plate. The light behind the plate blinked a few times. Nothing happened. Tom shook his head. “Take that ring off and try again. You might not be getting a good contact.”
Lewis lifted up the hand and I slowly twisted the ring off. Lewis’s grip squeezed a thread of black syrup out of the bottom of the wrist. It splattered onto the waxed floor. Sheldon, unable to look away up to this point, gripped his stomach and mouth. He turned and puked into a corner. I slid the ring onto my right hand.
“Try again,” Tom said.
Lewis gently placed the hand on the glass plate. It blinked again. We waited for what felt like an hour and then…
“Authorization accepted,” a computer voice said.
Tom looked up with the face of a doctor who just told a patient they had terminal cancer. “That’s it. We need to be at least fifty miles from here in ninety minutes.”
“Coming, Sheldon?” I asked.
“Yeah, fuck it.” He coughed and wiped his mouth. Lewis handed him an M4, which he slung over his shoulder.
We headed out.
Up Next…Get to the Helo!
PART 6
Get to the Helo