They stepped aside to let an officer with an arm-full of papers exit and then they were inside Fort Carson’s Command Post. The gym was busy, with the noise of hundreds of muted conversations all merging into a single roar of chatter. A partially partitioned off central area had a printed A4 piece of paper attached to the front of it – ‘S3 OPS’ it stated, in a bold font, denoting the operations branch. That was where everything would be controlled and immediate decisions made. All around them different cells had sprung up, using the army’s staff system to delineate responsibility. Off to their left was the ‘S4’ or Logistics branch, which seemed to be the largest, busiest and best-manned of any of them. Next along was the ‘S1’ or personnel, then ‘S5’ plans. The ‘S2’ intelligence branch was between plans and the central ‘S3’ ops cell, but Dan couldn’t think of what the int guys could be doing in a situation such as this. His gaze lingered, and he thought he could see maps and overlays being studied in their block. The intelligence operators didn’t have insurgent networks or enemy ORBAT’s to identify but there was still a lot of information that needed to be processed for the decision makers, he accepted. Off to the far side of the ops cell were the ‘S6’ signals group, which occupied a hub of wires and cords spanning the building – probably linked to batteries, antennas and satellite dishes on the roof, judging from their appearance.
Dan followed Lance towards the partitioned operations branch. They both had to keep their wits about them as they side-stepped through the constant lines of foot traffic. When they reached the ops cell they had to wait while a couple of servicemen finished having a discussion over the top of the partitioned wall. They were talking about opening another safe zone inside the base by extending out the wire and walls. Progress, it seemed, was being made. The figure who had been jotting notes moved away and they stepped through the gap in the partitions.
Over ten men and women were scattered around a number of collapsible tables that had been hastily arranged against the partition dividers. Only a few laptops could be seen – they had reverted to paper, with maps and lists and notes taped and pinned all around them.
Lance had managed to get the attention of one of the three majors in the cell who had been in the midst of making notations and drawing on a series of maps.
“Is there any information on the three Ranger humvees from last night? They were the northernmost call-sign along Nebraska Avenue.”
The major looked at him, wearily, and seemed to be making up his mind about whether to ignore the interruption. His shoulders were sloped and the bags under his eyes gave away that he hadn’t had any sleep during the last 24 hours. After a long pause he turned to one of his colleagues.
“Jake, a question about battle-tracking. Ranger Hummers, to the north, last night was it? Do you know what happened to them?”
The second major stepped forward and took a good look at Lance.
“The squad split and the guys to the north made a final stand next to a car-park. They held off hordes for damn near an hour by themselves, brave bastards. Their stay behind force made a last-stand, too, which we lost track of in amongst the chaos and confusion. Say...” the major’s voice trailed off as he took in the grime and blood on Lance’s plate carrier and pouches, and his eyes flicked over his painted HK416 and then settled on the 75th Ranger Regiment tab on his shoulder.
“You weren’t one of them, were you? How the fuck... well I’ll be damned.” His second sentence was spoken quietly and with great reverence. The other major had now given them their full attention. Another officer behind them who had heard the exchange stood in his seat.
“Holy shit...” He then reached out and held Lance’s shoulder.
“What you guys did... It was a fucked plan from the start, that couldn’t be avoided, and your men saved a lot of lives by holding your position for as long as you did.” The other major leaned forward and shook both Lance and Dan’s hand, looking at them in turn and muttering something under his breath. Dan felt like he didn’t belong there and tried to stand well behind Lance, who was the Ranger and not just an infantry officer who had somehow stumbled his way into their squad.
Lance himself remained quiet. He had known, deep inside himself, that his men hadn’t returned from their sortie to the north but he had needed to hear it confirmed, beyond all doubt. Hearing it all confirmed was a painful blow that weighed heavily on his heart, piercing through the numbness and shock that had otherwise blocked all of his emotions out.
“Hey, the commander will want to see you two himself,” one of the majors said, before guiding them back across the busy floor to a staircase leading up onto a mezzanine level overlooking the gym.
A few days ago the area would have been used for gym staff to umpire games and for a small crowd to watch the basketball games beneath them, but now it was an outpost of staff officers. Boards were set up and a few discussions were taking place between small groups of standing and sitting men and women in various uniforms.
“We’re trying to keep this place as free as possible for the commander, but there are a lot of people vying for his attention right now.” The major walked them through to the back of the room. He waved to get the attention of a bald, fifty year old man and introduced them.
“Sir, these men here were part of the Ranger forces that held the northern end of Nebraska during the evacuation last night. They, uh, we’re pretty sure that they’re the only ones who made it...”
The older man stood up and excused himself from his discussion, waving the others around him away. He turned and faced them. The major quietly retired, telling Dan as he left that he would be available in the ops cell if he could help them in anyway.
“Gentlemen, it’s beyond an honor to have you here. Your work last night... inspiring. Rangers, eh... you did your Regiment proud. Damned proud. Couldn’t have imagined better. Here,” he said, waving them over to a seated area that looked like it had been set up as a desk, “take a seat. I’m Jed Eckhart, the Executive Officer of what is left of Fort Carson. The commanding officer, Major General ‘Ike’ du Plessius, is walking the grounds right now but he would want to know that you were looked after and that you were personally thanked on his behalf for your actions last night.” While the senior officer’s voice wasn’t loud, it did carry a lot of authority. Definitely a senior officer, Dan thought, and looked at his rank. Brigadier General. Brigadier Eckhart paused to reach behind him into a duffel bag that was behind his make-shift desk.
“He’d also want you to have these,” he said as he passed them two Carlson beers.
“The last two we have on us, but I think you’ve earned them. Savor ‘em, they’re a rare commodity right now on Carson. They might even be the last ones. Everyone’s busy here – rushed off our blasted feet, and most of us are functioning on less than four hours sleep – but the least I can do is give you some time to update you to this whole shebang. Since you’re not in our chain of command and came from... Peterson Air Force base, I believe?... I’m thinking that you two might not be aware of what is going on in our crazed new world.”
Dan and Lance both looked at him blankly, which gave him the answer he was looking for.
“So what do you know, then? Anything at all?”
“Nothing,” Lance replied. “We were part of con-plan Athena, showing up to secure a transfer point for any strategic leadership at Peterson that may have needed to get from strat-air onto a helo. We got in and things were up shit-creek and, since then, we’ve been playing catch up.”
“OK, then, sounds like you’re back at square one. Where to start... well, we’re lucky we know what we do. A lot was going on behind the scenes and the CDC,” – the federal Centre for Disease Control agency – “labs in Atlanta were sealed from environmental contamination, as part of their normal lab operations. That meant that the research types and docs in there were spared from the events on the outside, at H-Hour at least. We were lucky that they had a team already studying the disease so when things struck, they knew where
to look. They managed to broadcast the details to all military units via a relay at the Pentagon. We haven’t heard from either locations since, but they got a lot of info out before going silent, God bless ‘em. The info doesn’t exactly help us right now but it’s a damn sight more comforting knowing what we do, and I’d hate to be in the dark right now, fearing the worst and having no answers. Not that it could be much worse for us though.
“So, where was I? In short, CDC was monitoring a vector-borne virus that had been picked up a few months ago. It had moved through the majority of the world’s population by the time it got onto their radar, having left a very small and unnoticeable genetic trace in each person as it was transmitted via self-replicating particles in the atmosphere – sneezing, breathing and contact all aided its movement, too. We’ve all been left with the trace remnants of the virus, you two included, after it moved through the human population back in January. As far as they could tell it had left a benign mark on the human genotype, looking like one of the many million marks of failed genetic interactions any organism sees in normal evolutionary mutations. Or so the flash from CDC said, at any rate. I’ve read it and studied it countless times; most of us here have, so it sounds familiar to me but I’m still coming to grips with what it means.
“Our scientists in Atlanta eventually picked this up while looking at other pathogens but at the time it wasn’t considered much more than a curiosity. Some post-grads on monitored it out of curiosity more than anything, we’re told. They identified a potentially dangerous reaction the trace remnants could initiate if a particular chemical chain event occurred. This was pretty wild, out there stuff, even for the scientists, and they thought it was more sci-fi scare-mongering than reality and didn’t take it too seriously. Some concerns lingered amongst the junior researchers though, and at a conference in Geneva some small talk occurred. Long story short, a Russian bio-geneticist over-heard the speculation and pretty much panicked. Turns out that this was the Russian’s most secretive weapon they had ever concocted – part of a bio-weapons project from the last decade that had been kept under the strictest security. Even the CIA had never heard anything about it. The code-name the Russians knew it by was ‘Jugashvili’ – Stalin’s surname at birth. They named it that because it was a tyrant of a virus that they couldn’t tame. Their original intent was to bring under control so they could target it – give it a half-life, allow them to weaponize it, so to speak. Make it effective so it could run wild through a country, but not so wild it would circumvent the world and ended up obliterating the Motherland, too. As it was, it couldn’t be directed and had the potential to spin through everyone the world over in a matter of weeks. Their program got caught up in budget cuts and military reprioritization when they deactivated most of their bio-weapons programs early last decade and they never developed it any further. So they say, at least. Naming it after their Georgian-born dictator was their way of indicating that it the most evil fucking weapon they’d ever conceived of. The English speaking world is – or was, in the first few hours when lines were still open and we could talk – calling it the Stalin plague, for exactly the same reasons. Fucking Stalin.
“So, the Russians managed to get the highest level authority to open their files to us. As soon as they told us what it was, CDC teams went to their labs in Sirhzi, or Stirhzi, or however you pronounce it, while Russian teams flew over to assist us state-side. One of our CVN carriers had been set up in San Francisco with Russian scientists and CDC on board as part of this emergency monitoring. We don’t know why they were on board a United States Navy vessel – part of a plan if they needed some Marines and helo’s as a response team, perhaps, or maybe they were just using the comms suite to be able to talk to the team in Russia. At the same time we got some int feed from our partners – Brits, Saudi’s even, especially Mossad – as well as updates from our own sources that there was some strange activity being picked up around Tehran. The Iranian government reached out pretty quickly when they recognized the severity of what they’d gotten their hands on. It seems their Revolutionary Guard had managed to pick up some of the Russian bio-weapons recently via theft, espionage or purchase we don’t know, but they were doing tests of their own in Iran. Having shut down their nuclear weapons program as part of a diplomatic agreement, they were looking for an alternative deterrent they could use to off-set American dominance in the region and had gone down the route of bio-weapons. They were trying to find out what Stalin was, exactly, and didn’t realize that they had first released it... and then activated it.
“You see, Stalin is effectively a two-part virus – the transmission of the genetic instructions that make up the abomination we are facing is technically called ‘Josef’ and it spread the trace-elements through the human population in a slow but through manner over eight or nine weeks ago. It was highly contagious but, because it didn’t kill or visibly impact the hosts – that is, all of us – it was nigh on unnoticeable. The second part was the trigger for the Stalin virus which would activate the otherwise benign genetic instructions left by the Josef virus inside the host, causing – if the conditions were right – massive neurological disruption.
“This two stage infection is pretty much the key to the success of Stalin, because it means that the far more temperamental activator ‘Jugashvili’ doesn’t have to convey detailed instructions or entrench itself in a host before activating. It just has to get passed onto someone who has already picked up Stalin and tell it to activate. It also means that the outbreak can’t be controlled easily, as we aren’t fighting a virus that is killing its hosts at the same time as it spreads. Instead, we are fighting a simple genetic instruction that is, on its own, non-descript and harmless, not to mention impossible to be alarmed about until it is all too late. It doesn’t need to entrench, it just needs to activate.
“When the Iranians realized the enormity and sheer power of the virus it was too late, and both Jugashvili and the Stalin activator were in the open. The Iranians didn’t let us know what version of the trigger they had used, as apparently there were a number of ways it could be deployed. They may not have even known themselves how it was activated. Besides, the Iranians, may God have mercy on ‘em, weren’t in a position to clarify as they were the first nation to fall victim to this. This was happening over a matter of hours, I should add. The team on-board the carrier in San Fran were the first to inform CDC Atlanta that they had identified Stalin activating in America and then the team, the carrier and half the flipping harbor went up in a nuclear fire-ball. Complete speculation on our behalf, but some around here reckon that the on-board scientists, after identifying the trigger signal amongst them, tried to stop it by nuking themselves in an attempt to save the rest of the States. If that was the case they failed all the same.
“The virus went live across CONUS in the best part of four hours, simultaneously racing around all population centers with no obvious path after it was picked up in San Fran. East to West, West to East, North to South, airports outwards, it just grew, exponentially. International reports are sketchy but indicate that the whole world went under as Stalin activated itself globally just under 24 hours.
“Stalin itself, if it is correctly kicked off by the right amino-acid chain reaction, links the otherwise independently benign genetic instructions together around an hour after the victim is exposed to the viral trigger. We don’t know why the latency exists, and it might be a design feature to ensure that it can spread before any alarms are raised – we don’t know. But that hour mark is pretty much a defining moment and, after that period, the chain reaction commences inside the victim’s body. Sometimes, amongst a small part of the population, it doesn’t take hold and that’s why I’m still here talking to you. Why it passed me over I don’t know, but it did. For the majority of the population, at any rate, the amino-acid chain reaction is sustained in the blood-stream by a hormonal surge and the victim almost immediately exhibits massive and irreversible hemorrhaging in the frontal lobes. Once this kicks
in it fucks with the person’s higher level intellect and effectively throws you back past the evolutionary stone-age, turning you into a bipedal animal unable to reason let alone speak. Some subjects also exhibit marked amplification to neuron behavior in the vicinity of the brain’s amygdala which moderates and controls aggression. In other words, we’ve got a lot of very angry ape-like beings out there who were once human – not that I want to cast aspersions on the good and gentle apes of this earth, though, as these new creatures are just pure goddamned evil.”
Dan and Lance had been sitting, listening to the background to the events in silence.
“These creatures,” Dan said, “what are we calling them?”
“Hacks, right now. We initially called them ‘Zulu’s, as in phonetically ‘Z’, for zombie. Not that they are zombies – we haven’t seen any brainless staggering around from them and they aren’t out for human flesh, although they aren’t adverse to biting during an attack like any animal if cornered or threatened. We changed our mind when we realized that it mightn’t be fair on the folk down in South Africa who are no doubt battling this as well. And you know, this is still the modern US Army – politically correct to a T, even after the end of the world has hit us. So the term ‘Zulu’ didn’t last.
“Really, Zulu was a pretty lame term and was never going to last. Some, starting I think in the Special Forces lines, had started calling them ‘hacks’ based off their normal method of attacking the more passive, regressive types. You know, as in the constant battering action, like they were hacking away at firewood.” The Brigadier shuddered a little.
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