by Franks, JK
Tahir had been the more active participant in the mission, but everyone on board was aware of the imminent attack on the Thunder Ridge base. “Yes, sir.”
“Good, time is short, and lives are at stake, so let me get right to the point.” The older Garret stood and walked over to the huge wall map that had been brought up from the chart room. Scott and his people are here, we believe the objective is in this area,” he drew his finger in a circle. “Now, we put out the call to other military units who are able to converge on that spot in the next several days. Some may be as much as a week out, but the point is, your guys are going to have one hell of a backup force.”
He turned from the map and leaned heavily on the back of one of the leather office chairs, crossing his arms in front of him. “The problem is, the infected are literally everywhere. Units are running into large groups of them. If they engage, they lose time, people, ammo…everything. If they don’t engage, the damn things follow and wait for them to stop and start attacking like a pack of wolves. The commanders no longer want to fire on them as their blood is highly contagious as you both well know. So, gentlemen, we need another way of dealing with them, and you are going to help us do that.”
DJ looked at Tahir confused, but noticed his friend was smiling and nodding.
Chapter Eighty-Four
Wilmington, North Carolina
The scent of the ocean greeted her as she opened the door, grabbed her bag and headed for the gate. Although she’d never been here, the encrypted nav system in the Beast brought her within feet of the dock. She was relieved, the last few hours had been some of the longest of her life. Dense pockets of infected had roamed the highways making travel a challenge. Eventually, she had given up trying to dodge the brainless dotes, trusting the brawny vehicle to deal with them. The hood and grill of the presidential limo were covered with gore. The wipers had maintained a pair of clear portholes in an otherwise red-filmed windshield.
While officially, the United States hadn’t had a yacht for the president since 1977 when the USS Sequoia was sold, unofficially having a floating version of the White House was fairly common. No longer a Navy vessel, the California was a 60-meter German-crafted Lürssen super-yacht and was the epitome of style and performance. Now, thanks to a complete retrofit at a private defense contractor in association with the shipyards in Bath, Maine, it was also one of the safest places in the world for her to be.
She didn’t think Ms. Levy was aware of the yacht. Chambers, herself, had actually commissioned most of the work. As secretary of transportation, she had vetted the firms involved, then gotten very active in the redesign. Once she was sworn into the top office, she’d commissioned a Coast Guard crew to covertly relocate it down here to Wilmington. In the months since, she had added several of her private security forces to the ship, stocked it with every manner of food and supplies and kept it as her ace in the hole. It was now time to play that card.
The ensign watched the woman as she got out from behind the wheel of the presidential limo and began to walk up the aluminum gangway, her polished black heels clicking and scraping as she walked up the short incline. “Madam President?” he asked questioningly.
“Don’t just stand there, take my bag,” Chambers barked.
He took the bag from her outstretched hand, then looked back to the car she had exited. “You…you drove yourself, ma’am? Where is your security…”
“No time, please instruct the captain we will be departing immediately—no excuses. Run along now.” She didn’t want anyone else questioning her authority. She was in fact still the president, despite what some might think.
The ensign decided cooperation was the smarter course, nodded his head and led the way into the massive craft. He showed her to the richly appointed suite, left her bag and exited to notify the captain. She marveled at the luxury touches everywhere. While the yacht already had world class interiors, she had chosen the award-winning designer Luca Dini to put the finishes together. The last time she had seen any of this it had been renderings and textile samples. “Oh, my!” she exclaimed excitedly. This will be perfect.
The video call screen lit up with an incoming call, and she languidly touched the button to activate it. At the same time, she felt the gentle purr from the massive engines start-up. An older and very handsome man's face came into view. Behind him, the control room with all of its hardened and very advanced electronics were all coming to life.
“Madam President, we weren’t expecting…”
She cut him off as well, “Yes, yes, the bunker was overrun by the infected. I lost my team getting away. None of this was planned, Captain. We just need to get somewhere safe for the time being...you know? Until things settle down.”
The captain nodded and looked at something to one side of the camera. “Infected?” It was less a question than a statement. He quickly recovered, “Do you have a specific destination in mind, Madam President?”
“Hmm, something….tropical. Maybe, St. Kitts, just surprise me.”
While she was not on the level of Ms. Levy, Madelyn was not without her own tricks. This ship being one of them. She was a survivor and had all intentions of staying one for a very long time. She had not bothered with clothes, makeup or any of the normal items a traveler might pack. Duplicates of her entire wardrobe would be in the suite’s wardrobe room, and new containers of her favorite toiletries and makeup were already waiting for her at the dressing tables. No, the one bag she brought contained only two things. A thumb drive with the firing sequence for Thor’s Hammer and the nation’s nuclear launch codes.
In the command center at Thunder Ridge, Archangel was waiting for Ms. Levy’s decision. “I don’t have time to meet him right now. If he is not Vincent’s replacement, then you handle him. I trust your judgment. Get him up to speed as soon as possible, though. I need you dealing with your primary issue. You know, the main reason I pulled you out of that prison.” She walked briefly out of camera view.
“Also,” she went on, “the military, well, what remains of the military, is up to something. They went after the president, now they want power. They know a lot of the legislatures wound up in these protectorate camps despite us trying to prevent that. The one at Raven Rock, in particular, has enough senators in it to start their own nation.”
He decided not to mention that camp had been one of the ones to fall the past week. Insurgents had blown a gate, and the entire facility was overrun by infected. The woman didn’t seem interested in a dialogue. She only met with him now by video link, so he never actually knew if she was here in the same facility or somewhere else on the planet. Her paranoia seemed to be growing. The apparent betrayal by Vincent seemed to have thrown her over the edge.
Walking back to the adjacent meeting room, he turned a chair around and faced his subordinate. “Skybox, I know you have questions, but they have to wait. I need to get you up to speed here securing this facility.”
“Wait…what?” Skybox asked with general confusion.
“You are being promoted and, in time, will be assuming Vincent’s role in securing this facility. You have the background and know the tech.”
“But..” he started to protest, then noticed Angel cutting his eyes up and to the right where a small video camera was positioned. He choked off his protest, Angel knew of his disdain for whoever was behind all this. “But I just arrived,” he amended.
“Yes, yes, I know, but these are difficult times. I am going to get you integrated at once. I know you have been given the antivirals as have all of us.” That in itself was telling. The doc’s cure had made it here along with her it would seem.
Skybox nodded and smiled, “Yes – thanks to my blood, I believe. By the way, the lead doctor who did that has disappeared. Gia Colton, she was one of ours. Any idea where she might be?”
Archangel shook his head nonchalantly, “The name seems familiar, but don’t think we have her. You can check with the science labs we have onsite, they might have some ideas. If no
t, you would have to bring it up with our civilian boss, Ms. Levy, but she is quite busy at the moment.”
He nodded and stood, “Show me my new job, Boss.”
Chapter Eighty-Five
Harris Springs, Mississippi
The code streaming across the screen was gibberish to most people, but to Tahir, it was the keys to the kingdom. He fidgeted in his seat like a small child anxious to open a gift on Christmas morning. The backdoor he’d found was a programmer hidden access point. Luckily, whoever had done the system security for the facility at Thunder Ridge had used a snippet of some framework code he had created years earlier when working with the DoD.
So far, it was only giving him access to the most mundane of information, but the beauty of the code was the inclusion of a toolkit buried deep inside of it. While innocuous looking to anyone developing the system, he had buried a small sysadmin access into one of the tools that would covertly tunnel in where root access could then be gained. “I have you now.”
DJ looked up from the other system. “Are you gaming again?”
“Huh? Oh, sorry, no, the other thing I am working on,” Tahir mumbled. The two of them had been following up on the commander's request since the meeting. While working on two very different and very complicated tasks would be inordinately challenging for most, Tahir simple thrived on it. The man lived for the challenge and being here on the AG had rekindled his hacker spirit in amazing ways. Besides trying to game the security system at Thunder Ridge, he and DJ were trying to develop a type of defense against the infected. Not a defense against the disease, Gia and her team had essentially done that already. However, an effective way of dealing with enormous hordes of raging animals, which the infected became, was something new.
DJ had mentioned that a few of the labs had tried various ways of killing the infected en masse using everything from aerosolized toxins to napalm. Something Gia had told him earlier had stuck with him, though. Apparently, Commander Garret also had been briefed on it. She said the infected were somewhat reactive to certain sounds and smells. To be precise, they reacted toward very low frequency sounds; they also gave off two types of pheromones. The most common one drew them together, another seemed to repel them from one another. Using these two factors, he and DJ were working quickly to develop either a lure or a repellant to help protect the troops encountering the hordes.
Currently, they were running various computer models on the audio waves as that seemed to be the easiest to develop. The only problem was, they needed to get near the infected to test it. Judging by the rate they were advancing, in a couple more weeks, they would be able to simply walk outside and take their pick. That would be too late.
“So, you never kept live specimens?”
“Of the infected, are you crazy? Of course not. Well, other than Skybox—technically, he carried the affected genes, but he never showed any reactions to sounds…we did test that. No, all we kept here were dead bodies in cold storage, so we could get cell cultures from them.”
Tahir tapped the pencil against his lips as he watched the compiler working on the security system code. “A cell culture wouldn’t react, would it? To the frequency, I mean.”
“I doubt it…maybe, but how would we know?” DJ answered. Both men loved the brainstorming part of these types of projects. “Not sure if we could tell if a cell was reacting toward or away from anything. Also, we would have no way of knowing if the results would be the same in a host. We could infect live animals and run test. That was something we did in the Devil’s Tower lab, but the Navy has been unwilling to let us do live animal testing on the Bataan.”
“Well, we can only do so much with computer modeling, DJ. We can get the specs to the teams in the field and let them experiment to see what works or find us some infected to see for ourselves.”
“Wait, what?” DJ looked scared at the very thought of going out there.
Four hundred miles to the north, Scott would have easily been able to test out anything his friends could have supplied. Owens crouched by the window clicking the fire selector on the M16 to the burst position. “Those fuckers are everywhere,” he whispered unnecessarily as everyone in the room could see them clearly. Nez was on guard duty when the first had shown up in the middle of the night. None of them had been this close to the infected, and despite their presumed immunity, the creatures still scared the fuck out of them.
Solo just watched them curiously. He hadn’t received the antiviral since it was based on a human genome, and the science team felt it was more likely to kill the dog than the actual Chimera would. Something in the way the infected moved seemed to interest the dog. He ran from window to window silently watching them move down the highway or wander through the parking lot of the hotel. They were now a prey animal, that much he could sense, but they were sloppy at it, easily avoided unless they were hunting in packs.
Scott watched Solo intensely, the dog was an ally, a friend, and he knew that on some primal level the dog was trying to determine how significant a threat the infected might be. Would the dog be immune, would he get infected if he bit one of them? How could he warn him? Scott tapped the bench he was on to get his attention. Solo glanced over, Scott pointed out the window and gave the sign for danger. Solo returned his gaze to the diseased wanderers outside, seemingly more curious than concerned.
Krychek brought up the obvious question, “So, how are we going to get past those things to even get to the base?”
“Maybe there will be less by then. Haven’t heard from Sky in days…could be a lot more before we get the call,” one of the Rangers replied from the darkness.
Scott shook his head, “No, they will continue to grow in numbers. These are the ones coming from east of us. The big cities and the internment camps that were deliberately infected. We have to assume the numbers will get worse before they get better.”
Rollins chimed in, “Yeah, Scott is right, guys, but hey, we got a truck out back. All we gotta do is get to it, we can fight our way that far. Owens, you think they could get us in there?”
“Nah, we should be fine, lot safer than in here.”
In response to that, a hard thump hit the glass door of the lobby as one of the infected tried to get in. “They can’t turn doorknobs, can they?” Rollins said.
“Dude, you’ve watched too many movies,” Owens answered. “They’re human, so hell yeah, they can. Right now, they haven’t seen us, and not many are coming off the road toward the hotel, but…they will, and they can break a window or open a door same as us.”
Scott found several eyes on him; this part of the op was his to lead, and even he didn’t like the plan he came up with.
Chapter Eighty-Six
Central Alabama
Steven shifted the rugged Land Rover Defender into third gear and accelerated away from the carnage behind them on the highway. Kitma’s call had ignited a bug-out plan he had been working on for years. Elvis sat in the back seat and hung his wet snout on his shoulder looking out the window. Pam watched Steven from the passenger’s seat, concern evident on her face. “You okay?”
“Yes, love,” he lied. Leaving the cabin had been the hardest decision he’d ever made. The cabin was secure, hidden and still stocked with more supplies than they would use for years. He stretched his uninjured hand across to his wife. She leaned in and kissed him as JD let out a groan from the rear seat. “Hush kid, or I’ll put you out.”
They knew he wasn’t going to do that. Driving the isolated backroads of Alabama had been relatively peaceful until the roadblock outside the town of Opp. The highwaymen had looked tough but found themselves outmatched by the RPG Steve had fired into the barricade. His friend, Major Kitma, had provided some nice additions to the Sentinel’s arsenal. He thought back to how that friendship got started, the same time he’d first met Pam as well. He, JD and another friend, the original Sentinel, Gerald Leighton, had been ambushed trying to get home, and Kitma took them in. Pam was his medic. Sadly, Gerald hadn’t made it, but
he had provided them his bug-out shelter and second home, the cabin.
It had taken Steven months to understand everything Gerald had provided and over six months to locate the Defender buried in an empty septic system vault. Once they had transportation, they began making occasional short trips to Fort Benning where the friendship with Kitma and with the pretty lieutenant began to grow.
“What do you think about the call?” Pam asked.
Steve knew the call she meant. The Patriot’s call. “Could be a trap,” he admitted.
“They said they had a treatment for the disease, though.”
He nodded, continuing to sweep his eyes back and forth across the road ahead. “I recall the president saying the same thing early on. ‘Come to the aid camps where we can protect you and treat you from the pandemic.’ We saw how that turned out.” He glanced down at his mangled left hand remembering some of those earlier issues they dealt with.
“We barely got out of Albany ahead of them, Steve. If we keep going west, we are going to be close to that location anyway. They said they had a ship.”
He tended to trust broadcasts over the Patriot Network. Over the years, they had worked out enough codes and techniques that fakes were exposed pretty fast. The group that had made the call was one he would have marked as an ally. They had supplied good intel and advice over the years. He had no reason to distrust them, yet…they gave an actual position. That was something you just did not do. Your exact location was perhaps the most closely guarded secret any of them kept. How else could they tell people where to come, though? In the end, it was the fact that everything they said matched up to the final broadcast of his friend Kitma. He had to take the chance.
“Up there…what is that?” JD said leaning up over the seat.
