River of Night

by John Ringo

  Stantz lowered dark glasses over his eyes and opened the clear lucite box that covered the object of his affection.

  It was finally about to happen.

  He depressed the Big Red Button.

  The remaining lights all around the dam dimmed.

  CRACK. CRA-CRACK! CRA-CRACK!

  The report of the new weapon firing was a series of impossibly loud detonations that were spaced closely enough together to be perceived as God’s own novelty joy buzzer.

  If that joy buzzer was powered by the firing of an infinite number of overlapping Army howitzers.

  Blinding light illuminated the entire area as arcs of blue white electricity spanned the space between the top of the “smoke stack” and the metal ring. The eerily beautiful loops and whorls of pure energy flickered from infected to infected, seizing scores and then hundreds in a deadly embrace. Where the wrist-thick spark actually touched individual infected, the target instantly ignited, flashing aflame and then to charcoal in a moment. Occasionally, the tissues of the infected actually blew outwards, but more commonly the zombies suddenly froze for meters around each strike, their bodies first straining in the galvanic clutch of the coils and then falling in windrows, en masse.

  Time elapsed: two seconds.

  Stantz’s “smoke stack” was anything but.

  As a final backup to the now mostly quiescent line of Tesla coils, he had built a very, very large Marx generator. Using designs nearly a century old and consuming much of the stock of equipment intended to maintain the upper third of the Tennessee Valley Authority hydroelectric power plants, Stantz had constructed a powerful artificial lightning machine, dwarfing the output of the much smaller Tesla coils.

  Marx generators had been used for esoteric purposes before, such as testing pre-Fall passenger jetliners for lightning strike safety, or Mike Stantz’s personal favorite, testing the ignition sequence of a plutonium fueled bomb.

  But as Tom witnessed, the Marx generator was a peach when it came to large scale zombie disposal.

  Electricity from the dam’s five generators, each pushing nearly forty megawatts, powered multiple arrays of powerful industrial-sized capacitors set vertically into the side of what had in fact actually been a smokestack, charging them in parallel. Each time that Stantz depressed the firing button, a mechanical armature changed the circuit architecture. The capacitors in successive arrays were instantaneously aligned in serial, and discharged violently along a waveguide that led towards the top of the tower. The energy desperately sought a ground, and so the spark was attracted to the metal shuttlecock more than a hundred feet away. The spark appeared to last only a second but in that brief instant of time the waveguide discharged at twice the base frequency of the electricity that powered the entire array.

  Stantz had designed the array to operate at sixty Hertz so the spark struck the impact zone not sixty but one-hundred and twenty times per second.

  Delivering almost two hundred thousand joules per strike.

  Aiming was somewhat haphazard. The metal shuttle-cock attracted the hundred-foot-long spark, but the actual strikes lit the area around the target, stroboscopically outlining the zombie mob while the discharge lasted. The energy was bright enough to be visible in the still brilliant illumination of the Gleaner flares.

  “Now that’s worthy to be the weapon of Zeus…” Tom said, exhaling appreciatively. No one could’ve possibly heard him because the deafening thunder from towering Marx Generator absolutely blanketed all other sound, leaving everyone’s ears ringing despite the ear protection they all wore.

  “Absolutely beautiful.”

  As the entire first wave of infected dropped, the array automatically shut down, and began recharging the capacitors. The menacing bass hum again became audible, presaging the release of more power.

  Tom could hear Stantz carrying-on jubilantly, something about his machine being hungry, but he wasn’t sure.

  The surviving infected at the edge of the affected area stumbled on the bodies of the fallen, slowing their progress. A few saw the chance for an opportune snack, further slowing the progress of the wave front of infected.

  But in a few seconds, the pressure of thousands of zombies restarted the hungry flood.

  Fifteen seconds after the first shot, the “ready” light illuminated on the panel.

  Stantz slammed the button again without waiting for direction.

  Once again the glowing fist of God danced along the impact area. Everywhere it touched it created catastrophic burns and interrupted normal cardiac function. More zombies poured into the fire sack, only to be caught by the same arcs as their fellows. Less than two seconds later, the killing ground was still and smoking. The capacitors instantly began recharging and the angry hum of the god of lightning filled the almost deafening quiet.

  More than a thousand infected lay before them, perfectly still. Some were charred beyond recognition and others had massive, sizzling wounds where electricity had explosively exited from their bodies to ground, but most were still and unmarked.

  Dead.

  Looking at each other and the carnage, the defenders began to remove their hearing protection.

  “Hole-lee-shit,” Kaplan said, awed. His toothpick dangled from one lip. “I thought that I’d seen every way to kill a zombie, but this is just…”

  “Perfect,” Tom said, finishing the sentence. “Absolutely aces. Absolutely. Fucking. Aces.”

  More infected flooded onto the killing ground.

  The light next to the Big Red Button glowed again.

  “You’re gonna want to keep that ear pro in,” Stantz said, laughing exuberantly. Then he depressed the firing stud again.

  “YES!” he screamed again, overpowered by the thundering reports of his weapon.

  Tom couldn’t make out the rest of whatever it was that Stantz was yelling, but the normally taciturn engineer was certainly letting it all out. Tom could feel the harsh buzzing discharge of the Marx generator resonate through his very bones as he watched the powerful yet eerily beautiful man-made lightning dance across the killing ground, reaping an ashen harvest.

  Glorious.

  * * *

  “Okay, okay,” Brandy said with an aggrieved sigh. “So maybe that is pretty cool.”

  “Pretty cool?” Detkovic said. “Pretty cool?”

  “Okay, so it’s very cool,” Brandy said with another sigh. “But you have no clue how hard it was to build the damned thing in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Stantz used everything!”

  “Worth every bit,” Detkovic said, watching another zombie disintegrate into a charred pile of smoking meat. “Whoa! That’s gotta HURT!”

  USSTRATCOM

  Offutt Air Force Base

  Omaha, Nebraska

  The Hole

  “Whoa!” Airman Charles Barner said. “What the hell is that?”

  “What?” Master Sergeant John Doehler said, glancing up from a magazine that he hadn’t reread in at least a week.

  Prior to the Fall, the U.S. Strategic Command maintained a continuous watch, serving as a backup to the backup for American national level command and control facilities. Since it had been designed during the height of the Cold War, the facility was built deep underground in order to ride out a barrage of Soviet nukes which, mercifully, had never come. That location had earned it the sobriquet, “The Hole.” Despite the lack of a view or a nightlife, its air handling, filtration and overall security made it the home of the senior surviving representatives of the U.S. Government, insofar as it could be ascertained.

  Of course, those representatives were pretty far down the seniority list. The enlisted staff still standing their posts were even more so, which meant that although the Russians were mostly preoccupied with their own problems, it being a zombie apocalypse and so forth, someone had to watch the remaining satellite feeds.

  Those feeds had been pretty dull, unless your thing happened to be watching the tide of infected spread across the face of the planet, extinguish
ing civilization. Recent events in the Caribbean had begun to brighten the mood in The Hole.

  And now there was this, whatever this was.

  “One of the launch warning birds—SBIRS 7 Delta, Master Sergeant,” Barner replied, referring to what the U.S. military discreetly labeled “overhead assets.” “Older vehicle, was scheduled for de-orbit. Just pinged an anomaly in southeastern CONUS. Very high energy flux. The lat-long shows as…shows as Watts Bar Dam in Tennessee. I’ll route the optical feed to your station.”

  “What the hell is that?” Master Sergeant Doehler asked, unconsciously aping his subordinate. He studied the image and then pulled up a database of anomalous photonic signatures as he continued to observe. “That’s no launch plume. We don’t have missiles in Tennessee anyway. But that’s one hell of a lot of photons.”

  “So much for one point of light,” the airman said with a snicker.

  “We weren’t sure before, but I think we can definitely say that something in Watts Bar is operational,” Doehler said, making a note. “And damn that’s a lot of freaking photons. Call Commander Freeman.”

  * * *

  After the first three firings, Stantz had to pause for longer and longer intervals to allow enough infected into the killing ground. After a dozen shots, the infected crowding the fence were all dead and the thousands thronging the open area had begun to recoil from the brilliant discharge and overwhelming man-made thunder. The infected were predators, and hungry, aggressive hunters at that, but somewhere deep in their remaining predator reflexes lay the recognition of a greater, more terrifying killer. Slowly, increasingly alarmed by each firing of the terrible weapon, the zombies halted and began to retreat towards the apparent safety of the treeline.

  CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!

  A fresh line of dead fell or were consumed by the light.

  The terrifying god of day had awoken, and it was hungry.

  As the elated defenders watched, the zombies began to retreat even more rapidly.

  The pitch black night was safer, as long as it lasted.

  * * *

  The number of bodies was actually impeding the view of the killing ground in some places. They mounded as high as the fence in a few spots.

  The shuttlecock had been blocked by corpses more than once, but the concentrated discharge of the Marx generator had actually burned and disintegrated the bodies to the point where the aiming system could traverse freely once more.

  “Brilliant!” Tom clapped Stantz on the shoulder, repeating himself. “Absolutely fucking aces!”

  “Well, that was certainly—” Kaplan said, blinking beneath the dark glasses which he had belatedly donned. “—very bright and very, very loud.”

  He handed back the beer to Stantz before cocking his head sideways and again plucking out his safety orange foam ear plug.

  “Hey, anyone else hear that?”

  CHAPTER 19

  “That’s unexpected,” Loki said musingly, watching the tremendous lightshow across the river. Even at this distance, the intensity of the electricity coming from the “smokestack” was too bright to observe directly. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear the afterimages that impaired his vision. It was akin to staring at a welding arc and probably about as good for you.

  “Don’t look directly at it!” he yelled. “Pass it along! Don’t look directly at the light!”

  Once he could hear the order being passed along, he stuck a finger in one ear and called Green on radio.

  “Governor, it’s Loki, did you see that?” he transmitted.

  There was a pause, lasting about as long as it would take to stop walking and operate a walkie-talkie.

  “Mr. Loki, I think the entire country saw that,” Green answered, asperity plain in his tone. “What’s making that light?”

  “Smith has some kind of super lightning weapon built into the smokestack at the dam,” Loki said, wincing as yet another shot of lightning snarled into the ground near the target. “It’s killing zombies by the hundreds, but the regular lights are out.”

  “Ah!” Green exclaimed. “They don’t have enough power to do two things at once. Push all the way across the bridge immediately. We’re going to initiate our flanking movement now.”

  “Got that, sir,” Loki answered, waving at his people to get their attention. “We’re starting now.”

  He lowered the radio and switched channels before making a second call.

  “All groups maximum advance. Roll the trucks. Shoot anyone with a gun, then anyone at all and if you can’t see anyone, lay into the blockhouse and fighting positions. Nobody stops!”

  Shots began to crack out along his front. He tapped the shoulder of the designated marksman lying down next to him, who was still looking though his scope.

  “That means you, dumbass.”

  * * *

  “It’s starting to get pretty hot,” Kaplan said over the radio. “I think that they’re starting the push in earnest now.”

  “I can see that,” Tom replied, watching from inside the blockhouse. “Pass the word. Keep returning fire, but nothing heavy till they reach the midpoint. The point is to keep their heads down and concentrated on us and deny them a chance to move across the dam quickly.”

  Rounds snapped overhead with ugly, distinctive cracking sounds. After the sounds of the Marx generator, they weren’t too intimidating. That itself could be a problem. A single bullet in the right place was every bit as fatal as a few thousand megawatts.

  “Got it,” Kaplan said, and then stopped, listening to the volume of enemy fire increase steadily. “It’s picking up, gonna get worse before it gets better.”

  “Good,” Tom said. “That means they’re following the plan. Let’s allow them to feel confident. I’m heading back to the reserve.”

  * * *

  “Keep up the fire,” Loki said, patting one of the shooters on the back. “Keep them pinned down.”

  They were about a quarter of the way across the dam top. Besides the equipment boxes, railings, stairways, portable cranes and other equipment, the walkway was interrupted by regular zombie barriers including a mix of barbed and chain-link fencing. Teams had to slowly nibble their way through that. The absence of lights was reassuring, but inexplicable, now that the big lightning machine had quit. Even better, the machine gun fire had mostly stopped as well.

  Of course, the defenders’ marksmanship was still pretty dangerous.

  “Mr. Loki, we just lost another man!” came the cry from ahead.

  “Keep moving or you’re gonna lose some more!” Loki shouted back. The casualties were making the group wary. Retreat wasn’t an option anymore, and he needed the bullet sponges to keep leapfrogging up. He and the few picked men had probably killed more of the defenders than the rest of the idiots combined.

  But they were doing what Green wanted. Being a really, really good distraction.

  His radio clicked twice. He barely caught it over the fire; it might not have been the first time. A glance at the channel told him who it was, but he acknowledged then keyed the radio again.

  “Dragon,” he growled, bottling his irritation. “Where are you? Roll the vehicles all the way across, now!”

  “Dragon’s rolling the tank,” the Gleaner replied.

  Finally! What had that unreliable Triad jackass been doing all this time?

  The radio clicked again then was silent.

  Above them, on the causeway, Loki could hear the snarl of diesel engines revving.

  After this fight, he’d have to have a little meeting with Dragon.

  * * *

  Green took a knee in the gravel of the short, curved beach, while a couple of underlings pulled the motley collection of aluminum skiffs all the way out of the water. The thick brush of the northern peninsula screened his perimeter while he considered the situation. The entire group of camouflage-clad, face-painted, Gleaner “special operators” could hear the crackle of fire from the embattled dam defenses. The brilliant, overwhelming loud lightshow had end
ed and the lights on the dam were still out. The Gleaners were about to decisively engage the defenders from the rear end and roll this engagement up.

  It was perfect.

  Which bothered Harlan Green. Loki’s radio calls, audible over an earbud, were calm and indicated things were going more or less as planned. His landing and sneak to this point had been straightforward, almost routine. The defenders were preoccupied with the mob of infected that he’d baited into the area. His group remained undetected and Green hadn’t even seen zombie one, or even deer, on the approach.

  The entire peninsula was silent, empty and appeared entirely undefended. There was even an old, overgrown access road that made for a convenient path.

  Other than the intermittent rainfall, it was just too damned easy. Smith was, supposedly, some kind of military expert. There was no way a professional would leave this area entirely uncovered.

  And with all the light, zombies should be waking up and moving all over. There weren’t any. They’d run across a few old skeletons but no fresh kills.

  Something was badly wrong. If there had been any way to hit the pause button, he would’ve retreated and reconsidered. But with the main force so totally committed, it would be organizational suicide. It was win or die at this point.

  “One of those fucking coil things,” Freddo said, whispering and pointing.

  “As I said,” Green said, using the reflected light from the dam lights to spot the shiny Tesla coil, “use your normal voice, pitched low, if you please. It carries less far than a whisper. And, yes, good eye. But we’re out of range.”

  “You’re sure, sir?” Freddo said nervously. The entire group had heard the lurid story of Khorbish’s death.

  “Positive,” Green said, holding out his hand to hold the Gleaner in place. “We’ll move that way,” he added, pointing down the road. “You’ve shown considerable improvement since the unfortunate incident in Virginia, Freddo. You can take point.”