“None of it matters now. What’s done is done. What’s more important is that it looks like somebody wasn’t affected by the electromagnetic pulse.”
“How do you come to these conclusions?”
“Think about it … the only reason we’re hearing radio traffic from our scanner is because it was protected in that Faraday container. But the flip side of that means this Eagle’s Nest group was not affected.”
“Or we got lucky and picked up another person using a Faraday-protected radio.”
“The chances of that are astronomical.”
“Whatever, we need to continue east.”
“Have everybody fall in,” Briggs told Edwards as he headed out the back door.
“Fall in … backyard … let’s go,” she shouted.
All the soldiers ran to the backyard and fell into their positions, massing a platoon-sized formation.
Next door, a growing number of civilian tagalongs were massing. What used to be a show of solidarity between the Bloods and Crips had morphed into a compilation of all types of people. The new situation called for Americans to lay aside their petty differences and work together in unity.
Taking a heavy risk, Briggs took his backpack off and set it down at Edwards’s feet.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting a better look.”
Briggs had spotted a tree he could climb to get a better view of the area. He had started to climb the tree when he smelled the cold ocean breeze as he elevated. It was a quick reminder of what he was fighting for. He thought of the national anthem and the words from sea to shining sea. The Pacific coast might not be clean, but the sun had a way of catching it just right. The waters glistened and gave it a shiny effect.
Briggs now had a vantage viewpoint of the block and the surrounding area. He was glad to see so many people amassing, but was also worried that such a number would certainly draw attention.
Climbing down and gently hanging from the bottom branch, he let go and found himself next to Edwards.
“Well, Eddie, it looks like a couple hundred people two doors down.”
“Hey, look, over there,” somebody shouted.
“TAKE DEFENSIVE POSITIONS,” Briggs shouted.
The platoon broke formation, and each soldier found a place to take cover. Sergeant Briggs moved into a defensive position at the corner of the house and looked into the direction of the voice that shouted.
There were some civilians standing on the street corner, drawing attention to their position. They were pointing down the road, but he could not see what they were pointing at.
“Eddie, grab a squad of PFCs and follow me.”
Briggs ran into the backyard and followed a fence line through the neighboring house’s backyard. From there, he crept up toward the back door of that house. It was unlocked and he walked in. Briggs hastily cleared each room until he found his way into the living room, which had a picture window facing the direction of the way the civilians were pointing. From this position, he saw a squad-sized group of FEMA employees garbed in biohazard suits. They were covered from head to toe, gas masks included.
“What are we looking at?” Edwards asked.
“I’m not sure what to make of this, Eddie.”
“Where’d they come from?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
Briggs looked up and down the block and could not see a vehicle. “They must be stranded.”
“Let’s take them prisoner!” Edwards suggested.
“I think I’m down with that, but my main concern is that they may have been working in something we don’t necessarily want to be exposed to.”
“Well, maybe they’ll surrender without having to touch them. If they can count, they may cooperate,” Edwards said, referring to the number of people they had with them, which was a stark comparison to the FEMA workers.
Briggs’s platoon was made up of four squads of ten soldiers. Doing the math in his head, he figured he could take three squads against the FEMA group, to overwhelm them, and keep one squad with the civilians for moral support.
“Eddie, go get me two more squads and leave the last with the civilians. Let the others know what we’re doing so if something goes bad, we’ll have backup ready.”
“Roger that.”
Moments later, Briggs had three squads of soldiers advancing on the FEMA group. From Briggs’s position, it appeared that the FEMA group only had a couple of rifles. The rest were walking down the road, oblivious to the fact they were being tailed.
When they were within fifty yards of the FEMA group, they ran out into the open with their rifles at the high ready position. Briggs and his men were rapidly advancing on the group. When they were just feet away, the group heard the hustling footsteps and turned around to face their ambushers.
Shots were fired in both directions. Hearing the gunfire, the extra squad that was held back ran to the front yard and was followed by the mass of people. Each one was eager to get involved. They all took off in a dead sprint towards the gunfight, but the bullets had stopped flying.
Briggs was holding his gut with his left hand. Two men of the three squads were lying on the ground, each wincing in pain and lying in red puddles.
Turning towards Briggs, Edwards could see he had been shot.
“Briggs,” she said.
“I’m good,” he said, reaching into his cargo pocket and pulling out some zip-ties. “Get them secured,” he said.
Edwards took the zip-ties and passed them out to the others so they could expedite the securing of the prisoners.
“Get them out of the street,” she commanded, pointing them to a yard just off the roadway. “And get these soldiers some medical attention.”
She looked back to Briggs and saw that he was now on his knees. She ran to help him up.
About the time Edwards was able to get Briggs on his feet, the swarm of civilians had gathered together at their location.
“Do any of you have any experience in medicine?” she asked.
“I’m a nurse,” one lady called out.
“I’m good,” Briggs said one last time. “Go help them.”
“Go with them, and do what you can to help,” Edwards added to Briggs’s words.
Edwards was primarily concerned with Briggs’s health, but he had reassured her that he was fine. Moving him off the street, she could feel his weight getting heavier as his legs began to give way. He was no longer fully supporting himself. They both fell to the ground before they could make it to the house on the corner of the block, where they were congregating.
“Briggs, don’t do this to me,” she said.
“To you?” he quipped. “I’m the one that’s bleeding out here.”
Briggs moved his hand off his abdomen, and it was saturated in his own blood. Edwards opened up his flak jacket to see where the damage was located. Three bullets had found their way through a weak spot between the flaps of the vest and had entered a few inches above the solar plexus area of his chest. His breathing was shallow, and there were no exit wounds.
“Briggs, stay with me,” she told him, knowing the curtains of his life were about to close.
“Briggs,” she said one more time.
His body was now limp, and she found herself crying for the first time since her family had disappeared. Filled with rage and a newly found sense of resolve, Edwards tightly gripped her rifle. The only emotion she felt surging through her mind was anger, or was it hatred? She couldn’t discern between the two as she gently laid Briggs’s head down on the cold concrete sidewalk and stood up to take inventory of what had just happened.
Looking around, she could see one dead FEMA employee garbed in a full-body hazard material suit, lying in the middle of the street where the ambush took place. Two trails of blood were noticeable. One ended at Briggs’s body and led backwards to the ambush site. The other led to the backyard of the corner house, where they had the remaining eight with their hands zip-tied behind th
eir backs. Three of them were hunched over. One was writhing in pain and complaining that he had been shot.
That must be where the other blood trail ends, she thought. With her rifle firmly in her shoulder, she charged up to the wounded person. Every person within close proximity of the bleeding FEMA employee saw her moving rapidly towards the zip-tied prisoners, but her focus was on the bleeding one. In one fluid motion, she advanced, aimed down her sights, and pulled the trigger. The force of the impact jerked the killer’s head backwards as the rubber protective breathing apparatus on the person’s head burst open, spraying blood and chunks of human skull debris and brain matter from the exit wound.
The civilian populace gave a small response. There were a couple grimaces, but for the most part, they all seemed hardened to what had just happened. The rest of the FEMA employees were trying to stand up and run off, but they were grabbed and put back on their knees.
“Please don’t kill us,” one of them shouted. The breathing apparatus muffled the man’s voice. Edwards looked down at the lifeless body of the person she had just shot. Long brown hair saturated in crimson blood was protruding from the back of the person’s head.
She had shot a female. That gave way to curiosity.
“Why are you wearing hazmat suits?” she shouted, pointing her rifle in the direction of her next intended target.
“Because we were working with a very volatile pathogen,” the man said through his muffled breathing apparatus.
The words of the frightened man brought with them expressions of fear that became visible upon the faces of each person within earshot. Some people even took a few steps back.
Edwards paused a moment, long enough to move her eyes to the right, where there was a man standing with blood spatter from the head of the deceased person completely covering the bottom of his trousers.
Remaining calm, she moved on to her next question. “What type of pathogen?”
The man didn’t want to answer the question.
The moment grew silent.
Edwards pressed the muzzle end of her rifle against the man’s head. “You better start talking.”
“You’ve already killed every civilian not wearing personal protective equipment,” he said, with a strangely discomfited voice.
The civilians began to disperse. Some backed away, and some ran altogether. The soldiers backed away into the street. Edwards figured if she was contaminated, it was already too late.
“What were you working on?”
“We worked in a biocontrol and engineering facility managed by FEMA and sanctioned by the UN …” The man paused.
“Go on,” she pressed.
“We reverse bioengineered the Ebola virus and found a way to control the human population by isolating certain DNA strands that can be joined at the cellular level to—”
Edwards hit the man with the buttstock of her rifle. “Keep it simple. I’m not a scientist,” she demanded.
After regaining his composure, he summed it up. “We can control the population and determine who survives through selective processes.”
“Selective processes?”
“Don’t tell her any more,” one of his companions said.
Edwards pointed her rifle at the man who attempted to silence her questioning, then pulled the trigger. The man’s body fell forward and to the right, moving with the direction of the impact of her 5.56 mm projectile.
“The … the … uh, selective process isn’t our decision. It’s done at the government level.”
“How does it work? Talk fast; I’m very inquisitive.”
“You’re safe … anybody with a government job is safe. You’ve been inoculated. It’s been in the mandatory influenza vaccines for years. It was a foolproof way of eliminating the societal burdens.”
“Societal burdens?”
“Yeah, the homeless, the jobless, everybody that doesn’t contribute to a mutually beneficial way of life. Those people don’t get inoculations.”
“What about the government freebies? What about the free medical care?”
“Smoke and mirrors. When the grid went down, the virus became unstable. We were no longer able to keep it contained, so we fled. This pandemic will sweep across the nation and kill upwards of ninety percent of what’s left of the population.”
“What about you? Why are you wearing hazmat gear? Aren’t you a government employee?”
“We were contracted in. To keep us quiet, we were promised inoculation at the end of the operation.”
“Operation? What operation?”
“Operation Acts of Defiance as you know it was only a prelude to a greater story. In the end, the global population will be no more than five hundred million. At the end of this operation, the UN troops will return to their home countries and then to their families. At that point, their fate will mirror ours. The US wanted to lead the world … here’s its chance.”
“Where are the prisoners taken?”
“FEMA Pacific Region Nine is headquartered somewhere in Nevada. I don’t know where they go.”
Edwards paused to take in everything she had just heard. She had one last question.
“Why would you do this to your own country?”
“We were under threat of death. If we were to save ourselves, then we had no choice but to go with the program. They took our families away early in the Relocation Protocol and promised us that we’d be reunited with them.”
“Your fate will be no different than the rest of America’s. We chose to serve our country,” she said, pointing to her brothers and sisters in arms, “but we didn’t choose to be inoculated with the knowledge that the rest of the world was going to burn.”
Edwards squatted down and lifted one of her pant legs to reveal a knife that was strapped to her right shin.
The man began to beg for his life.
Edwards removed the knife from its place and walked up to the unarmed man. She grabbed the flexible material that made up the design of the breathing apparatus and balled it into her fist. Instead of pulling the man’s head backwards, as he was supposing she was going to cut his throat, she pushed his head forward and stuck the knife into the protective rubber barrier, cutting it open. She ripped his mask off.
“Like I said … your fate will be no different.”
One by one, she walked up to the remaining FEMA workers and cut off their gas masks and sent them away, with their hands still tied behind their backs.
Disillusioned, she took another moment to collect herself before she turned to speak to the platoon.
“I’m just a specialist. I haven’t been endued by the Army with leadership abilities, and I’m not in a commissioned or even a noncommissioned position, for that matter, but I am headstrong and resolute. I intend to do what I can to resist what our government has brought to our shores. Nobody’s making you tag along. You’re free to go if you like, but if we choose not to fight, then we have no hope.”
Edwards was having a moment of clarity in what otherwise felt like a great fog that had descended upon America. There were still more questions than answers. The biggest of all of them was what will become of us? Nobody knew the answer to the question that was on everybody’s mind, but no one dared to ask. The answer was rhetorical. To do nothing is to die. That pretty much left one option. To the warrior, it meant to press onward, to spit in the face of adversity and to destroy the enemy, whatever it might be, foreign or domestic.
With their families missing and nowhere to go, the decision was unanimous. Specialist Felicia Edwards put her knife away then reached up to her collar and unfastened the rank insignias that symbolized her position in the Army. She never had to utter a word to speak the volumes that that gesture had just uttered. There was no more Army, no more ranks, no more superiors. Now it was survival of the fittest, kill or be killed.
Each member of the platoon followed her example. She didn’t have to attend special leadership classes to gain their respect. What she was missing, had she been a corpora
l, was noncommissioned officer status. Now, they had chosen to reintegrate into a broken system and to fight for what was left. They had chosen to remain together as a team, a family. All they had was each other, and though the future looked grim, they made the choice to face it together, whatever might come, be it pandemic, FEMA security forces, UN soldiers, or US government turncoats.
Black Hills Army Depot, South Dakota
Thirty attack choppers had closed in on the formerly abandoned army depot. The data NORAD had recovered showed that they had flown in from somewhere in the Midwestern United States. They were heavily armed and given one mission: soften Black Hills Army Depot and draw out the Marines. What they did not know was that NORAD and USNORTHCOM were not aligned with the executive commander’s orders. NORAD launched a Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advance Missile, or CHAMP, to defend the American Marine regiment.
The CHAMP missile was locked onto its target, a formation of hi-tech enemy choppers, and was flying at an altitude higher than that of the helicopters. When the stealthy CHAMP missile unleashed its technology upon the unsuspecting pilots, it did so without making a sound. There was no detonation, no carnage, no shrapnel, not a single hint of what was ordinarily associated with modern warfare. The electronic systems on the choppers shut down. The engines maintained their momentum and they executed an uneventful fly-by.
The choppers continued on their course, no doubt confused as to why they couldn’t communicate and why their equipment was not working. The only thing that kept them airborne was the analogue backup controls. They flew roughly a mile before turning around to begin their return flight home. Without electronics, they could not engage targets or even release their payload.
When the choppers had made a complete 180-degree turn, they were met with swift and immediate retaliation. Several CH-53E Super Stallions, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Howard, unleashed the Hellstorm missile system upon the would-be attackers. The wreckage, fused together with the sinew of the human pilots, fell to the ground and landed just outside the exterior perimeter of Black Hills Depot. The victors returned to their landing zone in Hot Springs and celebrated the outcome.
Whiskey Black Book Set: The Complete Tyrant Series (Box Set 1) Page 60
