A Place Called Hope (Z-Day Book 2)

by Daniel Humphreys

  From what little Tasha had said, the grandfather had gone down like a hero, but it had been bad in the end. Her little brother still hadn’t said a word.

  It had taken a lot of persuasion on Charlie’s part to coax them into a vehicle so he could bring them back, but their body language was still wary after a week in what passed for civilization these days. He’d hoped that time around other kids would have softened the rough edges, but the two still came off as tense.

  Not sure what I can do about that.

  Despite the length of the lunch line, things progressed well and he headed into the cluster of tables bearing a well-provisioned tray. As he scanned the occupants of the room, he recognized a familiar face.

  He was sitting alone, so Charlie decided to be bold. It was a move he might not have made before his latest dose of CDC bullshit. If nothing else, it was a reminder that not all the new residents were a pain in the ass.

  He tapped the Marine on the shoulder. The other man turned and Charlie got a glimpse of his name tape. “Sergeant Del Arroz, you guys went out yesterday?”

  The Marine gave him a squint-eyed look, then relaxed as he recognized him. “Charlie, right? Yeah. Almost didn’t make it back, either. Had a critical failure on one of our choppers. Things got a little dicey there for a bit.” He motioned to the table. “Have a seat.”

  “Thanks.” Charlie set his tray down. “Did you get them?”

  Del Arroz frowned. “Mind if I ask why?”

  Charlie shrugged. “I’m the one who found the kids and brought them back. I want to do right by them.”

  The Marine NCO cocked his head to one side and murmured, “Silent Charlie.”

  He frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That’s you, right? Lots of stories going around about you, man.” Del Arroz shrugged. “Trying to reconcile the legend.”

  “You know how it is. Guys get a little too much under their belt, they start telling fish stories.”

  “Sure. Somehow, though—I think you’re a bit more than that. We need to get you a new handle, though, Silent Charlie.” Del Arroz winked.

  “Let me know what you come up with.”

  “I believe I will. And yes, we found them. Also found a woman they’d been keeping hostage for God knows how long. Two survivors. The rest didn’t have the wisdom to give up.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That happen a lot?”

  “It’s not the first time we’ve dealt with this sort of thing, but it’s not common. We had some hairy stuff in the Exumas, but…”

  “So what happens to the survivors?”

  “Military tribunal. Depending on what the hostage has to say about what they did, they go away for a long time.”

  Charlie frowned. “Go away? Exile?”

  “Basically. We’ve got a little island where we drop off problem children. Nice place. Coconut trees, some rock formations that tend to collect rainwater. No animals, though, which is a shame.” The Marine gave Charlie a savage grin. “We toss `em on the beach and let them know the rules. They dig for salt, we bring them food and water.” He shrugged. “Saves us from having to do it with the limited labor we have. We’ve got reliable sources of power, but it’s a great preservative and we’re not exactly brimming with other spices to liven things up.” He caught the look on Charlie’s face and added, “You don’t approve?”

  “It’s not that. We never had any sort of problems that required something so drastic.”

  “What, you people have just been a happy little family for the last eight years?”

  Charlie considered. There’d been more than a few disagreements over the years but nothing that resulted in anything other than fistfights. The guilty parties would spend a night or two in a jail cell, then move on. Of course, in the last couple of weeks, the mask had come off. Murder, drug dealing, and an accidental explosion that breached the perimeter.

  Had Hope been peaceful all along, or had that been an illusion?

  “We never had more than a couple of hundred people,” he admitted. “And a good chunk of those folks have—difficulties, shall we say. Psychological issues.” At one point, Charlie had been among their number, but over time he’d come out of the state of shock he’d been in when Pete, Miles, and a few others had found him and brought him to safety. “There’ve been some power struggles, and a few people got killed before my time, but we kept on. I guess we had good leadership.”

  Del Arroz raised his mug. “I’ll drink to that.”

  Chapter 5

  March 11, 2026

  Camp Perry, Ohio

  Z-Day + 3,066

  A half-dozen men and women with notepads and pens were about to sketch out the future of a good portion of humanity’s surviving population.

  And one of them isn’t actually here. Vincent grunted a chuckle at the irony of it before calling out, “You receiving us, Admiral?”

  Admiral Joshua Kanapkey was the most senior surviving officer of the US Navy. By rights, Vincent supposed that made him the Secretary of the Navy, but the number of operational ships they had qualified more as a task force than a fleet. So he stuck with admiral.

  “Five by five, General. It’s a beautiful day in paradise.”

  The people around the table chuckled. Ohio in springtime wasn’t horrible by any stretch of the imagination, but it wasn’t the Caribbean, either. Although anything got old after years of it.

  “All right, let’s get started. Ellis, how’s the cupboard looking?”

  “General, we’re down three helicopters in the last week. The one in Cincinnati was a total loss for obvious reasons. The other two are simple mechanical failures. My guys think they’ll need to deadline one of those, but it’s not like we can source replacements from the Pentagon.” Colonel Quentin Ellis shrugged. He’d worked miracles for almost a decade as the S-4, or logistics officer, but Vincent was well-aware that there were limits to the rabbits that he could pull out of his hat.

  Before the outbreak, Camp Perry had seen primary use as a training base. It hardly seemed like the best place to use as a stepping stone to reclaiming their country. But they’d had plenty of opportunity on the float over to study what little satellite data there was of the continental United States. Much of it was hopelessly out of date. Satellites didn’t fare well without periodic ground contact, but they had assumed—and rightly so—that little of what they saw in those old images had changed.

  Perry had proven to be a goldmine of weapons, ammunition, and rations. Some of it had suffered from exposure to the weather, but the vast majority of it remained in sealed shipping trailers and was still useful.

  They even had row upon row of dusty Abrams main battle tanks. In a fight against infected, they were of limited utility, even ignoring the gas-guzzling nature of their turbine engines. What had been most helpful were smaller vehicles such as up-armored Humvees, MRAPs, and Bradley fighting vehicles. Eight years of exposure wasn’t conducive to good maintenance, but there were enough vehicles—and spares in a few of the sealed trailers—that the vehicle casualty rate was a bit less than fifty percent.

  If anything, the helicopters had fared better, parked inside pop-up hangars. There just hadn’t been as many, for whatever reason. Somewhere out there, Vincent assumed, there was an airfield littered with helicopters intended for Perry. Finding it was going to take mark-one eyeballs. None of the remaining functional satellites had useful coverage of the continental United States.

  The big green war machine had been revving up to take the fight to the infection, but the nation had fallen before the troops could put the mass of equipment to good use. Camp Perry was a literal boneyard now. The overgrown grass teemed with the well-picked skeletal remains of those who’d made their last stand here. And some of those bones were much smaller than the general wanted to contemplate.

  Vincent turned to Lieutenant Colonel Tim O’Neil, his S-2, or intelligence officer. “You get a chance to debrief Major Matthews, Tim?”

  “I did. He reconfir
med most of the potential sites we had in mind.” He consulted his notes. “But he also added a few. There was, apparently, an Indiana Army National Guard helicopter detachment near Fairland.” O’Neil nodded to one of the other men at the table. “I have the particulars, but I wanted to run it by you before we kicked off the mission.”

  “Good. I hope he’s given you enough to work with for a while because I need him elsewhere. I’ve made my decision.” He nodded toward Captain Ben Carlyle, his S-3, in charge of operations and planning. “Icarus is a go.” He smirked. “Major Matthews was impressed with what you were able to put together, Captain Carlyle. I’m not sure how the chief and Ross took it, though.”

  None of his team exhibited any visible reaction, but General Vincent had been working with them long enough to recognize what they were feeling. Hell, he was feeling much the same way himself—cautiously optimistic, tempered with worry for the future.

  It was a race against time. Before they’d come to understand that the nanoplague was evolving, they’d assumed that they could run out the clock. The majority of the infected would, at some point, rot away to nothing, and they’d be able to rebuild a society. Sure, they’d be taking a step back to somewhere in the late 1800s in terms of technology, but there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

  Now the race had much higher stakes.

  Vincent turned to the final officer at the table. “Susan, I’ve got Major Matthews en route now to pick up McFarlane and his team.

  Major Susan Sobodos glanced at her tablet and frowned in thought. As the unit’s S-1, she held responsibility for the constantly moving chessboard of various personnel. “Watson’s squad has a few casualties. But if you include Major Matthews and the SEALs, that gives you a short company for Icarus.”

  Vincent nodded. “We’ll need to fill it out with some engineering support, but we can source that from the ship. Josh.”

  “I know that tone of voice. What are you thinking?”

  “Even if we could transit the Canal zone, we’re still looking at a logistics nightmare for the fueling. I was thinking we could shift the Lucas off supply runs. Other than the subs and the Ford, it’s the only nuke vessel we’ve got.”

  Kanapkey rubbed his chin in thought. The aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford sat docked, as it had for some time, on the Caribbean island of St. Croix. The same equipment that made the carrier an ideal tool for disaster recovery efforts meant it was perfect to supplement the base they’d established there. They’d cleared the island of infected long ago, and the slow-growing population—many of them civilians who’d survived at sea, or survivors the military had found over the years—enjoyed an idyllic existence. Their small farms were a bit more than self-sufficient, but the real reason for St. Croix’s value was the Hovensa oil refinery. The nuclear-powered Ford provided electricity and purified water; the refinery produced fuel for the rest of the fleet. “It makes sense,” he admitted. “I’m sure Captain Wilhite will be chomping at the bit to see some action.”

  “How soon can you switch the Lucas’ mission load over? Full court press. If my boys end up needing fire support, I want them to have it.”

  “Three days, max. You want Fleet to provide the helicopters?” The Ford’s fixed-wing aircraft rested on the ocean floor, discarded for a lack of fuel, munitions, and spare parts. The few remaining helicopters were stretched thin around the island bases. They’d been working on the logistics of shuttling spares down to the Caribbean from Perry last week, before the wall breach and the battle of Hope.

  “Yup,” Vincent confirmed. “We’ll nail the how and why down later, but that’s what I’m thinking.” He considered the Lucas’ vehicular capacity and said, “Two troop choppers and a gunship of some sort. I’ll let the ground team make the final call, but that’s what I’d use.”

  Kanapkey looked down at something out of the camera’s line of sight and frowned. “This is one hell of a long shot. I hope the intel is accurate.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Vincent pointed out, needlessly. Everyone knew the stakes. “We lose air superiority, we lose. Period.”

  April 4, 2018

  Southwestern Illinois

  Z-Day + 168

  It wasn’t a lie, really.

  Sandy did have a Ph.D.—it was just that it was in microbiology. And while he thought he might remember enough of his pre-med anatomy courses to be dangerous, he did have one ace up his sleeve.

  Growing up, Papa Scopulis had been one of the hardest working men Sandy had ever known. In the working-class Jersey neighborhood he grew up in, that was saying something. So when it came time for college, while Sandy’s grades and test scores were good enough to get him some assistance, it wasn’t enough to cover all his tuition. Given the rants Papa had regaled the household with on the subject of debt growing up, the possibility of taking out student loans was a non-starter.

  So, between semesters, Sandy worked. Some pre-med students might have regarded a job as an EMT as somehow beneath them, but the pay was good, and Sandy looked at it as both practical practice and a constant reminder that he did not want to go into surgery. Any time he felt like skipping out on studying, he’d remind himself of some of the bad scenes he’d seen while working.

  It had been a great motivator. Berkeley hadn’t been a hotbed of violence, but he’d seen enough action that he felt he could at least try and bluff his way into the good graces of these folks. It was an open case whether that was a good idea or not, but his feet hurt, and he was ready to find someplace more secure than an RV with a jury-rigged security door. He looked at the carefully arranged boat hulls around the building and felt a hunger that he’d never known himself to be capable of. I need this. I need some semblance of security.

  In response to his cry, the man standing in the bed of the pickup truck lowered his rifle. “Jason, Richard—put your guns down, for God’s sake.” He called out over the roof of the truck. “You better not be messing with me, chief.” He was a big man, balding, with florid cheeks and the look of someone who’d lost a lot of weight fast.

  Sandy stepped forward and called out, “Do you have a first aid kit?”

  The big man nodded. “Be right back.”

  He turned to the two men flanking the injured fellow. “Jason? Richard?”

  The one on the right slung his scoped rifle over one shoulder and patted himself on the chest. He was about Sandy’s height, with dark hair and a patchy beard. He couldn’t have been much beyond drinking age, and something about his bearing shouted ‘college student.’ “I’m Jason.” He jerked a thumb to his side at the other, older man. “That’s Richard. Can you help?”

  Sandy’s earlier apprehension vanished as he stepped forward and knelt at the side of the wounded man. He was an old-timer, with a full head of white hair and a beard of impressive proportions. His face was almost the same shade as his hair, and he had both hands clutched to his side. Blood welled between his fingers. Hell.

  “Hang in there,” Sandy said with far more assurance than he felt. He reached under the man’s side and probed with his fingers He found the small exit wound and elicited a yelp of pain. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about digging a bullet out, but with the way the old guy was bleeding, it must have hit something vital on the way through. He eyed the wound in front and estimated the angle it must have taken through the gut to make that exit wound. Sandy winced. If the bullet had nicked one of the major vessels supplying the liver, that would explain the amount of blood they were seeing. It also turned the injury into something touch and go even for a well-equipped trauma center.

  Still, he had to do something. Selfish desire had moved him at first, but as he hovered over the dying man, a vague sense of rage kindled within him. Six months ago, this scenario would have been unthinkable. In Sandy’s current existence he feared the infected, but he mourned the loss of civilized society even more.

  He dumped his backpack onto the ground and fished around. A couple of weeks back, he’d scrounged his way through a spor
ting goods store. Anything useful as a weapon was long gone, but he’d found some much-needed fresh clothing including fresh socks. He grabbed the plastic bag and pulled the next-to-last new pair out. They weren’t liable to be sanitary, but they were better than nothing.

  He rolled up one sock and crammed it into the exit wound. The old man yelped, but it was far more subdued than it had been. He was fading fast. “Hang in there,” Sandy repeated. “Get ready to hold this tight, all right?”

  The man on the ground gave him a tight nod, then yowled again as Sandy got the other sock into the entrance wound. He clamped his hand over the makeshift bandage with renewed fervor, though Sandy thought his grip wasn’t quite so strong as it had been a few moments before. He turned to one of the standing men.

  “Where’s that kit?”

  Neither man answered—they were too busy staring to the north. He followed their looks and cursed under his breath.

  The engine noise from the convoy of raiders must have roused the infected in the vicinity as they passed through the countryside. They’d trailed behind, like the children of Hamelin following the Pied Piper. The gunshot and the injured man’s screams had been more than enough direction for them to home in on.

  Sandy had seen more infected at one time—a lot more—but it had been in a city. The fact that there were this many here and now was not a happy sign. He’d spent countless hours in study, staring out the windows of his lab the past winter while attempting to catalog their movements.

  Maybe the city had been too quiet. Perhaps the buildings had redirected or deadened the noise. He was by no means an expert at moving silently, but by hiding and being patient, he’d made it through more than one horde using the behavior patterns he’d discerned.

  He wasn’t used to being wrong. Before the outbreak, the consequences of mistakes weren’t generally life-threatening. But if he didn’t get this one right, it was possible he’d be left out in the cold.