by Dave Lund
Jones turned the truck north on 3E, speeding back up once he was pointed in the right direction.
“Jones, once Kirk gives the word that the PLA made the turn, I want you to floor it.”
“The lead vehicle just made the turn, Chief.”
Jones didn’t wait for any other instruction; his right foot slapped the accelerator pedal to the floor, and the big turbo diesel roared. They were quickly nearing the railroad tracks and then the bridge for the hasty ambush. With nothing but radio silence, Aymond was internally wishing for the radio call to come across the speaker.
“We’re set, Chief!”
Cold, with no emotion in his voice, Aymond replied, “Roger. Keep your speed, Jones. Once we clear the overpass, try to make a turn off and get us up on the highway.”
Jones nodded.
The bridges flew overhead, a gray concrete blur as Jones stood on the brakes, frowning at the abuse his truck was taking. They would need to get comfortable and give him at least three days to work over the M-ATV in a location that had the tools and parts he needed or the truck would end up as a combat loss. They already had too many asses in the truck for seats; the remaining three Marines would make one truck nearly impossible to travel with as a team.
Skipping the desert to avoid having to drive through some fences, Jones made the turn off onto the north frontage by bounding through the ditch and back onto the pavement. Reaching the Interstate, Jones bounced the truck through the center median as he raced to the other truck, Kirk already bringing the mounted M2 into the fray.
Five APCs lay in ruin, charred corpses falling out of the trucks that were burning. The second truck’s 50-caliber M2 caught the pursuing PLA by surprise and at close range. The heavy rounds punched through the armored personnel carrier’s light armor like cardboard.
Aymond keyed the mic. “OK, back to the FOB. We get the other truck, get our gear, and we get our asses out of Yuma. If the PLA have radio contact, then it might be raining APCs in a short time.”
SSC, Ennis, TX
Steam filled the cavernous shower room. Like a high school locker room, stainless-steel shower heads protruded from the tiled walls and columns.
More like a damn prison.
Hot water poured off Amanda’s nude form. Her hands against the tile wall, her head and neck under the shower spray, Amanda felt her tight muscles begin to release from the morning’s PT session. She examined what she could see. With her legs lean and muscular and her stomach flat, this was the best shape she had ever been in and the hardest exercise program that she had ever attempted. Apparently, after the world ends and you’re trapped in an underground prison sheltering you from the storm that rages on the surface, there’s time to exercise.
Clint often joined her in the shower. Today he didn’t, and she was thankful he didn’t. Amanda knew she was leaving tomorrow, and she wasn’t sure if she was capable of keeping up the ruse much longer. Especially if her boyfriend...ex-boyfriend...was trying to get laid.
Using the checklist in her mind, she clicked off all the items that she had loaded into her MRAP. There wasn’t much, just the essentials of some food, water, fuel, and as much ammo as she could scavenge without being noticed.
The little notebook in the pocket of her battle rattle held the long key code to open the main door on the surface, the secret rising platform built into a forgotten shed in a small park on a small lake in the middle of Texas. If she found any other survivors, she could write down the number and give it to them with directions to the facility. Clint be damned, she was going to save her country at all costs.
With a flick of her wrist, the shower went from steaming hot to ice cold, sending a momentary shiver through her body at the sudden change, Amanda took a deep breath and felt awake, more alive than she had in weeks. Everything felt more real now that she had an actual plan and she was going to be able to actually help people. Turning the water off, Amanda pulled the crappy military-issue towel from the hook on the wall, brushed away most of the water, and wrapped her hair into the towel before picking up her rifle, which hung by the sling from another hook on the wall. As she walked past the sinks and mirrors, she stopped to admire her fit athletic body. The scars of child bearing shone red against her pale skin. Her heart sank momentarily while thinking about her children. Frowning, Amanda walked into the bunk area adjoining the showers and to her footlocker. Digging through the contents, she came up with a pair of scissors that she had pulled from the supply cache after first arriving.
Standing in front of the mirrors over the sinks once again, Amanda removed her towel and began cutting at her long hair.
Lost Bridge Village, AR
Warren walked near Andrew. Oreo kept watch up ahead with Mary as they walked down the hill alongside the tiny airstrip. Mary was nearly twenty yards in front of them. Oreo’s ears were perked up and on watch duty, his tail wagging slightly; he would nudge Mary every so often to have his head scratched. In her hands, she held the pink rifle from the day before. Warren had his rifle slung over his shoulder nonchalantly as if this was all perfectly normal for life in the United States.
Well, it is normal now.
“Our little community here kept together before the end, but looking back I should have pushed to organize everyone better. We lost a lot of people to the dead at first. Welp, we’re nearly there, just a bit further now.”
They passed by a fenced-off pool and building.
“What’s that, Warren?”
“That was the civic center. Now we use it mostly for our weekly meetings. Outside of that, the pool is practically worthless, so much chlorine in it that it would pro’bly damn near kill a man if he tried to live by drinking much of it.”
“Couldn’t you distill it?”
“Sure’n we could, but don’t need to really. A few of us have wells dug, and the rest can take water from the lake. We made filter buckets out of rocks and sand to pour water through, and then we boil the water to kill off anything we can’t see. Works all right.”
“Seems like you and the others were well prepped when the end came.”
“Welp, we was thinking we was, but sure enough, we have so much that would make life better if we had it.”
Mary stopped at a driveway, the home’s backyard ending at the shoreline. A lone metal tower behind the house stood out of the tops of the trees against the blue sky. She waited with Oreo for Warren and Andrew to walk up as well.
“OK, little one, go’n ahead and knock.”
Mary walked up the drive and knocked smartly on the front door. A few moments later, a balding middle-aged man who looked like he’d lost a significant amount of weight recently opened the door. He smiled at Mary, looked puzzled by Oreo, and was shocked when he saw Andrew standing with Warren.
“Morn’n, Warren, Mary. Who’s the stranger?”
“He flew in yesterday. His name is Andrew.”
“Flew? How’d you fly in here, flap your arms real hard?”
“He’s got an areoplane up on the strip, out of gas and needs unleaded, but he’s met other survivors...he also has something for you to look at.”
“Like what?”
“Plans for a homemade radio, picked it up on the shortwave, them peoples over in Nevada broadcast it along with instructions on Morse code.”
“CW, yes, sir, I know it already. Y’all come inside and let me see the plans you wrote down. We’ll see what it is, and then we’ll try to find some gasoline for your plane. It’s just that what we’ve got left, we’re trying to keep for the boats so we can fish and eat.”
Andrew nodded. “I can respect that. Just remember that fuel goes bad, and fuel with ethanol in it goes bad even faster.”
“Yup, we know,” Will said with a hard glance at Warren, who acted like he didn’t hear the discussion.
As they walked into the house, candlelight flickered in the living ro
om. Dark curtains hung over the windows in Will’s house just like they did at Warren’s house.
“What kind of radio you have in your plane? Does it still work?”
“I have nothing. It didn’t work, so I took it out to save weight.”
“Huh. Well most of my shit got fried by the EMP...sorry, Mary. My radios were fried by the EMP. All I have left are a couple of cheap Chinese dual-band handhelds, for all the good they’ll do you with only four watts of power and no way to charge them. Besides, who you going to talk to on two meter? All the repeaters are down, too, at least all the ones I could reach with those little things.”
Andrew joined Will as he brought the candle from the living room and sat down at the dining room table. After handing Will the notebook and his notes, they all watched in silence as Will copied the notes onto a legal pad, nodding his head with a crooked smile.
“Yes, sir, top band with a spark-gap radio...this will work, this will work just fine. We’re gonna have to get creative to build this antenna. First, we need to build a power source.”
“They have directions for that too. I wrote them on the next page.”
Will nodded and turned to the next page, reading intently.
“No, that design won’t work. Well it will work, but it will just be hard to use. I have a better idea.”
Saint George, UT
“Let’s get a move on, vaquero.”
Chivo grunted at Angel’s remark. Angel led the afternoon’s happy trail ride of two. Chivo followed Angel as they rode down the jagged desert hillside about a quarter mile north of the compound. This was the flattest descent and the only one the horses could take to head east without going back to the Interstate. Moments later, the horses’ hooves clopped along the sunbaked asphalt of the now-defunct neighborhood.
“We cleared about half of these homes before giving up on finding anything useful. We evaluated the risk for the reward and decided to leave whatever forgotten supplies sat in these homes until we needed them, assuming that there is even anything worth needing left in the first place. I think our perspective of what we need might change in a couple years.”
Chivo nodded, the reins of his horse held softly, which both surprised and didn’t surprise Angel. Angel had heard rumors that Special Forces in Afghanistan had been using horses. It seemed like a random skill for a top-level operator to have, but Angel knew he was biased since he loved his horses. Snaking their way through yards with desert landscapes and crossing unfinished cul-de-sacs with half-built homes made it feel like they could be riding horses on Mars, except for the random homes in which the dead thumped against the windows trying to get out at a fresh kill as it passed. Trapped in their homes for all eternity. Chivo didn’t know which was worse, living in the new world or the possibility of never quite being able to die.
Reaching the eastern edge of the subdivision, the pair were again crossing red dirt and desert. This time, they were close to I-15, much closer than Chivo would have liked, but the geography made them take this route. If they’d taken a different route further north, it would have added hours to their journey, increasing their time of exposure to danger and leaving the compound less protected longer than if they were there.
Chivo looked at the shimmering Interstate. The dead still owned this stretch of road, but their numbers were thinning with each passing day. He knew that every day that lapsed was another day that the other group could launch another surprise attack. Next time, they might not be so lucky as to only lose one member of the group. Operations such as this were a delicate balancing act, running down the high wire at full speed with no net to catch you. One little mistake could be the end. Chivo felt his horse tense up, quarters quivering, close enough to the dead to smell the rotting stench. The air around them buzzed with black flies. Petting the side of his horse’s neck, Chivo tried to keep his mount as calm as he could. If his horse bucked him off, he would fall off the high wire. If the horse bolted, he would fall off the high wire. If a number of things out of his immediate control happened, he would fall off the high wire.
Rounding the edge of the hillside, their path turned more northerly and away from the teeming mass of death to the south. Truck yards full of CONEX containers sat in their path; the chain-link fences, CMU-made walls, and barbed wire fought to keep intruders out of the trucking firm’s property, which made sense before the end.
“Angel, you guys could scavenge all these fences and build an outer perimeter or a series of concentric rings. The cliff on one side trumps it all, but adding layers of security will slow down future attacks.”
Angel looked at the fences, nodding. “That’s a good idea, but it would be hard to accomplish on horseback. We need a truck or a trailer that we could team the horses to, but we don’t have any harnesses for such a thing.”
“Then get a truck.”
“Sure, but you had a truck, and look where you are now.”
Chivo shrugged and kept riding as they passed outside a trailer park wall; they turned to ride around the side of a duplex and into another subdivision. This was their last hurrah before reaching the wrecked truck. More homes held the dead, or so it seemed, for the sounds of the dead throwing their bodies and their heads against the windows to get out increased in frequency. Some of the homes were burned-out shells. The lack of emergency services after the fall of society left homes to burn to the slabs and fire to spread as the wind blew it. Modern cars sat dormant in the twin driveways of the duplexes, except for one lone old Beetle that had been converted into a Baja-style Bug. Chivo didn’t say anything, but he made a mental note to check the car on the way back.
Eventually, the pair reached the back of the squat convenience store and gas station on the corner, the last bit of cover before possibly having to enter the open area and be dangerously close to the Interstate and the chumming swarm of death it held. Dismounting, Chivo handed his reins to Angel. Still around the back of the convenience store, Chivo snuck around the edge to check for any threats before really reconning the area. The traffic lights were knocked over, the truck was a burned-out shell, and the bodies of the undead had melted and charred into the blackened pavement near the truck where they had caught fire. The scene was as gruesome as Chivo had ever seen in a long professional career of unique combat experiences. Binoculars now held up to his eyes, he scanned the scene in more detail. The fuel cans were nowhere to be found, presumably burned into the pavement, but Chivo expected nothing less with such a fire. Following the line from the damaged bridge railing where the truck had taken flight to where the truck crashed, he continued scanning along that path to find where the contents of the truck bed might have landed.
In the rock-lawn landscaping of the convenience store lay his prize, a long Pelican case, still latched. Behind one of the large rocks in the landscaping was a bit of green poking out. Chivo hoped it was some of their gear. Angel and his husband had a lot of gear cached, but anything extra would be an added benefit. Besides, Chivo didn’t want to use up too much of the group’s resources. They might need them after he and Bexar left.
Chivo returned to Angel and the horses. “Tie’em off. I found it. I’m going to dart out there to get it; I need you to hold cover for me just in case I missed something.”
“Got it.” Angel tied the reins to the electrical box on the back of the building and took a kneeling position on the edge of the corner. Chivo gave him a thumbs up and darted in a low crouch to a space between two palm trees in the store’s landscaping. Waiting and scanning for a moment before darting again, Chivo reached the Pelican rifle case and found one of the gear bags they had brought from Cortez. Shouldering the bag, holding the rifle case, Chivo made one hard sprint for the building. Dead were falling off the bridge to a hard crunch on the burned pavement below. Trying to reach their new prize, the dead streamed out into the open from around the gas station across the street, their awkward, shambling gait slow but never ending. Chiv
o could hear them, but he didn’t look back to see them as he sprinted, not slowing down until he passed Angel and the relative safety of the back of the building.
“No times to check your gear now, a bunch of dead are giving chase to the little Mexican that could.”
Chivo smirked, tied the rifle case to the side of the saddle, and wedged the gear bag under his elbows and sort of in his lap. They left in a slow trot to gain some distance from the advancing dead, which made it around to the back of the convenience store just as they left.
Groom Lake, NV
The concrete at the bottom of the stairwell was darkly stained, blood smeared the walls, and it all smelled wretched. Jessie coughed and threw up at the smell. Leaning over the handrail of the stairs, she finished with a couple of dry heaves before spitting and trying to wipe the spittle and snot from her red face.
“Sorry. Pregnant nose.”
“What?” Erin looked perplexed.
Sarah smirked. “Pregnancy is weird. You have to pee all the time, you can’t remember what you were doing or why you came into a room in the first place, and your nose is really sensitive. Morning sickness is a cruel joke. It is really all-day sickness and with your newly found superpower of supersmell, it doesn’t take much to set off losing what food you were able to keep down in the first place.”
“That sounds horrible.”
“It is,” Jessie gasped, still trying to regain her bearings. “OK, well I think I’m done with that for now. The bottom floor is supposed to be the lab. Let’s see what’s behind door number one.”
Jessie held the keycard against the RF reader, and the little LED light on the reader turned from red to green, the door lock releasing with an audible click. Jessie opened the door and held it open. Darkness greeted them. Erin loudly slapped her hand against the door frame a couple of times, but nothing stirred in the darkness.