by Lund, Dave
He took another deep breath and stuck his head closer to the open window, hoping the rushing air would help wake him up enough to focus. Bexar turned onto the driveway and stopped. A gate blocked entry onto the abandoned air base, chains with locks wrapping through the pipe gate and post.
“I’ll be right back,” Bexar said over his shoulder as he climbed out of the FJ. Inspecting the gate, chain, and padlocks, Bexar tried to think through a solution. He didn’t have a shotgun any longer, so the easy breach of the locks wasn’t an option. The cattle gate was attached to the fence post via two hinges. It took a moment, but Bexar had an epiphany. Smiling slightly, Bexar lifted up on the gate next to the post and the gate slid off the hinges; either on purpose or by accident, the gate hadn’t been installed correctly. Bexar pushed the gate to the side, still being held on by the chains and locks, drove the FJ through, climbed back out, and put the gate back on the hinges. They didn’t need anyone else, dead or alive, meandering into the inside of the fence line if they could help it.
After a short drive along a dirt driveway, the tires of the FJ found the concrete of the expansive runways and taxiways. Bexar drove toward the remains of the large hangar. Chivo’s directions were based on starting from that hangar to find the right place to enter. Traveling directly south from the hangar along what used to be the aircraft ramp, a non-descript concrete building stood. Following the instructions, Bexar found the access panel, entered the ridiculously long code, and waited. The entire building began to rise slowly with a deep hydraulic hiss. A lit entryway appeared with painted concrete floors and a ramp that would take them underground. Bexar tried to not act surprised, but Jessie knew he was. His eyebrows arched, Bexar looked like a bearded little boy on Christmas morning. A few moments later, they were driving down the ramp, pausing only to push the button that closed the entrance behind them before driving across the cavernous room, stopping next to the large blast door. Military vehicles sat in the shadows parked along the sides of the passageway. This was like a scene out of a bad sci-fi movie; Bexar was mostly sure that there was a guy with two talking robots making funny comments about them while watching on the movie screen.
Outside of Las Vegas
It was a zero day, like long distance hikers would do occasionally; this was going to be a zero-mile day. They were making terrible time to get to where they wanted to go, but the other days were out of their control; this one was their choice. Besides, the truck stop had things they needed and it was convenient to stay put while taking care of personal needs, fueling their big new MRAP, and taking some time to try to shed some of the stress they’ve been enduring. That was the problem with the end of the world that it seemed all the movies and books Jason had watched and read hadn’t discussed: it was exhausting and the stress was incredible. There really wasn’t any real downtime where someone could really let their guard down and just let the reality around them evaporate.
Erin made a sleeping area using some of the random stuff for sale in the truck stop: cheap Mexican-style blankets, that were made in China ironically, travel pillows, and other things; pretty much all the stuff that others hadn’t looted already. However, up and awake, Jason went through the doors into the parking lot to observe what was around them and to take a leak. Toward the highway and coming from the direction of Las Vegas was an ominous low black cloud, churning and growing.
“Erin!” Jason yelled as he turned to go back into the Love’s. “Errrriiin!”
Erin appeared in her panties and T-shirt. “Damn, Jason, what?”
Jason didn’t say anything; he took Erin’s hand, led her outside, and pointed toward the cloud.
“Fuuuuuck.”
Erin stared at the cloud for a moment before turning to go back into the store. “Don’t just stand there looking sexy. Get your ass in here and help me gather gear. We’ve got to get the fuck out of here.”
Their zero day was no longer and they had some choices to decide on in the next few minutes.
“We’re set back off the highway, so we might be OK.”
Erin shook her head at Jason for that one. “No, we won’t. If there are enough to have a cloud of flies, they will spread out and flatten this fucking place. No, we’ve got to bug out. The question is either the direction we were going or we take a perpendicular route away from this danger.”
Jason rolled up their new blankets; cheap as they were, they were more blanket than they had, which was none. The pillows too. Erin took some plastic bags from behind the counter and began gathering all the things they should have gathered the previous night and put in their truck. She made a mental note about that. If they were going to live very long, they couldn’t make stupid mistakes like that. She had become soft with the easy living at Groom Lake.
Twenty minutes later, they were in the MRAP, Erin now wearing pants, and they discussed their options while the truck warmed up a bit. The cloud was getting closer, and so were the Zeds.
They decided to push on ahead of the approaching herd, trusting that they would turn off the highway soon and get clear. They really didn’t want to go well out of their way when there was always the chance to run into another herd of Zeds.
Driving toward the parking lot exit, Jason slammed on the brakes, the heavy truck rocking and the air brakes hissing in protest.
“What’s up,” Erin asked. Jason pointed toward the highway and left.
“Fucking Chinese.”
Stopped on the highway was one of the four-wheeled APCs that they had seen being used previously. Jason slowly backed the MRAP away from the highway. There was a man sticking out of the top hatch of the APC, but he was looking the wrong way. After backing out of view, Erin crawled into the back of the MRAP and retrieved her big rifle.
“Come on, lover, we need to check this out.”
SSC
Breakfast was a simple affair; it had to be because there didn’t seem to be an easy way to make a hot breakfast for only three people. Three hundred? Yes, easy to do. Three? Not easy to do unless you want to waste a lot of food. Industrial-grade commercial kitchens are purpose-built for the crowds, not family-sized meals.
“Next time I venture out, I need to try to find a camp stove, like a Coleman that burns gasoline as well as the special fuel, and maybe a couple of small pans. Then we can make a hot breakfast.”
Jacob didn’t notice; he was too busy eating his third helping of oatmeal and spacing out as only boys know how to do.
“Sure, but this is simply fantastic. For the first time in months, we are in a safe shelter that is well stocked and has modern amenities that actually still work. I’ll give it five stars on Yelp,” Eric laughed while saying.
Amanda smiled. Her life had been much too serious for far too long and it felt wonderful to have some humor and levity.
After another half hour of humorous banter, Jacob was finally full for the moment, so Eric and Amanda began the grand tour of the facility, as far as she understood it.
“You’ve already seen some of the highlights, such as the hot showers and you have new clothes from the storeroom, but through this door are the tunnels. This facility was originally a large public project to build the superconducting super collider, but in reality, the entire public project was a cover to build this facility. Anyways, the large tunnel still exists and it houses a bunch of equipment and vehicles.”
Lights clicked on in sequence down the cavernous tunnel, flickering on one by one, slowly illuminating the dark void with hard shadows and flickering light like an old gymnasium. Eric let out a low whistle.
“Wow. Do these all work? You could go rescue people or bug out or build whatever you needed. I mean, I always suspected these sorts of places existed, but wow, unbelievable.”
“This place is unbelievable. It was the best money could buy and now it is just about all that is left. There used to be a lot more facilities like this, this one and the one in Groom La
ke—you know, Area 51—are the only two that are left. Others like the one in Denver were destroyed or overrun.”
“If they’re overrun, then it would be possible to go take them back.”
“Um, yeah, I hadn’t thought about it like that, but it could be. It would be dangerous.”
“Sure, so is living, but…what did you call the biters?”
“Zeds.”
“OK, but with the Zeds, everything is dangerous. At least clearing out another facility like this would open up an opportunity for hundreds of others to have a chance at surviving.”
“We’ve offered for survivors to come find safety at Groom Lake, and the response has been good, but there are a lot of others who want to stay put and survive on their own.”
“So what? They’ll want to survive on their own until something bad happens. Once something bad happens, then they will want to have a safe place like this one to escape to.”
“That’s a good point.”
“You said Groom Lake. Have you not offered…what are you calling this place?”
“The SSC.”
“You’ve not offered the SSC to other survivors?”
“No, well no not until yesterday, and that’s a long story involving what we thought was a government official turned double agent for the Koreans and Chinese was basically holding this facility hostage, keeping it a secret. He’s being taken care of and is gone, so we can open things up. The problem is that I need help; I can’t do it by myself. Also, there may be people who want to come from Groom Lake to here and need help getting here.”
Eric took a long pause before answering.
“Those people aren’t your immediate concern; they’re safe or at least safer than a bunch of other people who are hacking it out of the wilds instead of sitting safely behind the walls at Fort Apache. Wait. That means that the enemy knows all the secrets about this place!”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Shit.”
“Exactly. That’s why I was building up the earth-works up top, to give us fighting positions. Groom Lake was attacked by some sort of Chinese and Korean special forces-type of team and it nearly was lost. There are a few Marines there and some really brave survivors who helped beat back the attack.”
“We need people, as in hundreds of people, who can fight—people who know how to fight. We appear to have the equipment and arms, now it just takes bodies and trigger pullers.”
Amanda’s eyebrows arched. “What sort of background do you have?”
“Eclectic, but I deployed twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan.”
“That is simply marvelous. Thank you for your prior service, but your president needs you again.”
Groom Lake
“Contact rear!”
Rifle fire erupted while the squad rapidly moved to counter the ambush. The heavy sound of the SAW gunner unleashing controlled bursts of withering automatic fire momentarily droned out the slower sound of the M4s being fired rapidly, but not on burst.
Happy slapped the man lying behind the SAW on the shoulder, the man immediately ceasing firing. Happy yelled over the continued rifle fire from the rest of the squad. “Gunner is hit! Break contact and recover the causality!”
Two of the others, a man and a woman, low-crawled to the gunner’s position who lay slumped over his smoking automatic weapon. The man grabbed the causality and rolled him to his back while the other’s rifle fire had increased in tempo and volume, some of the lead elements releasing semi-controlled burst shots.
“No pulse! He is dead!”
The man drew his right hand, placed the tip of his finger on the gunner’s forehead, and mimed shooting him. The woman had already taken position behind the SAW and unleashed another controlled burst of heavy automatic fire, brass casings ejecting to the ground around them, hot to the touch. After “killing” the gunner and preventing him from becoming a Zed, the man yelled to break contact. The woman operating the SAW unleashed a heavy burst of fire, the can of linked ammunition running low. As the last lead element ran past, rifle fire erupted behind her, but offset. The woman leapt to her feet, the heavy M249 SAW in her hands, her M4 hanging by the sling across her chest. She heaved the weapon and sprinted toward the rear and away from the ambush. Heavy rifle fire covered her retreat as she ran, just like she had done for the others.
“CEASE FIRE, SAFE WEAPONS!” Happy yelled. The gunfire stopped. Even with the earplugs in, everyone’s ears were ringing from the simulated firefight.
“Good job, but you guys were way too fucking slow getting that fucking SAW back into the fight. In a real firefight, you’re going to need that weapon fucking up the enemy and stacking bodies to give you a chance to bug the fuck out. A long break in fire like that and the fucking PLA will destroy you and overrun your fucking position.”
Happy smiled. The training was intense, more intense than most of these civilians had ever experienced, but they were getting better and the next time the PLA came knocking, they weren’t going to like it. Happy was also a more intense person than most of the survivors had encountered in their previous lives. He looked up and longed for some air cover. If they could feed 9-lines to some fast movers, then the PLA wouldn’t stand a chance, but for all the longing in the world, they would probably never have any sort of air support ever again. Even if they found pilots, even if they found aircraft, even if they found arms, there just isn’t any way there were enough people left to maintain and fly complex war machines any longer. The crazy flying guy with the dog would get destroyed by enemy fire trying to do anything; it wasn’t even worth asking. They were thrust back into the man-on-man fighting that killed so many in the First World War.
The squad of civilians looked exhausted, and with good reason. They had been training for most of the morning. “Get those fucking weapons clean, then you can get clean and grab some chow. Fucking tell D-Squad their ass is on deck for this afternoon.”
Sure, they looked exhausted, but they also looked wired and happy, excited for successfully, if not sloppily, executing the training plan.
Outside of Las Vegas
Erin’s breathing was slow, deliberate, and steady, her big rifle pulled into her shoulder, her body rigid, but relaxed lying behind the rifle’s optic, her finger carefully indexed along the side of the weapon, safety on. Either through good luck or bad, the convoy had stopped on the highway only a couple hundred yards past their exit and past the truck stop.
Jason was near her, eyeing the scene through his spotting scope. Normally, they would be concerned with rear security, especially with random Zeds shambling up the highway, but they were on the roof of the truck stop, using the business facade as a sniper blind. The Zed stragglers had apparently followed the small convoy of four APCs. This group did not have a radar truck. Erin thought that they were a scouting element; so far, they had seen 23 soldiers, one of whom appeared to be a woman. She also appeared to be in charge.
“What do you want to do, babe?”
Jason took a moment to think before he responded. “We wait and watch. It wouldn’t be smart to engage such a large number of them compared to us and the rifle fire would attract even more Zeds. So we wait. If they come up here, then we engage and run away; otherwise, we watch.”
“I think they might be scouting routes for the larger force we saw a few days ago.”
Jason nodded slightly, not that it was very noticeable; he was still peering through the spotting scope and Erin was still surveying the scene through the powerful optic on her rifle. They continued watching in silence. Jason was fascinated with the dynamics of the people below, trying to decipher what they were doing, what they were saying, even though if they could actually hear them neither he nor Erin would be able to understand what they were saying. This wasn’t a bad action movie where the bad guys spoke English with an accent.
This felt more serious to Jason than deal
ing with the Zeds did. He wasn’t sure if that was because he was used to the Zeds now or understood how to work around them unless they swarmed or if it really was more dangerous so it was more serious. It didn’t matter. Jason shook his head to clear it. Dead was dead regardless of how someone got there. He had to focus and pay attention; the last thing they needed was to be surprised by the PLA.
“One of them is pointing toward us,” Erin whispered.
Jason sat perfectly still, trying to will himself to melt into the roof of the truck stop. The man wasn’t in view of his spotting scope, but Jason didn’t dare move to adjust his view.
“He’s looking at us through binoculars—fuck!”
Erin fired her rifle; Jason moved his scope in time to see the man crumpled to the ground, his head intact.
“You hit him center mass, not in the head.”
“I meant to,” Erin yelled as she shifted and fired again.
The scene below erupted into pandemonium. The other PLA apparently weren’t completely sure where the sniper shot had come from, the sound of the rifle’s report echoing across the desert. By the third shot, they knew and were trying to return fire. Erin fired rapidly, emptying the rifle’s magazine quickly. Every single shot, every single man she killed was with a massive .50-caliber round to the chest instead of the head. Jason shimmed down the ladder at the back of the store—thankfully, the side opposite of the gun battle—and dropped onto the roof of the MRAP. After climbing through the gunner’s hatch in the roof, Jason retrieved two loaded magazines for Erin’s file and a pouch of loose ammo. Moments later, he was back on the roof and Erin had a fresh magazine in her big rifle. The gun battle had paused while the PLA tried to figure out if they had the right spot for the sniper or if they had killed him. Luckily for Erin, they hadn’t hit her; unlucky for them, she was pissed and now once again had a loaded rifle. Silent with steady breathing, Erin made minor adjustments to her position and waited. A head popped out from behind one of the APCs, and it evaporated into a red mist moments later, eviscerated by the big round ripping through it. Blood sprayed in an arc out of the ruined neck of the nearly headless man as he fell to the highway.