by Dave Lund
“Thank you, but I made a promise to my friend here, and I’m going to make good on it. It’s time to finally return him to his pregnant wife.”
Groom Lake, NV
Jake, Bill, representatives from each of the different “towns” of Groom Lake, Sarah, and Jessie sat at the conference table. Erin flat out told her mother she wasn’t going to “some stupid meeting,” and Sarah had half a mind to join her in not attending, but Jessie was going so she felt like she needed to go to give support. Jake smiled and tapped his knuckles on the table. The conversations in the room slowly died off until all eyes were on him.
“Good afternoon, and thank you all for coming. First of all, I wanted to thank Jessie and Sarah again for their help. They may be new members of our community, but they have really made their mark in a short amount of time.”
The group clapped politely before Jake continued. “With his new radio setup, Bill has made contact with more survivors. Some have expressed interest in attempting to come join us; others are content to continue to shelter in place, but all have expressed a strong need for help, which I can imagine surprises no one here. However, that is not why I asked all of you to this meeting. We have two issues that may become serious problems if we don’t address them. First of all, we have lost all contact with the Texas facility; we haven’t heard from Clint or President Lampton in a few days, and we are hoping that they are only experiencing technical difficulties. I would ask that we keep that information only between us. I’m afraid that rumors may get out of hand if we make that public knowledge.
“Second, we intercepted two radio broadcasts that by themselves would be concerning, but in the context of losing communication with Texas, the apparent cyber-attacks on our facility, and some previous radio broadcasts that we’ve heard, we are quite concerned. Bill?”
Bill fidgeted in his seat and looked at his notes. “At least one numbers station appeared briefly recently, broadcasting for two days, two different messages on two different frequencies.”
One woman raised her hand; most of the others looked puzzled.
“Right, umm, numbers stations is a generic term for radio stations that began around World War One but really became prevalent during the Cold War. They would broadcast random numbers or letters, sometimes with different tones or other sounds. There were a few conspiracy theories about them. As we sit here in Area 51, I would tend to assume that the theories may have been right; regardless, it was generally assumed by those of us in amateur radio that the stations were broadcasting secret messages to spies or agents. Since the stations were broadcast on the shortwave bands, the recipient could have been just about anywhere. Back in the height of all these stations some other ham-radio operators began DF’ing, or locating the broadcast locations, or at least where the broadcasting antenna was located. Sorry, direction finding or triangulating the locations. Anyways, the numbers stations that appeared recently are now gone; we have no idea who broadcast it, who received it, or what it meant. That alone isn’t too big of a deal. I mean, we know that Clint and Cliff are out there. It is possible that others are out there too, trying to do the right thing, but two really strange radio broadcasts really makes me concerned about the numbers stations too. The best way to describe the two other broadcasts are that they were broad spectrum noise on HF, the high-frequency bands, like the radio broadcast equivalent of someone hitting a large gong. One of the broadcasts appeared to have been sent from some distance away, and the other was much closer.”
Bill took a drink of water, holding up his hands in response to the questions that started immediately.
“Most likely those were encrypted messages, one being sent and the other being a reply. We have no way of knowing what the messages were. We don’t know where they came from exactly, but HF broadcasts, depending on propagation, could have come from nearly anywhere in the world. The one guess I’m willing to take is that the reply message came from within North America, possibly somewhere fairly close to here.”
All the representatives from the different Groom Lake cities began asking questions, talking over each other, nearly shouting to be heard. Jake stood and held up his hands to get their attention; once everyone had calmed down, he sat again.
“My concerns aren’t really about those radio broadcasts; my concerns are specifically about our underground city surviving. I broke all of this down into bite-sized bits of information so I could understand it better. If Cliff were here, he would have a plan of action, but he isn’t, and we can’t reach him, so all we have are one another.”
Jake stood and walked to the dry-erase board on the wall and began writing. “Some of this most of you probably know; however, a lot of what I’m about to tell you hasn’t been told to anyone but myself by Cliff. After this meeting, after we have a plan of action, we will have another full assembly, and I will explain all of what I’m about to tell you to all of our fellow survivors and residents.”
All eyes were glued on Jake; the room felt as if it were collectively holding its breath.
“Number one, we know that the Chinese and North Koreans teamed up to attack the United States with an EMP strike followed by overflights that sprayed what we know now to be called the Yama Strain. The name doesn’t really matter, all that matters is that it is a tool of mass genocide, a way to kill off an entire country with little damage of war. Cliff assumed that since the attack happened, the Chinese had devised a way to counter Yama. He didn’t know if it was a way to stop it or a way to inoculate others from it, but he was confident that the dead would remain the dead. Even the infected dead couldn’t be brought back to life; they could only be destroyed. In the depths of this very facility, a group of scientists were working on a solution. The United States government knew about all of this and expected the attack; the problem is that they thought there was more time before it came. Cliff was originally in a facility in Denver under the airport when the attack came. That facility was overrun and went dark, but he somehow escaped and came here, this being the closest backup facility. Besides Texas, there were many other facilities, but Cliff said they were destroyed, except for Texas, as far as we know. Basically, the whole plan that the U.S. government had for what they felt to be an eventuality fell apart; the entire safety net failed, and here we are. Cliff found this facility overrun but lit and operational, unlike the one in Denver, which had completely failed. Systematically, he cleared the entire facility of zombies, the evidence of which can still be seen on the floors and walls in some areas. There was one lone survivor here, Lance, a young scientist still trying to find a solution, an end to Yama. Lance died; Cliff didn’t really go into detail about it, but said that with Lance’s death any chance to scientifically combat Yama died with him.
“If the attack was the prelude to invasion that we think it could be, then we may be in store for actual war, more attacks. We’ve done well to save so many people and to provide a safe place to survive and live, but the Chinese must know that we’re here by now.”
Some gasped, and others shook their heads.
“We have a few ideas and are welcome to any other ideas that any of you have, but as we see it, our options are to continue as we are and hope we’re wrong, lock down the blast doors, turn off the radios, and go dark, or train for war with the weapons and gear we have on the fifth level.”
“What about the others, all the people out there that have made contact with us, the ones who can’t or won’t come here, what about them?” someone called out.
The room erupted in conversation, growing louder with each passing second. Jessie stood abruptly, and her chair hit the wall behind her and tipped over with a crash. Everyone turned to look at her in silence.
“We have to tell them. We fucking tell them everything. There is no choice but to tell them the entire story, the history, and the fears. Let them prepare. Let them know. Bill, where are all these people located?”
“Uh, all over. We
have a map in the radio hut with pins showing each contact we’ve made.”
“Tell them all, Jake, tell them everything you just told us. Keep repeating it until we can’t anymore. Jake, every able-bodied person in this goddamned hole in the ground is going to have to get ready to fight, ready to fight a war, be fully ready, and be ready now. We can’t wait until next week or even tomorrow—this isn’t going to be our fucking underground Alamo!”
Jessie stormed out of the room, the door slamming behind her; everyone looked at Sarah who was still.
“I agree with her. If I were you, every single one of us would go down to the fifth level and get geared up. If this is going to happen, it could happen today, next month, or next year. We have no idea, but we can’t wait helplessly and hope it won’t happen. Like she said, we get ready, we stay ready, and we hope it doesn’t happen, but we’re ready if it does.”
Everyone looked at Jake before the room erupted with everyone talking at once. Sarah looked at the room, shook her head, and left to find Jessie and her daughter. If Jake and the others didn’t get ready to fight, they needed to be ready to bug out.
Tatum, NM
James was back, his bicycle left in the yard. Sunlight filtered through the windows of the home, and a dozen people sat in the living room. Lisa was the woman who lived there, Amanda learned, and her husband, Joe, came home about thirty minutes after James came back. Everyone who sat in the living room arrived on a bicycle, some of them new-looking, some of them ancient and held together with some unusual repairs.
“After the gas started going bad a bit ago, we all turned to bicycles. Inner tubes are a bit of a problem. We started with using cans of Fix-A-Flat that we got from the gas stations. Eventually we started using small pieces of rubber from the tire shop as inner tubes. Seems to be working OK,” Joe explained.
Amanda nodded, her curiosity quenched. As excited as everyone in the room was, all but Amanda held an open MRE in their hands. All of them appeared thin, and their clothes didn’t seem to fit them as well as they had. She quickly learned that of the town’s original six hundred or so residents roughly two hundred of them were still living. The roaming herds of the dead hadn’t come through town and, within the first day of the attack, the citizens of Tatum banded together to have constant patrols to put down any zombies who came through. Mostly, especially at first, the dead that posed a threat were their own fellow residents. There was an outbreak of suicides about six weeks after the attack, which in the end really brought the rest of the survivors together. They pooled their supplies and made sure that everyone had a firearm and a fair share of the supplies necessary to survive, and they held open discussions about depression and survival. For all that they did well as a community, what the entire town was waiting for was help.
Over the previous weeks, small groups would bicycle together further and further out on patrols looking for other survivors, scavenging for anything of use, and hoping to find answers. The clusters of farms around the county were contacted, a few more survivors found among them. Eventually, they bicycled all the way out to Plains and down to Lovington. There were a few survivors in Plains, but the town hadn’t done as well as Tatum. Lovington as a town hadn’t banded together, but there were three big survivor groups that held roughly four hundred people of the nearly eleven thousand previous residents of the town. The groups were each led by experienced preppers and, surprisingly, each of the groups had good relationships with each other. Amanda was astonished, expecting a splintered town run by three different factions with different leaders and loyalties to be at a bit of a war with one another. They weren’t, and had even facilitated a barter system for trading.
Rumors abounded in Tatum and in Lovington, but no one knew exactly what had happened.
Mr. Finch arrived about the time that Joe finished giving the quick history of Tatum and how they had survived.
“Welcome to our little town, Ms....” Mr. Finch paused.
“Lampton, Amanda Lampton.”
“Ms. Lampton that’s quite the truck you have. How is it that it still works, and where are you getting fuel for it?”
“It was stored in a hardened facility in Texas, but it was designed to survive an EMP anyways, as far as I know. Fuel is always a bit of an issue. I tend to syphon what I can find out of semi-trucks’ fuel tanks.”
“We had a few older vehicles that still worked after the EMP, but fuel began going bad sort of quickly. Some of the guys who used to work the oil field said it was due to the ethanol, and we’ve run dry of the diesel fuel we did have. Either way, we’re pedaling our way around nowadays. Thank you for the food you could share, but we must know, do you know what happened? How did you survive? How did you get here? Where are you going and why?”
Amanda was waiting for that question. She knew it would come, and she had spent the previous half-hour in an internal debate trying to decide how she would approach it.
“First, I do know what happened. The Chinese and North Korean governments launched an attack on the United States. It began with nuclear missiles detonated high in the atmosphere, which caused an EMP, destroying electronics and the country’s electrical infrastructure, as you are already aware. The aircraft you saw fly past after the EMP sprayed what has been named the Yama Strain.”
Amanda continued for nearly an hour, explaining that she had been the Secretary of Agriculture, how two agents had come to her house in Little Rock, about the journey to Texas, the facility there and the one in Groom Lake, and the hunt for survivors. Then she extended an open invitation for any to join her on her journey to Nevada, with the intent to return to Texas. Believing that these people, survivors, fellow citizens deserved to know the truth, Amanda left no detail a secret, except that she was now the sworn President of the United States.
Once finished, the room sat in stunned silence, each of the people in the small living room trying to process all the information that was thrown at them, trying to decide how much to believe, if they could believe any of it.
Joe spoke first. “So there is no help coming.” It wasn’t a question.
Amanda shook her head. “There is nothing in place still functioning that can help, yet.”
“And your plan is to drive to Area 51, pick up a group of people, drive back to Texas to get more vehicles, and then shuttle back and forth until all those people are safe underground in Texas? What about people like us?”
“We didn’t know about other survivors. Well, some people who had radios that survived were able to contact those in Groom Lake, but no one knows how many people have survived. We don’t know how many people died.”
Faces around the room, previously elated to have a large meal that equated to more than the typical day’s ration of food, now looked defeated. Amanda tried to keep a positive attitude, but the loss of any hope for the future sucked the air out of the room.
Mr. Finch finally spoke. “Thank you, Ms. Lampton. We’ve survived as a town together so far, and we will survive as a town together into the future, hoping that someday things will get back to some sort of normal that we once knew. Tomorrow we will hold a town hall discussion to let everyone know what we learned from you. If you are going to be staying the night, you are welcome to join us in our meeting tomorrow.”
Amanda didn’t answer at first. “Mr. Finch, thank you, but it would be best if I continued my journey. Don’t give up hope. Don’t give up on one another. We will survive, but only if we work together. We now know you are here. I’m sorry we didn’t know that before. The task we face is hard but not insurmountable. Once in back in Texas, I will send a truck to you with all we can spare. I’m sorry that there isn’t more we can do more quickly.”
When she stood to leave, Mr. Finch stood as well. “Ms. Lampton, let me at least walk you to your truck. Joe, I’ll be back in a moment.”
Mr. Finch went to the front door and held it open for Amanda, and they walked in s
ilence until they came to the back of the MRAP. “Ms. Lampton, how many other cabinet-level secretaries survived?”
Amanda paused before answering. “None of them.”
“That’s what I thought. Madam President, God’s speed.”
Amanda shook his hand, opened the back hatch, climbed into her truck, and passed down another case of MREs to Mr. Finch, “We won’t fail you.”
Mr. Finch nodded and walked back to the house. Amanda climbed into the driver’s seat, started the truck, and drove down the block to return to the highway; turning left, she drove west, the sun low enough on the horizon to shine directly into the windshield.
In the Aviat Husky
Oreo’s insistence that they land grew, and the day was getting late, so instead of pushing on and being left to an airplane that smelled like dog crap, Andrew saw the single long airstrip near I-40 and decided to take the opportunity to land for the evening. The town, which sat on the opposite side of I-40 from the airfield, wasn’t too large, so he didn’t think that there would be too big of a problem, or at least he hoped there wouldn’t be. If worse came to worst, he could let Oreo relieve himself and they could fly on, landing on a deserted small highway or somewhere else if need be. Although fueling up was also high on Andrew’s priority list, second at the moment only to Oreo’s situation.
Banking over the airport to make a final turn for landing, Andrew saw a large concrete arrow by the beacon and smiled. This airport was a part of the original air transport system from the late 1920s. Happy to see that some history had survived even the end of the world, Andrew landed and made the turn-off for the FBO and a small group of hangars. Two white tanks sat aboveground, which was a good sign for easier fueling, but first, after the prop stopped spinning, Andrew climbed out and pulled Oreo out of the back seat. Oreo immediately ran to the taxiway sign and peed on it. Andrew scanned the area. There was no sign of movement, no signs of the dead, although this section of I-40 appeared to have been pushed clear by a massive horde, as had the entire stretch of Interstate since Albuquerque. They appeared to be outbound toward the West Coast. Andrew was following in their path, but he had no way of knowing how far ahead of him they were and if he might catch up. Using the available tie downs, Andrew secured his aircraft and began clearing the closest hangar to find a spot for the night.