Z-Day (Book 3): A Place For War

by Humphreys, Daniel

  “We’ll see,” Sandy said, his voice full of doubt. “The viral portion of the nanoplague is long gone at this point. Hopefully, there’s something in the server data I can pin down.”

  “You’ll get it,” Miles said. I hope.

  Pete and Guglik strode into the clearing. “Pack up,” his uncle announced. “We’re leaving.”

  Miles offered Sandy a raised eyebrow, but the doctor shrugged. “Guess he got what he came for.”

  “Fair enough.” He walked to Tish’s side. “Everything go all right?”

  She frowned, then nodded. “Pod people,” she muttered.

  Miles thought about it, then laughed. “I get it. You need help with that?”

  “I’m fine. Let’s just get the hell out of here.”

  The hair on the back of his neck stood on end as they retraced their steps down to the beach. He kept turning to look over his shoulder, but his former coworkers hadn’t followed. Sandy’s ex stood at the top of the hill and watched them go with her arms crossed over her chest. She looked a little pale, but all in all, Miles couldn’t see any obvious injuries. Whatever Pete had gotten out of her, he must have been convincing without having to resort to anything physical.

  He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. The only time he’d hit anyone of the opposite sex had been Sophie Huffman in fourth grade when she pushed his best friend Sticks down on the playground. And heck, Sophie had been taller than him so that had been a pretty fair fight, all things considered. Miles shook his head at the memory. He was pretty sure he’d have gotten his ass kicked if one of the teachers on recess duty hadn’t pulled the two of them apart.

  This was no schoolyard feud, though. The uncharacteristic desire to put a bullet in the back of Melanie’s head left him with a tense feeling in the pit of his stomach. I’m supposed to be one of the good guys. Do good guys think like this?

  They reached the beach before his thoughts could turn any darker. As they boarded the launch to return to the patrol boat, he couldn’t help but notice a familiar smirk on Pete’s face. It wasn’t a look he’d seen often as a kid—his uncle dispensed emotion only in measured portions—but he’d seen it often enough to recognize satisfaction when he saw it.

  “Spill the beans, old timer. What’d you get?”

  Pete grinned. “Soon enough.”

  Miles rolled his eyes and Tish gave him a knowing smile. If ever there was a cat that ate the canary, it was Pete Matthews as they left Genesis Cay.

  With the weight of the expedition off their backs, the return to the patrol boat wasn’t quite as nerve-racking as the original trip to the island had been. Once aboard, the MPs and corpsmen went their own way, and Pete led the rest to the boat’s small mess.

  While Miles and the others got settled, Pete drew things out, preparing himself a mug of coffee. Right about the time Miles was about to burst in frustration, his uncle sat down at the head of the mess table. “Interrogations are easiest when you know most of the answer to what you’re looking for. In the end, all I needed was confirmation and a little bit of clarification.”

  Guglik sighed. “You can’t be serious—you’re going to lay it all out, like this? Most of this is still close-held, Major.”

  Pete gave her a look of annoyance. “Relax. It won’t hurt a thing. Zulu hasn’t gotten to the point of gathering intelligence.”

  Yet. Miles held the comment back—he didn’t get the sense that it would help at this juncture.

  The former CIA agent threw her hands up and leaned back in her seat. “Fine. Whatever.”

  Peter turned back to Miles and grinned. “Don’t fall for it, she’s not usually such a stickler for the rules.”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “What did you get out of Melanie that’s got you giddy as a school girl?”

  Tish laughed, and Pete glowered at the two of them before speaking. “I’ve got printouts back at St. Croix. I really was planning on telling you all. But I guess I can’t blame you for not wanting to look at PowerPoint slides.”

  Sandy snorted, shaking his head. Miles looked over at him and grinned. “You’ll get used to his smart-ass attitude, at some point. It might be a while.”

  “Put a sock in it. Here are the nuts and bolts. Fleet’s been trying to assess the best starting point to reclaim the country ever since you recovered the server data from GenPharm. Camp Perry was never intended to be a permanent outpost, it was just convenient based on where they needed to get.”

  “Understood.”

  “The satellites are no good to us now, but we’ve still got access to their imagery from up until the point their orbits decayed. So, we can take that as a point of reference, find areas of interest, and use drones to get more recent intel. Talking to Sandy’s ex confirmed that we hit the jackpot.”

  Sandy wrinkled his forehead, confused. “I don’t get it. They’ve been out of touch for all this time, what information could she give you that would tell you anything?”

  “Here’s the thing, we had a roster of everyone involved. The playing cards we issued the Marines, remember?”

  Miles frowned, confused, then it hit him. Pete had told him stories about how they issued troops in the Gulf decks of playing cards with the pictures of high-value targets printed on them, so they’d learn the faces even in their off-hours. Saddam and his two sons had been three of the four aces in the decks.

  “I remember.” Sandy sounded sour.

  Pete patted the table. “Water under the bridge, Doc. Anyway, we assumed that the people who weren’t found on Genesis Cay were dead—the Jack of Hearts and the King of Spades.”

  “Which one was Sandy?” Miles asked.

  “Jack,” Pete said.

  He grinned and nudged the doctor. “Aww, that’s adorable, Doc.”

  Sandy scratched his temple with his middle finger. “Bite me.”

  “The other guy—honestly, we probably should have made him one of the aces. It sounds like he was instrumental in pulling the whole thing off. Does the name Henry Schantz ring a bell, Doc?”

  “Of course,” Sandy replied. “I never worked with him—my team and I were responsible for the biological aspect of the virus. Henry was pretty much the world’s leading expert on nanotechnology. He was doing some revolutionary stuff, years ahead of the curve.” He sighed. “I remember wondering what he was doing working for the seventh-ranked pharmaceutical company in the US and shrugging it off.”

  “Well, I think we found him—or at least where he died. As we were scanning satellite imagery of the continental United States, some of the analysts noticed some weird visual signs near the Mark Twain National Forest. That’s south of St. Louis.” Pete made a face. “This really would be easier with maps.”

  “What does weird mean, exactly?” Miles asked.

  “Well, let’s put it this way—it was only odd because, after Z-Day, everything pretty much shut down. Not to put too fine a point on it, it looked exactly what an overhead shot of Hope looked like during the same time frame.”

  It didn’t take long for Miles to realize what a satellite would see, looking down on Hope. “You’re talking about what, agriculture?”

  “Exactly. Cultivated fields, we even saw some smoke from a few houses. Not sure of the exact date, but the most up-to-date shots were from a bit less than a year after Z-Day.”

  “So, survivors. That’s great.”

  “Oh, that’s not the best part.” Pete leaned forward, almost manic with excitement. “There weren’t any walls.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Miles said. “They could have used something else—cable, chain link fence.”

  “Boats,” Sandy offered.

  “Right.”

  “No signs of anything. Now, we’re not talking the highest resolution, sure, so maybe there was something there at some point. If nothing else it called for drone recon. Here’s the kicker—we get new overheads, we don’t see anything. The fields are overgrown, with no sign of living human beings.”

  Miles s
hook his head. “Too late, I guess. That seems to be a common story, these days.”

  Pete raised a finger. “Ahh, but there’s the rub. There are paths, for lack of a better term, running right through the middle of a point in the center of the area where the farms were, before.”

  “Paths,” Miles said. “What do you mean by that?”

  “There are trails worn into the vegetation, centered around a particular point on this mountain in Missouri. And we all know there’s only one thing walking in big enough numbers these days to create that sort of thing.” Pete shrugged. “That’s what the effect looks like, at least.”

  “So now they pass through the place instead of it repelling them?” Miles frowned.

  “We don’t know for sure, but that’s exactly what it looks like. For whatever reason, the area used to be a circle, but now there are chunks missing from it, so to speak.”

  “Okay, great, so there’s weird shit after the zombie apocalypse. It’s not really a news flash, Pete.”

  His uncle sighed. “Think about this. The GenPharm people on the island, what do you think their plan was?”

  “Kill a shitload of people and smoke expensive cigars while the world burned?” Miles glanced at Sandy. “Sorry. But, still. How the hell should I know?”

  “Doc, you guys had a way of turning the nanites off, right? During testing?”

  A strange look flashed across Sandy’s face and he shifted in his seat. “Yeah,” he nodded. “Counter-nanites, basically. They’d go active in the bloodstream and repel any existing or incoming test nanos.”

  “That,” Pete declared, “should tell you right there that they had no intention for the infection to last as long as it has. They wanted to tear the world down, yes, but they wanted to rebuild it under their watchful eyes, as well.”

  Sandy cocked his head to one side. “That sounds megalomaniacal enough for Melanie and Henry. But what went wrong?”

  “No clue. But when I asked about the exclusion zone, Melanie spilled the beans. They needed a way to coordinate the activation signal on Z-Day. A slow wave of infection, popping up over time, that’s something that the powers that be can defend against or put under quarantine. Instant chaos?” He snapped his fingers. “Worldwide zombie apocalypse, in a matter of minutes? Something entirely different.”

  Sandy blinked. “Wait—it was simultaneous?”

  Pete nodded. “You never knew that?”

  “I’ve spent most of the last few years in one community with a bunch of local people, we didn’t get a bunch of outside information. I holed up in my lab, after Z-Day, but the Internet went out not long after.”

  “That makes sense,” Miles nodded. “They probably wanted to isolate their systems from the outside world, in case anyone traced the outbreak back to them.” He thought back to the shadow-cloaked office where he and the Navy SEALs had recovered a vital component to get the Project Guidestone files and wondered—had they done something to cut off the network in there? There were any number of ways to do it. Since the server blade had been functional, he supposed it might have been something as simple as cutting the fiber optic cables in the basement. “Lock everything up to local access only, guarded by a couple of hundred thousand hungry security guards.”

  “So, per Melanie, to flip the switch on, they installed extremely-low frequency transmission equipment in various GenPharm properties around the world. That’s the same sort of system we used to use to talk to submarines—it’s not hampered by the curvature of the Earth or terrain like higher frequencies are. But to coordinate the signaling, at least in the United States, they needed a central location for a primary antenna.”

  Miles scoffed. “Missouri? Why didn’t they put it on the side of a mountain somewhere?”

  “She mainly worked on the biological side, like Sandy, so she wasn’t sure. But she said the mountain they chose was near the Mississippi River. Once he activated the signal, Henry and his protective detail were to catch a flight to a waiting boat, which would then take them to Genesis Cay.”

  “Only they never showed up.”

  “Got it in one,” Pete confirmed.

  “What went wrong?” Sandy wondered. “I mean, it obviously worked.”

  “Unknown. They had no means of contacting Henry and his team. But the exclusion zone around the broadcast point—that was a fallback. It’s a higher-frequency antenna, so the range isn’t quite as long, but they intended it to keep them safe until they could get out. Somewhere between then and now, it partially broke down. Cause unknown.”

  “What does that have to do with their plans?” Miles demanded. He was beginning to get a little annoyed with each revelation. Every fact was another element that Pete had neglected to share. The consequences had been pretty damn dire the last time his uncle kept things close to the vest.

  “The same broadcast equipment that turned the nanos on can turn them off using a different set of antennas. GenPharm projected that the die-off after five years would be great enough for them to begin the next phase, so the plan was for the system to automatically begin broadcasting the kill signal over ELF a little over four years ago.”

  “That would have been nice,” Tish said, a wistful look on her face.

  “Right. Instead, the nanos have been in the wild for a lot longer than their creators intended, and they’ve begun to surpass their design purpose.”

  “The enhanced, and the alphas you talked about,” Miles said.

  “Exactly. I think that more than anything else spooked Melanie into talking. We knew there was something odd about the location just based on drone surveillance, but this cements the fact that we need boots on the ground to inspect the facility and see if we can activate the kill switch.”

  Miles closed his eyes and made a silent count to five, trying to push down the shakes that threatened to overcome him. “Let me guess—two of those boots are on my feet?”

  “I’ll be right there with you, kid.”

  “No!” Tish said. “You can’t be serious, Pete!”

  “I’m deathly serious. Miles is the only person I trust not to screw the tech up, and I also trust him on my six.”

  “There has to be another way. How many times are you going to throw your own family to the wolves? Did you think bribing us with a vacation would make this go down easier?”

  Pete’s face was stony. “No. Not at all. This is an unexpected event. If there was anyone else, I’d ask them in a heartbeat, Tish. You think I asked for this? Former IT guys with familiarity to GenPharm systems are a little light on the ground, in case you haven’t noticed. And who knows how many chances we’ll get.”

  Miles took her hand. “He’s right, honey. And if there’s a chance we can stop this, I have to help. I owe it to Trina.”

  Her nostrils flared as she tried to stare him down. He met her eyes and refused to look away until his wife sighed. “In my head, I know that you’re right—but that doesn’t make it easier for me to accept.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?” Tish caught herself, then softened her tone. “I’m sorry. Of course, you do.” They’d both grown up without at least one parent—her mother to breast cancer, and both of his to the same auto accident that cost Pete his legs.

  Pete cleared his throat. “If it helps, the drones that surveyed the site intercepted the signal. We’ve been able to reproduce it, and after we experimented a bit, we’ve made use of it.”

  Sandy straightened in his chair. “To what end?”

  “We’ve been practicing herding them in, actually, getting them to where we want them to go. When we’re ready, we’re going to bring them down to the river for a little fun and games.”

  “The roach hotel, thing,” Miles said.

  “Yup. Pete’s eyes gleamed with joy. “Over the next few months, we’re going to keep herding them. The signal will keep them in a holding pattern, basically, once we get them close to St. Louis until we kick off the festivities. From the looks of things, most of the area around t
he broadcast site is a safe zone, so zulu presence should be light. I’m not promising it’ll be easy—but we’ll have air assets and plenty of firepower to back us up.”

  “That’s your plan,” Miles said. “Pick a fight in one of the twenty most populated metro areas in the country as a distraction?”

  Pete grinned. “I can’t take credit, but yeah, that’s the gist of it. And look at it this way—if we have to pull out before we hit the kill switch, at least we’ve got the signal. We can start buffering our walls with exclusion zones and keep them away. Of course, that takes an electrical infrastructure. I don’t know about you, but I like the quick solution, myself.”

  Miles stared at his uncle and debated whether or not the old man had lost his mind. Shaking his head, Miles barked a tight laugh and said, “Fair enough. I’m in.”

  “Me as well,” Sandy interjected. Pete raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. “I can handle myself, you won’t have to carry me into the place. And like you said, GenPharm people are a little thin on the ground.”

  “Okay, then,” Pete said.

  May 23, 2026

  Naval Base Guam

  Z-Day + 3,139

  The fist pounding on the door of the visiting officer’s quarters shook Lieutenant Commander Lynn Repko out of the first solid sleep she’d had in almost two months.

  One moment, she’d been shredding zulu with highly-accurate naval gunfire. The next, she and the rest of the crew of the USS Jack Lucas were scrambling to evacuate the ship as an engineering failure cut power to the systems and set the experimental destroyer adrift, doomed to beach itself within reach of a ravening zulu horde.

  Repko and the rest of her crewmates had cleared the ship right before a tidal wave of necrotic flesh crested the bow of the stricken vessel.

  Anacapa Island, off the coast of Ventura, California, made for a surprisingly placid refugee camp for both the crew of the Lucas as well as a group of civilian survivors they’d encountered. The boats of the people who’d ridden out the years since Z-Day on the old Ventura Pier had been a lifesaver. The extra cargo capacity had given the crew enough breathing room to load up on food and water.