by Lundy, W. J.
The M240 was back on the floor next to Mega’s outstretched feet. The big man’s head was tilted back, and he was staring up at the ceiling. The rest of the men looked the same—physically and mentally exhausted. The scene reminded Gyles of old World War II movies he watched with his dad as a kid. Worn out and exhausted men in the belly of a submarine, trying to stay quiet so the enemy destroyers above wouldn’t hear them and go away. Culver reached for a bottle of water and knocked over his rifle, which clanged to the floor. They were rewarded with fifteen minutes of frenzied activity outside.
“I don’t even know why I joined the damn Army,” Culver whispered.
Sergeant Tucker sat up and gave the kid a serious stare. “Good thing you did, or your ugly ass would be out there with them, instead of in here.”
Mega started to laugh. Tucker turned and shot him a hard finger. “Don’t you even open that damn blowhorn of yours.”
That was all it took, and Mega was having a fit of laughter that the others joined in on. “I know it’s fucked up, but I can’t stop,” Mega said, holding his belly.
Tucker moved closer and held his hands over the big man’s mouth, jokingly. The infected outside banged at the armor, their screams dulled and not as loud as before.
Luke looked back. “Damn ladies. You all do know the basics of what we are trying to do, right? You ever play hide-and-seek as a kid?”
Gyles shook his head and moved back to the bench seat across from Weaver, who reached across the gap and handed him a warm bottle of water. Gyles put it to his mouth and drank half of it, not realizing how thirsty he was until the water hit his lips. His hands were shaking from the adrenaline, and he realized his clothing was soaked with sweat. He set the half-empty bottle beside him and peeled off his uniform top. The other men began doing the same. It was hot outside, and with the engine off, it had to be approaching a hundred degrees inside.
All the interior vents and firing ports were open. There was a slight breeze, but the airflow carried the stench of death and decay, which only made things worse. Weaver looked at him. “How fucked are we?”
“Like a flesh light at football camp,” Gyles grunted back.
The crew compartment of men again let out bellows of laughter, only the way soldiers facing death could. Mega’s booming voice echoed. The others laughed harder at the absurdity of the big man’s obscenely loud voice when all of them were trying to remain quiet.
“Damn ya’ll hooting and hollering like a bunch of sorority girls back there,” Luke shouted from the front.
That caused only more laughter. Soon they were panted out, breathing hard and sweating. The stink was beginning to stick to them, and they could taste it on their mouths. The men weren’t complaining about the heat yet. They’d been in the Iraqi desert less than a month ago, and they still remembered what real heat felt like. They were dressing down and drinking water.
Gyles looked at his watch: nearly 1700 hours. It would be dark in a few hours and the temps would drop some, not much—but the sun off the MRAP would help cool it. The ravaging infected outside had tempered down; what was once feverish slamming against the sides of the vehicle had lulled and slowed to a dull tapping against the windshield.
Moving from his seat to the cupola, Gyles looked up through glass blocks in the bottom and scanned a three-sixty. As Luke had predicted, the infected were already leaving. The things did have a short attention span, but how far would they go? He watched some walk out of view as several others remained close by. A mob of what used to be young men walked through the wreckage, picking over the dead to their front. Others walked the highway, weaving in and out of the abandoned cars. He dropped back down and climbed into the front passenger seat. Luke had his head back; he thought the man was asleep.
“How’s it looking out there?” Luke said, the sound of his voice in the silence startling him.
Gyles looked over at the driver then back to the taped cardboard to his front. “They are thinning out. Maybe you’re right, and by morning they’ll be gone.”
Luke grunted and stretched like he was in his Lazy Boy recliner at home. He seemed content to be stuck on the side of the road, like this was just another day off, and he didn’t have shit to do. “When you were out there earlier, you see anything solid we can hook the winch cable to? I reckon we could pull ourselves out if we have to,” the man said, leaving his eyes closed and his arms crossed on his chest.
Gyles nodded, thinking about it. “Probably. I guess some of those trees beyond the fence could be beefy enough to do it. Maybe even a fence post. We can’t be in that deep.” He looked at the radio and pointed. “Any word?”
“Nope. Like a ghost town out there. Nobody. Everything is buzzing. Even the local police nets and trucker traffic is static.”
“How far did we get?” Gyles asked. “How much further do we have to go?”
“We’re about fifty miles to Belvoir.” Luke paused then said, “You know what’s bothering me, though, is Mount Weather is just north of here. I thought for sure they would have been broadcasting.”
“What the hell is Mount Weather?”
Luke looked at Gyles and shook his head in disappointment. “It’s a big shop for FEMA. Not only that… it’s sort of a hub for the Emergency Alert System.”
“What? Those pops and beeps on the radio?” Gyles said. “I didn’t know that came from a place, just thought it was local thing.”
Luke shrugged. “I don’t know how it all works, but I know there is a big control center for it up there on the mountain. My cousin was a radio tech in the Navy. After he got out he got a job with them. He told me about all kinds of high-tech shit they had up there.”
Gyles pointed at the radio in front of him. Under the big police radio mounted below the window was a traditional AMFM deck. “What station are they on? Let’s see what they have to say.”
Luke shook his head again. “It’s not like that; they’d be all over the spectrum. Doesn’t matter, though. Everything is down.”
“Down? What makes you say that?” Gyles asked. “Maybe it’s just off. Or we’re out of range.”
Luke shook his head. “If the religious freaks on the AM dial have gone silent, you know something is wrong. I tried earlier, just a steady buzz on every channel.” He sighed and looked at Gyles. “Seriously, bro, you’ve never heard of Mount Weather?”
Pursing his lips, Gyles shrugged. “I don’t know. I remember stuff about a doomsday bunker, but that was just all comic book shit… or maybe something I saw in a movie.”
Luke pointed his finger at him and smiled. “See, Sergeant? You ain’t as clueless as I thought.”
“What, that doomsday bunker shit is real?”
Luke laughed quietly and nodded his head slowly up and down. “Hell, yeah, it’s real. My cousin said during 9/11, helicopters were dropping big-time government folks in there around the clock. They didn’t come back out until the all-clear was given. Some say Dick Cheney even moved into that crib. Yeah, that shit is real.”
“If they are so dug in and sealed up, then why aren’t they broadcasting? You think the infection got them?”
Luke sucked in his lips and shrugged. “It’s something I was wondering about myself. Even if they were all dead and gone, we should still hear unit traffic, HAM radio operators, some remote radio stations. Hell… just other guys like us stuck in a cab out on the road… you know, shit like that. Do you remember the night this started?”
“How could I forget?” Gyles said. “I had no clue what was about to go down.”
“You remember the radios? The cell phones? I was working at the station. There was so much damn traffic, we could hardly get through to the deputies. And state police, after a few beats… forget about it. Everything was jammed up; the nets were useless.”
Gyles dipped his chin in agreement. He remembered listening to the chaos from the Chinook.
Luke reached forward and adjusted the volume on the AMFM radio, turning it down almost all the way. He power
ed it on and hit scan. The digital dial spun, catching nothing two straight passes through. He pushed a button and manually dialed it to 93.7 then looked at Gyles. “This was a popular station up here. The Emergency Broadcast System should be pushing messages traffic through it. What do you hear?”
Gyles listened to the steady buzz with its occasional ticks and whirr of static. “It’s just buzzing and clicking.”
“Listen to the clicks. Weed out all the rest of the noise, ignore the buzzing,” Luke said. The man waited, holding his fingers on the volume dial.
Gyles intensified his stare and leaned forward with his eyes closed, concentrating. There was a click then he counted with his fingers. After six seconds there was another click, then another six seconds later, and another six seconds after that. “What is it?” Gyles asked.
“I don’t know, but check this out.” He flipped the dial over to AM. The same buzz, and at the same six-second interval there were clicks. Then Luke turned off the radio and flipped on the police scanner. The same buzzing and clicking at the same six second interval. Luke turned them all off and sat back in his seat. “Different frequencies, different spectrums, even different radios and antennas. I think Mount Weather is up. That is a loop; it’s not by accident.”
“Then why aren’t they talking?” Gyles asked.
“Because they are jamming us, jamming everything. Most likely everything except short-range and military nets dialed in direct. Probably why you could talk to the colonel at Hunter from the Stryker. But you couldn’t hear anyone else. That’s just a guess. I don’t know shit about radios, other than pushing buttons.”
“Why would they jam everything?” Gyles said, doubtful. “What’s the point of taking down communications so people can’t be warned? Why keep us from talking?”
“Hey—they sent all those messages on TV and the radio early on, told folks to stay put, and it didn’t work. If people had locked up like they were told, the police and military could have done their jobs. The infection never would have spread to places like Vines. It never would have crossed state lines.” Luke paused and took a deep breath. “They took it down because the network news started talking about safe areas and FEMA camps in places like Atlanta. I think they turned all that shit off to keep people from moving around, stop folks from spreading the virus.”
Luke looked hard at Gyles. “They wanted to stop shit like that guy telling everyone to go west to Fort Knox. Telling people to get the hell out of the Capital. Keep people off the roads.” Luke swallowed hard and pointed at the sky. “Maybe even to keep that shit about bombing highways and culling survivors quiet.”
Gyles sighed. “That’s a hell of an idea. Doctor Howard actually said something about the only hope to really stop and contain the virus was for people to stay home. To stop spreading it.”
“You know it’s true. It has to be what’s going on,” Luke said. “Not like we don’t have a precedent for jamming communications when we fight an enemy. Like Howard said, people are the infection, they want to stop them from moving. News about FEMA camps and safe areas give people hope. It gets them out on the road.”
Gyles went to speak when they heard the roaring of the infected outside. They were screaming, but they weren’t pounding on the MRAP; the sounds were moving away from them. Then suddenly the screams were joined with the noise of a loud diesel engine. Gyles looked at Luke, who reached to his front and peeled back a bit of the MRE cardboard. A bright light shone in at them. Gyles squinted and considered the beams. Something big and loud was moving directly at them. “What the hell is it?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Day of Infection Plus Eleven, 2100 Hours
Near Haymarket, Virginia.
“Who the hell are they?” Luke said, pulling the rest of the cardboard off the windshield. “And what do they want?”
Gyles held a hand over his eyes, blocking the bright spotlights. “I don’t know what they are, but they’ve got the infected pissed off. So, I’m on their side.”
The vehicle moved closer, the intense beams no longer directed at them, but over and to the sides. The vehicle was big and yellow, scorched with burn marks and splattered with blood. It groaned and grunted, belching clouds of black smoke. A large spike-toothed bucket extended out toward them. Gyles flinched back, waiting for it to crash through the cab of the MRAP. Instead, it dropped down and clenched the front of the vehicle with a screech of metal-on-metal. The front end of the 30,000-pound armored vehicle shuddered and rose off the ground. They shook back and forth as the MRAP settled onto the hook.
“Aww shit, here’s to hoping they are the good guys,” Luke said, lifting his hands off the wheel.
The yellow vehicle to the front groaned, and the bright spotlights on the back of the vehicle powered off as others turned on in the opposite direction. Luke strained forward, keeping his hands off the wheel as they were dragged ahead, along the side of the road. “It’s a bulldozer, a big-as-shit bulldozer.”
Gyles looked ahead and could see the big CAT symbol on the back of the oversized machine. A cab centered on the top was covered in welded-on plate steel. Infected were all over the dozer. Occasional muzzle flashes from inside the cab knocked them off when they managed to get too tight a grip onto the steel grating. In the crew compartment, the soldiers had their faces pressed against the side windows, observing the chaos and infected horde outside.
“I don’t care who they are, they are getting us the hell off this road,” Mega shouted. “You see all these things out here, Sergeant?”
Gyles shifted. The side of the road was once again packed with them. The creatures were back in force. If they’d attempted to dig out of the vehicle the next morning, they would have certainly been killed. He looked back to the front as the dozer slowed. They were leaving the highway. A mile from where they’d been stranded at the roadblock, the dozer made a hard turn.
The MRAP bucked and protested, the metal screeching as it was dragged around a hard corner. They were now moving on an elevated road about twenty feet wide, the infected still packed in around them. Ahead, they could see steel walls and bright lights shining down. Muzzle flashes popped like strobes all along the perimeter of the building. There was a gate ahead and just outside of it, the dozer stopped and the bucket lowered fast, slamming the MRAP back to the surface with a steel-crunching thud and the suspension protested.
The dozer moved ahead and turned right down a steep decline, leaving. At the bottom, the dozer again made a sharp turn through sections of dragon’s teeth barriers laid out on a narrow path below. Cutting right and into cover, its lights were suddenly shut off and the dozer vanished from view as it continued a trek with most of the creatures still in pursuit.
Gyles sat, stunned. The building ahead of them was massive—concrete walls the first eight feet, then plate steel over that. Outside the walls was a large span of blacktop then a high steel fence that completely enclosed the structure. Surrounding the outside of the fence, ten to twelve deep, were the infected.
Before Gyles could ask how they were going to deal with the crazies outside, the perimeter lights of the compound shut off. The firing stopped. Gyles lost sight of the building in the darkness. He reached for his night vision goggles, but before he could find them, there was a faraway explosion—a ball of fire that lit up the night sky.
The infected along the fence pulled away and stared directly into the distant inferno. A building maybe a quarter mile from them was in flames. The crazies were consumed with it. Screaming and howling, they turned and ran toward the fire. Gyles looked across at Luke. The man shook his head then pointed toward a gate. A man in Marine Corps camo was standing just beyond it. He pointed up, and they spotted a small tower they hadn’t seen before. A man was frantically waving them forward. Luke hit the ignition, firing up the engine. He put the MRAP in gear and edged forward. Just before they hit the gate, it slid to the left. The Marine on the ground guided them in then ordered the gate closed behind them. The man outside walked in
front of the MRAP and, with a red flashlight, directed them with hand signals, waving them ahead. Luke followed his instructions. A large bay door opened in the side of the steel building.
They followed the ground guide into a large concrete bay filled with other military vehicles. The Marine on the ground turned around and pointed at the cab of the MRAP and ran a slicing motion across his throat. Luke reached down and killed the engine. The Marine flashed a thumbs up then walked away. In the silence, they could hear the bay doors closing behind them then a trio of men in uniform moved in their direction from the right.
“What the hell just happened?” Gyles mumbled.
“Bout to find out,” Luke said. He unlatched his door and dropped outside. The Marine who had been guiding them turned back and raised his rifle, seemingly surprised that the driver would exit without instruction. Luke’s hands shot into the air.
“Aw, hell,” Gyles said. He opened his own door and dropped to the ground. More rifles were turned on him from Marines to his side he hadn’t seen before.
“On your knees,” the Marines barked.
Gyles held his hands up and dropped to a knee. “Calm down, hero. I ain’t a bad guy,” he said, his head swiveling. “Name’s Sergeant First Class Robert Gyles. Just trying to link back up with my command at Fort Belvoir.”
“Slow it down, Devil Dogs,” a stern voice barked from the trio.
Gyles’s head drifted back toward the trio. A silver-haired man with a strong jaw walked directly toward them. He wore black eagles on his collars and the name McDuffie on his shirt. He moved just to the front of the vehicle and eyed Luke, then turned to Gyles. “Got me a cop and a busted-up soldier riding in a painted-over MRAP.” A door slammed behind them and a crew of men stomped in, one wearing olive-green coveralls and a pistol in a shoulder holster. The colonel looked to the group. “Any problems out there?”
