by David Achord
“Honestly, Zach, I’m nothing more than a noncommissioned officer.”
“I’m pretty sure General Chesty Puller started off as a private,” I said.
Justin groaned. “Zach, I’m no Chesty Puller. He was a living legend and the most decorated Marine in history.”
“You get the point though,” I said. “You know that adapt, improvise, and overcome stuff. You have the intellect to learn how to run a military.”
I hesitated a moment before continuing. “What if I were to tell you we are going to need a standing army within the next year? At least a battalion size, maybe larger?”
“For what? The zeds?”
“Yeah, zeds, and the Russians.”
Justin turned and stared in confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“As you are aware, there’s a reason why Grace and Garret are only topside occasionally. They spend hours down in the TOC monitoring and analyzing satellite feeds.”
Justin was suddenly tense. “What have they spotted?”
“I’ll have the full report available for you, but right now, I’ll give you the short answer. Two weeks ago, they spotted a significant amount of activity from a port city in Russia named Beringovsky.”
“And?” he asked.
“And, nine days ago, they observed a fleet of fifteen ships leave the port. Two days ago, they watched the fleet land in various ports along the coast of British Columbia. We don’t know of the exact number of personnel on each ship, and we have no idea what they’re up to, but it can’t be good.”
He stared at me a long minute before speaking. “When, exactly, was the ruling party going to tell the rest of us this information?”
I thought a moment, thinking of the appropriate words. “A couple of them believed the best course of action was to keep this information secret until the appropriate time.”
“You sound more and more like one of those politicians every day,” Justin said.
“Yeah, I spend too much time with them,” I replied. “So, I agreed with them, for the most part. There were only six of us who know about it; Parvis and myself, Stark, Grace, and Garret.”
“Who is the sixth?” he asked.
“You.”
“Why was it kept a secret?”
“Because the Mount Weather society loves to gossip, and you know how that goes.”
Justin gave a slow nod. “Every time it’s retold, the facts are distorted and embellished. Point taken.”
I watched as his line went taught and he pulled in a decent-sized fish.
“Looks like ten pounds, at least,” I said as Harold came jogging up.
“Yep, that’s a tenner for sure,” he said as he pulled it off Justin’s hook.
“So, the brain trust believes a threat is imminent?” he asked after Harold had walked away.
“Eventually,” I said. “It is more than likely they’ll attempt to establish a stronghold on the west coast and then, eventually, move east. We’ll need to eject them, which, in plain talk means, kill them. Parvis and I have done the math and believe we have a year to prepare before they cross the Mississippi. President Stark agrees with our assessment.”
“Speaking of President Stark, I have a question.”
“Let me guess, you want to know when will there be the next election?” I asked.
“Yeah, and don’t think I’m the only one who is asking that.”
I paused a moment and glanced down the riverbank at the others. Rachel had snagged one and Fred was helping her with her line. I watched as Fred wrangled the fish in and Rachel took advantage and pinched his butt. He looked at her like he was dealing with a wayward child while she, in turn, grinned playfully.
“Short answer, I don’t see Stark allowing a presidential election anytime soon, but it will happen, one day.”
“Yeah, I can see that, but, I have to say, and again, I’m not the only one saying it, we’re living under a dictatorship.”
I didn’t answer, but I could not disagree.
“Alright, I guess I understand. So, what’s next?”
“Continue with our present mission,” I said.
“Sure, I get it, but there’s other shit going on, wouldn’t you agree? Like, what the hell happened with the vaccines?”
I gave him a cold stare. “You can be certain of one thing: I’m going to find out who sabotaged those batches of vaccinations.”
“And then what?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. Justin picked up on it.
“Okay, I understand. I know you well enough to know what you have in mind. Count me in if you need help.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “Hopefully, it won’t come to that.”
“You know, we’ve been through a lot,” Justin said after we had fished in silence for several minutes.
“Yes, we have,” I said in agreement. “There is no reason for us to be at odds with each other.”
He glanced at me. “We’re on the same side and all of that shit?”
“Yep.”
He gestured down the riverbank at Fred. “Does he know?”
“Probably,” I said.
“You’ve got to admit, he’s an odd dude.”
“I know him better than anyone, I’d say. Not only do I trust him with my life, I trust him with my kids’ lives.”
“Yeah, no doubt. So, how does this all work out?”
“I’d like to think I have you on my side, just as you have me on yours. I hope you feel the same. You know everything we’re doing is not for us, but for our kids.”
He paused a moment before answering. “Of course.”
“I have a lot of ideas, Justin. Ideas I’ve not shared with Parvis or Stark. I think they could work.”
Justin lowered his fishing rod and now stared at me thoughtfully. “You have aspirations of replacing Stark one day, don’t you?”
I reeled in my line and waited a long minute before answering. “Yes, yes I do. But, make no mistake, I’m in agreement with his mission. I’m as committed to rebuilding America as he is.”
“Jeremiah and a couple others don’t think it’s possible,” he said.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He shrugged. “That’s a question far out of my pay grade.”
“What does Ruth think?”
He gave me a questioning look.
“Your wife is a hell of a lot smarter than everyone gives her credit for.”
“Everyone except you and me,” he said.
“Yep. I got to know her pretty good back when you people were holding me against my will. By the way, don’t think I’ve forgotten about that.”
He glanced at me. “We’d like to have more input,” he said. “That being the OMs.”
That was the term he referred to when referencing the original Marines.
“All I can say is, when the time comes for me to take over as director of ops, you’ll have my ear.”
“Do you think it’s possible?” he asked. “To rebuild America?”
“Yes, one day,” I replied. “It won’t be easy though.”
We talked throughout the day while we caught fish. Harold would jog up and grab them as we pulled them in and kept gleefully repeating, “I told you it’s full of fish!”
It seemed like we’d worked out our differences. At least, I hoped so. Between the two of us, we caught two dozen catfish, and I think we caught the least number. We spent the time talking about everything under the sun. It seemed like old times. While we fished, I’d been absently watching Zoe. She was having a great time wandering up and down the riverbank, occasionally eating some of the catfish guts that Harold had thrown on the ground. Suddenly, she stopped and started sniffing the air before emitting a low growl.
“She smells zeds,” I said. I stuck my arm up and waved it back and forth until I got everyone’s attention. Once everyone understood, we hurriedly secured our fishing rods and formed up.
It seemed like every river in every state had a road al
ongside it named River Road. The Shenandoah River was no exception. We moved quietly through the trees up to where we’d parked the Humvees. Jeremiah led the way, suddenly held up a fist, and then pointed down River Road where it intersected with Route Seven.
I counted seven of them. Normally, it would’ve been a no-brainer. We would’ve simply moved in on them and hacked their heads off or put a bayonet in an eye socket. But, today there was a difference. I saw Fred looking at me and he cut his eyes to Sammy. He then motioned for us to follow him. He made Sammy get into the Humvee before slapping on the hood of the vehicle. The zeds instantly broke into a jog, coming at us.
They were more agile these days, but still no match for us. It was a simple matter to jam a forearm into their faces. They’d try to bite down through our jackets, which made the knife work easy. Nobody played around. We killed them all within seconds. I was about to give Justin a high-five when I glanced back. Sammy had gotten out of the Humvee and was squared off with two zeds.
“Shit,” I growled as I began running toward him. We were all over a hundred yards away from him. I heard a gunshot ring out. A burst of crimson came out of a hole in the middle of the forehead of one of the zeds. I instantly knew it was Fred who made the shot. Before he could shoot the other one, Sammy had tackled it. When I got to him, he was on top of the zed, yelling and stabbing him repeatedly.
My first impulse was to grab him and pull him off, but, Sammy was on a tear. The zed was a male with a stocky build. He struggled for the first few seconds before the life was torn out of him by Sammy’s repeated stabs to the head. After several more seconds, Sammy realized it too and stopped. He looked up to see all of us staring at him.
“They were sneaking up on you guys, but I got the sonofabitch,” he said excitedly, and then looked at Fred. “You should’ve let me kill the other one too.”
We headed back home two hours before sundown, the back of both Humvees stocked full of fish. Justin was silent all the way back to Harold and Maude’s.
“Alright, you boys, take those directly to the cafeteria,” Harold said after he’d unloaded all of the fish guts. “There ain’t nothing better than freshly fried catfish.” He helped himself to a couple of the big ones.
“Momma, we’re going to eat good tonight,” he said. Maude giggled. Harold bid us goodbye and the two of them walked down the raised walkway to their house.
We arrived back at Weather within minutes. All of our fish were piled up in the back, so we finally figured using a wheelbarrow would be the best way to haul them to the kitchen.
“Sammy and I will take care of it,” Fred said. “Get those vehicles washed out so they don’t stink.”
“You two go ahead,” Justin said to Jeremiah and Rachel. “Zach will give me a hand with these.”
I nodded in agreement.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Justin said as we hosed down the vehicles.
“Oh, yeah?”
“I believe I understand now and you can count on me. Me and Ruth. I’ll explain it to Jeremiah and the rest of them. They’ll be on your side. Hell, Joker has always been on your side.”
“I appreciate that,” I said.
I helped him wash and then park the vehicles in the motor pool. We stood in front of the bay doors in a moment of awkward silence. Finally, I stuck my hand out.
“I hope we’re square,” I said.
Justin took my hand and we shook. “Roger that,” he said.
I told Kelly everything after we’d gotten the kids to bed.
“Sammy killed him?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not sure what to think about that,” she said.
“I know we don’t want our kids to go through this, but, you know, he reminded me of the first time I had to kill one of them with a knife.”
“He’s too young for that,” Kelly said.
I sighed. “I’d like to agree with you, but it’s time. He’s what, sixteen now? That’s how old I was when all of this stuff happened. He needs to know how to be able to protect himself and others when nobody else is around, like Fred or me.”
“I don’t like it,” she said with a hint of anger in her tone. I got the impression I should leave it alone and changed the subject.
“In other news, I think I’ve cleared things up with Justin and Jeremiah.” I then proceeded to tell her of our conversation.
“You told him about Parvis?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“Yeah, but I figured he needed to know.”
“I talked to Ruth earlier,” she said.
“How’d that go?”
“She said Stark treats her like a servant. That probably has a little bit to do with Justin’s behavior.”
“Yeah, it could be. He said the same thing.”
“Maybe you could have a word with him,” Kelly suggested.
I grunted in response and wondered how in the hell was I going to tell President Stark how to behave.
“Well?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’ll figure something out.”
Chapter 28 – Frog Anatomy
“It’s colder than a bullfrog’s ball sack,” Joker grumbled.
There was some light laughter at his comment. He was right. February arrived with a bluster of icy cold wind and the temperature plummeted into the single digits the entire first week. But, we’d had a brief warm spell with lots of sun, a false spring, and the ice had mostly melted before another cold front moved in. This cold snap was dry though, so that meant we could travel. I looked over at Joker and a small smile crossed my face.
“Did you know, there are some frogs that can freeze solid and when they thaw out, they come back to life?”
“How in the hell can they do that?” Joker asked.
“They have cryoprotectants in their blood,” I said.
“What is that?” he asked.
“You mean, you don’t know?” I asked. He smirked at me. “It’s kind of like antifreeze. Someone like Doctor Kincaid can probably explain it better.” I started to say more, but I was suddenly hit with a memory of several years ago, back when I was talking to the Allen family. We talked about zombies freezing solid and then coming back to life after they had thawed. I wondered if that black, oozing blood flowing through zombies had some kind of cryoprotectant. I made a mental note to either send an email or talk to Doctor Kincaid about it.
“The good thing about this below-freezing weather, any zeds we encounter will be moving too slow to be much of a threat,” I said.
“Even those new zeds?” Sammy asked tentatively.
Joker gave him a light bop on the back of the head. “We’ll find out, won’t we,” he said with a grin.
“Alright,” Justin said. “Let’s load up and move out.”
We filed our mission plan the night before and exited the main gate at 0600 hours. The route was ninety-two miles, but in spite of the warm spell, there were still sporadic spots of black ice, so we proceeded carefully. As a result, it took four hours to reach Letterkenny Army Depot and we arrived at a few minutes before 1000 hours.
We’d been to Letterkenny a couple of other times. It was a combination of a storage, maintenance, modification, and demilitarization facility focusing mostly on missiles and ammunition. However, the place was also had a plethora of military vehicles, Humvees and MRAPS mostly, and parts for those vehicles. The first time we visited, it was devoid of any ammunition and there were only a dozen vehicles left. We could only get one vehicle running, so the next time we visited, we brought a tow truck.
There were twenty of us in six vehicles, including Sammy, which was going to be his first away mission. Three of the vehicles were tow trucks. Any vehicle we wanted, we were going to hook up and tow back. The plan was to find suitable vehicles to take back with us. We also had the semi and a deuce-and-a-half pulling a five-hundred-gallon tanker.
I drove the semi, with a trailer hooked up this time
. We were going to load it up. Bob, Fred, and Sam were with me. There were some, Kelly included, who balked at the notion of Sammy coming along, but Fred and I talked it over. It was time to start treating him like a man and teaching him about these operations.
The deuce was being driven by the new guy, Troy the truck driver. He was a likeable, humorous man, but was given to long bouts of silence. He looked like the kind of guy who was a hundred pounds overweight, back before. He’d long since lost it, but he still had the look. In the debriefing, he told us he was from Kentucky but had mostly lived out of a semi as a long-haul trucker most of his adult life. His only living relative was his mother, who he’d found half eaten one day. Logan rode with him while Liam and Priss drove one of the tow trucks.
It was only ninety-two miles to the depot. The roads were still mostly intact, but we had to be mindful of the ice. After four hours of travel, we stopped in the middle of Coffey Avenue, with a snow-covered golf course on one side of the street and a large metal building on the other. We stared at it in puzzlement. The word “Letterkenny” was written in big block letters, and underneath it was a smaller inscription, “Supporting the Joint Warfighter.” But, what puzzled us was some sloppily written words in black spray paint off to the side. More specifically, it was a poem. Someone, it sounded like Kirby Jenkins, decided to read it over the radio.
“To all of you politicians with your vanilla smiles and obsidian wit, you’ve turned this world into a pile of shit. Now the world’s gone crazy, we’re all barking at the moon, but one day, politician, you’ll meet your doom.”
“Holy zombie balls, I think it’s a message for you, Senator,” Joker said on the radio and roared in laughter.
“Out of all the people in this world who perished, some wiseass poet has survived,” Bob grumbled. Clearly, he was not amused.
“They’re just messing with you, Bob,” I said. “They know you’re the only politician who volunteers for these missions.”
“Thank you, Zach,” he said.
Justin’s voice chimed in on the radio. “All Teams, this is Team One, rally around me,” he said.
He had stopped in a large parking lot. The rest of us formed a defensive perimeter with our vehicles. Sammy grabbed the binoculars without having to be told to and started scanning our sector of fire.
