Connelly brought the radio to his mouth. “Hey, old timer, you still kicking out there?”
Molly closed her eyes and tried to wish the tears away. She tried to wish the world back to the way it had been, or at least wish the bad men away, so that they could be in their safe place, huddled around a board game by candlelight.
But this had never been a world that granted the wishes of young girls, and nothing over the past few months had changed that fact.
“I’m here,” Dave said.
“You got some good-lookin’ kids, Mister Metz. I thought to myself, a man like that, he’s lived his life. He’s seen the world. The only thing driving him is family. Bad-ass Army vet, you knew the score. Problem is, the times have passed you by, brother. I will admit I didn’t expect the little trick with the landmines. You must have done that before we put our drone up, but we had your positions pegged.” He let his finger off the button, waited for a response, then chuckled when none came. “I was going to be reasonable about this until you blew up my men. I was going to give you the chance to come along, nice and quiet.”
He let off of the transmit button of Molly’s radio, then keyed the one clipped to his vest. “You have them bracketed?”
“Roger that.”
“Take out the woman.”
The big gun boomed, a half-dozen chest-shaking concussions right after another, and Molly’s radio came alive.
“You bastard! I’ll skin you alive!”
Connelly brought the walkie back up. “Gotta love a Browning, don’t you? Don’t worry, old-timer. We’ll take good care of the kids for you.”
He keyed the other radio, and muttered, “Finish it.”
Molly didn’t hear the last round of gunfire over the sound of her own screams.
Chapter Twenty
June 20, 2026
Naval Station Galveston—Gulf of Mexico
Z-Day + 3,167
“What did you think of the new weapons?” Pete asked as Miles and Sandy stepped into his office.
Even after a month, it was a strange situation for Miles, and he couldn’t imagine how Sandy felt about the entire deal. He’d been dubious of the doc, at first, but the guy kept his mouth shut and bent to any task with grit and determination.
Since they’d returned from Genesis Cay, Pete had alternated using the two of them as gophers and attaching them to the crew of Marines tapped for the recon mission to Taum Sauk. Byers and Lawrence were among that number, so there were a few familiar faces who spread the word that Miles wasn’t a total incompetent. The corporal’s broken leg had healed, but despite his recent injury and the presence of the two civilians, Sergeant Byers pushed the ad-hoc crew through merciless training and conditioning drills. Miles had gotten into pretty good shape over the years since Z-Day. Since starting the unofficial Galveston boot camp, he’d reached an entirely new level.
The other advantage to being so busy was that when he finally did stop for the night, he was too exhausted to dwell on what was to come.
This morning’s work had been more fun than was usual. The lack of effectiveness standard weapons had shown against alpha infected out on the West Coast had fired up Pete’s paranoid streak. He’d pushed the tech guys for more effective armaments going forward for any units that would be in close contact with zulu. The resulting gear ranged from jury-rigged in the case of the flamethrowers to truly flabbergasting in the case of the fully-automatic shotgun with specialized rounds that Miles took for a spin.
“I’m going to miss my Blackout, but that AA-12 is nasty.” A full-auto 12-gauge shotgun was impressive enough. Throw in the specialized ammunition they planned to bring along and it was ludicrous how overpowered the thing was.
Pete flipped through one of the stacks of paper on his desk and scratched a note in the margin. “I’d bring it along, anyway. Those drum reloads are heavy.”
Miles settled into one of the chairs in front of his uncle and grinned. “You always were a pack rat.”
“Don’t knock it. It’s kept you alive this long.” Pete glanced at Sandy as he sat down next to Miles. “Doing all right, Doc?”
“I’m hurting in more places than I even knew I had muscles, but yeah. Getting there, I think.”
“The timeline’s firming up a bit,” Pete told them both. “I’d be lying if I said it’d make you happy.”
Miles groaned. “That bad?”
“We’ve got a lot of moving parts involved, and none of us want to screw this up. If anything, we’re overpreparing. River clearance is ongoing, and we’re setting up staging areas for fuel, ammunition, you name it.” He waved a hand at one of the stacks of paper. “We’ve got close to a dozen recovery teams out, pulling ammunition out of every warehouse in the vicinity of the coast. Fleet raided several of them in the past for small arms and .50-cal ammo, so they’re already cleared and secured. We haven’t used mortars in years, so there’s more than enough ammo stocked there. The Air Force depots are a different story—they’re uncleared terrain, and we’ve had plenty of casualties securing them.”
Miles shook his head. The more Marines he encountered, the less abstract those losses became. “Is that changing the plan at all?”
“Someone threw the idea out during our last review session, but General Vincent put his foot down. We have to recognize that this engagement might not be decisive. With the A-10s back in the fold, that ordnance could be useful down the road.”
“I talked to Tish the other day,” Miles replied. “She mentioned they’ve gotten most of them flying.”
“That they have,” Pete said. “Bit of a learning curve, from what I understand, but they should have time to polish their skills.”
Miles narrowed his eyes. “When you said the timeline was firming up, that wasn’t abstract, was it?” He waved a hand. “Spill it.”
Pete grinned. “Well, that was another issue we discussed during our last meeting.” He dug around and found a single sheet of paper, and presented it to the two of them. “We’re a few months out, but the timing is convenient, I suppose you could say.”
Miles accepted the sheet and snorted a short laugh at the bolded date on the memo. He handed it to Sandy, who simply said, “Ah.”
Pete smiled. “It’s all down to the waiting now, son. I’ll be mighty put out if we kick things off and run out of ammo before we finish the job. But it’ll be time before you know it.”
“That’s what you used to say about Christmas,” Miles noted. “But I take your meaning.”
“If we do this right, October 18 is going to be right up there, somewhere down the line, when the three of us are just a memory.”
April 23, 2018
Outside of Ironton, Missouri
Z-Day + 187
Hatcher cried himself to sleep before the Hummer made it to the camp on top of Taum Sauk.
As much as Molly wanted to join in on the tears, she dared not allow herself to give in to the impulse. She settled for rubbing the little boy’s arm, staring out the window, and trying to ignore the intermittent buzz of conversation between the men who’d killed Dave and Annie. For their part, they ignored her as well, though Camby, the man who’d helped the leader capture the two of them, grumbled about the whining. Connelly told him to shut up and ignore it. That settled the matter.
The lights they’d seen from the farmhouse turned out to be portable stadium lighting like she’d seen at football games—wheeled generators with extensible poles for the lights. Six months ago, she might not have given that a second thought, but Dave and time had taught her hard lessons, creating a knack for looking at things from perspectives the old Molly would have found foreign.
Generators for the lights means fuel, which means they brought it with them or they’re getting it somewhere. Which means that they aren’t all infected—they’re going outside of the safe zone.
As they crested the hill and reached the site at the top of the mountain, she saw how correct that hunch had been.
Being a local, she’d spent
more than her fair share of time in the park—cookouts, birthday parties, field trips, that sort of thing. She’d never been much of an outdoorsy type, but she knew what should have been at the top of the mountain: a graveled parking area, a clearing with some grass, picnic tables, charcoal grills, and a timber-framed visitor’s center. The building sat unstaffed most of the time. If the trail maps of the mark under glass on the outside wall next to the door weren’t enough, you didn’t need to be hiking there.
The small cabin was gone, replaced by a massive, block-walled building with a green metal roof. The construction was larger than the high school gym in town, filling most of the open area next to the parking lot. Light reflected off periodic patches on top of the building, and she realized that solar panels covered the roof. Maybe they don’t need as much gas as I thought.
The antenna Dave had described loomed behind the new building, a tall, slender pole shooting straight into the air. Heavy cables descended from it and anchored into the ground around the clearing to form the Christmas tree shape he’d noted. As she got closer, the intensity of the overhead lighting allowed her to see two other cables, mounted on telephone poles, threading out of the block building in a parallel line to the edge of the clearing. Once there, each took an opposite ninety-degree turn and disappeared into the woods. She didn’t know if they were power cables for the antenna or something else, but as the Hummer turned the corner around the block building, the rest of the camp derailed that train of thought.
Molly didn’t know if Dave had made it far enough to see the old parking area. Even if he hadn’t, the sight before her convinced her that his instinct to not antagonize the contractors had been the right call.
Neat rows of portable trailers lined the rear of the gravel lot. More men—and women! —than she could quickly count moved about the camp, all intent with unknown purpose. Dozens of other vehicles ranging from civilian SUVs to more Hummers occupied the rest of the lot. Some of those Hummers looked different compared to the one she’d rode in, bristling with antennas or guns larger than the ones they’d used on her friends. One of the vehicles was missing the rear half of its cab, replaced by a strange-looking turret with a long, squared-off box on either side.
Camby swung their Hummer into an open slot, and Connelly hopped out and had Molly’s door open before she realized that they’d come to a stop.
“Move,” the contractor demanded, and she extricated herself from the rear of the truck. The seats were nowhere close to comfortable, and her legs came alive with pins and needles as she finally stretched them out. Hatch murmured in his sleep as she brought him along, but at a signal from Connelly, one of his men stepped forward and swept him out of her arms. Surprised at the sudden move, she stumbled against the side of the truck. Before she could catch herself, she blurted a response.
“What the hell?”
The man who’d taken Hatch didn’t respond; he had his back to her and he’d already taken a half-dozen steps toward the block building. The jostling and rough handling shattered the toddler’s sleep, and he blinked bleary eyes at Molly. His eyes went wide when he realized that someone was taking him away from her.
“Mole!” He screamed, reaching out with one hand even as he struggled to squeeze out of the contractor’s grip. “Mole!”
She started after him, but an iron hand seized her by the shoulder. Connelly flexed the muscles in his arm, and she cried out at the sudden pain. “Easy, now,” he whispered in her ear. “The doc wanted some kids for his little project, but you’re right on the threshold, aren’t you? I think you’d best behave yourself, or we might decide that you’re too old to be of any use to him.”
Somehow, she managed to pull away, only to realize that she stood in a circle of hard-faced men from the trucks. Molly knew all about boys and awkward leering, but this felt different, somehow. She’d been tall for so long that she wasn’t used to feeling little. Under the hard states and cruel smiles, she felt like a very small piece of meat.
Outside of that immediate ring, the other members of the camp had taken notice. Many stopped what they’d been doing, waiting to see what would happen next.
“Help me!” she screamed, searching the sea of uncaring faces for something, anything, to reach out and find salvation in. She pointed toward Hatch. “Help him! He’s just a little kid, for God’s sake!”
If she’d found the apathy of the crew immediately around her horrible, the reactions out in the camp were far worse. Many turned away, others stared, but some saw her anguish, heard Hatcher’s cries as he disappeared into the building, and laughed.
October 17, 2026
Over St. Louis, Missouri
Z-Day + 3,286
A subtle shift in the angle of the Orca’s deck told Lieutenant Michael Ross that they’d begun their approach to the LZ moments before the crew chief stuck his head in the darkened cargo compartment. “Three minutes, gentlemen!”
Ross sat up and nodded to his men without a word. They knew what to do, and didn’t need any instruction from him. Across the compartment, under dim red lights, the quartet of SEALs used quick, economical hand movements and checked magazine pouches, weapons, and other equipment. Once each man was certain of his own loadout, he turned to help check the next man in line. Once Foraker, the SEAL sitting next to Ross, patted him down, he slapped him on the shoulder and gave him a thumbs-up.
Chief Petty Officer Gus Foraker was a broad, powerfully-built man. His bushy beard was almost completely gray. At one time, command would have shuffled him off to a training assignment or even forced him to retire, but experienced Special Operations soldiers were a dying breed. The SEAL teams had been playing ‘Ten Little Soldier Boys’ since Z-Day. Their remaining manpower numbered in the high double digits, and the only assured method of retirement was death or disability. Foraker bitched about his creaky knees, but the burly Chief had been Ross’s right hand for so long that he didn’t trust anyone else in the Fleet to watch after his boy ‘Mikey.’ Ross tugged on his gear one last time, amused at the thought though he kept his face blank.
PO3 Paul Nash and PO2 Lenny Richards were new transfers to his unit, piecemeal replacements for the men they’d lost since beginning operations to reclaim the mainland. This would be their first active action in the lower 48 since Z-Day. As members of SEAL Team 5, they’d helped pull uninfected American forces out of South Korea amid the chaos of the outbreak, clear Guam to form a safe haven, and conducted multiple search and salvage missions throughout the Pacific Rim over the years. They came with glowing recommendations. Ross still couldn’t help but wish that Janacek or one of his other guys was still around, because this particular shindig was apt to be dicey.
The crew chief bellowed behind them. “Ninety seconds!”
The Orca was an experimental cargo blimp. Fleet had three of the craft, as well as designs and schematics to construct more. They’d converted two of the vehicles to bombers. The vehicle the SEALs rode in started out as a trainer, then was tapped as a Special Operations and search and rescue craft.
In a world where the slightest noise could be deadly, a nearly-silent vertical takeoff vehicle had a multitude of advantages over helicopters.
Ross tapped the magazine of his SCAR-H one last time, then flipped it off safe. “Chief, Nash, you’ve got the duffel. Richards, ready?”
“Yup,” he said. Unlike most of the other SEALs, the petty officer was clean-shaven, which made him look far younger than he really was. It was hard to reconcile the description he’d gotten of a taciturn bad-ass with the smooth-cheeked troop at his side.
Guess we’ll find out.
The crew chief didn’t announce the final countdown. Their only indication was the sudden cut-out of the lights in the cargo compartment and a low hissing noise of hydraulics as the rear ramp dropped.
Pilots have gotten damn good, Ross judged. The surface of the bridge below was a bare three feet from the lip of the ramp. Shouldering his rifle, he scanned the bridge deck from side to side even as he steppe
d forward and took the jump, landing with his knees slightly bent. The faint twinge in his calves reminded him that he was closer to forty now than thirty, but he didn’t pay it any mind. There was no time—he moved forward and out of the way to allow the men behind him to step down. He heard a heavier scrape of boots on asphalt, and then the wind brushed at his back as the Orca’s props revved up to lift it out of the way. Turning away to avoid the sudden rush of grit, he flipped down his quad-tube night vision goggles. The bridge leaped into view, painted in shades of green. Someday they were going to run out of spare batteries or spare goggles, and that was going to well and truly suck.
“Remaining on station for evac, Lieutenant,” the voice in his ear said. He didn’t speak but clicked his mic twice in acknowledgment. Using hand signals, he spread the other three men across the westbound lanes of the bridge and began moving them forward.
Within the first two weeks of the outbreak, all civil order collapsed. A few pockets held on, here and there, but the outbreak had been too widespread and too fast to quarantine. Despite that, when the mantle of Presidency fell onto his shoulders via continuity of government, the former Speaker of the House panicked and ordered the implementation of a CDC quarantine plan. The fact that the same agency was screaming that it was the wrong plan for the situation hadn’t dissuaded the Congressman from the state of Wisconsin. He gave the order, and the surviving units of the military executed it to the best of their ability.
And almost every major bridge and river crossing in the lower 48 went down under the impact of bombs or cruise missiles. Instead of sealing off pockets of infection, the move limited the internal movement of surviving forces and opened them up to defeat in detail.
If we’d been able to mass up, form bastions, we could have nipped this in the bud. The thought carried no heat—it was an old issue, and Ross was well past the point of wishing he could change the past.
Z-Day (Book 3): A Place For War Page 23
