CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3

by Matthew Mather

  “I don’t like this,” he said.

  “Me either.” I tried to smile. “I’ll see you soon.”

  He scrunched up his face and threw his arms around me. I hugged him back, then hugged Olivia, who was crying too.

  “I’ll keep them safe,” Lauren said, her submachine gun slung over one shoulder.

  Only one and a half magazines left for it. There was a collection of other weapons and ammunition just inside the door.

  “I know.” I stood to embrace her, took a moment to press my face into her neck.

  “We need to go.” Chuck pulled on my arm gently.

  I had just watched him say goodbye to Susie. We had moved her over here and into the basement, with about forty other townsfolk and kids. Half of the residents didn’t want anything to do with us and stayed in their own houses. I couldn’t blame them. We told them to get under the stairs, find what weapons they could, and stay hidden.

  Bonham and Ellarose were downstairs now too. Ellarose hadn’t wanted to let go of Chuck, but he had explained that he couldn’t ask these people to do something he wasn’t willing to do himself. She hadn’t understood, or didn’t want to.

  We had to go anyway.

  My wife squeezed me tight. “Get going,” she whispered.

  I nodded, released her, and looked into her green eyes. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” She took Luke’s shoulder and nudged him backward. “Come on, guys, we need to get you inside.”

  I took one last look, and then turned into the darkness.

  “Careful, that last step’s a big one,” Chuck said.

  When they’d raised the church to put in the storm shelter, they hadn’t quite gotten the levels right. I hopped onto the walkway and joined him. I tried to think of something clever or funny to say, but my mood wasn’t up to it.

  Travis’s dirt bike was parked by the curb. I swung my leg over the seat and waited for Chuck to get settled behind me.

  “You all set?”

  “That was a good speech in the farmhouse, Mitchell,” Chuck said. “You have a bright future as a speechwriter in DC, if I had to wager.”

  “You trying to be funny?”

  “Does the p—”

  “Don’t answer that.”

  I pulled on my helmet, kicked down the starter, revved the throttle, and then looked up into the brightening sky.

  Chuck was still on the curb beside me.

  “What? Get on. We gotta get over there.”

  “If either of us don’t get out of this—”

  “Stop that.”

  “I’m serious.” Chuck said, and he rarely was.

  I looked at him from my seated position and revved the throttle once more.

  “I love you, brother,” he said. “Been a full-on bromance since the day I saw your face across the hall from my apartment in New York.”

  “Didn’t you accuse me of stealing your newspaper?”

  The noise of the generators near deafening. Thirty-four of them roared and whined in the confines of the barn. The doors of the truck were open, its panels pulled apart, cables snaking in and out like umbilical cords stretching up into the rafters, wires of all colors webbed across the cathedral ceiling of the barn.

  Travis saw Chuck and me come in the door and extricated himself from the passenger side of the truck. “Selena is a beautiful piece of equipment. Next-gen stuff. Can’t wait to see her progeny out on the battlefield.”

  “Probably not with tan crocodile leather seats,” Chuck said.

  Travis glanced back. “Is that croco—”

  “He’s kidding.” I slapped the top of the passenger compartment.

  Damon was in the driver’s seat and had his nose in a laptop. Not just one laptop, but four connected together around him. Paulina was in the seat behind him, wiring another laptop up as Damon explained what needed to be done. Since we’d arrived, the two of them had been inseparable.

  The three of them, really. Damon and Travis, the tech duo, and Paulina, the tech backup with a semiautomatic slung over one shoulder.

  “We’re getting enough raw power out to do some of our own radio jamming,” Travis explained. “Selena is listening to their chatter out there. FHSS—frequency-hopping spread spectrum, and DSSS—direct-sequence spread spectrum. Before the shooting starts, it’s always a war of the air waves.”

  They had ripped the truck apart and scavenged it for parts.

  “You think they’re coming in?” I said.

  “The signal bursts we can decipher are getting closer. Sun will be up in an hour. They need to be out of here and finish what they need to do before clear daylight. Our own military has gotta be watching every inch of the continental US by now. Whatever is about to go down will definitely get the attention of our Homeland Security and military.”

  “Then shouldn’t we just wait?” I said. “Set off a bomb? Wait for the good guys?”

  Again, this plan came down to me. Again, it had been me, in the middle of the night, convincing everyone else to trust me. No matter how many times it happened, and how each time I swore I wouldn’t do it again, there I was. Do you trust me? Great.

  In the light of day, my nerves always got the better of me. Leaving my family behind. It felt like going up in a plane to go skydiving, but then when you get to that open door with the ground thousands of feet below, it suddenly seems like insanity. The other times I’d done this, it was mostly just me that was put in harm’s way. Today, a lot of people might die, one way or the other.

  “Our attackers are monitoring any radio chatter,” Travis explained. “If they’d gotten wind that any US military or support was coming this way, they would have moved in by now. We have a good plan, Mr. Mitchell.”

  That was right. It wasn’t just my plan.

  Travis had been the one to come up with the actual order of events for the fight. Then again, hadn’t Travis just explained to me the day before that any battle plan went out the window the second the fight started? My stomach knotted into a pretzel that made me feel like I needed to pee and vomit at the same time.

  “We have some surprises for them,” Damon said as he got out of the truck. “We got stuff coming they won’t see.”

  “We stick to the plan, Mitchell,” Archer said. He was cutting out the last panel from the truck. “Mumford, you’re with me.”

  Chuck said, “Are you kidding? I’m going out with Ken.”

  “You got that bum left arm. I’m the best babysitter. Your wife made me promise.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Archer smiled and said, “Does the pope p—”

  “Don’t even do that.”

  The two of them began organizing gear, ammunition belts and guns and grenades that had been rounded up from the basements and gun vaults and shops around town. They strapped on chest plates and ballistic vests. I heard Chuck say to Archer, aren’t grenades illegal? They both laughed and began stuffing them into their pockets.

  The senator was waiting for me. He had finally changed his shirt and suit and now had on jeans and a sweater with a tuque over his normally finely coiffed hair. A sidearm in a leather holster hung at his side.

  “You’re not getting a weapon?” Leo asked.

  “Of course he is.” Chuck strapped a holster around my shoulder and waist. “Nine-millimeter Glock, I loaded it with hollow points myself. Good enough for the Marines, good enough for Mike Mitchell.”

  “Safety?” I said.

  “Technically, it’s got three. Trigger, firing pin, and drop—but as far as you’re concerned, just get it out and pull the trigger. No safety. Hollow points for stopping-power at short distances. Fifteen rounds.” He slipped two grenades into the front pocket of my hoodie. “For good luck.”

  “I don’t know how t—”

  “You don’t watch movies?” He got one out of his pocket to illustrate. “Pull the pin out, but keep hold of the spoon. Once you let go, a couple of seconds and boom. Easy as apple pie. Exploding apple pie, bu
t you get me. Make sure you get them at least fifty feet away from you, or find some cover.”

  “Signals are getting louder,” Damon yelled from inside the truck.

  “We gotta move.” Archer grabbed Chuck’s shoulder.

  My friend gave me one last smile, mouthed, love you buddy, and then joined the special ops soldier.

  “Okay, Leo,” I said to the senator, “let’s go get ready.”

  Ours was a special mission.

  We were the football.

  Chapter 38

  CHUCK SAID, “YOU stink, you know that?”

  “You don’t smell like roses either, Mumford,” Archer replied.

  Chuck tried to keep step with the big lunk of meat behind him. It was like playing that game where you stepped on someone else’s feet when they were dancing. No, not that. Like the potato sack game where you both needed to jump at the same time. Their legs were lashed together, their backs to each other. He felt like he was dancing with a two-hundred-fifty-pound hippo linebacker.

  Step by step, they edged farther out into the cornfield, taking as much care as possible not to disturb the stalks and flattened corn underfoot. They needed to be as quiet as possible.

  To the east, the rising sun, still obscured, lit up the craggy tops of the Virginian Appalachians in a blue-white line. To the west, the sky was purple and littered with dots of clouds. The air smelled of corn husks and dust, with an undertone of the burnt forests that rose into the foothills across the road a hundred yards away.

  To the north, the field sloped away to the Ohio River. A single road cut along the edge of the river, passing beside the farm and into the town of Vanceburg. The farmhouse, painted white, seemed to glow in the dim light. The steeple of the church just visible over the oaks farther down the road. It was quiet. No birds chirping at the sunrise. Silence.

  “This doesn’t feel right,” Chuck said.

  He felt exposed. There was zero cover. All of the crops flattened when they ran over them with the corn heads the week before. Chuck and Archer stood straight up, erect, in the middle of the open field.

  Except they weren’t quite visible.

  He hoped.

  Travis and Damon had cut away Selena’s skin. The metamaterial coating was paper thin, and it didn’t care what it was being wrapped around. The material bent light around it, so they took a strip of it just high enough to cover two people and bent it into a cylinder. The effect was nowhere near perfect, but it deflected infrared and heat signatures, and in the dim light, nobody would notice them—probably.

  Archer said, “Keep moving. We need to get as far from the barn as we can. Make sure you don’t step on any lumps.”

  “Lumps?”

  “Anyone hiding under the corn.”

  “I know. I’m trying, but—”

  “Keep quiet,” Archer whispered.

  “I talk when I’m nervous.”

  “Look,” Archer said.

  Fifty feet toward the forest, to Chuck’s right and Archer’s left, a sheaf of gray corn husks shifted in the dim light. Rose up a few feet, moved ten feet forward, and dropped again.

  Archer pointed but remained quiet. Chuck nodded.

  The first sign of their attackers. Travis has been right. The young soldier had designed much of the battle plan together with Archer.

  Draw them in. Pick them off.

  Chuck and Archer remained motionless as the lump of corn husks advanced past them. More were visible now they knew what to look for. Chuck counted seven or eight slowly crossing the field.

  A low whine in the distance.

  Two and then three large drones appeared, quadcopter types. They came in low from the burnt forests to the east. The drooping muzzles of their flamethrowers were visible beneath. They glided over the road in, then across the cornfield toward the barn.

  Chuck figured their plan was to light up the barn and farmhouse, maybe even the church, and then pick off people as they tried to escape the flames. He watched as the flamethrower drones approached the barn.

  “Just a little closer,” Chuck whispered under his breath.

  Four hollow thuds, then four more. From the top of the barn, a flickering appeared against the purple sky. One of the flamethrower drones stopped near the edge of the structure and spat out an orange lick of flames. It took a split second for the roar of it to reach Chuck, about the same time as the net launched from the top of the structure sailed down and snared the drone.

  It crashed to the ground, still spurting flames, and ignited into a fireball.

  The next drone became ensnared but was only partly caught and stayed airborne. It veered to the right into a copse of birch trees. The third drone accelerated away to the left, out of the way of a net that landed harmlessly in the dirt.

  The lump of corn husk closest to Chuck broke cover. Chuck made out a tattoo on the man’s neck. A rose. Susie said the guy who came to the house had a rose tattoo.

  Chuck’s whole life, he had imagined a moment where it might come down to him defending his family and his country against invaders. Did he have it in him? He took a deep breath. The moment of truth had arrived.

  Archer said, “Get free and target at will.”

  Chuck knelt, cut the cords that connected him and Archer, then put the blade away. He used his left hand to prop up the submachine gun in his right, lowered the muzzle through a crack in the metamaterial sheath around them.

  A sizzling roar erupted. A bright flash sliced down through the purple sky.

  The barn exploded in a heaving gob of blazing orange, a billowing sheet of flames blowing out the base of the structure. The glowing conflagration expanded, shredding the timber in an expanding, glowing ball. The shockwave knocked Chuck backward, the heat and fury blistering and ripping away the paper-thin metamaterial sheath around him.

  Chapter 39

  “WHERE DID YOU come from?” Lauren muttered.

  The ghostly green outline of a human form edged along a wall in the inky shadow to the west of the small house across the street. That side was where the Ohio River began, not forty feet from the edge of the main street.

  How did this attacker get into position? Lauren hadn’t seen anyone come along the road from the east or west.

  The sky was coloring, but still black as tar beneath the trees and houses across from the church. She had on night vision goggles scavenged from the gun store in town. The church had been raised so that the new storm shelter could be poured in cement beneath it, but they’d miscalculated a bit and left an edge of cement. She lodged herself under the front balcony, protected by the lip of concrete.

  The man edging through the shadows paused and looked her way. They must have come up through the water. Didn’t matter.

  Lauren sighted along her scope.

  Took aim.

  She jolted down. Released the trigger without firing. Stuttering incoming gunfire erupted to her right. Chips of wood splintered from the balcony above her.

  A strange loping creature bounded into view.

  Lauren took a second to process what she was looking at. It had to be one of the dog-bots that Susie encountered at the cabin. A gun mounted on its top unleashed a fiery torrent of rounds at the church.

  Lauren ducked again. Shrapnel sprayed.

  The dog-bot bounded down the middle of the street and swiveled to unleash another burst.

  “Now, do it now!” Lauren yelled.

  A tennis-net-like web jerked up across its path, the wires supporting the net sagging from trees to either side. The dog-bot skidded and slid but became ensnared. The wires dropped. The machine flailed, hopelessly entangled, and fell to its side.

  Another of the gun-wielding dog-bots came down the road from the other side, but held back and fired from a distance. An explosion lit up the twilight sky to Lauren’s right; the blast hot on her cheek an instant before the shockwave blew her hair back. A firestorm roiled into the sky from behind the farmhouse, shattered beams of the barn cartwheeling in slow motion.


  Lauren gasped, “Oh, no.”

  A white-hot needle appeared in the purple sky as another missile flashed toward the ground.

  The searing fireball engulfing the barn burned Chuck’s face and hands. He staggered back; mouth agape as he watched the splintering remains churn into the air.

  Chuck was stunned, but Archer sprang forward. The man used the shattering detonation to begin methodically scanning and targeting the attackers that had moved past them. In a low crouch, he stepped forward and then sidestepped, his weapon up and firing in controlled bursts.

  A second missile blazed down from the sky. It knifed through the roof of Joe’s farmhouse. The ground floor splintered and spat outward before a thundering ball of flame engulfed the upper floors and the entire house disintegrated in the expanding conflagration. The thudding concussion of the explosion hit a split second after another blast of heat.

  Chuck fell back but went to one knee and brought up his weapon.

  Archer was twenty feet ahead of him and took aim at the rose-tattoo guy. A burst of two rounds knocked him down. Archer kept moving and found his next target. Splinters of wood and shattered fragments of the barn and farmhouse rained down onto the field. Ken and Rick were a hundred feet farther to his right and had broken cover and begun firing.

  Chuck was about to get up from his crouch, but the crumpled body of the tattoo-guy shifted. The man rolled to his side. He had to be wearing armor. Archer was already ten feet past him. From a prone position, the tattoo-guy lifted his weapon and took aim and trained it on Archer.

  Chuck raised his rifle, took careful aim right at the rose tattoo on the man’s neck. The guy must have sensed it because he turned and swung his weapon.

  Too late.

  Chuck squeezed his trigger. Two shots. Right into the neck tattoo. The man slumped into the corn. Sighting down his rifle, Chuck got up and walked in measured steps toward the man and kicked his weapon away. The guy was gagging, his hands to his neck. Chuck aimed and fired two more times.

  Corn husks at Chuck’s feet erupted in spraying bits. Inbound fire from the left.