by Dave Lund
Nellis Air Force Base, NV
One recon team was out, and the other team split into two shifts for security; so far the reports weren’t good. The entire base was overrun, although they did find the Thunderbirds’ F-16s sitting on the flightline. The daylight waning, the recon team was heading back in for the night. Aymond debated staying another day or leaving after the sleep rotation in the morning. The shortwave broadcast was back on, someone repeating the same script and advising a channel switch for other information. The other frequency had another person repeating instructions on how to construct some sort of radio and how to use Morse code. It didn’t matter. Aymond was glad to know someone else out there survived.
One more day, if there is anyone here, we’re going to need them. Then we’ll go to Area 51, which I hope is staffed with military personnel. We have a war to fight.
CHAPTER 9
Outside of Magdalena, NM
April 7, Year 1
Amanda woke unrested, her mind having refused to let her sleep peacefully through the night. The survivors in Tatum, all the others she didn’t know about, that no one knew about...she had been right. There were survivors, many survivors trying to just live another day all across the country. The longer she took, the more time it took to mount an effort to help, to somehow conquer the reanimated dead, the more of them that would die. After refueling from another abandoned semi-truck’s fuel tanks on this side of San Antonio, New Mexico, she drove into the night until she knew she was really making a bad choice due to her emotions by pushing on. She simply stopped in the middle of US-60, turned off the lights, turned off the truck, cracked the roof hatch for some air, and felt utterly and completely alone.
Giving up on sleep, Amanda climbed out onto the roof of the truck. Standing out of the turret, she saw the eastern horizon beginning to glow with the morning twilight, the moon only a sliver of light in the sky. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Amanda could see well enough to drive. Scanning the area and confirming that she was actually alone, Amanda climbed down to the pavement, squatting against one of the large wheels before starting her day. She missed the perfect facilities of the SSC, the hot showers and mostly comfortable bunks, but meeting the survivors in Tatum the previous day had galvanized her will, her resolve to win re-energized. Back in the MRAP, Amanda tore open an MRE as she drove. Today was the day, unsafe or not; she wasn’t going to stop for the night again, and there simply wasn’t any more time to waste.
Saint George, UT
Bexar woke up early, before sunrise, dressed and walked into the garage. The only other person awake was Frances, who was sitting security watch for the last half of the night. He thought it was smart that the group split the nightshift, only five hours per person; the dayshift was seven each. That made the rotation harder with fewer people, but the problem of being too tired during a long shift of sitting in the dark listening to crickets was slightly easier to withstand and still be useful with the shorter shifts. As a rookie, Bexar had worked the nightshift, just as every rookie cop did wherever they might work. The dayshift was for the veteran officers and people trying to buck for a promotion. The nightshift was the fun shift, as long as something was going on. For Bexar, it seemed like every nightshift had something going on; it seemed that without fail he would fall into some sort of fucked-up call. It got bad enough that his sergeant forbade him from making traffic stops after four a.m. because every time he did it would end in a chase, a fight, or having to Taser someone, and other units running code across the city to come help.
Standing alone in the garage over the work bench with his AR disassembled, he slowly cleaned the rifle, inspecting each piece, and removed the bolt carrier and took it apart. Bexar finally realized what his old supervisor had been trying to do. It wasn’t about keeping the calm; the reality was that when an officer was a complete shit magnet, the numbers game could catch up, and an officer-involved shooting would follow. Officers never really recover from having to shoot someone. It had been only in the last couple of years that officers were beginning to be encouraged to see a therapist, especially after a critical incident, but before that they were told to man up and truck on. The things that followed were a common script: heavy drinking, failed marriages, and lives ruined for a once proud officer, and that was for the “good” shoots.
Bexar shook his head, absentmindedly dragging the teeth of the small extractor across the back of his hand to see if it left light scratches. Scratches were good; when the extractor became worn, it wouldn’t scratch the skin, and failure to extract malfunctions would be soon to follow. The ejector spring felt good, and the gas rings still spun, but they were showing wear.
I should probably switch out parts when we get to Groom Lake and start carrying some spare parts.
He’d always hated cleaning his weapons, a chore, a task after a range day or qualifying, something to be done quickly, efficiently, and be done with. But this morning, Bexar felt a certain amount of Zen in meticulously cleaning and inspecting each part of his rifle before reassembling the bolt carrier and putting it all back in the upper. A light coat of Break-Free covered the bolt carrier and charging handle. After checking the trigger, he set a drop of lube on the edge of the hammer’s release, carefully working the hammer back and forth. Someone taught him a long time ago that it helped with a smoother trigger squeeze, and he wasn’t sure if it was real or not, but it felt like it made a difference, and that was what mattered.
The irony of the concerns about being in an officer-involved shooting wasn’t lost on Bexar after reassembling his rifle, making a functionality check, reloading, and making it ready. Not counting the risen dead, he had no idea how many actual living people he’d had to kill in the past few months. Unloading and disassembling his pistol on the bench, Bexar thought about what the number might be and became angry. Angry at each of the bastards that forced him to kill, angry that his little girl was dead, angry that his wife was still miles away, angry that they were going to have to raise a baby in this new and horrible world they lived in. Most of all, he was angry at the bastards that started this whole mess, the faceless attackers, angry that no amount of justice could be taken to reconcile what they had done.
Working faster, Bexar’s previous Zen of weapon maintenance left him, and he quickly cleaned, reassembled, and reloaded his pistol, holstering it and walking back into the house. Following the smell of coffee, he found Guillermo sitting at the kitchen table, chatting with Frances, who had apparently finished her shift on security watch.
“Welcome, my friend Bexar, join us.” Guillermo gestured to an open chair next to Frances, standing to pour a mug of coffee for the new arrival; two mason jars sat on the table, one with powdered creamer and the other with some artificial sweetener. As preppers go, this group was living the luxurious life. Bexar, Malachi, and Jack’s original group plan of canvas tents and country living paled in comparison.
“What are you going to do after you get there?”
Bexar stared into his coffee, his mind wandering in the steam. “I’m, sorry, what?”
Frances smiled wearily, tired but needing to wind down before going to bed. “After you get to Groom Lake, after you are reunited with your wife, what are your plans?”
“Hopefully live a peaceful and uneventful life; raising a child...I’m not sure if that can happen.”
“If you bring your wife back here, I bet it could.”
Bexar smiled. “You guys are really trying for the hard sell before we leave, huh?”
Guillermo grinned. “Wouldn’t you? Why leave to live in a hole in the ground in Nevada? What about Chivo? What is your friend going to do, settle down underground with your family?”
“I’ll probably do what I’ve done for the last twenty years, mano: Serve my country with unique and secret distinction.”
Guillermo stood and brought another mug of coffee to the table. Frances stood. “Merylin is probably waking up,
and it’s her day to cook. If I want any time with her before she gets to work and I get to sleep, I’ve got to get it now. Bexar, Chivo, if I’m asleep when you leave, thank you, thank you for everything.”
Chivo smiled and thanked her.
“What about you guys? The compound has eight members once we leave. Are you going to keep on with the same plan or try to branch out for something new?”
“We’re not sure, Chivo. Our plan is to keep on the same track, but we’re always open to new opportunities, like the chance Angel took with you two. That worked out for the better, even if it was a hard road to travel.”
The small talk continued back and forth, drifting from scavenging for more working vehicles or somehow finding horses to replace the ones Chivo and Stan had lost to the dead. They talked about the new weapons and possibly changing the security setup and protocols to include them; Chivo thought it lunacy not to. When you have the ability to deploy automatic weapons and RPGs to deter an invading force, why keep those tools in the back locked away.
“The SEALs do this thing when they encounter a superior force; they fire everything they have, I mean everything, and it is staggering. The enemy force can’t respond quickly enough; it’s like a sudden wall of death. By the time a counter attack can be mounted, the frogmen have slipped away and disappeared into thin air. While I was in the unit, we tended to use other kinds of support, but we had the Little Birds and the amazing pilots of the 160th. Holy shit, the Night Stalkers would take those fucking helicopters places I wouldn’t want to drive a car through, and they would do it in total darkness and in shitty weather. God, I hope they made it through this mess. If we’re going to function well enough to destroy the fucking Chinese, we’re going to need guys like that.”
“Is that where this is going?” Guillermo asked.
“It has to. I don’t know what they wanted to accomplish. The only thing that makes any sense whatsoever is the attack being a prelude to invasion, but I don’t know how they would conquer the dead to do it. Maybe there’s something we don’t know. Maybe in a year’s time or two years, the bodies of the reanimated dead fall apart. It could be a war of patience and attrition, who knows with those fuckers. Afghanistan I got, I understood those tribes and the centuries of fighting, the same with the drug cartels, and I understood the purpose and the money driving them. This shit we’re in now, I can’t wrap my brain around it; it’s just loco, all of it.”
Guillermo shook his head. “Only time will tell?”
“Sure, mano, in a year, maybe two, we’ll know. Either things will happen or they won’t, and there’s shit all we can do except react to it. If there’s an invasion, then we need all the survivors and all the equipment we have left to repel it. If it is a war of attrition, we just have to survive, and we’ll take the country back. If this was some sort of suicide pact, destroy the world, destroy themselves, or just destroy the world so they have their own slice to themselves, that just doesn’t make any sense, but it seems to now. So we’re left with the only three things we can do: wait, train, and survive.”
Merylin walked into the kitchen, smiled, and began preparing the group breakfast. Each of them had a specific role in the group, but tasks like cooking rotated daily to keep things fair for all. Bexar and Chivo hadn’t cooked a single meal since they’d arrived, but Chivo, being experienced with such things, assured Bexar privately that eliminating a threatening rival “tribe” and returning with war booty was all they would have to do even if they stayed for a year.
Chivo excused himself and left to walk outside. The VW sat in the courtyard, next to the massive forklift. The new weapons, ammo, and gear were stored in the garage now that the shop had been destroyed, but the crates remained in the courtyard for the moment. The group had discussed using the crates as crates, or disassembling them to have wood for the fire or wood to construct unknown future projects. A vote hadn’t happened yet, so for now, the crates sat empty, stacked against the far fence line. Walking the fence line, Chivo inspected the fence and perimeter.
What they need is a bunch of Hesco barriers, make the compound a true fire base, something that could be defended more easily. Start with the fence line and then gradually extend out the compound’s security wall in concentric rings until they “owned” the whole hillside.
A hardened target is a target passed by. Chivo checked the homemade roof rack, the extra gas cans, and their share of the booty, mostly ammo and a few grenades, all unpacked from the bulky crates and jammed into the tiny car. It sat squat on the worn suspension. The best estimate that he had was that it would take them roughly five hours of driving to get to Groom Lake, if everything went right. Roughly two hundred miles, so ten gallons of treated gasoline from the group’s stores were in the Beetle’s gas tank, and another ten gallons sat in two gas cans on the roof. If twenty gallons wouldn’t get them two hundred miles in an old Beetle, then they had issues.
Milan, NM
Oreo nudged Andrew awake, a dusty, dirty couch in the hangar his bed for the night. Andrew pushed his dog away, but Oreo nudged him again, and then Andrew heard voices.
“That’s the Husky we saw, so he’s got to be in one of the hangars. He isn’t anywhere else.”
Now wide awake, Andrew leapt off the couch, pistol in his hands; he crept to the hangar’s side door, edged against the metal wall and waited, nearly holding his breath. His heartbeat banged in his ears so loud that he was sure that the two men outside could hear it. The doorknob turned, and the door rattled, the deadbolt locked from the inside by Andrew the night before. There was the sound of a key sliding into the lock and then the deadbolt turned with a hard click. The door edged open, daylight burning brightly into the hangar. Andrew shielded his eyes the best he could to keep some of the night vision he had and waited for the men to step inside.
One then the other, both older men in jeans and worn-out tennis shoes, stepped into the dark hangar. Andrew waited, hidden in the shadows behind the opened door. Once inside, Andrew pushed his pistol into the second man’s back. “Don’t move or I’ll kill you.” Oreo barked.
“Hey, guy, we’re not here to harm you. You’re a pilot, and we’re pilots, and we live across the Interstate. After we saw your Husky land yesterday, we wanted to come chat. Nothing we have sitting outside will fly again without some work and parts we simply don’t have, but really we wanted news, wanted to know if you know anything about what’s going on.”
Andrew waited for Oreo. If Oreo approved, he would trust his dog. He hadn’t been wrong yet. A moment later, Andrew felt a nudge on his leg, and Oreo sat down against him, “My dog says you passed the test. I learned to trust my dog more than I trust people nowadays. Why don’t we go outside and chat.”
“Sure, or I can push open the hangar doors to get some light in here, your choice.”
Moments later the metal doors rattled as the two men pushed them open along the tracks in the concrete, light flooding the hangar and the lone aircraft that sat in it, an older King Air. That plane easily flew higher, faster, and further than his little bush plane, but it took much more fuel and couldn’t land on rough fields.
After introductions, Roy and Jay told Andrew the story of their survival in Milan. Twenty-two of them were left after a horrible week last month when a massive group of the dead pushed through on the Interstate. They didn’t all stay on I-40; many of them flooded the town, killing thirteen while the rest of the survivors sheltered in place, praying to survive. Canned food kept the remaining twenty-two people alive, days spent scavenging abandoned homes and stores for anything they could find gave them a stockpile to last through the end of the year, but the one thing they didn’t have was any information.
Andrew told them about all the other survivors and groups he had met over his travels, about his friends in Arkansas, the home-built radio, Groom Lake, and his desire to get there.
“So Bob built the radio basically out of used car parts
?”
“Pretty much. He was a radio geek before the attack and knew what he was doing, so he changed the design a little bit, but that’s basically what he did. He made a much better generator design. The antenna was a long run of wire draped over power poles.”
“Do you remember what he did well enough to help us build one?”
“I can do you one better, I wrote it all down; it’s in the plane.”
Both of the men shot up, waiting impatiently for Andrew to take them to the new treasure of information, the ability to have a working radio, a way to talk to the outside world!
Half an hour later, the men were in the hangar, the cowls off the King Air’s engines, wrenches turning to remove some of the parts they needed to build a radio. Quickly they decided that the airfield’s historic airway beacon would be the perfect perch for the large antenna loop they needed. Promising to return in a few hours while they gathered the rest of the necessary parts and to bring a lunch back, they left Andrew with the key to the padlock on the Avgas tank to refill his plane while he waited.
This was a better experience than he’d had in the weeks before. News was a barterable good, but the directions to build a radio, a chance to communicate, that was more than just a barterable good, it was like having solid gold bars. Andrew wasn’t Oprah rich, he was post-apocalyptic rich, which was even better.