The doctor looked at Sgt. Stipling, then handed over his side-arm to the more experienced man before gathering those who would join him in medical. The group was gone minutes later. Rowe called the IT tech over, briefly explained their objective and handed over the XO’s pistol belt.
The tech looked at it as if it were an alien artifact. “General, I haven’t even touched one of these since basic training.”
“Son, when the time comes, I suggest you remember how to use it real fast.” Rowe checked his own weapon, and the two men headed out into the labyrinth of Feather Mountain.
-39-
DARK HORSE
McKean County, Pennsylvania – October 29
“What was that all about?” Devon asked from the passenger seat. Marcus was driving now, no longer displaying symptoms and, although still weakened, appeared to be getting better with each passing mile.
The agent took a drink of bottled water. “I guess the dying virus made one last grab for me.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was part of the remission. A doctor could tell us, but I’m feeling better.”
The fifteen-year-old wanted to say how happy that made him, but was afraid it wouldn’t be manly. Instead he just smiled.
Handelman’s Sig was back in its shoulder holster. When Devon had returned it, the agent immediately smelled that it had been recently fired. “While I was out, was everything okay?”
Devon answered “yes” too quickly.
“It’s pretty cool that you were driving while I slept. Anything you want to talk about?”
“No.”
Marcus nodded and left it alone. The haunted expression on the boy’s face told him the essentials of what he needed to know, and the part of him that cared deeply for the young man wanted to fix it, to make that expression go away. The deeper, male part of him pointed out that the world was now a far more dangerous place than it had been, and fair or not, Devon Fox was going to have to grow up fast.
“Well, whatever happened,” Marcus said, “you look like shit and you need a shave.”
The fifteen-year-old ran a hand across his face and flushed with pleasure.
Using the map, Devon guided them to 219, the road that crossed into Pennsylvania and would lead them to where they were going. The land here was increasingly hilly and forested, terrain that was quickly rising to form the Alleghenies. They passed farms, tiny communities and the occasional car accident, saw the remains of houses where fire had gone unchecked and reduced them to charred skeletons, but no people.
The infected were out in force though, skulking alongside buildings, rushing toward the road at the approach of the maintenance truck, even loping after it down the center yellow line once it passed. Men and women, children and the elderly, most of them wounded (some badly mangled and torn open) hunting across the landscape and seemingly ignorant of the damage to their bodies. Not all were silver-eyed, but most had that alien, chrome gleam.
The closer they got to Custer City, the more infected they saw in military uniforms.
“Why?” Devon asked as they passed a pair of bloodied soldiers scrambling up out of a drainage ditch and onto the shoulder, grabbing at the truck with fingertips as it shot past.
“There’s a base outside Custer,” Handelman answered. “A place with an airstrip. My understanding is that it’s a depot of some kind, a place where combat and transport vehicles are stored. In the event the equipment is needed, it’s flown out to its destination on big, C-5 Galaxies and the troops meet it wherever that might be.”
He swerved around an infected boy running into the road. Not because he didn’t want to hurt it or that it was a child, but because he couldn’t risk damaging the truck unnecessarily.
“We’re not going to that base,” Marcus said. “But Feather Mountain is close, and it has its own airfield. That’s how your dad will fly in.”
The look on Devon’s face said he wasn’t at all sure that was true.
“Part of the Bank Vault plan is for mechanized infantry to fly into Custer, get their equipment and mobilize to provide added security for Feather Mountain.” Marcus gestured out the windows. “These soldiers are probably part of that. I’m sorry I don’t have much more information.”
It was a factual statement. As a senior member of a First Family protective detail, his head was filled with plans for almost every conceivable contingency, including a hostile alien landing. That one was something the agents chuckled about in private, but there was a plan, although it wasn’t significantly different from the contingency for invasion of the continental United States by a foreign military power. It was all a lot to know, but no one could know every aspect of every plan. In many cases the broad strokes had to be enough.
Regardless of the plan or the improbability of the circumstances that would set it in motion, the mission was the same; protect the principles at all costs.
“It would be better if they weren’t part of it.” Devon said as Marcus maneuvered around a troop truck abandoned in the center of the road. “It just brought more of them here.”
Marcus agreed. The mobilization intended to provide security had only multiplied the threat level.
Custer City was a backwater burg, Marcus noted, small and struggling to keep its head above the poverty line and not doing a very good job of it. The agent suspected that if not for the jobs the Custer Military Depot provided, as well as the relatively local Walmart (they’d passed signs advertising it) the town would dry up and blow away.
The Secret Service agent slowed and wove around a few armored vehicles in the road, unmanned and unintentional steel roadblocks. The last was an armored personnel carrier with a New York State Police Charger crunched into its tail end, doors hanging open and airbags deployed. There was no one inside. Just down the road from the wreck, the map directed them to an unnamed, two-lane blacktop that split off and disappeared up a slope and into the forest on the right. A large, white sign with black printing stood prominently beside the road.
MILITARY RESERVATION
UNITED STATES ARMY
U.S. Government Property
Trespassers subject to arrest
And then beneath this in bold, red letters,
USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED
They hadn’t gone more than a quarter mile up this final stretch of road before Marcus hit the brakes and Devon braced himself against the dashboard. The road was packed with bloody soldiers all heading in the same direction, and more swarming through the trees on the right and left.
The infected were moving up the mountain.
-40-
DANCER and DESIGN
Custer City, Pennsylvania – October 29
It was a relatively short drive down US 219 from New York into Pennsylvania, and the view from the trooper car made what had already been rural, lonely country even more desolate. No one had responded to the car accidents and fires, no government agency had shown up to provide shelter and necessities, and no one had been there to protect travelers walking south from the predations of the infected. Dropped belongings, tattered clothing and wet patches on the pavement were all that was left of refugees who had headed this way on foot.
In the passenger seat, Patricia Fox covered her mouth and shook her head. All these poor people, all the shattered lives…how could the country ever recover from a nightmare of this magnitude?
Kylie was in a hurry, knowing the turn was coming up fast, and her eyes were on the GPS display. Not long, only a look, but enough so that she didn’t see the soldier running toward the grille, missing an arm and glaring with eyes like mercury. Kylie caught movement, her head snapped up and the infected soldier threw himself into the air at the oncoming police car. Both women screamed and Kylie stomped the brakes as the body hit and caved in the windshield’s safety glass.
Out of control, the trooper car slammed nose-first into the tail end of an abandoned armored personnel carrier. The infected soldier was hurled back out of the windshield and hit the armor, the blow crushing his head like a r
otten melon.
This time the airbags did deploy. The impact to Kylie’s already-broken nose made starbursts explode before her eyes and covered her face with fresh blood, and the aviator sunglasses she was wearing shattered and cut her around both eyes, coming just short of blinding her. Then blackness.
The erupting airbag shoved the bones in Patricia’s broken arm violently together, cracking the tibia in a new place. She would have screamed if the air in her lungs hadn’t been brutally shoved out of her.
A ticking engine. The hiss of escaping steam and no movement inside the wrecked charger. The scrape of boots approached from outside.
The First Lady gasped like a goldfish taken out of its bowl, trying to push against the airbag, her eyes squeezed tightly against the brilliant pain in her arm. Her head felt like it was filled with a throbbing mass of warm, wet towels, and when the pounding started at the side window, the sound seemed very far away.
This is how we end, she thought, then realized she hadn’t been driving. “Kylie?” The front doors on both sides opened at the same time, and Patricia tensed as hands gripped her. Teeth would come next.
“Be careful, she’s hurt!” a woman said.
“I will,” a man responded, hooking his arms around Patricia’s waist and pulling her from the wreck as gently as he could.
“I think she’s dead,” someone said. “What about the other one?”
A voice called back from the opposite side of the car. “Can’t tell.”
“This one’s not dead,” said the man holding Patricia, helping her to stand.
FLOTUS cradled her broken arm with the one that still worked, leaning on her rescuer so she wouldn’t fall over, and looked around. There were four adults and a couple of teenagers, and it seemed that everyone was armed with a pistol, shotgun or rifle of some sort. The man keeping her from falling was big with a flowered shirt and a full, red beard. He had an assault rifle slung over one shoulder.
“Can you stand?” the bearded man asked, not letting go.
Patricia nodded and tried, still hanging on and trying to catch her breath. “My daughter…?
“Here she comes,” he said. A man in his fifties and a younger woman had Kylie supported between them, and were helping her around the trunk of the totaled squad car. The blood from her broken nose made her injuries look worse, but her eyes were open.
Mother embraced daughter. “Oh, God, honey you’re alive!”
Kylie let out a strained laugh. “I’m a mess.”
Patricia held her daughter as tightly as she was able.
“We need to get moving,” one of the women said, looking nervously in every direction, then led the group toward a pair of vehicles parked on the shoulder up the road near a turn-off; a florist’s van and a short, yellow school bus. More people were gathered there, a few looking toward the wreck but most of them watching outward.
The woman leading them suddenly stopped and stared at Patricia. “My God, you’re the First Lady.”
Patricia smiled and nodded. “Thank you for pulling us out. This is my daughter Kylie.”
The woman shook her head in wonder. “Where’s your protection? Shouldn’t you already be someplace safe?”
“That’s where we’re going.” Patricia pointed to the turn-off where the two vehicles were parked. “Right up there.”
“I knew it!” said the bearded man. “Our map said there was a military base up there, and we thought going there made sense. What could be safer? But there’s a big sign warning people away. We didn’t want to get shot.”
“It has to be safer than out here,” the First Lady said. “I think we’ll be okay. I’m supposed to be there, and you’ll come with us.” Her rescuers nodded. She didn’t know them, where they were from or even if they represented intact or only partial families. But they were among the living and willing to help others. As far as Patricia was concerned, they were heroes.
A shout came from the vehicles. “They’re coming!”
“Droolers,” said the bearded man, unslinging his assault rifle. When he saw the question on the First Lady’s face he said, “The infected, the ones who turned into animals. It’s what they do.”
Kylie stopped. “Wait, I have to go back. The shotgun is still in the car, and the pistols too.”
“No time,” the bearded man said, moving up to the lead and putting the butt of the assault rifle to his shoulder. They all hurried to follow.
Everyone climbed into either the van or the school bus, Kylie and her mother into the latter, and they stayed close together as they found a seat near the front. Both women noticed that the bus was packed with children, making up at least half the refugee group. The kids stared at them.
The woman who had recognized Patricia handed Kylie a package of moist baby wipes. “These are for your face,” she said, and Kylie accepted them gratefully. “Take this too,” the woman said. “It has a full load.” She pressed a snub-nosed, .38 caliber revolver with worn checkered grips into Kylie’s hands. “It was my dad’s,” she said, then found her own seat. The vehicles started rolling, the bus in the lead, and turned up the steep forest road to Feather Mountain.
Out the side windows, Patricia saw soldiers – hundreds of them! – running toward the two vehicles from every direction. Even as the bus and van pulled away from them, the infected pursued, flowing onto the mountain road behind them.
The main entrance to the grounds of Feather Mountain was simple; a fence-line, a rolling gate and a guardhouse on the other side. Simple only at first glance, though. The guardhouse was a squat structure of reinforced concrete and blue, outward-tipping ballistic glass. The fence, taut and made of heavy gauge steel, rose ten feet to a tight coil of razor wire, the kind used on prison perimeters. It was set in a four-foot-high concrete slab at its base, giving it a total, impressive height of fourteen feet. The wide, movable gate was made of the same steel and hung in a reinforced frame, with a concrete pad beneath it that vehicles would have to cross in order to enter. Most forbidding was the row of retractable bollards; fat, solid steel posts painted bright yellow that protruded up out of the pad, each four feet high. They could hydraulically sink into the concrete in order to allow access, and completely deny it when extended, as they were now. Both Fox women recognized it as the same type of defense that protected the White House. Nothing was going to crash through either the gate or the line of fence.
The bearded man stood before the gate with his hands on his hips, the bus and florist’s van stopped behind him. He looked at the massive fence disappearing out into the pines on both sides and whistled. “Man…Jurassic Park.”
The smoked glass domes of a CCTV system looked down at the gathering of refugees from atop the fence and the corners of the guardhouse, but it appeared no one was home because no amount of waving or yelling at the cameras had gotten anyone’s attention.
“Now what?” Kylie said, watching the shadows deepen within the pine forest as afternoon drew swiftly on. The woods looked hostile, a dark place to shelter monsters.
“No way we can ram it,” the bearded man said, slapping the top of a steel bollard. “And the controls for these and the gate will be in there.” He pointed at the guardhouse on the other side of the fence.
“Someone could climb it?” Kylie suggested, then was sorry she had. It would be dangerous, and between her wounds and the way her head was making her feel she knew it couldn’t be her. It was selfish to volunteer anyone else.
The bearded man gave a humorless laugh and patted his stomach. “I sure can’t do it.” A look around the group and at the shaking heads revealed that no one else thought they could either, or at least didn’t want to try it.
“We’re going to be stuck out here when the sun goes down,” said the woman who had recognized the First Lady. “And you all saw them. They were following us. It won’t take them long to get here.”
Hearing the quaver of oncoming panic in the woman’s voice, one of the other adults quickly gathered the few children stand
ing around and shepherded them back onto the bus.
The bearded man looked at the woods, then back at the gate and scratched his hairy face. “This sucks,” he muttered.
It had been bloody, gruesome work, but there’d been no choice. Now the front end of the Harrison School maintenance truck looked like something from a horror movie. Gore covered the hood and windshield; chunks of flesh, tatters of uniform and even an entire, severed hand that had become wedged beneath a wiper blade. The windshield was covered in webs of cracks and the safety glass sagged inward in places. Headlights were broken, the grille was folded in and the metal of the hood was wrinkled and popped ajar. Radiator steam hissed from beneath it and the engine was making a loud knocking that made the truck rock in time with the noise.
The infected had been in the way. Marcus Handelman was forced to use the truck as a battering ram. They’d gotten through – the mob was only thick on the road for the first quarter mile or so – but their transportation had paid the price. The Secret Service agent hoped they would make it to the base, but if so it would be a one-way trip. The truck was finished.
Devon watched the woods out the passenger window, looking for figures running between the trees. He didn’t see any. “At least you killed a bunch,” Devon offered, trying to sound casual but knowing that their time on wheels was about to come to an end. And once that happened it was over for them too. They wouldn’t survive out there on foot.
“Not as many as I would have liked,” Marcus said through clenched teeth. He was gripping the wheel too tightly. “We would have needed a steam roller to get them all.”
“Yeah,” said Devon, “and they would’ve had to line up in a nice, neat row and waited for you to run them over,” then thought, even that wouldn’t have gotten the ones moving through the trees. Although the moment was behind them now, Devon was sure he could still hear the horrid thuds the bodies of the soldiers made when the truck slammed into them, and the crunch they made beneath the tires. He’d looked back once to see blood and flesh kicking up in an arc behind the truck the way mud or rain might spray out behind tires. He hadn’t looked back since.
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