A Place Called Hope (Z-Day Book 2)

by Daniel Humphreys

  She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “That’s where you’re wrong, you know. Real heroes are the ones that fight past their fear.”

  Chapter 17

  March 15, 2026

  Aboard the USS Georgia

  Z-Day + 3,070

  Charlie had suffered through one of the worst nights of sleep he’d had in a long time. He would almost have preferred the recurring nightmare that had plagued him since Z-Day than his experience on the submarine. Whenever he’d grown close to passing out, another strange noise would shake him awake. Intermittent rushes of air, the creaking and popping of the hull, and the occasional mystery clang of metal on metal had all contributed to his restless night.

  Submarines are supposed to be quiet, for God’s sake. He didn’t know if the crew of the Georgia given up on the concept in the last eight years, but there was more than enough activity that by the time 0600 came around, Charlie was staring at the bunk overhead with bloodshot eyes. He wondered if he could get away with grabbing some breakfast and lying back down. Maybe he could dig up some earplugs, somewhere.

  Unlike the Detroit, the Georgia was actually running a bit light on crew, so while Charlie was sharing a cabin with Chief Foraker, Del Arroz, and one of the other Marines, they didn’t have to endure one of the joys of the silent service Charlie had read about in Patrick Robinson novels—hot bunking. His rack was his, and while it wasn’t the most comfortable bed he’d ever been in, it beat the folding cots they used out on scavenging runs. With three other men in the room, he might have assumed that it would have been stuffy and hot, but if anything opposite had been true. The air was chilly enough that he’d bundled up in his covers and wished for more. One of the advantages to nuclear-powered air conditioning, he supposed.

  What was more difficult to adjust to was the lack of the sky. The tight quarters on the first ship hadn’t been so bad when he’d been able to step out on deck. Now, all he had were the cool bulkheads of the submarine and the knowledge that they were underwater. And he didn’t even know how deep! They could be hundreds of feet down, though he supposed it wouldn’t matter soon enough.

  When Pete had laid out the mission Charlie had assumed they’d be sailing south. But it was quicker—and for some mysterious reason, safer—to sail north. Soon enough, being underwater would be the least of his worries. There’d be a thick layer of polar ice over their heads.

  Charlie sighed.

  “Chuck, you’re killing me, bro. Did you sleep at all?”

  He turned his head and glanced across the compartment. Del Arroz was lying in his rack with his arm thrown up over his eyes. “Not much.”

  The other man sat up and put his feet on the deck. “Couple of days, you’ll get used to it. Scout’s honor. This ain’t my first trip. The subs are running a more regular route than the city bus under here. It’s the safest and most efficient way to move people and equipment around. But first few nights I tossed and turned worse than you did.” Del Arroz stood up and pulled on a t-shirt. “Come on, I got what you need. A little exercise and some chow, and you’ll be ready to hit the rack.”

  Charlie let him get out of the way, then followed after. “Where the hell are we going to exercise on this thing? It’s packed tighter than my mother-in-law’s basement.”

  The Marine laughed as he led him through a progression of cramped corridors and compartments. Finally, when Charlie was about to call uncle, Del Arroz led him into a room that felt more spacious than it probably was after the confines of the rest of the boat. The compartment ran the width of the ship and much more lengthwise. Despite the space, it wasn’t completely open. Two rows of orange-painted cylinders spanned the length of the room, and Charlie realized at once where they stood.

  Del Arroz looked back as Charlie stared at the sight before him. “C’mon, Chuck. Let’s get some laps in.”

  “You want to run laps around a room full of nuclear missiles.”

  There a short bark of laughter to one side, and they turned. A sailor emerged from one side of the room carrying a clipboard. “That’s a good one.” The sailor—the name tape on his uniform read ‘Adams’—raised his eyebrows and rapped his knuckles on one of the giant cylinders. “Knock, knock.” Charlie didn’t know what it should have sounded like but it didn’t sound full. He shrugged. The sailor favored him with a broad grin and whispered, “They’re empty.”

  “Uh— do I want to know?”

  The man winked. “No. No, you do not.”

  Del Arroz snorted in annoyance. “Ignore him, Chuck, he’s screwing with you. This thing hasn’t carried nukes for a long time.”

  The sailor grinned. “Sorry, Marine. Gotta get my fun where I can.” He glanced at Charlie. “They replaced the ICBMs with Tomahawk cruise missiles long before the wave, my brother. We shot our wad. They’re storage, now. More chow, more room to haul y’alls junk around.”

  The situation was so strange that all Charlie could do was shake his head. He glanced at Del Arroz. “Lead on. Let’s see if I can keep up.”

  The Marine grinned. “That’s the spirit. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

  March 16, 2026

  USS Georgia—Arctic Circle

  Z-Day + 3,071

  On their second day under sail, the captain of the Georgia extended a dinner invitation to Pete and Lieutenant Ross. The two had spent much of the time since boarding going over the ops plans again and again, in search for any small detail they might have missed. At some point, they needed to get the assault teams together and do a walkthrough, but the ship had limited space. ‘Sherwood Forest,’ the ship’s missile bay, wasn’t quite open enough for that sort of thing. The next-largest room was the dining facility, and it was so small that the crew had to rotate through for meals. For better or worse, Pete had made the call to let his team take the downtime. Full preparation would have to wait until they reached the Pacific and switched ships again. For now, he trusted Master Sergeant McFarlane to ride herd over the Marines and keep them from getting too wild. On his strolls through the ship, he’d been happy to see small groups making use of the Sherwood space for jogging as well as the exercise machines tucked away in various nooks and crannies.

  He’d thought the sub huge from the outside, but the inside was surprisingly claustrophobic. Even officer’s country was Spartan, and the captain’s wardroom wasn’t much different. The table in the middle of the room took up much of the floor space, and Pete’s back brushed the bulkhead as he navigated around to the offered seat.

  He’d met Captain Zach Timmons for a moment during boarding, but he hadn’t found the middle of a pier bustling with Marines and seamen loading cargo the best place for a meeting. Timmons had agreed, and the two had gone their separate ways, focusing on their respective cat-herding.

  The slim, balding officer greeted him with a smile and a handshake. “Major, how are you? You and your people settling in?”

  Pete pulled out his chair and eased into it. “Haven’t heard any complaints. And call me Pete. I’m still getting used to Major.”

  Timmons chuckled in agreement and nodded to Ross. “Lieutenant, it’s been a while.”

  “Kitsap, wasn’t it, Captain? That was a hairy one.”

  “Indeed it was.” He indicated the fourth man in the room. “Gentlemen, Lieutenant Commander Lowes, my XO.”

  Lowes was somewhere between Ross and Pete in age and had closely-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “Ben,” he said. “Welcome aboard.”

  Timmons took his own seat and waved extravagantly. “Dinner tonight comes courtesy of your people, Pete. Captain Piatt had some frozen ground beef in our resupply package.”

  Pete glanced at Ross. The SEAL winked. When they’d first met, it had been over hamburgers at the aptly-named Last Bar, back home. As a result of that meeting, it seemed that supplies were already flowing both ways. Some cow is more than a fair price to pay for a garrison and beefing—heh—up the walls. “Sounds good, Zach.”

  Captain Timmons pulled the covers off the steam tra
y in the center of the table. “Rest of the guys are getting chili mac, but Cookie whipped up some meatloaf for us. Serve yourself—we’ve cut things as close to the bone as we can. My steward was one of the first reassigned.”

  The meal was quiet with the intense attention dining merited since the outbreak. Pete had often reflected that the zombie apocalypse had been the greatest enforced diet and exercise plan in human history. The American culture of ‘snack now and snack later’ had become one of scarcity that few of the survivors had experienced in their lifetimes.

  Pete’s uncertainty of his community’s long-term survival had ended only when his friends and neighbors no longer had the hollow cheeks of war refugees. Many still dealt with the mental aftereffects, but they had the resources to survive, at least. And now, like an island of civilization sprouting in the wild, the community that he’d helped build and kept safe, more often than not through sheer strength of will along the way, would have the opportunity to be the linchpin for the reconstruction of modern society. Strange as it seemed, the meatloaf he’d eaten was the first symbolic step in that process.

  Pete took a sip of the coffee Timmons had poured after clearing away the plates and cutlery and resisted the urge to grimace. The brew had the unique flavor combination of being both watered-down and burnt at the same time. Week-old dregs from a hole-in-the-wall gas station might have tasted better, and he wondered how long the mess staff had been recycling the grounds. He put the cup down. “So, Zach, what role are you and your men filling, now?”

  The captain must have found the coffee palatable because he took a healthy swig before answering. “Mail runs, for the most part. Shuffling people and equipment back and forth between the Atlantic and Pacific. It’s not the most exciting job in the fleet, but it’s an important one.”

  Ross grinned. “Captain Timmons is being too humble, Pete. There’s a bit more to it than that.”

  “Well, we have done our share of covert insertions.” Timmons toasted the SEAL, “but Ross and his men see the bulk of the excitement there.”

  “Recon? Supply runs?” Pete was honestly curious. General Vincent had never gone into much detail of how he’d gathered the surviving military together. Hanratty had some pretty hairy tales of making his way out of post-outbreak Iraq, but Vincent had waved off any discussion of the past as moot.

  “Little bit of both,” Timmons agreed. “Early on, we looked for any signs of life we could find, but survivors were few and far between. Islands we could clear out, at least. Most of the ships we came across were derelicts or brimming with zulus.”

  “I remember hearing somewhere that something like three-quarters of the population in the world lived near a coast,” Pete mused. He added a couple of packets of sugar to the coffee and took a cautious sip.

  “Which makes any attempt to reach the interior highly exciting,” Ross agreed.

  “No holdouts?”

  “Nothing to speak of,” Timmons sighed. “Some of the most isolated places we’ve checked were either empty or hostile territory. All it took was one vaccinated person. The signal goes out, nanos switch on, and that’s all she wrote. The worst place to be during the outbreak was an island. Sooner or later, you run out of places to hide.”

  “Or a boat.”

  “Or a boat.” Timmons gave Pete a flat stare. “On the bright side, we had lots of locking hatches. But I lost two dozen good men before we regained control. A lot of other boats weren’t so lucky.” He snorted. “I was at Annapolis with a guy, Lyndon Murray. Real stick up his ass. He had Jimmy Carter, and he always rode herd on his crew. Sometimes I think the idiot crapped paperwork. Anyway, sure as the world, every sailor on his boat had their shots up to date and checked off. Ol’ Murray, I guess he forgot to get his. We sailed up on Carter—she was docked at Kitsap—and we get a hit on shortwave. Captain Murray’s holed up on the bridge, and every member of his crew is pounding on the hatches trying to get at him. No way out.” Timmons made a face. “Tried to talk him down, tell him Ross and his boys could get his ship clear, but he wouldn’t listen. He ate a bullet rather than give us time to work the problem. So, yeah.”

  “It’s a hard thing to grasp. We’ve got people back home that just broke, couldn’t deal.” Pete shrugged. “No shame in it.”

  “True enough. We’re isolated from the worst of it, so it’s been better for us. Anyway, after that, we did our best to catalog the status of the ships that weren’t answering. Wasn’t so bad, back then—we had the satellite network. It was a matter of cruising around and checking them off the list.” Timmons frowned. “There’s a lot of American steel rusting on foreign beaches. But we made our rounds.”

  “Not much else we could do with empty magazines, eh, Captain?” It was the longest sentence Lowes had uttered since they’d sat down to eat, but his tone immediately raised Pete’s hackles. “Fleet shot off damn near every Tomahawk in inventory,” Lowes confided to him. He took a sip of his coffee and made a face. “Believe accuracy was a hair shy of one hundred percent.” He laughed. “Not like bridges and train trestles dodge, though, am I right? Between us and the Air Force, I’d be surprised if there’s a major bridge still standing in the continental United States.”

  Pete had a gallon Ziploc bag full of vacuum-sealed dark roast in his rucksack. I’ll be damned if I offer any of it up to this fool. He gritted his teeth to keep from speaking up. If Lieutenant Commander Lowes picked up on his annoyance at the direction the conversation had taken, he didn’t react, continuing on in the same vein.

  “Scuttlebutt was, targeted nuclear strikes were on the agenda, but I guess that National Command Authority folded before they could issue the strike order.”

  Ross took the chance to interject as Pete unclenched his jaw to speak. “Based on what we’ve seen sir, the silo crews had a damn high rate of treatment with tainted vaccine. If there was a launch order, they were dead or reanimated by the time it came through.”

  “That right? Interesting.”

  Pete forced himself to look away from Lowes. “That doesn’t sound like supposition to me, Mike.”

  “It was early on when we thought we could neutralize hot spots. Thankfully, we didn’t lose anybody on that one.”

  Pete fixed Lowes with a stare. “Lucky break, I guess. Bad ideas usually end up getting people killed.” Like taking out every bridge in the Continental United States.

  He hadn’t voiced the last part, but he didn’t have to. Lowes reddened. He opened his mouth to retort, but Captain Timmons cut him off before he could speak.

  “Ben, why don’t you head up to bridge and spell Lieutenant Monaghan? Send him our way, I don’t think he’s eaten yet, and there’s plenty left. Hate to see it go to waste.”

  Lowes took another sip of his coffee, blotted his lips with a napkin, and nodded to the table. “Yes, sir. Gentlemen.”

  The room remained silent for a long moment after the XO had left. Timmons broke the silence. “My apologies, Major. I didn’t think to brief my crew on your background.”

  Pete sighed. “None needed, Captain. Bit of a sore subject. You might consider telling your crew not to bring it up, if and when they get shore leave. In my area, at least, let’s say those air strikes were poorly timed.”

  “Not to mention ill-conceived,” Timmons agreed. “It doesn’t seem to have done much at all to limit the spread of the infection, and the lack of crossings looks to be a major issue going forward. Going to keep what’s left of the Seabees and Corps of Engineers hopping.”

  “I’m not sure if General Vincent is aware or not, but we’ve got a structural engineer back home, Vir Singh. He designed the walls and the more permanent bridge structures we had to put in. He’s working with the detachment back home, but he’s not the sort to toot his own horn. Might be a resource to look at down the road.”

  Timmons gave an interested grunt. “I’ll pass that along to the folks on that side of the house. They’re always on the lookout for anyone with more than a couple of brain cells to rub together
.” He raised his eyes and fixed Pete with a serious stare. “Being blunt and off the record, I thought it was a stupid-ass order. But it was a lawful launch command, conveyed through the proper channels. We obeyed it.”

  “Who sent it?” Pete wondered. “Things fell apart so fast that the only thing I ever heard was rumor and supposition over shortwave.”

  “The White House fell early on. Chain of command conveyed to the Speaker. CDC had preselected target coordinates, intended for a nationwide quarantine. It was the wrong plan at the wrong time, but they didn’t know that, obviously.”

  “Figures. I never did like that Eddie Munster lookin’ twerp.”

  Timmons snorted a laugh. “Well, if humanity survives long enough to write the next chapter in the history books, he’s not going to come off looking so well. By the time our forces started pulling together overseas, there was no intact continuity of government.”

  “Everybody got their damn flu shots. Courtesy of GenPharm.”

  “Yes, they did. Thankfully they weren’t the primary supplier for the military—particularly overseas—or we’d have taken a much harder hit than we did.”

  Pete raised his awful coffee. “Well, here’s to incompetent enemies.”

  “I’ll drink to that.”

  Chapter 18

  March 21, 2026

  Aboard the USS Georgia

  Z-Day + 3,076

  Del Arroz was right.