by JT Sawyer
She handed the tablet back to him. “That’s right. I initially acquired this at Ground Zero in New Orleans. It had come over on a freighter from Cuba and had CIA encryption. Last I saw it, it was on its way back to White Sands so General Adams and his people could decode the thing. It may be our one hope of unlocking the Annoric Cold-Weather Bio-Facility in Alaska.”
“That was all that she was carrying aside from the usual weaponry required for life on the road today.”
“And your scouts found her where, exactly?”
“About thirty miles south of here. She was fighting her way out of an abandoned truck stop—after dispatching a bunch of zombies. One of my guys saw the whole thing unfold—said she had just killed four creatures in the back parking lot and was trying to hotwire a car when three more closed in on her. She quickly gave them a dirt nap too.”
“Willis must have taught her some firearms skills that came in handy.”
“Not with a firearm—she used her machete. Her rifle and pistol mags were already depleted from another battle earlier in the day, she said. By the time my guys got to her at the truck stop she had already finished killing several more that had moved in on her. She must have fought her way through dozens and dozens of those things just getting through the suburbs down there.”
Carlie was trying to reconcile this image of Eliza with the one she knew from her time on her protective detail in Arizona. She was afraid that the kind-hearted woman she knew may have been swept aside, or more likely erased, in order for Eliza to have survived such agonizing loss and hardship.
“With the right amount of skill and a smidgen of luck, miracles can happen,” Carlie uttered in a soft voice.
“I’ll have her escorted to her room in a little bit if you want to wait for her there.” Duncan got up to leave. “I’m sure you two will have a lot to talk about. You’re probably the closest thing to family she has left now.”
Chapter 39
Carlie was sitting in Eliza’s room looking at the seasoned accouterments on the wooden desk in the corner beside the bed. The tarnished blades, their formerly stippled handles worn smooth; the pistols whose slides showed exposed metal; the tan backpack with its threadbare shoulder straps and frayed edges. She heard the door handle behind her click and open. Duncan’s face appeared in the entrance followed by Eliza as he escorted her in and then left.
Eliza was clad in clean fatigues that seemed at odds with the woman’s weathered face and hands. She stood still as Carlie stood up and moved towards her but then stopped. Eliza’s face held a faraway look as if she was trying to process who was in front of her. A white sliver of sunlight shining in through a narrow window to Carlie’s right landed on Eliza’s neck, causing the young woman to tilt her head and gaze outside.
The young woman spoke in a whisper, her monotone voice barely audible. “It seems like a long time since I’ve felt the warmth of the morning sun on me.” She angled her chin up into the sunlight as her lips started to tremble. It looked as if the warming rays were penetrating beyond her epidermis, as if an invisible cord tethered to her body was pulling her into the light. “I never knew for sure if I’d ever really make it here.” She looked at Carlie but still stood motionless by the door as if needing to know she could turn and run.
“Seems like it was not long ago that we stood at a base like this before,” said Eliza.
“I remember. I was telling you that you were a warrior and could overcome anything that life threw your way.”
“All these months—I hoped to make it back here…” She paused, darting her eyes along the ceiling. “But I never knew for sure if it would really ever happen. I kept trying and trying but just couldn’t seem to make it.”
“But you did. You’re finally here, Eliza.”
“Am I really here, Carlie, in this place with you right now, or is this another dream?” she said, her voice cracking as she moved a foot forward then stopped. She lowered her head into her hands as tears began flowing down her cheeks and her legs began quivering.
Carlie rushed forward and embraced her as Eliza folded into her and began sobbing. “Tell me this isn’t a dream.”
“Only the good kind, Eliza,” she said, no longer able to quell her own tears as they both hugged and wept as the walls of the room resounded with pent-up sorrow. After a few minutes, Carlie took a deep breath and motioned Eliza back to sit on the bed while she sat opposite her on a folding chair.
“There’s nothing left for me—not the old life I once knew. With the laptop safely here, I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“This base will be our home for now. You’ll be safe here.”
“Safety is an illusion—there’s no such thing anymore except what you forge with your own hands.”
Carlie looked into Eliza’s resolute eyes and then at her deeply weathered skin and facial scars. She reflected back on her own ordeal in the tropics and how she had the strength and courage of her friends to help make it through such a gut-wrenching experience. How different that would have been if she had been alone after having everyone she loved torn from her.
“I’m sorry you’ve had to endure such pain and loss by yourself. I wish I could’ve been there for you.”
Eliza looked at her and smiled then glanced up at the window. “Now that I’m here, I don’t want to be shuffled off to some remote corner of the base by the sec-def. I know he had no love for my father. He probably views me as extra baggage now.”
“That’s not going to happen. Not while I’m around. Once you’ve had time to recuperate, we can talk about what comes next.”
“I’m not going to lounge in this room. I want to finish the training Willis and I started and become a better fighter. I want to help others, Carlie. Everything I once knew and depended on is gone.”
Carlie put her hand on Eliza’s shoulder. “Not everything. You’ve still got me to boss you around and I’d be honored if you join me and my team.”
“How’s that possible? Will Lavine even allow it?”
“If he won’t let you on my team, then I’m not on his.”
Eliza let out a half-smile, keeping her head slightly turned to prevent her scarred cheek from showing. Then she moved back on the bed and leaned against the wall, staring up at the vent. “A real bedroom with central heating. I’d forgotten what such a thing feels like.”
Carlie pulled up a chair and turned it around while resting her arms on the backrest. “When we got back here, I marveled at a bar of soap and a bottle of lotion. You’d think the shower house I was in was a chic European spa,” said Carlie with a sigh.
“One of the soldiers offered me a Snickers bar on the ride back here and I thought my taste buds exploded when I bit into that thing. The sugar was almost too much.”
“And what about the feel of clean socks and underwear?”
“Yeah, right. I mean, did you ever think that those were so essential to feeling human again? And what about dragging a brush through your hair and not having it filled with twigs and dirt.”
“For me, it was always sand—endless white sand in my hair, ears, nose, toes, and everywhere the sun didn’t shine,” said Carlie with a chuckle. “And then there were the sand fleas.”
“Yeah, Duncan said something about you biding your time at a resort in Mexico,” Eliza said with a short-lived grin. “Sorry, he told me to say that—said you’d find it funny but I guess not judging by your look.”
Carlie’s stolid expression gave way to a chuckle which turned into a fullblown laugh, causing Eliza to resume her smile.
As the soft rays of sunlight filling the room lengthened over the coming hours, the women exchanged stories that were interspersed with occasional mirth, sighs, or tears. They conversed into the late morning until their hunger led them down to the cafeteria, where they continued talking like two old friends as if no time had passed. Carlie could see in Eliza a look that she had witnessed in battle-hardened soldiers but occasionally she would catch a glimpse of the carefree girl t
hat she once knew and that brief flicker of hope breathed life back into Carlie’s soul. She felt the months of tension in her face wash away and her stride lighten with each step.
Chapter 40
Three days later, Duncan was sweeping his binoculars across the miles of frozen tundra as he lay sprawled out on a snow-encrusted ridge a quarter-mile away from the Annoric research facility. It was a single-story octagonal structure measuring one hundred feet in diameter. He knew from studying the layout on his tablet that the majority of rooms and labs existed on the nine subfloors buried deep beneath the permafrost. He knew if there were survivors they would be holed up in the lower levels but his SAT imagery wouldn’t penetrate that far inside the facility.
Outside of the main entrance was a small cinderblock building with a satellite dish atop it that had been previously used for communicating with the outside world. Duncan surmised that the crumpled metal dish was canted severely on its side either from extreme wind damage or someone wanting it offline. Surrounding the entire facility were thirty wind turbines that seemed to be intact and spun furiously in the gusty air. These accounted for a third of the facility’s electrical needs with the rest coming from a fusion reactor on the lowest level.
Duncan felt more confident moving forward with his plans to penetrate the facility since he was able to obtain the security entry codes from the laptop that Eliza had provided. In addition, the hard drive contained a detailed schematic of the structure, personnel records, and research protocols. If everything went according to plan they would be down and out in a few hours and then on their way back to Ft. Lewis by tomorrow.
As Duncan continued scanning the immediate area, plumes of his breath wafted upward like miniscule ghosts, the fur trim on his parka collecting some of it and instantly forming his breath into ice crystals.
On either side of him were seven other men who were a part of his 1st Special Forces unit. Bogged down by inclement weather, frigid temps, and fuel shortages for the helicopter, he and his men had been delayed in their efforts. Now with a break in the weather, they were hopeful that they could finally obtain what they so desperately needed—the last vestige of the original KAD97 virus.
“What the hell are we gonna do with this test tube of viral bugs, again?” said Mendez, a wiry soldier lying on the snow to Duncan’s right.
“We get it back to Fort Lewis and then our new comrade—the Russkie scientist—will brew it up into an antidote that we mix into our morning coffee,” said Duncan with a slight smirk. “You drink coffee don’t you, Mendez? Otherwise, you’re fucked.”
“I could go for a hot drink about now.”
“Yeah, well, why don’t I stop what I’m doing and brew you a cup of Chai tea seeing as how you sound as helpless as a bleating calf that just dropped from her momma’s belly.”
“Hell, Sarge, you hit that nail on the head,” said Ruffalo, a stout soldier to their right who was adjusting the focus on his binoculars. “Mendez even needs my help opening his MREs.”
“That’s because I can’t stomach the initial smell, you piss-ant,” said Mendez.
“Alright, as much as I’d love to continue this banter, let’s head downrange to the lab. These last fifteen minutes of observation haven’t revealed any movement but, all the same, treat this infil with the same precautions as any other and keep an eye out for any deeks. We don’t know if anyone or anything is still inside.
“Mendez, you and your team cover us as we approach. Once we’ve unlocked the outer security hatch, then I’ll give the go-ahead to come up.”
“Copy that,” said Mendez, who was lining up the sights on his MK12 rifle.
Duncan scrunched up in a low crouch with three of his men and they slipped over the tiny ridge, zig-zagging across the crunchy snow in their Arctic footwear. Their dappled white garments and weapons blended into the endless snow drifts that carpeted the landscape. Within minutes, the unrelenting wind had erased signs of their passage and they made it to the semi-enclosed concrete entrance. While the three soldiers provided cover with their rifles, Duncan removed his mittens, letting them dangle off their lanyards that attached the handwear to his parka. He removed a small computer device resembling a Smartphone and plugged one end of a terminal into a port in the security keypad on the wall. The red-illuminated numbers on his device rolled over until six numbers were revealed. He tapped the code into the keypad and then heard the vacuum-sealed double doors to his left begin to open. “Thank you, Eliza Huntington,” he muttered to himself.
He quickly removed the portable device, jammed it into his parka, and then reached for the FN Bullpup 5.56 rifle slung off his shoulder. As he stepped into the entry, he smelled an amalgam of bleach and body odor that reminded him of a gym locker-room.
As they entered, the overhead fluorescent lights went on, triggered by a motion-sensor device on the wall. The passageway before them was ten feet wide with bare concrete walls and a beige-tiled floor. Lining the walls on both sides were metal doors. At the end of the forty-foot-long hallway was another entry similar to the main doors.
Duncan flipped back his parka hood and tapped his ear-mic, telling Mendez to move up to his location. As he dragged his sleeve across his frost-encrusted beard, Duncan walked forward and heard something crack under his boot. He glanced down and saw the remnants of long bone splinters.
The rest of Duncan’s men moved up alongside him, their rifles kept in a low-ready position while everyone scanned ahead. Duncan knelt down and brushed the pure white bone fragments aside with the muzzle of his rifle. “Looks like these were four finger bones,” he said, searching the floor for more clues. “But where’s the rest of this poor bastard?”
“Looks like he won’t be using any of the security keypads around here,” said Ruffalo.
A small cyclone of wind-chilled snow blasted into the chamber as Mendez and his team entered. “Before we close the main doors, let’s sweep the rooms on either side,” said Duncan.
A few minutes later, after both teams indicated everything was clear, Duncan slapped his palm on the red button near the entrance doors and sealed them in. The passageway quickly flooded with warm air from the overhead vents and the men began unzipping their parkas and removing their woolen headwear.
“Thermal imagery sent to me from Fort Lewis earlier indicated that the main compound is devoid of human life and any deeks. However, some of these facilities have impenetrable walls that can prevent proper scanning of existing creatures on the inside, especially in the lower levels.”
As Duncan led his men down the hallway, the double doors ahead unlocked along their vacuum-sealed edges and both doors began opening inward while a blinding light flooded in towards them, partially obscuring the disheveled figures of eight former lab technicians. The first one to emerge before Duncan was a ghastly yellow figure dressed in a blood-stained lab coat, the nails from its slender fingers clacking along the doorframe. It paused and looked forward, its milky eyes unflinching. Its lips separated as it emitted a low hiss while the other creatures sprang forward, moving with greater agility than anyone expected.
Chapter 41
After spending the first few days adjusting to life at Fort Lewis, Carlie inserted herself into a firearms training position working with new recruits. It felt good to have a roof over her head again along with a daily routine but she knew it was only temporary. The sec-def hinted at putting her, Shane, and Matias into operational roles after they had had time to physically recuperate from their survival ordeal abroad. In the meantime, she was content to fall into the position of firearms instructor especially since it meant furthering Eliza’s training. At the end of each day, she would pull the young woman aside and run her through several core drills focusing on refining her shoot-and-move skills along with empty-hand combatives. She knew that Eliza already possessed undaunting willpower and was obviously capable of enduring tremendous physical hardship. Carlie could impart the advanced tactical skills needed to turn Eliza into a reliable fighter that would
augment her existing team’s abilities while giving the woman a healthy outlet to work out her pent-up aggression from her months on the road.
Following an intensive seven-day training regime, Carlie gave her recruits a day off. She was sitting on the floor of her room stretching before going on a morning run around the outside of B-Wing when she heard the intercom crackle on the wall beside her cot. It was the youthful voice of the sec-def’s assistant who was requesting her presence in her boss’s office two floors above.
After confirming her arrival, she changed out of her sweats into her fatigues and reluctantly headed upstairs. She sat in Lavine’s office alone for only five minutes before he came bursting through the wooden double doors and quickly insinuated himself into the leather chair at his desk.
“Ms. Simmons, I’ll get to the point as my time is precious.” He paused, steepling his fingers and pressing them against his lips. “We’ve lost contact with Duncan and his team. They gained access to the Annoric facility two days ago and have been dark since then. Our last communication with them revealed that they were headed to the lower level but there hasn’t been any word since then. SAT imagery reveals that there are heat signatures in the lowest sub-level but they are inert which means they are probably cut off from their evac route. It appears there are three organic assets.”
“’Organic assets’: you mean Duncan and his men, right?” said Carlie, knowing what the term meant but forcing Lavine to rethink his words.
“Yes, exactly, Duncan. I am stretched thin here with two of our other teams spread out along southeastern Washington. I know the extent of your training and need you and your crew to head up to Fairbanks and take the lead on this search-and-rescue operation.”
“A few of us have done cold-weather ops before but not my entire team.”
“Tell me what you need and I’ll see if I can make it happen. I can provide you with all the gear and tactical support I can muster but you’ll have to get your team up to speed on cold-weather issues enroute to the target.”
