by JT Sawyer
“It’s tucked away back in the William Douglas Wilderness Area west of town,” said Darcy. “There’s only one road going in and plenty of game trails through the mountains out back that only a few of us know. It’s a paradise, with a trout stream and freshwater springs.”
Mitch looked at the pistols on her hips. “And trust me, with your skills, you’ll be more than welcome, not to mention that you saved our asses and we owe you big time over the next ten lifetimes.”
Eliza never figured that someone would be thanking her for saving their life. All of those years of being annoyed by the constant hovering of Secret Service agents and now she just wanted to go back in time and thank them all. Eliza looked down at the pack between her legs on the floor and thought of the laptop inside. They were still several hundred miles away from Ft. Lewis and she needed to keep the contents of her pack as well as her background hidden for now. She just wanted to forget what was at stake, forget about the world as it was, and just crawl into a corner somewhere and be left alone. Everything she knew was gone and returning to Fort Lewis would only bring endless questions about her ordeal, reminding her of what she no longer had. No one in this group knew who she was and it felt good to be anonymous for once in her life.
As they continued north, Eliza beheld miles of open country ahead of them, surrounded by coniferous trees and rugged wilderness. She was at once excited and intimidated, having spent most of her life in urban areas. Then she realized that it was the first inkling of actual emotion she had felt since she was with Willis, training with him, laughing on occasion, and being wrapped in his arms at night.
One day she swore that she would return to the scene of his final resting place to let him know that she had made it. Until then she would persevere, she would adapt, and she would prevail in this new world no matter what befell her or how difficult the road ahead was. Eliza looked up at the snow-capped peaks of Mt. Rainier looming in the distance and took in a deep breath, relaxing her balled fists and easing back into the seat.
Chapter 32
The four-hour flight on the C-130 from Coronado to Fort Lewis was a smooth ride as a high-pressure system cloaked the west coast. Carlie kept shaking her head, wondering if their ordeal was really over and, despite her being a seasoned air traveler, she still shuddered every time she heard the engine roar or the wings rattle. They had all bear-hugged the pilots and flight crew and bellowed out a victory cry after the plane landed at Coronado but it still all seemed so surreal and everyone sat with the same dazed expression on their furrowed faces. Are we really on our way to a military base? Is our long, spirit-draining trek actually over? She glanced down at her sunbaked hands and just wanted to thrust them over her face and weep but she still needed to maintain her composure in front of the group. How she longed to sink into a bed and turn off an actual light switch in a private room of her own where she could lose herself in her own thoughts.
As she looked out the window at the whitecaps on the Pacific Ocean below, she barely noticed a medic making his rounds. The youthful, blond-haired man sat down beside Amy and unfurled his blood-pressure cuff.
“What can you tell us about White Sands?” said Shane to the young man. “We couldn’t get through to them.”
“Shit, that base went dark over two months ago. I guess you lose track of time when you’re hanging out on a beach in Cancun,” he said with a chuckle. “Bad joke, I know. It’s just seems like a helluva place to ride things out for a couple of months if you have to.”
Carlie glanced at Shane and the others, who were smirking. Two months—has it really been that long? “And what about the president and his daughter? They made it to Ft. Lewis, right?”
The medic’s face froze and he looked down at the metal flooring. “Air Force One made it out but the plane went down in Idaho. They’re all gone. There was a general and some doctor on board too but no one survived.”
Carlie felt like a red-hot javelin had been thrust into her side. She leaned forward, trying to breathe, but her ribs seemed to compress. Eliza is dead…and her father. Everyone perished while we were rotting in that tropical hell. Her eyes raced around the cabin. No, that can’t be. There must be some mistake.
The medic interrupted her tortured thoughts by tapping her on her shoulder. “Can you roll your sleeve up so I can check your vitals?”
Shane put his hand on her arm and helped roll up her sleeve. “I’m sorry, Carlie.” She heard his words but felt numb and didn’t even feel the blood-pressure cuff constricting her arm. She looked across the cargo bay at Pavel, who was sitting opposite her. I hope that all of these months of suffering were worth it. When the medic was done she leaned her head forward into her hands and tried to push away the image of Eliza and the others on board Air Force One.
Before landing, the tall medic moved up beside the group and explained the safety protocols. “Since the outbreak at White Sands, all military bases have implemented security procedures for new arrivals and for existing personnel to prevent a catastrophic breach of the entire base. Ft. Lewis is now divided up into four wings that are all self-contained and separated by electric fences and concertina wire. Should one area be compromised, the other wings will remain intact and operational. You will be taken to D-Wing for decon and another checkup by my colleagues. After that, you’ll be escorted to your rooms to rest and get some chow before meeting up with the sec-def or whomever he assigns to your debriefing.”
“Wait, Secretary of Defense Lavine is in charge here?” said Shane.
“Yep, he was visiting the base when things went to hell and has been there ever since. He’s not just holding the reigns at Lewis but the entire country.”
Shane scrunched his eyebrows together. “Man, that guy is just a comfort princess—he’s got no real-world experience on the battlefield.”
Matias shook his head and then hung his head low. “Now I really feel nauseous.”
“Yeah, the world just got a whole lot scarier,” said Carlie.
The medic rolled his eyes and snickered. “Geez, you guys sound like the rest of my unit when we’re sitting around the card table at night. Now Lavine’s ears must be burning even more.”
Chapter 33
After arriving at Fort Lewis, Carlie and her team were taken to D-Wing where everyone underwent an anti-viral shower and scrub down, followed by an inspection in the quarantine section. Afterwards, they were taken to the medical lab for a thorough physical exam. Upon completion, everyone was shown to their private rooms where they were provided with new clothes, boots, and toiletries.
Like the rest of her group, Carlie was told to meet in the conference room down the hall when she was finished getting dressed so they could each be debriefed individually. All she wanted to do was sink into a cot and fall asleep but she knew that they were probably looking at an afternoon or more of intense debriefing.
She was the first one to arrive in the conference room and was met by Sergeant Major Duncan who introduced himself and then sat down across from her. He quietly thumbed through a manila folder, occasionally stopping to glance up at her.
“The notes from my men on the air transport crew indicate that you were Secret Service on a special mission coming back from…” He paused to squint at the next words, “Cancun, Mexico.”
“Well, when you say it like that, it sounds like another taxpayer-sponsored campaigning event abroad.”
He feigned a smile and then leaned forward, placing his elbows on the table. “It also says here that you have on your team two former DEA agents, a paramedic, a former Soviet scientist,” he said with a frown, “and, I’m quoting here, ‘a MacGyver-type character with all the bullshit one-liners to match.’”
“Yeah, that would be Jared—he’s a…” she said, shaking her head. “Never mind. I can see how this must look. Sergeant Major, you’re probably as baffled by our arrival here as I am that we even made it. I am here though, and prepared to answer any questions you have, so fire away.”
“First off,
you knew the unlock codes for accessing our secure frequency here. Tell me more about that for starters.”
“I was working under a directive issued by General Adams at White Sands. We had clearance from the president to infiltrate Cuba after learning of a connection between the virus at Ground Zero in our country and a route of transmission on the island of Nuevo Gerona. We expedited the rescue of Pavel Dimitrikov, who was the leading Soviet researcher working on the original viral strain. He is the key to a vaccine along with any intel that was on that laptop that we procured.”
“What laptop? Can you be more specific?”
“The laptop that was in General Adams’ possession. It was a CIA encrypted device that may have held some answers to a cold-weather facility in Alaska that houses the original strain of the virus.”
“New Orleans, Cuba, Cancun, and now Alaska. That’s a lot of globetrotting the president had you undertaking at a time when our resources were stretched thin within the military. Mexico, though, that sounds like a good time, working on your tan on the beach for a couple of months.”
Carlie leaned back and crossed her arms, giving Duncan a chilly stare. “Look, the fact that you’re in 1st Special Forces, and a Sergeant Major at that, is reason enough for me to believe that you’ve got more brains than the sec-def and could probably be running this place. But frankly I am so exhausted right now and also getting so pissed at comments about living the good life on a beach in Mexico that I would like to just punch the next person in the fucking jaw who says that to me.”
“Ms. Simmons, you can stand down,” he said, sliding the papers from the manila folder across the table towards her. She glanced down at the papers and saw the same story she had just rehashed spelled out in formal detail.
“What the hell, you knew all this and…”
Duncan raised his hand, palm out. “I just needed to be sure your story meshed with the classified papers that I had in front of me—what little we got from General Adams before Air Force One went down. I don’t know you or any of your team and it’s not as if we can pull up SAT imagery from two months ago to confirm your whereabouts. The fact that you had unlock codes to our frequency was a good first step to confirming who you were but I wanted to meet you in person and hear your side of things.” He ran a hand through his hair and leaned forward. “No offense about the Mexico comment. I can’t imagine the deprivation you’ve been through since the USS Farragut went down and all the deeks you’ve had to deal with out there. And if it makes you feel any better, you’re not the first person who has wanted to ‘punch me in my fuckin’ jaw,’” he said, rubbing his chin.
“So can we get on with business then, and how we can help, or do you need to yank the chain of everyone on my team?”
“You’ll suffice,” he said with a lopsided grin. “But I do want you to provide a full briefing of what you know along with Pavel’s account of his work so we can correlate that intel with our own findings,” he said, getting up and walking around the table and extending his hand. “Now let me try this again, Ms. Simmons. I’m Sergeant Major Ron Duncan and I want to welcome you to Fort Lewis. I look forward to working with you and your team.”
She slowly extended her right hand and exchanged a handshake. “It’s just Carlie unless you give me a hard time again, in which case it will be Ms. Simmons, Jawbreaker.”
Duncan laughed and reshuffled the papers, placing them back in the folder.
“So, ‘deeks,’ that’s what you’re calling those things?”
“That’s what my men and I call ’em, which is short for ‘decomposers.’ Now, the sec-def prefers the term ‘inorganic mutant combatants’ but that never really took.”
Carlie shrugged her shoulders and blew a strand of hair off her nose. “Of course that’s what he’d prefer. I’ll have to tell that to my team, they’ll get a kick out of such an idiotic term.”
Duncan sat back down and grinned. “Carlie, I can see that we are going to get along just fine.”
Chapter 34
Eliza stepped onto the wooden porch of Darcy’s small cabin and looked out over the rustic encampment below. Eleven other timber-framed cabins made of Douglas firs encircled a spring-fed pond that was roughly the size of a basketball court. Brown cattails lined the edges and a firepit was off to the right near a wood shed. The former Forest Service logging camp was designed to be off-grid and was equipped for handling the living needs of a small group. The air was heavy with the smell of resinous wood from a nearby woodpile of freshly cut spruce logs.
The camp was nestled in a valley of thick conifers and a mist hung over the mountains to the west, its canopy illuminated by the rising sun. They had taken a circuitous route along old logging roads that eventually turned into narrow jeep trails followed by a two-mile hike along a seldom-used path to reach the place. The only evidence that anyone was in the rugged wilderness area became evident from the sound of someone chopping of wood as they walked into the camp, much to the surprise of the other eighteen residents.
Eliza marveled at the setup, which reminded her of a pioneer village she had been to in Virginia on a school fieldtrip in younger days. Across from her cabin was a smoke shack used for preserving venison, trout, and wild game that had been procured from the surrounding forest and rivers. A tool shed with an overhanging porch held an assortment of axes, wood-splitting mauls, shovels, picks, drawknives, and sharpening tools along with shelves filled with nails, drill bits, and hand-powered tools. Next to the pond was a clothesline, a galvanized laundry tub, and primitive washboards.
There was even a rustic shower house made of local stone with a cedar-shingled roof. Near the rear was a 55-gallon water drum that was painted black and had a pan underneath it for adding hot coals from the campfire.
Darcy stepped onto the porch and rested her hands on the railing beside Eliza. “It’s not home but it’s close enough.”
“How did you come to be here?”
“My ex-husband and I worked for the Forest Service and stayed here on woodcutting projects many times while fighting fires. After my homestead east of Yakima was overrun by creatures, I came here with a few friends. The rest of the folks are either locals or survivors we picked up on runs to different towns in the area. Most of us were already pretty self-sufficient when the world went to hell so it wasn’t a stretch to be up here. The others are adapting. And there are two other remote camps like this spread along the eastern flank of the mountains but we don’t see each other much given the difficulties of getting around in this terrain.”
“And you’re gonna stay here through the winter?” Eliza said, rubbing her arms and shrugging her shoulders as a cold breeze blew past them.
“These cabins are winterized. All we need is to shore up more firewood and then increase our hunting efforts to lay in plenty of venison and trout for the coming months. We’re already behind the eight ball on that and need to intensify our work in the coming month before the heavy snows arrive.”
“What can I do to help? I don’t really know anything about the outdoors other than a family camping trip I went on as a kid and that was in an RV.”
“You seem pretty hardy and that’s the most important thing. The rest we can teach you. Why don’t you come down to the main fire pit in an hour when we all meet up and we’ll see who needs the most help with their projects today.”
Eliza liked Darcy even though she had a hard time trying to figure out if she would have been a Democrat or a Republican, an irritating assessment tool that had been ingrained in her since childhood and that she constantly tried to overcome. Eliza felt Darcy was a cross between a hippy and a redneck with her mannerisms and expressions but felt at ease around her nonetheless. She could tell by the older woman’s calloused hands and weathered face that she was no stranger to manual labor in the elements.
Darcy looked at her. “Everyone here has had to leave behind their old lives and begin anew. But I’m just curious—you have a subtle Boston accent yet you said you were from Arizona.”
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Eliza turned away and stared out at the pond below. “I was going to college in Arizona, in Tucson actually, but I’m from the east coast originally. You have a good ear; my family was from Boston.” Eliza felt a pang of concern as she thought Darcy might have recognized her. The last thing she wanted was for everyone to be looking to her for answers—what was the government doing to help out survivors, where had the virus come from, or why hadn’t her father prevented all of this from happening in the first place. She clenched the railing lightly, hoping that Darcy wouldn’t have a sudden flash of insight and blurt out Eliza’s background to the others.
“Well, it’s just good to have you with us,” said the older woman, who walked past her down the steps. “You’re welcome here as long as you like.”
Eliza went back inside and grabbed some extra clothing and her gloves then stowed the ruggedized laptop in a loose plank in the rafters behind a thick wad of cotton-candy-like insulation.
Chapter 35
In the month that followed, Eliza grew more at ease with herself in the outdoors, learning a medley of woodsmanship skills from anyone who would teach her. It was a fascinating world that she knew nothing about and her eagerness to try new things made her a willing participant. She accompanied Darcy and the more experienced hunters in the mornings, learning how to track, stalk, and butcher wild game. The afternoons were spent with Mitch learning how to fish, mend gill nets, sharpen axes, and undertaking the never-ending chore of woodcutting, always in search of non-coniferous trees, which helped to reduce the smoke signature around the camp. The evenings involved preparing meals over the campfire and filling the smoke shack with more strips of venison and fish filets. Living off the land was a full-time, exhausting job but her enthusiasm made the days sail by and kept her mind from dwelling on the horrors of the recent past. Without drawing attention to her interest, she tried to glean what she could about the status of Fort Lewis and the route there. A few people had mentioned that the base was still operational from infrequent radio chatter they’d heard but the southernmost roads were choked with abandoned vehicles or were impassable due to bridges that had been blown by marauders. People were trying to forget about the dreadfulness of life outside of this small community and were transfixed with improving their dwellings before the full onslaught of winter. She felt an urgency to press on northward but needed to wait until she could discover what she was waiting for her at the other end and, most importantly, how she could get there on her own.
