Odyssey

by Michael Stephen Fuchs

  In the better light, and reduced tension, Homer could also now see the couple was young, or certainly young-looking, probably still on the right side of thirty. They were both attractive, well-groomed, especially for the post-Apocalypse. They looked like young professionals.

  Jen stood up from the couch again. “Okay. Who wants what? Tea? Water? Or something to take the edge off? Cocktails?”

  Homer smiled. “Tea would be great.”

  “Sarah?” Jen asked.

  Sarah appeared to de-tense, slightly. “Sure. Tea.”

  “Don’t move.” Jen disappeared into the kitchen.

  “So,” Roger said, leaning back. “You a man of God?” He nodded at Homer’s crucifix, which had come loose from under his vest again, and glinted in the lamplight.

  Homer nodded in confirmation.

  “Us, not so much. Not even before God made it clear how much he hates us all.” He smiled. “I guess the two of us were right in the middle of the big secular demographic.”

  “What demo is that?” Homer asked. “What did you do?”

  “Technology for her,” Roger said, nodding toward the kitchen. “Government in my case. Well, public sector. Think tank.” He laughed again. “That’s a ridiculous phrase, isn’t it? Don’t know why none of us ever thought of all this, before it was too late.”

  He looked wistful, both nostalgic and sad, which Homer figured were emotions shared by everyone left alive.

  “Both based in DC,” Roger added. “But we both mostly telecommuted, working from home. Lucky for us, I guess.”

  “You’re not alone here,” Sarah said. It wasn’t a question.

  “No. There are other families – in this block, and elsewhere in the neighborhood. A few more farther out on the peninsula.”

  “But you’re not in the UK survivor registry,” Homer said.

  This was a database, maintained by CentCom in London, of all known pockets of survivors around the world. Homer hadn’t committed the entire thing to memory, but he’d tabbed through it once, and would have remembered anyone from his home area.

  Roger shrugged. “It’s because we don’t have long-range radios. We’ve been able to pick up the survivor broadcasts on our handheld ones. But if anyone over there has heard us back… well, I always thought they just didn’t like us very much.”

  Homer smiled at this. Before he could answer, Sarah spoke.

  “How have you stayed alive? For so long.”

  “A lot of luck.” Roger smiled again. He seemed to Homer to have an easy smile – even now, after all this. “As your frogman will know, there’s a high density of military bases, as well as military families, around this region. I guess, being military, the families had a high degree of readiness, compared to the general population. And the bases, well, even though they fell, it still means the scavenging around here is awesome. Dangerous, of course. But I don’t think we’ve put a dent in the stockpiled MREs, canned goods, and bottled water, in all the canteens, supply depots, and base PXes. Or even the booze in the desks and footlockers of senior officers.”

  Now Homer laughed at that.

  Jen reappeared, carrying a tray with mugs, bowls, napkins – and a plate of baked goods. “Don’t know how you take your tea,” she said. “We’ve got real sugar, and powdered creamer.” She passed mugs of tea to Homer and Sarah.

  Sarah regarded the pastries. “Where’d those come from?”

  “I baked them,” Jen said.

  “You still bake.” Sarah sounded both incredulous and impressed. Homer figured she recognized self-reliance when she saw it. But Jen wasn’t so much survivalist as domestic.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Love it. Have to do it in the fireplace now, instead of the oven. And I hope you like, you know, vegan brownies. The last eggs and butter are a ways behind us.”

  Roger smiled. “This batch is actually edible. Believe me, there have been some vegan baking catastrophes in our recent past.”

  “Hey,” Jen scolded. “No flogging our domestic laundry.”

  “You mentioned scavenging,” Homer said.

  Roger nodded. “Those of us in the neighborhood kind of divide up the duties. Some of the ex-military, or wannabe tough guys, lead the scavenging parties.” He shrugged. “They’ve gotten a little paramilitary, in my view, more guns and knives than strictly necessary, going out wearing all black – even though of course the dead aren’t tracking them by sight.”

  “Paramilitary types?” Sarah asked.

  “They’re okay, really. Heck, I’m one of them, some nights. I don’t go out of my way to volunteer. I’m definitely not an action junkie. But everyone’s had to toughen up.”

  “How big is your compound?” Sarah asked.

  Roger laughed. “Compound is a little grandiose. In here, we’re just a few households, and a big square of fence. Like I said, there are others dotted around the area.”

  Homer asked, “Why didn’t you consolidate?”

  Roger shrugged. “We talked about it. But, of course, nineteen out of twenty houses are empty, or filled with the dead. Clearing a single block’s easy enough. Someone suggested we all move into one area, clear out all the adjacent houses. But, you know suburban homeowners. We like our own homesteads.”

  Sarah said, “It’s probably hard to know where to draw the circle.”

  Jen shrugged. “We try to draw it as wide as we can.”

  “You’ve done well,” Homer said.

  “We’ve been lucky,” Roger said. “At least at first.” He paused. “It’s actually been unnervingly clear these past six months. The dead kind of just seemed to clear out. All wander off.”

  “And then…” Jen said.

  “Then what?” Homer asked.

  “Then it looked like they were all going to come back. All together. And all at once.”

  Homer and Sarah exchanged a dark look.

  * * *

  Homer looked back to Roger. “You mentioned overrun bases.”

  The man nodded.

  Homer said, “There’s one I have reason to believe didn’t fall.”

  “Yeah.” Roger exchanged a look with Jen, which Homer couldn’t interpret. “Down at Dam Neck. But I think they also would have been weathering a hell of a storm down there.”

  “From the dead coming back,” Homer said.

  “Yeah. We don’t know much, really, not outside of our tiny little micro-area. I mean, we send out these scavenging parties. But not any farther than we have to. And maybe you see a little something, you come back, you’re locked up again inside. But—”

  Jen took up the story. “Some of our neighbors, the radio enthusiasts, picked up transmissions from other survivors, across the border in North Carolina. Just in the last few days.”

  “What kind of transmissions?” Homer asked.

  “Scary ones. Talking about big packs of the fast ones, swarming in from out of nowhere, and even more slow ones massing behind. It wasn’t clear what was happening. But it didn’t sound good. And then it all stopped. Just silence.”

  Roger took a breath. “A couple of our guys volunteered to take a patrol down into Norfolk, across the water. Ordinarily, no one goes down there anymore. But there’s a twenty-five-story building in the city, Dominion Tower. Tallest local thing. And getting up high…”

  “Gets you your best intel,” Homer said.

  “Right. Anyway. They got up there, radioed back – said there was a herd coming in. And it stretched as far as the eye could see. More than anybody had ever seen in one place. And it was coming in fast. Then they said they were going to haul ass back here. While they still could.”

  “And after that?”

  “Nothing. We haven’t heard a word from them. So we’ve just been staying inside, battening down the hatches. Staying quiet.”

  “Worrying,” Jen added. “A lot of that.”

  Sarah raised an eyebrow. “If the compound at Dam Neck is secure, why aren’t you there inside it? It’s got to be more defensible than this block, Ho
me Depot fencing aside.”

  Jen answered: “We’re not invited.”

  “And…” Roger looked to her again. “It’s not really safe to go poking around down there. Like I said, we don’t go across the water anymore. Scavenging parties… well, sometimes, they don’t come back.”

  Sarah opened her mouth to drill down on this, but Homer cut her off. “I’m sorry about the people you lost.”

  “The two guys in Norfolk?” Roger asked. “We don’t know they’re lost. Not yet.”

  “For everyone you’ve lost, then,” Homer said.

  “We were just talking about that,” Sarah said. “How eventually we all lose everyone.”

  Jen said, “Oh, we haven’t lost everyone. The ones still around us, here… well, they’re more precious now. And definitely closer. A lot closer than when it was just, you know, the homeowners association.” She and Roger smiled at each other. “Or keeping up with family and lifelong friends from thousands of miles away on Facebook. When everyone in your life was just a little text scrawl in a messaging app. It wasn’t good enough. We’re a gregarious species. We need people actually around us.”

  Homer nodded. He got that.

  Roger said, “They say that’s why soldiers miss war, isn’t it? Horrible as it is. Why even the survivors of natural disasters, or man-made ones like the siege of Sarajevo, miss that, too, later.”

  Homer nodded. But Sarah raised an eyebrow.

  “Because everyone banded together. They were forced to work together, for the good of the group, in order to survive.” He shrugged. “And working together is surely what we were made to do. Isn’t it?”

  Homer very definitely got that.

  “Hey, Rog, man. You guys awake?”

  An unfamiliar voice, accompanied by a quiet squelch, emerged from beneath a pile of old magazines on the coffee table. Roger pushed them away, revealing a handheld Motorola radio. Smiling apologetically, he said, “I should take this.”

  Homer nodded and stood. “We need to get going anyway. Thank you. Both.”

  Roger shook Homer’s hand, then Sarah’s, and brought the radio to his ear as he exited the room. “Hey, I’m here, Kev. Any word from Will and Josh…?”

  “Yeah, about that. We’re gonna need you to gear up an—”

  But then he was gone, the conversation out of earshot.

  “Take some brownies with you,” Jen said.

  Geronimo

  Homer slowed the truck to a roll at the foot of the bridge, which disappeared long and low ahead of them over the black water.

  “You sure about this?” Sarah asked.

  He paused, knowing that, even without night vision, she’d be able to see how perilously narrow the low span was. With only two lanes in each direction, divided by a tall concrete median, it had absolutely no emergency lane, never mind shoulder.

  It was also over four miles long.

  The James River Bridge was not the route Homer originally had in mind for crossing from the Virginia Peninsula over to the Virginia Beach area to the south. The interstate they’d been on, 64, crossed via the Hampton Roads Bridge–Tunnel, which Homer knew well. He just couldn’t know whether it would be clear now. As a backup, again out of familiarity, he’d planned on the Monitor–Merrimac Bridge–Tunnel, to the west of it.

  What he probably hadn’t given enough thought to was the tunnel part. Basically, both crossings were half bridge, half tunnel. And tunnels were not fantastic places to be in the ZA. They tended to be jammed not only with abandoned vehicles, but also with their former drivers and passengers, still stumbling around in the dark and confined quarters.

  Luckily, in the last conversation before they left, Jen had asked what route they intended to take.

  “Bad idea,” she replied when Homer told her. “Take the James River Bridge. Trust me on this one.”

  Homer realized his oversight. “The tunnels not a good idea?”

  “No, not remotely.”

  But he still had his doubts about the other route. “How do you know the bridge will be clear?”

  “Because we cleared it. Well, Roger and some of the other guys did. Just enough to drive over. It’s how they always crossed over. Back when we still went down there. Oh – stay on the southbound side. That’s the clear one.”

  Score another one for local knowledge, Homer thought.

  Now, looking across at Sarah, he answered her doubts. “It’ll either be clear, or it won’t be. And if it’s not, we’ll figure something else out. We adapt and overcome.”

  “Check,” she said.

  He got them rolling again.

  * * *

  Twenty-two minutes later, they were safely off the other side.

  It had been slow going, having to switch lanes repeatedly to get out of the obstructed one and into the clear one. But at no point had both lanes been blocked. And at no time did they see a single corpse – not an animated one, anyway.

  Now they were accelerating into a tidewater wilderness area, on another partitioned four-laner, but one with emergency lanes on both sides. And as they got some speed back up, after all the creeping left and right around abandoned cars and trucks, both began to relax again.

  “We’re good,” Homer said.

  “They were good,” Sarah answered.

  Homer smiled. He wasn’t going to bludgeon the point. But he appreciated her saying this. They both knew they might have gotten badly jammed up if they’d attempted the tunnel crossing Homer originally had in mind. But they’d been saved from that. So not only did they get the local knowledge he’d been hoping for. But, after the Airsoft marauders in Ohio…

  They’d perhaps even had their faith in humanity restored.

  * * *

  “Do soldiers really miss war?” Sarah asked.

  Having successfully crossed the James River to the mainland in the south, they still had twenty-some miles, a handful of additional bridges, and the urban areas of Norfolk and Chesapeake to negotiate. It was enough time for Sarah to get apprehensive. Now she was talking to relieve the anxiety.

  Homer glanced across at her in the dark. “I could personally do without it. And I’ve seen enough for one lifetime. But… yeah, many do.”

  “Tell me why.”

  Homer sighed. “Someone once said humans don’t mind hardship. In fact they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary.”

  Sarah sighed and absorbed this in silence. When she spoke, she said, “We’re still going to have to just rock up, aren’t we? When we get there.”

  “Yeah,” Homer said. “Pretty much. But I’ve got some ideas.”

  She looked across at him. “How do you think your old team survived for two years? You said you know they’re still alive. But after that last stop, I’m honestly wondering how.”

  Homer exhaled. “That one’s not a total mystery. The Annex, at Dam Neck, was actually designed to be largely self-sufficient. Including in the event of a collapse of civil society.”

  “For how long? How long did they plan for?”

  “Eighteen months, as I recall. Everything essential was already on site. Including an ocean of diesel for the generators.”

  “Man,” Sarah said. “I thought I was prepared. But my ‘year’ of supplies barely stretched nine months. Also, I’m guessing, with eighteen months of runway…”

  “Yeah,” Homer said. “They’ll have figured something else out by now. Also…” He trailed off.

  “Yeah?”

  “Trust me. You don’t know these guys.”

  Sarah hit him in the shoulder. “Is the location isolated?”

  “Yes and no. It sits on a fairly forgettable piece of beachfront, tucked out of sight of the strip malls of Virginia Beach. It’s private, but definitely not in the middle of nowhere. With the nearby population centers – Virginia Beach to the northeast, Norfolk and Chesapeake to the west – they’ll have had some challenges keeping the dead off them.”

  “Or keeping the living off them.” Homer didn’t answer
that, so Sarah switched gears. “You said three hundred operators live there in… the Annex?”

  “There were three hundred operational personnel – team guys, trident holders. But most of us had houses in the surrounding area. That’s why Roger knew who I was. People here were used to, basically, being part of the Naval Special Warfare community. They knew enough not to ask a lot of questions. But they could tell when a team guy walked into their bar or restaurant. And as often as not, we were in their backyards for their barbecues.”

  Sarah smiled faintly as the road spooled out in the dark.

  “But, as I also said, there were about fifteen hundred support personnel who worked onsite. And there was a lot of residential capacity inside, mostly occupied by younger operators, a few officers who weren’t going to be around long enough to buy property, and some of the support people – pilots, Seabees, bomb disposal guys, engineers, medical staff. Intel staff.”

  “I’m guessing it’s all incredibly secure.”

  “Definitely. Big perimeter wall, thousands of yards of barbed wire, concrete barricades. No real sight lines.”

  “And I’m further guessing that will have been beefed up.”

  “Probably. When I was last there, it was still a relatively new facility, costing over a hundred million dollars, all state of the art. But from the outside, or above, it just looked like a lot of big, nondescript, blocky buildings, along with shooting ranges and small boat docks on the water. On the other hand, there’s a thirty-foot-tall trident sculpture out front – made from a fragment of the World Trade Center.”

  “Nice.”

  “And that stands in front of a large black wall with the names of our fallen.”

  Sarah softened. “That must be quite a reminder.”

  “It is.” He cocked his head. “You had a dog, right? At your cabin? Who you lost?”

  “We did.”

  “You’ll appreciate this, then. If you stand with your back to the wall of the fallen, looking forward, ahead and to the right is another smaller wall – with the names of our fallen dogs. That’s where they always walked: ahead and to the right of us.”

  “I read you had a dog on the bin Laden mission.”

  Homer looked out of the corner of his eye at her, hesitating, like he didn’t want to be drawn on that one. But ultimately he couldn’t resist. “Cairo. He was a good dog. What you probably don’t know is he had almost been killed in combat before that. Got shot twice, once in the chest. Everyone thought he was a goner. But our medic that night… well, he just wouldn’t give up on him. Treated him like any other wounded SEAL. Cairo not only recovered, but came back to duty. That night, in Abbottabad, he wore the same blood-stained vest, with a bullet hole still in it.”