Lips pressed into a tight line, Melanie shook her head.
“I mean, you want to see the worst of humanity, that’s one way to go about it. It would be ironic if Keeping Up with The Real Housewives, or whatever the name was, inspired Project Guidestone.” Sudden surprise rippled across her face with his use of their code name, but Pete didn’t let on that he’d recognized it. Gotcha. “Miles was a teenager and it seemed like everything he watched was one of those damn reality shows, so I saw my fair share. The one I always liked, though, was Survivor. I mean, heck, that’s practically a vacation, you know? Sure, they had to figure out their own food, shelter, water, all that jazz. To a Marine, that’s nothing. We call that sort of thing good training. I imagine things weren’t quite so easy for y’all at first, but you’re still here, going on nine years. I’m thinking you’ve got it pretty well figured out. All things considered, this is a pretty nice prison.”
“Whatever you say. Myself, I aspire to a bit more than pulling weeds or hammering rocks together to start a fire.”
“I’m sure you do. You’re all ambitious sorts, aren’t you? Had big plans to put the world back together to your liking, I guess. Must be disappointing to just be … on vacation. A few of your folks flipped, I hear, begged to work with the fleet rather than stay here.”
“Nobodies,” she sneered. “We chose poorly, bringing them on.”
“They’re not true believers, not like you and the rest, I suppose. You ever get a chance to look at your grand accomplishment?”
She cocked her head to one side. “I don’t follow.”
“I talked to Sandy a bit, he told me about you dropping the truth bomb on him on Z-Day before you ran away. I guess I wondered if you ever stopped to look upon your works.” He waited, but she remained silent, and he allowed a smile to crest across his face. “That’s what I figured. You saw it from your office building, sure, and maybe by helicopter. Where’d you go from there—private jet? Hell, I bet you and your people were landing on this island paradise before the sun went down, that first night. Toasting yourselves with champagne and caviar, watching the end of the world on satellite television. Come on,” he said with a wink. “You can tell me. I’m sure it was a big day.”
“We came to the island by boat—we flew into a secured airstrip on the Keys. That first night, yeah, we celebrated. Lobster,” she shrugged. “Foie gras. Plenty of wine—I’ve never liked champagne.” Her eyes were far away, and the smile on her face wasn’t entirely human. “It’s not every day one rewrites the history books.”
“It’s a shame,” Pete said. “All the great work you accomplished, and you never got to see it.” He leaned forward. “We’re going to fix that. Guglik—go get the MP. We’re going to take the cuffs off.”
He didn’t turn to look, but the question in her voice was obvious. “Now?”
“Sure. We’ll leave the others here for a bit. We need to run back to St. Croix. I don’t think Captain Pross will mind sailing up to Miami for a look-see.” His eyes bored into Melanie’s as the door clicked shut behind him. “I just got back from California, myself. We anchored off of Ventura Pier. Relatively unpopulated, at least compared to a place like Los Angeles—but hell, nowhere on the coast is really empty, you know? I remember reading something like a hundred million Americans lived near the ocean before Z-Day. After? Zulu doesn’t tend to wander, much. I guess you wouldn’t know that, not having seen them for yourself. You went to Berkeley, right?”
Melanie’s voice was flat, tense. “You’ve done your research.”
“I like to talk to people, what can I say? Haven’t had much of an opportunity for it, these past few years. Ended up talking to myself more than anything. Broadcasting into the empty. Which worked out, in the end—that’s how the fleet found us and started looking in the hope that Miles was still alive, to help them access all your project files.” He laughed. “My nephew had a saying, back in the day. I’m guessing you never heard it. ‘Don’t fuck with anyone who makes your food or fixes your computer.’ Oops.”
“Bravo—you can read our e-mails. I’m sure anything you can glean from them will be well over your head.”
He put a hand to his chest. “Now, why did you have to go and imply I was stupid, Melanie? I thought we were having a nice conversation. Oh, I got off on a tangent. We were talking about California. That was a close one, let me tell you. We lost some good Marines, and I lost one of my best friends. You might have been interested to meet him.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, he was immune, of course. Charlie had some pretty impressive scars, but he never turned. In fact, when an enhanced infected wounded him later on, the nanomachines changed him. Fixed him. He had severe scarring on his vocal cords, you see. Poor guy could barely talk.” Pete snapped his fingers. “Day or two after he got a fresh dose of nanites, he’s chatting away like me.” The mention of his friend made him want to wince, but he forced himself to stillness. Even after he’d regained his voice, Charlie hadn’t been the sort to waste words.
He would have regarded this entire exercise as a joke, being honest.
Pete’s revelation had piqued Melanie’s interest. She leaned forward, now, intent on his face. “What do you mean by ‘enhanced infected?’”
“Oh, they’ve never told you? They’ve gotten smarter. Faster. They use tools. Pretty damn terrifying, actually—they’ve weaponized the virus. They use bits and pieces of infected bone attached to spears. Keeping them at arm’s length isn’t a safe proposition, anymore. And then you have the alphas …”
“Alphas?”
“Bigger, faster, harder to stop. The one I saw, I don’t know if it was eating other zulus, but it looked like Schwarzenegger. Tore through some of my men with its bare hands. We had to blow up a building to stop it.” I hope. They’d never actually checked, after all. He forced a smile onto his face. “It sounds like you’re in dire need of an update on what you’ve accomplished, doctor. And I’ve always said that the best way to learn is up close and personal.”
She swallowed. “What would that entail, exactly?”
“Well, I’d be lying if my inner asshole wasn’t screaming for me to tie your feet to a rope and hang you from a helicopter—play fishing for zombies. But what’s the sport in that? I think we’ll find a clear spot on the beach and back off. See what happens.” He looked at the ceiling, remembering the desperate fight on top of the Skunkworks warehouse. “When you first see a swarm, it’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced. One of the survivors back home, he pissed his pants the first time we ran into one. That’s the first rule of combat, right there—use the bathroom before you kick things off. Because when they pack in together, they stop being individuals. It’s like a wave of necrotic flesh, united in purpose—feed and propagate. If they can’t walk around an obstacle, they’ll pile up until they go right over it. It’s crazy, really. They’ll do it for even one living person, and there’s no way most folks have enough meat on their bones for all of them to get so much as a single bite. But I guess they don’t need much, hey? You and your people really did engineer a marvel of science. They don’t even rot, not until you destroy the brain.” Pete lowered his gaze and met her eyes. “You look like a fast runner. I’d give you ten minutes. Tops.”
Melanie’s face went white. She was silent for a long moment, and when she spoke, her shaking voice told Pete far more than her words.
“What do you want to know?”
He leaned in. “Tell me about the exclusion zone.”
Chapter Fourteen
May 21, 2026
Naval Station Galveston—Gulf of Mexico
Z-Day + 3,137
Even in placid seas, the barge felt about as seaworthy as a shoe box. Wobbling back and forth as he tried to move closer to the bow, Coop finally surrendered to the ship’s unpredictable movements and seized a handrail to steady himself.
It won’t be so bad once we get on the river. I hope.
At full capacity, the converted barge
had once hauled hundreds of tons of freight up and down the mighty Mississippi—shy of three-quarters of a million pounds. Mortar emplacements, heavy machine gun mounts, crates of ammunition, and the angled chain-link fence outriggers were a drop in the bucket compared to that formidable mass. Now, the flat-bottomed boat practically skipped across the waves behind the tug.
“Stahlberg!” Coop yelled, waving over the lance corporal who’d drawn the comms duty for the proof-of-concept mission. “Get on the horn and tell the Navy guys to ease off the throttle before they shake us all off!”
“On it, Sergeant!” The yard workers had set up an open-sided command shack in the center of the barge to help shield the Marines from the elements. All things considered, the weapons load didn’t take up a huge amount of space. This left plenty of room under the shack roof for cots, the generator setup, radios, and a few other odds and ends.
The barge lurched again. Shaking his head, Coop decided to hang on for the ride until the guys running the tug got the message. He turned to watch the island slide by. The south side of Galveston had always struck him as more normal than the side closest to the mainland. Its current population was nowhere close to what it had been before Z-Day, but the few surviving inhabitants, refugees, and Marines stationed there had worked together to fortify the north side of the island.
The main problem in using Galveston as a base was the shallow depth of the bay between it and the rest of Texas. Though it was ten feet deep in some areas, in others it was as shallow as six. Zulu didn’t need to breathe, and while the current would keep any from taking a straight-line path, it was possible for one to walk up onto a beach or boat slip.
Using the hard-won experience of the original core of island survivors, the Marines had varied their defenses. They fenced off low spots to prevent easy access to the sea. Stronger construction served as defense in depth on more solid ground inland—walls of cinder block and wood. Hotels, parking garages, and apartment buildings all became part of a combined curtain wall. All told, these fortifications formed a mostly-solid band with known choke points. Patrols walked the fences at all hours, and it was a rare day when they didn’t find at least one infected trying to gain access.
It might have been worse, but the mainland across from the island tended toward marshes and farm ground. That area was empty save for the occasional roamer. The town of Texas City was the exception to the rule.
Which made it an ideal location to test the first ‘battle barge.’
The Navy guys received the message and throttled back. The ride became much smoother as the tug eased the barge around the eastern tip of Galveston. Should calm down a bit more once we’re out of the Gulf.
Galveston Bay was, indeed, much calmer, but the tight feeling in the pit of his stomach remained the further from the gulf they got. They were playing with fire—each mile they progressed into the bay was another mile closer to Houston and its outskirts. It was hard to say how many of the area’s pre-outbreak population of 6.5 million remained standing, but in Coop’s experience, a lot of them would be.
And fences and walls ain’t going to do dick if we pique their interest.
The tug took a gentle turn, towing them alongside a long and narrow peninsula. Coop’s maps labeled it the ‘Texas City Dike.’ One of the locals explained that the Texas State legislature commissioned its construction in the 1930s to reduce sediment outflow between the upper and lower Bay—with the side bonus of serving as a storm surge buffer to the growing suburb nearby.
One of the marksmen stationed on the port side called out. “Zulu!”
Coop turned and brought his binoculars up. Sure enough, a lone, weathered corpse had caught sight of them and begun limping along the dike’s cracked pavement.
“Take him out, Sergeant?”
He considered it for a moment, then shook his head. “Save the ammo—he’ll join the party on down the road.” If the zulu had been a spear-carrier or had the build of an alpha, he’d have answered differently. The scarecrow hobbling along the dike was your standard-issue infected. No sense wasting a bullet when they were about to drop some high explosives on the neighborhood.
A frontage road proceeded north from along a line of undeveloped, overgrown land where the narrow strip met the mainland. Rows of ragged houses and apartment buildings stood beyond that, the spaces between filled with grass and weeds.
Many of the buildings were missing shingles or sported broken windows—battle scars from years of hurricanes and tropical storms. One particularly bad bit of weather had hurled a big ski boat over the greenway and into a retaining pond between that frontage road and the street running in front of the houses. Spotting it, Coop waved to get Stahlberg’s attention.
“Let them know right about here is good,” he said. The other enlisted man nodded and picked up the radio. Coop eyed the coastline and judged they were a bit over a thousand feet from the shoreline. Closer than what they needed for the dimensions they’d have on the river, but close enough to work the kinks out—he hoped. Sergeant Major McFarlane and Colonel O’Neil were both riding along in the tug to observe.
The half-dozen mortar squads had taken plenty of time drilling and getting their skills back—if they’d even had them in the first place. Years of “every Marine a rifleman” and little else didn’t give much opportunity for remaining current in one’s prior MOS.
As the tug idled its engines and began to drift to a stop, the squad on the stern cast anchor. The call cascaded forward from team to team, and another squad deployed the bow anchor. Despite the calm appearance of the bay, the barge bobbed a bit in the current, but the thinking was that the paired anchors would be enough to keep the firing platform stable. It’s not like we’re going for pinpoint accuracy, here. When it came to HE and white phosphorous, the ballpark was close enough. With both deployed and the line slack between the barge and the tug, the anchor teams hit the winch to draw in some of the excess.
Coop scanned the line of buildings through his binoculars. Little moved save for foliage and the occasional loose piece of siding, but long experience told him that was false comfort. Zulu was out there, somewhere. It was just a matter of bringing them in.
He glanced to the closest mortar squad and called out. “Corporal Gray! Range that boat—let’s see if we can’t draw some attention.”
The short Marine bent over and unpacked a piece of equipment from a padded Pelican case, his every movement slow and exaggerated. It wasn’t stretching things much to say that the combination laser rangefinder and target designator was irreplaceable. So far as Coop knew they only had a handful of them left. The loss of accurate range finding wouldn’t be critical, but losing the ability to lase targets from the ground would be a tough break so soon after gaining access to aircraft and laser-guided munitions.
“Target range, 700 meters!” Gray called out. “HE, charge one.” The ammo bearer pulled a round from an open case, attached a single C-shaped propellant charge and handed it off to the assistant gunner. Corporal Gray nodded, then bellowed, “Fire!”
The AG dropped the round down the tube, and with a surprisingly subdued bang, the first artillery fire mission in years kicked off.
Coop’s eyes bored into the back of the boat, willing for it to hit. With a splash, the round arced into the retaining pond astern of the target. The shell exploded with a muffled whump that sent a plume of brackish water into the air.
Someone cursed, but as Coop turned back to Gray’s squad, the gunner was already lowering the elevation of the tube. “HE, charge one! Fire!”
Bang, wait—the bow of the boat disintegrated as the second round plunged through the fiberglass hull and exploded. Coop resisted the urge to pump his fist in victory, but he gave the other men a tight nod of satisfaction. Hell, I’m turning into McFarlane. He opened his mouth and bellowed, “HE, ten-round salvo! Fire at will!”
The other five squads imitated the angle of the first mortar. In the old days, that would have sent officers scrambling in outrage. M
odern artillery was a precise tool, not spray-and-pray. But given the numbers they’d likely be facing in St. Louis, it wouldn’t matter if they couldn’t land all their rounds in the same grid square. They were bound to hit something.
Shells impacted among the buildings, throwing up clouds of dust and debris while compounding the damage the homes had received over the years. In short order, Coop’s squads completed the fire mission. Silence returned to the bay as the assistant gunners swabbed out the barrels to clean them.
He thought he saw movement in the dissipating smoke. Squinting, Coop brought the binoculars back up and scanned the line of houses. The blasts had torn great chunks out of the structures; a few were even sagging in on themselves. Thrashing shrapnel had chopped the lush vegetation to shreds, and he allowed himself the ghost of a smile as staggering figures stepped out into the open.
Zulu had arrived.
“Come get some, boys,” he muttered. Raising his voice, he shouted, “Stahlberg! Call in the fireboat!”
Here’s the moment of truth. The FireStorm boats they’d recovered had a shallow draft, so in theory, they’d be fine close to the shore of the bay. On the other hand, their designers had never intended them to carry much in the way of cargo. The pumps on the boat used screened intakes to draw from the surrounding water. Part of the job of converting them over to gasoline had consisted of installing auxiliary fuel tanks for the firefighting apparatus to draw from. The converted boats sat noticeably lower in the water.
On the bright side, the extra weight hadn’t taken much of the boat’s speed—the big diesel engines drove the FireStorm along with water jets more akin to a Ski-Doo than traditional propellers, and one of the Navy guys offered the Marines on the barge a jaunty wave as they zoomed by. The rear of the fireboat boasted fresh-painted lettering that spelled out ‘Trogdor.’
Z-Day (Book 3): A Place For War Page 16
