Resurrection Express

by Stephen Romano

  “No.”

  The colonel waves a hand at Morales, who steps forward:

  “The W79 tactical warhead is a state-of-the-art neutron flux bomb. It creates a high yield radiation emission in the upper atmosphere of a target area which then spreads out like a cancer on the ground.”

  “Destroys people and leaves structures intact,” I say.

  “Mostly,” Morales says. “You can level half a city with a W79 variant if it’s delivered in the right way. The flux wave acts like an EMP—it’s capable of knocking out power sources for miles. The radiation kills every living thing—it can go through lead shielding six feet thick. But the kicker is that the fallout doesn’t last as long. Days instead of years.”

  I rub my eyes and shake my head. “Neutron bombs were discontinued in the eighties.”

  “You only know that because you heard it on the news,” the colonel says. “These bombs are clean, and clean bombs are silent bombs. Silent, as in you never hear about them. They’ve been in the silos for years.”

  Morales pipes up again. “In 2004, the president announced he was discontinuing the initiative, but it was just spin control. What they were really doing was replacing the existing warheads with fresh stock.”

  I heave a disgusted sigh into the floor, shaking my head. I’ve always lived with the opinion that Old Georgie-boy screwed up more history than any free world leader on the books.

  And now his legacy is complete.

  “The tritium in your average old-school neutron bomb has a half-life of just ten years,” Morales says. “When they re-upped, the engineers didn’t leave anything to chance. These new babies are solid state. The most dangerous weaponry on the planet.”

  The colonel turns to me. “The grid that controls the initiative is a secondary protocol that floats just under the main set of numbers in Region Eleven. Designed to take out the enemy in the event of an anticipated first strike from the other side.”

  “And nobody in the real world knows the difference,” I say.

  “Correct,” the colonel says. “The W79 Initiative is actually a Special Ops contingency against nuclear apocalypse.”

  Morales almost laughs. “You cut off the balls of the guy aiming his nukes at you before they have any idea you’ve hit them.”

  “And those Resurrection guys got control of it,” I say.

  The colonel nods.

  “They developed the prototype system to trick the computers at Cheyenne Mountain right under our noses,” Morales says. “And we had no idea they’d done it. But about two months ago . . . David Hartman blew the whistle.”

  Just like I figured.

  Hartman knew Texas Data Concepts had been conned into developing the program that would kill us all, and so he used his leverage with the company to seal the thing in a vault so dangerous that it would blow everything back to hell if anyone messed with it. Then he probably used what he had against Jenison and her people. To get whatever he wanted from them, which could have been anything. Girls, power. Or maybe—

  “Hartman was no hero,” the colonel says. “He was helping to fund those maniacs for years. But I don’t think the old boy figured on them actually using the system. There’d been talk in the CIA rumor mill of something like it, a virus in the works that could remove executive decisions from strategic defense.”

  Heather tilts her head, her eyes sort of rolling. “They actually called it the detribalization of civilian government.”

  The colonel rubs his chin, grumbling. “The idea of something that final was just too crazy for most of us to believe. I didn’t believe it myself. Until Hartman started communicating with us. Started feeding us important bits of information. Enough to keep us interested, anyway.”

  “You were talking directly to him?”

  “We’d infiltrated his organization several times, using deepcover operatives, but he always managed to sniff us out. Lieutenant Stone was still in his custody when he finally started talking. We learned a lot about Resurrection. Almost everything except for the location of the main bunker. He said we had to make a deal for that.”

  “The city underground,” I whisper.

  “Correct.”

  “That’s where they plan to survive the whole thing.”

  “Correct. It’s a fortified complex a mile beneath the surface. There’s others like it all over the world. They’ve been building these shelters for years and years, but this one complex is the mother of them all. It’s armored and way off the grid. It could theoretically survive anything.”

  “Hartman was on the Express until Jenison forced him out,” I say. “My guess is that he was greasing you guys to sell off its location, not to mention the software. He would have scalped it to the highest bidder.”

  The colonel nods. “That’s about the size of it. They’ve got thousands of people down there. They’ve been disappearing them for years. Water-powered hydro-electric generators, independent agriculture, environmental control. We think they may even have some sort of advanced cryogenics system. Some way to keep a select number of live bodies fresh in stasis for decades.”

  I see my wife floating there, breathing green liquid, surrounded by her own life essence.

  Just beyond my reach now.

  The prize that drives me mad.

  The colonel senses my gears working, and he almost says something, but I stop him fast: “That’s science fiction. You can’t expect me to believe that they’ve put a whole army on ice.”

  He almost laughs.

  “I think you do believe it, son. You may be a smart one, but I ain’t no fool when it comes to liars.”

  “You think I’m lying? You think I’m one of them?”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  He sizes me up again, takes a deep breath.

  Takes one step closer.

  “Let me tell you a little bit about who you’re talking to, friend. I’m what you call a lifer. Not a veteran. Not a twenty-year man. I’ve been in it since day one. Which means I’ve seen action all over the world, from way down in the mud to back here in the war room—and everywhere you go, there’s always some guy who thinks he can get away with something. Some of them are professional liars. You buy their bullshit because it’s their job. It works on most everybody. But it never works on me. See, son, I’ve been around since God created the earth . . . and that also means I’ve got a lot of kids.”

  He gets closer to me.

  Puts his hands in the air, fingers up—all ten of them.

  “That’s how many girls I’m a father to. And they’re all grown up, every single damn one of them. Women are the best liars. They train you to spot the bullshit and terminate it with extreme prejudice. It takes years to learn how a woman thinks, and you have to start from the moment they’re born. You have to do it over and over, year after year, decade after decade . . . until finally you can smell lies like gasoline in the air.”

  He snaps one of his hands into a taloned pointer and jabs my chest.

  “That’s how I know you were lying just then. I think you know something you ain’t telling us. So if you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll come clean right now. Or it might just get a little bit unpleasant in here.”

  “I’ve heard that from a lot of people lately.”

  “It ain’t how many times you hear it in a day, son . . . it’s who says it at the end of the day. Think about it.”

  He gets even closer now. His next words burning right in my face.

  “Think about it really hard.”

  Shit.

  Are these people really on the level?

  Is this some other elaborate mind trip?

  And does it even matter?

  “I saw the bunker,” I tell him. “Part of it, anyway. Jenison recorded a message for me. The guy smashed the iPad when it was over . . . but she was standing in the sleep chamber, whatever you call it. I saw it in the video. It was all women in the tubes. And my wife was there with them.”

  “You saw the cryo-freeze
?”

  “It wasn’t like that. Something more advanced. Fluid breathing systems.”

  “Why was your wife there?”

  “Hartman must have sold her to them. Or maybe she just got too close.”

  “God knows how many they have down there. All ready to repopulate the earth after they blow it to hell.”

  A wave of unreality crashes over me. “It’s completely insane. Even with all the bombs we have, it couldn’t possibly wipe out everyone on the planet.”

  The colonel grins big, without humor. “We have enough W70 MOD3 warheads on this side of the line to level the planet several hundred times over. In a best-case scenario, we’re talking about eighty-five percent of the world’s population dead by exposure to high-level radiation emission within forty-eight hours of the first bomb burst.”

  “We’re not just aiming our missiles at Russia or the Middle East anymore,” Heather chimes in. “There’s a big ugly world out there.”

  “They’re maniacs,” I whisper. “This whole wiping-the-slate thing they have in mind . . . starting over with the chosen few or whatever . . . it would never work.”

  “Well, they sure as hell think it can,” Morales says. “The idea is that with eighty-five percent dead on arrival, the remaining fifteen percent will starve in the wreckage and destroy themselves within five years. By then, the radiation would be long gone, and you’d have acceptable damage losses in the big cities. Full-out nukes would make that theoretically impossible.”

  I picture it:

  Half-wasted buildings and abandoned superhighways, littered with bodies.

  Fields filled with human wreckage, vaporized and rotted.

  A sea of bones and concrete.

  And then they put their machine to work, claiming what’s left. Their network of shelters, all full of soldiers and scientists and young bodies on ice, ready to have babies.

  All opened wide, like the gates of Eden.

  “They lit the fuse last night,” Heather says. “We’re not sure how. They were keeping you alive in the hospital because they thought they might need you, but they ordered your death as soon as they activated the system.”

  “They must’ve recovered the missing disc from the fire. After I blew it up.”

  Or maybe Franklin survived with the package.

  After all, I never really saw him die with my own eyes—he might have had time to jump while I was rubbing it in his face on the phone.

  Maybe I didn’t kill him at all.

  “Exactly how it happened doesn’t matter now,” the colonel says. “The tactical grid that guides our W79 missiles has been completely rerouted. New coordinates. Our own soil is target zero. Then everyone else. Their people acted fast when the orders came down. It’s been a bloodbath.”

  “A real bloodbath,” Heather says, pointing at the monitors. “We’ve had to shoot it out with a few of them.”

  “Panic in the year zero,” I whisper.

  “More like a very well-planned military coup,” the colonel says. “The president hasn’t even had time to organize a press conference, but they’re going live soon with an official denial. That won’t matter, either. Fifty-three of our silos in the northwestern United States are computer controlled. Our submarines act on encrypted code numbers. They’ve already received their orders and gone into communications blackout. Which means they won’t back off unless they get the official recall sequence.”

  My next words come nearly paralyzed now:

  “They’ll see our missiles coming, won’t they? The bad guys, I mean. They’ll panic and cut loose on us with everything they’ve got.”

  Horror, is what this is.

  Sheer final horror.

  “The new W79s are stealth bombs,” the colonel says. “They might see us, they might not. But there’s no doubt that the cow patties are about to hit the fan, one way or another. Resurrection has covered all the bases. Their computer is still running the game. We have to stop these psychos and we only have three hours left to do it. It’s brushing off every attack our hackers throw at it. The people who designed the application knew exactly what they were doing, and its gonna kill us all. You have to help me.”

  Yes.

  That’s why they brought me here.

  The question Heather almost got to ask me, before they started shooting.

  The colonel almost has a trace of fear in his voice now:

  “You were the hacker who went deep into the system guarding that vault. You were the only one who made it out alive. Lieutenant Stone says you brought back the coordinates to the main bunker.”

  “Yes. I memorized them.”

  “She was able to tell us that the target is somewhere in northeast Wyoming. Says she saw it on a GPS. That’s why we’ve set up shop on this base. But we don’t have the exact location. And we don’t have time to finish combing the state. It’s almost all over.”

  “Fancy, that.”

  “No jokes, son. My men have to go in and talk directly to their machine, and the recall numbers will only work for another three hours. It’s a last-ditch fail-safe window they put in, just in case. When the window closes, the damage is permanent.”

  Christ.

  They have it all there, at ground zero.

  They built an invisible fortress, and created some sort of supercomputer to wipe out the whole world, right in the center of it. They had every smart guy they could find building it for them. Hartman had the keys to it—along with a road map guarded by the most treacherous digital security system ever built. It was his golden ticket. And I’ve been carrying the ticket in my head ever since.

  You didn’t put the map there because you were crazy, David.

  You put it there for insurance.

  It would have made you untouchable.

  You could have been the man who sold the world.

  • • •

  “So your plot is to attack the fortress with everything you’ve got? How do you plan on keeping that quiet?”

  The colonel cracks a dismissing grin when I say that.

  “We don’t. We’re not exactly worried about quiet right now . . . but if we do somehow manage to make it out of this alive, let’s just say we’ve got people standing by to deal with any media leaks.”

  “Very serious people,” Morales says.

  “Even with a press blackout, an attack this big would be on YouTube within hours,” I say.

  “Don’t make me laugh,” the colonel says. “You think some yokel with a phone camera out in the middle of nowhere is gonna compromise national security?”

  “It’s happened before,” I say.

  “And we dealt with it then, too,” Morales says.

  Yeah, I bet you did. Just like those cops who kick in the doors of suspected protestors. The secret police who keep a lid on everything. Just like the public, who always buy it anyway.

  Doesn’t matter now.

  What matters now is my wife.

  She’s down there with them.

  Jenison grabbed her and put her there.

  That’s where she is.

  “Send me in with your boys,” I tell them. “I can break their computer in half.”

  “We have our own people for that,” Heather says. “Just give us the numbers. There’s no time.”

  “No. It has to be me.”

  The colonel gets huge eyes, looking right at me. But he keeps his voice steady, scary. “Have you lost your mind, son? We’re talking about the end of the goddamn world. You helped them make it happen.”

  “And you slaughtered your way to me so I could bail you out, so you have just as much blood on your hands as I do. I go in with you . . . or no deal.”

  “This isn’t a deal. This is goddamn war. Give us the location or I’ll have my men hold you down and make you give it to us.”

  Morales passes a concerned look to Heather.

  She almost blinks.

  “That kind of persuasion doesn’t work on me,” I say, looking right at her. “You’d know th
at if you really did your homework. It’ll take a long time to break me, and you don’t have that time. None of us do.”

  “I’m not kidding. I’ll do what I have to.”

  “So will I.”

  “You ain’t going in with my boys. As far as any of us know, you could still be one of Jenison’s.”

  I look at Heather. “Do you believe that? After everything we went through—do you really believe that?”

  I almost see a trace of that frightened liar from the dollhouse appear in her steel expression. But it’s gone quickly.

  “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” she says.

  “She’s damn right about that,” the colonel huffs out. “Now . . . I’m gonna tell you one more thing about my daughters. They’re very precious to me. My family is precious to me. That’s why I’m a soldier. I’m here to protect them. And right now you’re standing in the way of that. Are you starting to get the picture?”

  “Yeah, maybe I am. But can I ask you something?”

  “No. This is not a conversation. This is you telling me what I want to know.”

  I ignore him. Straighten my spine and lean forward, the cords in my neck snapping back, the muscles in my legs tightening, the sickness in my guts and my heart a dull ache that drives me forward.

  I look right in his eyes.

  “I just want to know one thing, Colonel . . . do you or your daughters know what it’s like to eat garbage on the street?”

  “I’m not listening to—”

  “Shut up. You have to listen. You have no choice—and you know it. You wouldn’t have brought me all the way out here and put me in this room if you did have a choice. I might have died on this slab and we’d all be screwed. So listen to me.”

  His face freezes.

  Gotcha.

  We size each other up. I see him like I see a prize opponent in a fistfight. Circle him, using my mind. He knew it would be this way. He has done his homework on me.

  I see it right on his face.

  I let loose with everything I have left.

  It all comes down to this.

  “You see, Colonel . . . I’m a guy who ate garbage when he was a kid. And people like me go along with the program because we think it’s all in the name of something bigger, something better. That’s all bullshit, isn’t it? Just some lie told to us by a politician. By people like you. Soldiers who get away with wading through bodies. When it comes down to it, all this is really about . . . is dead game.”