by Dave Lund
Glancing at the clock on the wall, Jessie realized that they had been at it for more than six hours. They had missed lunch, and if they didn’t act soon, they would miss dinner as well.
“Hey, Sarah?”
Sarah finished taking notes from the group reporting to her before walking to Jessie.
“Yeah?”
“We’ve been working for quite some time. I don’t want to stop. Think we should see if the mess hall could send down some sort of boxed dinner or something?”
“Sure...Erin!”
“What, Mom?” Erin yelled from somewhere in the darkness.
“I’ll be back in a few. Take my place!”
Sarah walked toward the door and handed her clipboard to Jessie, who sat down, absentmindedly rubbing her growing baby belly. She was tired and hungry, her feet swollen and aching, her back ached. and she wished she could go out for a pedicure.
“You going to make it?”
Jessie handed Sarah’s clipboard to Erin. “Well I don’t really have a choice in the matter, do I?”
Enterprise, UT
Sunset was over, twilight and the starry sky battling for domination overhead. Chivo and Bexar were trying to settle into their overnight accommodations, not far from the still smoldering gas station. The afternoon had been spent locating and clearing a good spot to sleep, after first looking for a usable vehicle. Giving up on finding a vehicle before the end of the day, shelter became the primary goal. Found and cleared, they began moving the surviving gear from the desert field to the metal building they had chosen for the night. Working together, they moved slower than they had the first two times that they moved the gear because the urgency and danger were gone from the situation, outside of the handful of gathering reanimated dead, attracted to the area by the blast and fire, coming from who knows where.
Chivo held his arm out, stopping Bexar. “You see that, mano?”
To the south, bright lights grew out of the desert, slowly coming closer, appearing brighter as they came.
“What the fuck is that?”
“That’s a truck.”
“No shit, Chivo, but what sort of Mad Max bullshit is it?”
“No, mano, that’s a fucking MRAP.”
“Like a Cougar?”
“Yeah, well, that’s one kind of MRAP.”
“The sheriff north of us got one of those surplus for the tactical team; fucking huge.”
“And heavy, armored, and armed.”
“How do we play this?”
“That’s our new ride, mano...I’ve got a plan.”
Groom Lake, NV
Jessie sat at the desk and ate her dinner. The mess hall had sent down enough vegetable soup and “orange drink” for all who toiled deep in the dark corners of the storage area. The soup was good, and the beverage again tasted more like the color than an actual orange. It dawned on Jessie that she would probably never eat an actual orange again unless she happened across one somewhere out in the wilds. Her baby wouldn’t have an orange, or limes, or lemonade.
My God, what about scurvy?
Taking a deep breath, Jessie felt distant enough from the situation momentarily to recognize the edge of a soon-to-be-mother freak-out. She was happy that she wasn’t far enough along to start nesting yet; she couldn’t see if the storage area had baseboards, but if it did she was sure they were filthy. She remembered their little house in Brazos County, their first house; after painting Keeley’s room bright blue early on in the pregnancy and then finding out that they were having a girl, Bexar repainted the room for Jessie more than anyone. The baby wouldn’t know the difference, but Jessie had to have the right paint and crib and covers and decorations...a couple’s first baby was a big deal. She laughed to herself. This time her entire pregnancy was a different story.
She was on the fifth level, or five floors underground, but Jessie didn’t really know how deep they really were or how stout the underground facility would be against an attack. Tipping up the plastic bowl, finishing the rest of the broth, she watched Sarah run the show. Erin went back and forth between groups, taking notes and also making a pile of gear for the three of them. Watching all the activity, activity she and Sarah were responsible for, Jessie wondered if they were making the right choice. If the SSC went offline, if there was an invasion, would it be better to be holed up in an underground fort on the frontier, or was there a better option?
Originally, their bug-out plan with Malachi and Jack was supposed to work. They had made all the right choices, stored all the right stuff, and built the right vehicles, and everything still went to hell. The plan failed because it was a single plan; it didn’t have any contingencies. This plan didn’t have a contingency, and she needed one for herself, Sarah, and Erin, and they needed one fast.
“Hey, Erin, could you come here for a moment?”
For all the activity in the vast storage area, the noise level was manageable; Erin heard Jessie from a few hundred feet away and began walking toward her.
“What’s up?”
“Tell your mom that you’re coming with me for something, and we’re going topside. There’s something I need to do with the FJ.”
“OK, like what?”
“Plan B.”
“Isn’t that the morning-after pill? A little late for that now.”
Jessie glared at Erin, who laughed and jogged away toward Sarah. A few minutes later, they stood in the hangar next to the FJ, wearing what had become their small-group-standard aboveground expedition kit, which contained significantly more gear and ammo than what consisted of their EDC, everyday carry, while underground.
Inside the MRAP, UT
Amanda slowed as she approached a T-intersection. Checking her atlas, she saw she needed to turn left. A lone reanimate stood in the roadway, right in the middle of the intersection. Veering to drive around it, she was startled when it started waving its hands over its head. Amanda slammed on the brakes, the heavy air brakes hissing in protest.
It was a man, not a zombie, and he was yelling at her, waving his arms, trying to get her to come to him. She couldn’t hear him in the truck, but it looked like he was yelling “Help.” Amanda drove forward, stopping very close to him, his chest barely visible over the high hood. He was yelling help and waving frantically. He wore a pistol, a dirty T-shirt, and pants, but appeared to have nothing else. Amanda left the truck running and cracked open her door to stand on the step to hear what the man was saying.
As she opened the door, her feet were ripped out from under her. Hitting her head on the step as she fell, the world around her went dark.
PLA Reconnaissance Position, NV
After driving north from S4, the APC turned and followed the dirt road, meandering up the western side of the mountain. Reaching their planned destination and confident of the lack of persons alive or dead in their surroundings, the four-man team left the APC just below the military ridgeline. They now lay under netting to break up their outlines and set a rotation behind the powerful tripod-mounted spotting scope. As they slowly scanned each of the buildings, the only movement the team could find was from the dead trapped in what the intelligence reports listed as onsite apartment housing for some of the facility staff. The location they were most interested in was the northeast white hangar next to the edge of the dry lake bed and the numerous other escape routes and hatches around the complex.
Encrypted satellite communications kept the recon team in contact with the small assault force. The elite of the expeditionary special reconnaissance teams of the PLA, the Siberian Tiger unit specialized in survival skills in harsh environments. They were the initial recon and assault team to clear out pockets of resistance and special facilities to be followed by the sweeper and cleanup teams comprised of mixed units from the PLA and the Korean People’s Army. This mission was easy: simple sabotage, infect, load up, and fly out. The sweeper t
eams would come through in the next few months, neutralizing the Yama-infected imperialists.
The assault set to launch just before dawn, the team continued to update their commander with status reports every hour. So far, each of the six reports was a simple one-word transmission indicating that the situation was unchanged and that no enemy imperialist movement was detected on the surface.
Groom Lake, NV
Jason joined Jessie and Erin, at Erin’s insistence. Her quick idea turned into another four hours of Erin gathering essential items to take with them. After her plan was outlined, Erin didn’t want Jessie to do any heavy lifting, which it was that, heavy, so the three of them drove out of the hangar, looping around to the west and heading south toward the shooting range. Dawn was only a few hours away. Although the canvas wall tent, the only remaining original group-standard tent, was dyed a flat-green color from the natural bright-white color of the canvas, Jessie wanted to find a spot where the tent would be close enough to get to, far enough away to possibly be missed, and amongst enough clutter to possibly be overlooked. Up the hillside from the shooting range stood a tank farm, and those five tall tanks would give Jessie all that she wanted in a discreet intermediary bug-out location.
None of them had any idea what was in the tanks – it could have been flying-saucer fuel for all they knew – but bouncing up the dirt road in the darkness, they couldn’t even see the tanks yet, even with the bright off-road lighting that Jack had installed on the FJ; the darkness was a thick veil around them. Jessie drove, with Erin sitting in the passenger seat and Jason behind her. Erin, hyper-vigilant, found her mind wasn’t on Jason but on the surrounding darkness. Her “big rifle” rode on the roof rack, which was where she planned to go if the shit hit the fan. With the short-barreled M4 in her hands, she absentmindedly kept tapping her right thumb against the safety, checking that it was flipped up and on safe. Jason’s weapon of choice remained his shotgun.
After what felt like an eternity in the darkness, the tanks grew out of the desert hillside ahead of them. Driving to the westernmost side of the tanks, Jessie stopped the FJ and turned off the lights and the engine, and each of them sat quietly in the interior, waiting for any reaction, any shambling dead to approach. Still not having the opportunity to practice with any of the night optic devices that they had located in the storage area, each of them clicked on their headlamps; the dim LED lights left the interior of the bug-out vehicle awash in red light.
Mostly confident that they were alone in the expanse of Groom Lake, they climbed out of the truck.
“Jason, the tent is in the case on the left, and the poles are in that PVC tube,” Jessie said, pointing to the roof rack. She began to reach for the PVC tube to start pulling out poles when Erin stopped her, reminding her that she was to hold security; she and Jason would do the work.
Grunting, Jason and Erin flopped the tent out of the case and down from the roof rack, and it fell with a dull thud onto the desert floor. Jessie and Bexar could set the tent up in about an hour, as they found out in Maypearl. They could pull the tent down in ten minutes when pressed, although not as neatly as they would typically. The EMT metal tubing clanked, sounding as loud as gunshots to the three of them in the darkness; they were trying to be quiet, but the tubing simply wouldn’t cooperate.
When the metal angle pieces were arranged and the strong tent frame assembled, Jason and Erin pulled the heavy canvas tent over the frame.
“Just like the pioneers, huh, Erin?”
“No wonder they had fucking wagons and donkeys and shit. If this is their state-of-the-art lightweight camping tent, what did they cook with, lead?”
“Cast iron, and, yes, it’s heavy too. There’s a skillet and a Dutch oven in the case in the back of the truck.”
“Isn’t a Dutch oven when a guy...”
Jason snorted. “Yes, but it’s also a cast-iron pot with a lid.”
Erin and Jason kept bantering back and forth, at a whisper. Jessie walked around the bug-out site for another security sweep, but also to get a feel for the layout if she had to come up here in complete darkness.
In the MRAP
Chivo drove. To say he was familiar with the different models of vehicles all classified as the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicle would be an understatement. Ironically enough, they ambushed and took this one, but the lone driver, a woman they knew and were surprised to find in BFE Utah and alone, lay flat on her back in the rear of the truck. Bexar tended to her. Although she had been knocked out from hitting her head against the thick metal side step, she came around quickly and with a severe headache.
After listening to both of them apologize profusely, Amanda had the pleasure of listening to a lecture on patrol tactics and safely using an MRAP from Chivo. Sipping water, he offered to give her a shot from the medical bag in the truck that he promised would take away all the pain, but Amanda opted to take a handful of 800mg Motrin instead. Chivo smiled slightly. If she was going to eat the 800mg “grunt candy,” then maybe she could become a warrior president yet.
Two hours after the ambush, President Lampton was awake, the MRAP was loaded with the remaining provisions that Chivo and Bexar had saved from the doomed VW, and they were once again pointed north, driving through the night at Amanda’s insistence. Beginning with the short version of events, Chivo wanted to know all the details about Clint and the two facilities.
“What about Cliff? Clint sent him a message, some sort of random numbers radio broadcast; he was supposed to go to Granite Mountain. We haven’t heard from him since you guys radioed your message from Cortez to Bill and them at Groom Lake.”
“Fuck Cliff.”
“Now, Bexar, sure he fucked us, but he also saved us, so I’d say that leaves him close to neutral,” Chivo continued, telling Amanda the whole backstory about Cliff sabotaging their exit and the group in Saint George, which surprised Amanda because she’d driven through the same towns they had, including Saint George, and hadn’t seen that survivor group. They also told her about Cliff’s partial redemption by saving both of them so Angel and his group could get to them.
“So why didn’t the other group...”
“Frank’s.”
“So why didn’t Frank’s group just ask for help? If they had helped you, why wouldn’t they help them?”
Bexar quietly listened to the conversation, wishing Chivo would speed up; they were closer to Jessie than they had been since Big Bend, and his heart ached to see the love of his life again. Especially now that even President Lampton felt it necessary to overland to Groom Lake, jeopardizing her life for the idea that an attack might be imminent.
“The two groups knew each other, or knew of each other at least, before the attack. Frank’s group didn’t think Guillermo and Angel would help them, so the story went.”
“How did you figure all of that out?”
“We captured one of their members during an attack, and I asked him.”
“And he told you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bexar chortled. “He fucking waterboarded him...uh, Madam President.”
Amanda raised her eyebrows. “Did it work?”
“The enhanced interrogation techniques worked well, ma’am.”
Faintly smiling, Amanda thought to tell him to simply call her Amanda, but her pounding head made her want to let him sweat it out a bit longer.
Chivo slowed and stopped after turning south onto Highway 93.
“Dude, why are we stopping?”
“Are you a medic?”
“No, I always called for medics.”
“Then chill out for a bit. I know you’re excited, but it is time to medically evaluate the President again. You can put your happy ass in that seat for a bit if you can’t wait five minutes.”
Chivo laughed and slapped Bexar on the ass as he climbed over him to get to the driver’s seat. The dash l
ooked about like any semi-truck that Bexar had ever seen. He pushed the yellow diamond valve in, and the parking brakes released; he looked for the gear selector.
“It’s a push button, mano,” Chivo called from the back.
After pushing the button for drive, they were off at what felt like a breakneck pace from his seat behind the driver’s wheel, but topping out at fifty-five miles per hour according to the needle. The powerful lighting turned the dark highway in the middle of nowhere into near daylight. As heavy as the truck was, it felt more nimble behind the wheel than Bexar would have guessed, as he gently swerved around an abandoned semi-truck in the roadway. Smiling, he felt invincible in the big armored truck sitting so high above the passing pavement.
Mercury Highway, NV
“Master Guns, I’m telling you I saw fucking headlights! They turned away from us and then disappeared.”
Aymond turned to Kirk, who sat behind the driver’s wheel. The entire team having heard Jones’ radio transmission, the convoy sat motionless, all their lights extinguished as a precaution. The lighting selector even disabled the brake lights. “We’re in the Nevada Test Site. Think it might be a patrol from Area 51?”
“No dice, Chief, why would they flip their lights off if they’re a friendly patrol, especially after inviting everyone to come visit on the shortwave?”
“The PLA didn’t have night optics.”
“The PLA and KPA that we fought so far didn’t, but who’s to say that these guys don’t have them?”
Aymond knew Kirk was right and knew the answer before he had even asked it. The trip out of Las Vegas had taken much longer than anticipated, darkness falling on them hours ago; the convoy had remained at a slow speed with the radar truck leading, the dome on and blasting away at nothing but empty desert for a good while. They hadn’t seen a single Zed since turning off of Highway 95, so the need for the dome being up and in use seemed moot, especially with possible tangos in the area.