Apocalypse Crucible

by Mel Odom

  “The navy.”

  “Made a career of it, I’ve heard tell. Me an’ Luther, why, we’s glad to be shut of it after the war. Got tired of bein’ told when to get up, what to do all day long, when to go to bed.”

  “It’s not a life for everybody.”

  “No, sir, it ain’t,” George agreed wholeheartedly. “You got a wife back here, don’t you?”

  Shame flushed through Delroy as he wondered just how much the old man knew about him. Marbury was a relatively small community despite the racetracks there. “I do.”

  “Comin’ back to see her?”

  “Maybe,” Delroy said. He supposed there was no way around that encounter. Unless she chose not to see him. And he had to admit that was possible. But he hadn’t come back to see Glenda.

  George was silent for a moment. Blues music continued to spin through the radio. “I hate to ask this, boy, but you been in touch with your wife?”

  More guilt assailed Delroy. He hadn’t called Glenda to let her know he’d gotten emergency leave from Wasp. With everything that was going on in Turkey, she’d have asked why he was leaving now. He couldn’t have lied to her; he never could. At least, he’d never knowingly lied to her.

  You told her you had faith, Delroy. You told her you believed as she believed. If that’s not a lie, then what is? Delroy stared at his own reflection. His blue-black skin almost made him a shadow inside the pickup. Only his eyes, bloodshot and haunted, stood out in the soft darkness. But maybe you aren’t so guilty there. Those are also lies you told yourself.

  “No,” Delroy said. “I haven’t called her.”

  “Them phones. A lotta them are still outta whack. People gets so they depend on them so much it’s terrible. Onliest reason I brought that up, you see, is ’cause a lotta folks—” he hesitated—“well … sir, … lotta folks done up and left Marbury.”

  “I know.”

  “They’s left places all around the world. Seen that on the TV.”

  Delroy said nothing.

  “One thing I been noticin’,” George continued cautiously, “an’ I might be wrong ‘cause I been wrong about a lot of things, but I taken a good look at all them what’s missing from Marbury.”

  “All the children,” Delroy said. That fact still hurt him. If Terry had lived, if he’d gotten married as he’d intended, there might have been grandchildren by now. And if there had been, those grandchildren would have been taken.

  “All the children,” George agreed. “An’ them growed-up folks what’s missing, far as I can see, was all good folks, God-fearin’ folk.”

  “Good folk, indeed.” Delroy thought back to Master Chief Dwight Mellencamp, his best and closest friend aboard Wasp. Even though he had died hours before the Rapture, the chief’s body had disappeared, too. Researching news stories, Delroy had discovered that bodies had disappeared from hospitals, morgues, and funeral homes. “That they were,” Delroy said.

  “An’ Miz Glenda, she’s a good ’un, too.” George carefully looked at Delroy. “What I’m sayin’ is that with her bein’ one of the best Godfearin’ women I know, could be she ain’t home when you go there knockin’.”

  “I know.” Delroy had already accepted that. In fact, he hoped Glenda had disappeared. He really couldn’t see anything other than that happening.

  “Just want you to be prepared is all,” George said softly.

  “I am.” Delroy stared out at the misty rain still falling from the dark sky. “I don’t plan on going into town just yet. If you could drop me at Henderson Road outside of Marbury, I’d be much obliged.”

  “Henderson Road?”

  “Aye.”

  “Why, boy, there ain’t nothing at the end of Henderson Road ’cept Sunshine Hills Cemetery.”

  “I know.”

  George took a final drag off his cigarette, then ground it out in the ashtray. “Goin’ to pay your final respects?”

  “Aye,” Delroy answered, but he knew what he had planned—what he had to do—wasn’t respectful at all. “And if I can, I’d like to buy one of those shovels you have.”

  3

  United States 75th Army Rangers Temporary Post

  Sanliurfa, Turkey

  Local Time 0422 Hours

  Keeping one hand on the Kevlar-lined helmet she wore, Danielle Vinchenzo hunkered down at the base of the only remaining wall of the small building where the OneWorld NewsNet team had been grudgingly allowed to set up headquarters inside Sanliurfa. Neither they nor the other media teams on-site were welcomed by the military, since the soldiers’ first objective had been to move the civilians to safety. But they were tolerated. The power of the electronic media had become a recognized force in military warfare since the second war with Iraq.

  But being a journalist doesn’t make you invulnerable, Danielle reminded herself. The concussive booms from a string of explosions a split second ago had rolled across the battle-torn city streets around her. Then a round of ammunition impacted against the building ahead of her. A shower of brick fragments peppered her back and shoulders, drumming against her Kevlar helmet.

  Cezar Prodan, the young cameraman who had been assigned to her when she had accepted the job with OneWorld NewsNet three days ago, threw himself down beside her. He cursed in English and in his native Romanian tongue. His triangular goatee, coupled with his broad forehead, made him look a bit like a wide-eyed goat.

  Curled up in a fetal position against the cracked and leaning wall, Gorca Bogasieru covered his head with his arms. Pale and overweight, he looked like a turtle that had pulled in its limbs to wait out certain disaster. His eyes were squeezed shut behind his round glasses. He spoke in Romanian, but Cezar quickly shouted him down. Gorca shifted his attention to Danielle. “What happened?”

  Before Danielle could reply, a corpse plopped to the ground only a few feet from her.

  Startled by the sudden movement and panicked by the grotesque sight, Danielle jerked back. Her head slammed into the wall behind her with enough force to blur her vision despite the helmet. When she drew in a breath, the stink of the dead soldier fallen from the sky filled her nostrils.

  Hold it together, she told herself. You’re a professional reporter. An award winner. You saw worse than this when the SCUD attack hit Glitter City. More than that, Dani, you’ve got the inside track on the story here. Nobody else is capable of getting the kind of footage out of Turkey that you are. You’ve got OneWorld NewsNet backing you. Biggest communications net presently standing after all the disappearances. Get up. Get moving and do your job.

  She forced herself to look at the dead man. At first, she was chilled by the fact that only half the torso lay there. One of the dead man’s arms was missing, as was half his face.

  But something was wrong. Even more wrong than such a sight should be.

  Then she noticed the blood. Rather, the lack of it.

  If the man had died in the blast, his massive injuries should have been scarlet with freely running blood. It wouldn’t even have had time to coagulate. But all she saw across his tattered uniform—and now she saw that it was a U.S. Army Ranger day camo BDU—were the dark black stains of blood from old injuries, long since clotted and dried. Dying orange embers in the uniform, leftovers from the explosion that had blasted him into their path, glowed briefly then faded.

  Despite the embers, the explosion hadn’t killed him. This man had already been dead when he’d been blown up. The realization almost sickened her.

  A fresh wave of artillery fire lit up the night, punching holes in the dreadful silence that had fallen across the city after the series of explosions. Warning Klaxons screamed immediately after. Around her, all across the street, and up on the rooftops soldiers launched into motion. In a heartbeat, their uneasy battleground became a full-fledged war zone again.

  Danielle adjusted her borrowed helmet and stood. Her knees quaked, but she kept her legs steady under her. She pushed her fear aside, telling herself again and again that she’d chosen to be here, that sta
nding up now and reporting was all she needed to do to rocket her career into the stratosphere. That was what she had always wanted. All she had to do now was do her job and live through the fight.

  She checked her satellite phone, patting the reinforced shell that protected the device from harm. According to Gorca, who worked as her technician and outfitter, that shell was proof against everything but a direct hit. After being in the field with her since the retreat from the Turkish-Syrian border and seeing the chances she took, Gorca had also felt compelled to remind her that she was not as impervious as her gear, despite the body armor the U.N. Peacekeepers had loaned her.

  Cezar glanced up at her.

  “Is that camera all right?” Danielle demanded.

  “Yes.” The young man nodded and held the camcorder protectively. “I think so.”

  “Get up. We’ve got work to do.”

  Looking past her, Cezar nodded at the torn corpses and body parts that lay strewn across the street. “Maybe now, maybe time not so good. Plenty time to film after attack.”

  Frustrated and furious, worn down from trying to get the story of the Sanliurfa’s military occupation on the air in the middle of a raging battle and from controlling her own fears, Danielle reached for the young man. She knotted her fist in the bright Hawaiian shirt he wore under the Kevlar vest. He looked at her in shocked surprise. She got her balance, set her feet, and pulled him upright.

  Danielle stood five feet nine inches tall in her stocking feet. She’d spent years working out at the gym to keep fit so she’d look good on camera, not to mention so she’d have the energy and stamina to keep pace with her high-pressure job. She was stronger than most men expected her to be. A lot stronger.

  Cezar almost flew to his feet. A few inches shorter than Danielle, the young man was skin and bone, more emaciated than lanky. He wore his hair in dreadlocks, fastened by multicolored rubber bands. A bout with chicken pox had left his face pitted. She loosened her grip on his shirt and surveyed him critically. He hardly looked worth her effort. Still, he had a great eye when he was looking through a camera lens.

  “Get that camera up and running,” Danielle ordered. “I want footage shot here and now, bits that we can cycle into the live broadcast we’re going to be doing in a few minutes.”

  “All right, all right.” Cezar stripped the lens cover off and powered up the camera. A belt of batteries hung around his narrow hips. Light spewed from the camera as he started shooting. A bright oval of it fell across the soldier’s corpse. With the disappearances of so many people around the world, the gloves were off when it came to broadcasting the harsh reality of the violence in Turkey. And OneWorld NewsNet had never been a media empire that felt the need to stint on the gory drama of any situation.

  Empty brass cartridges suddenly rained down over Danielle and rattled against the pavement under her feet. She flattened herself against the wall and looked up, spotting the Ranger standing at the edge of the building cradling a Squad Automatic Weapon in his arms.

  That’s a SAW, she reminded herself, not a Squad Automatic Weapon.

  Only a newbie calls them that. Getting the military nomenclature right was important. After years of war coverage on CNN and FOX News, the world audience had become familiar with military aircraft, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and hardware. She knew a lot, but she was also aware that she was continuing to learn. She didn’t want to make a mistake now.

  She tapped the speed-dial function on the sat-phone and snaked the earpiece up to her ear. The phone rang once before it was answered.

  “Yes?” The voice at the other end of the connection was dry as ash. The deadpan tone was uninflected, neutral, and impossible to place. The owner of the voice was a man named Radu Stolojan. At least, that was the name Danielle had come to know him by. She wasn’t convinced that it was his real name, just as she wasn’t convinced that the man ever needed to sleep. Whenever she called, he was there, always aware of her situation.

  “This is Danielle Vinchenzo.”

  “Of course it is,” Stolojan replied. “This is your appointed line.” If he heard the artillery fire blasting into the city around them, he gave no indication.

  “The Syrians have just attacked the city.”

  “I know. I watched them approach.”

  “And you didn’t think to call?” Danielle choked back a curse. She’d been interviewing military cooks who worked to feed the armies that had gathered inside the city. The attack had caught her by surprise.

  “There was no need to call,” Stolojan replied smoothly. “I knew that if the Syrians chose to attack, you would know soon enough. You are in the middle of the fight, after all.”

  Danielle cursed as she stared at the corpses lying across the street. A rapid burst of gunfire—from a .50-caliber machine gun she guessed from the way the targets jerked back under the drumming impacts—knocked two marines from the rooftop of the building across the street. Two stories below, both men smashed against the pavement. Neither man moved. If the armor-piercing bullets hadn’t killed them outright, the fall finished them off.

  A trio of U.N. soldiers, distinctive in the bright blue helmets they wore, broke cover and raced out into the street. They dragged the marines back, securing holds on their load-carrying harnesses. Before they made the distance, the makeshift barricade that choked the street two blocks away and rendered it impassable to vehicles suddenly erupted. A huge rush of flames blew cars and tractors into the air while others skidded forward.

  The ground shook beneath Danielle’s feet. Fear spun a ball of bile into the back of her throat as she heard the metallic screeches of the barricade sliding across the broken and pitted pavement. She dodged to the building’s side, flattening herself against the wall as a Volkswagen minivan wreathed in flames shuddered past her.

  “Are you getting that?” Danielle yelled, turning toward Cezar. She didn’t know if she could be heard over the cacophony.

  If Cezar heard Danielle, he didn’t respond. He knelt, camera to shoulder, and panned with the burning hulk of the Volkswagen as it roared past. A slipstream of embers and flaming pieces skipped after the vehicle. When the chips were down and the action was at its most intense, Cezar was the camera’s eye.

  The rescue effort by the U.N. soldiers suddenly turned into tragedy, the mass of flying debris catching and scattering them like tenpins. Fire clung to the clothing of two of them, but neither moved, and Danielle felt quite certain that neither would move again.

  “Medic!” one man shouted into the headset he wore. “Medic!”

  “Have we got satellite access?” Danielle asked over her sat-phone.

  “Of course,” Stolojan answered. “We are prepared to go live as soon as you begin broadcasting. I’ve already cleared you. Negotiations are underway even as we speak to run your piece on CNN and FOX News with a two-minute delay.”

  The delay was supposed to inspire dedicated news watchers to switch over to the cable stations that carried OneWorld NewsNet as an alternative to local or national news. The violence in Turkey coupled with the disappearances that had taken place almost immediately afterward had guaranteed OneWorld a large share of the worldwide viewing public.

  Nicolae Carpathia was—until a few days ago—a successful Romanian businessman worth millions. He owned OneWorld NewsNet. The day the war had broken out along the Turkish-Syrian border, the Romanian president in power at the time had stepped down from office and named Carpathia as his successor. In addition to running several corporations, the young Romanian power broker was now running a country.

  And he is scheduled to speak to the United Nations, Danielle reminded herself. She’d wanted to cover that meeting, knowing that—given the current situation—the talks would garner global interest, but the story of the men attempting to hold Sanliurfa against such untenable odds was impossible for her to resist. She’d stuck it out in the battle zone instead of breaking off to go to New York.

  A Humvee marked with the Red Cross insignia roared d
own the street. The front bumper grazed the still-burning hulk of the Volkswagen, spinning the vehicle around a little as it passed.

  The Humvee’s driver braked in front of the downed soldiers, providing a protective barrier between them and the open end of the street. Before the rescue vehicle rocked to a complete stop, four field medics leaped into action, breaking out gurneys and medkits. They shouted at each other, sorting out the quick and the dead. Another artillery round, probably from a tank, slammed into the barricade and threw more debris back over the street.

  Danielle tapped Cezar’s shoulder to get his attention.

  The cameraman turned around.

  “On me,” Danielle instructed as she took the wireless microphone from her jacket pocket and clipped it to her collar. She keyed the power and tucked the earpiece into her other ear. When she ran her finger across the microphone, she heard the rasp that told her the mike was live. Despite the danger, she took off the Kevlar helmet and ran her free hand through her short-cropped hair, trusting that every strand would fall perfectly into place.

  Cezar stood, brought up the camera, and focused on her.

  Danielle moved so that she stood away from the shadow of the building. The burning Volkswagen gave off enough light for her to be clearly seen by viewers. The Humvee and the medical team could be seen in the background, illuminated by the flaming debris that lay scattered across the street.

  “Cue live transmission,” Danielle said.

  “Live transmission cued,” Stolojan replied. “Live in three … two … one … go.”

  Cezar focused on her, framing her from the waist up so she could signal him with her left hand out of the camera’s view.

  “Sanliurfa, Turkey,” Danielle said in a clear voice. The collar microphone was cutting-edge technology, and Stolojan and his crew at OneWorld NewsNet headquarters cleaned up all the audio transmission as the piece went out live. “Also called the City of Prophets because of the biblical history that played out here and in the outlying lands. For generations, armies have marched and warred through these mountains and across the plains. Tonight, a remnant force made up of U.S. Army Rangers, the United Nations Peacekeeping force, and the Turkish army stand together against a common foe.”