A Place Called Hope (Z-Day Book 2)

by Daniel Humphreys

  “Hear what?” Ross replied. “Chief, let’s cache this ammo by the access door in case we have to fall back.”

  Charlie frowned. The buzzing in his ears sounded like a far-off swarm of bees. He unconsciously brushed at the side of his head, but nothing shook loose. Aftereffect of the wind, maybe. Ross and Foraker wore helmets that covered their ears. After they’d landed, Guglik had tucked her hair under a ragged New York Mets cap, but she didn’t respond to his query. As he straightened, the noise seemed to fade, and he shrugged it off.

  The warehouse roof was a broad, flat expanse broken here and there by the sheet-metal frames of HVAC equipment. A small concrete-block building rose from the side of the building with the office, and the SEALs led Charlie and Agent Guglik in that direction at a trot.

  “No solar panels,” she muttered. “Going to be damn dark inside.”

  They reached the door, and Foraker dropped the duffel. The heavy thump of it hitting the roof shook Charlie’s boots a bit. He cocked an eyebrow and the other man shrugged.

  “Got stuck on a roof and damn near ran out of ammo last week. Don’t want to repeat that situation.”

  “Good call,” Charlie observed. Guglik shoved her way through them and studied the door. There was no lock in the handle, but as she tugged on it, the door didn’t stir in the frame.

  She tapped a black rectangle set in the wall next to the handle. “Card reader. No good without power—or a card, for that matter. Extended power outage would trigger the deadbolt. You boys make yourselves useful and check the perimeter while I pick it.”

  Ross sent Charlie and Foraker on their way by means of quick, silent hand signals. Charlie trotted over to the north wall and studied the surrounding area. The area immediately surrounding the warehouse was mainly dead grass mottled with patches of bare dirt. The intermittent weeds were the only patches of green in sight.

  The perimeter fence was tall, around eight feet or so, and topped with razor wire. The section he could make out seemed intact, and he let himself relax, just a bit. If the same held true all the way around, they should only have to worry about any employees who’d been inside on Z-Day.

  From here he could make out the runway, but the buildings to the north were a vague blur. The morning was still crisp and cool under the newly-risen sun, and as far as he could tell, the area to the north was completely abandoned.

  He turned and headed back to the roof-access door. Foraker stood next to Guglik, waiting patiently as she poked and prodded at the deadbolt. Charlie glanced to the east and saw Ross jogging back.

  “Looks good on my side,” Charlie reported.

  Foraker nodded. “Same on west and south. Your fence up?”

  “Yup.”

  Ross rejoined the group. “Good east. Fences?”

  “Up. The gate’s shut by the office, but it looks a little sketchy. We might want to investigate rolling a few cars against it if we can.”

  “Good on my side, as well.” Charlie added. “No zulus.”

  “Yeah, this place is a freaking ghost town. I don’t like it.”

  “Nothing to like about it, Chief.”

  “Door’s open,” Guglik chimed in.

  Ross glanced at Charlie. “You ready for this?”

  He nodded. “Just a bigger version of my day job. With the added benefit of somebody watching my back.”

  The lieutenant nodded. “All right. I’m calling for the rest of the team to secure the roof and fences. After that—you’re leading the way.”

  Chapter 26

  April 3, 2026

  Aboard the USS Jack Lucas

  Z-Day + 3,089

  The air blasting from the vents in the CIC, or Combat Information Center, was cold enough to make your teeth rattle, Captain Tamara Wilhite mused as she stepped through the hatch. It was a necessary evil. There were enough heat-producing electronic systems in the room at the heart of the ship to melt an iceberg.

  Most of the stations in the CIC were identical to those present in the Burke-class before Z-Day, but the designers of the Lucas had taken full advantage of the extra room offered by the hull to incorporate the testbed technologies.

  Cruise missiles didn’t require much care and feeding in a traditional CIC—set the target, launch, and forget was the order of the day. Drones were different, and there were a dozen command stations for them in the CIC. Wraparound screens mimicked the HUD of a traditional fighter, and flight controls extended from the armrests of the custom seating for each station. It was, in a very real sense, the last operating arcade in the world.

  Captain Wilhite crossed her arms near her XO’s position. “How we are looking, Javier?”

  Commander Javier Nunez gave her a calm nod. The short, but powerfully-built man wasn’t a Lucas original—he’d been a junior officer on the since-beached USS Shiloh when the outbreak hit. The technology disparity between the old, turbine-powered cruiser and the surviving nuke boats was a big one, but he’d handled his business with aplomb and worked his way up over the years. “Advance team has entered the building. Fences are intact, so Icarus is a go.”

  She stepped over to the bank of wide screens displaying video from active drones. “How are we looking on overhead?”

  “We’ve got two units in orbit over the site and a third keeping an eye on the ingress route. If the Sea Hawks attract too much attention on their way in, we may have to shift the insertion route.”

  She made a face. The path over Los Padres National Forest was already out of the way. If they had to divert much further, that could come back to haunt them. When the Marines did pull out, at least, they’d be able to take a straighter—and faster—route back.

  “Cross that bridge when we come to it. Another option would be to find a target south of the current route and drop an SDB on it.”

  Nunez grinned. “That’s unconventional, Captain. I like it.”

  Wilhite tapped a finger to her temple and winked. The Sea Stalker drones they carried shared many common design features with the venerable Tomahawk cruise missile while being a little bit smaller. Launched vertically from a missile tube using compressed air, the drones had a pair of folding wings that deployed as soon as the vehicle’s turbofan engine fired off.

  There were some drawbacks to the design, of course. The Sea Stalker had a limited payload. Much of its mass consisted of fuel and electronics, and even then, its loiter time was far lower than most of the drones in use by the military before the outbreak. The fold-out stub wings had no way of carrying drop tanks or ordnance, so the only weapons it carried were a pair of GBU-39 small-diameter bombs in an internal bomb bay. Doctrine for ground support missions was to keep two or more drones overhead, then cycle replacements for refueling and rearming.

  By the time Icarus was fully in the field, all the drone control stations in the CIC would be up and running, in various stages of orbit, return, reconnaissance, or maintenance.

  Thankfully, the ship had plenty of spare drones—and the engineering mates had gotten refueling and reloading operations down to a science. Captain Wilhite gave Nunez a nod and moved to another station.

  “Lieutenant Commander, how are the rail guns looking?”

  Lynn Repko had been an F/A-18F Super Hornet pilot on the USS Gerald Ford before making the move into gunnery. Unlike Nunez, her ship was still in service—albeit as a land support vessel. Most of the planes from Ford’s air wing were long gone, discarded as scrap to free up deck space due to a lack of fuel, spare parts, and armaments. The surviving pilots had shifted to other positions.

  She was, Captain Wilhite had often reflected, quite possibly the most angry-looking woman she’d ever met. Can’t say as I blame her, getting benched like that. The other woman had been at the pinnacle of her career—fighter pilot on a brand-new, state-of-the-art aircraft carrier. With a few exceptions—you never knew when you might need a fighter-bomber for a rainy day—the outbreak had taken the Navy out of the fixed-wing business.

  “Perfect, Captain. We’re cycling t
hrough diagnostics every half hour, but keeping the capacitors offline for now. When the ground unit calls for fire, we’ll be ready to rain hell down on the enemy in a few minutes.”

  The smile the other woman gave her was almost too predatory, but Wilhite couldn’t fault her for hating zulu. She’d never gotten Repko to talk enough to find out what she’d lost—other than her plane, of course—but it was a moot question. They’d all lost people. Friends, family.

  Children.

  Wilhite dug her fingernails into her palms. Bad time to start thinking about that, Tammie. Save it.

  “Great job, Lynn. I know you and your people will be ready.”

  She stepped over to the video screens and studied the emptiness around the target warehouse. Nothing stirred, and the roof of the warehouse seemed as abandoned as everything else in view.

  “So far, so good,” she murmured to herself.

  April 3, 2026

  Aboard the USS Jack Lucas

  Z-Day + 3,089

  The aft deck was a maelstrom of activity.

  Men and women shouted, power tools sang, and equipment rattled and squealed across the deck. The Sea Hawks were out of the hangar, and Brumley and her fellow Marine aviators were conducting their final flight checks as Navy personnel helped Pete’s Marines load up the choppers with crate after crate of ammunition.

  The first insertion was going light on personnel—McFarlane’s Alpha team and Staff Sergeant Marshall Jackson’s Echo team were riding in to help unload the supplies.

  The loading was a precarious thing. One of the choppers was going to be carrying a DPV—Desert Patrol Vehicle—on a sling-load on the way in. Alpha team was going to find seating tight, given that they were going to be carrying three-quarters of the food, water, ammunition, and explosives.

  Pete didn’t like putting that many eggs in one basket, but it was the least worst option. The presence of the DPV wasn’t critical, per se, but not having it had the potential to make things much dicier.

  Standard DPVs looked like nothing else but a dune buggy with a trio of seats and a heavy weapons system—usually a heavy machine gun or a Mk 19 grenade launcher. The Lucas’ machinist mates had transformed the vehicle over the course of their cruise south.

  They’d removed the high-mounted rear seat, leaving only the driver and passenger seat. A pair of large speakers, facing out and to the rear, replaced it. Navy personnel had mounted and wired the required electronics to power and run the speakers in an area underneath. They’d eliminated the top weapons mount, though the light machine gun mounted for the passenger’s use remained.

  The tubular frame of the DPV now supported a layer of perforated aluminum planking. Linked together, the material was used to build quick, temporary landing zones. For a make-do armor, it would do the trick. The mates who’d done the welding had left gaps at head height on both sides for the crew inside to be able to see out. The front was more problematic—the passenger needed traverse space for the light machine gun, as well as plenty of view room for the driver to see the road. Rather than use the planking there, the welders had installed two offset layers of military link.

  The armor panels on the side made entry there impossible—a hinged hatch at the top provided access to the seating, and a locking bar along the front edge seated into the upper side tubes of the frame and made for a solid seal.

  The machinists mounted their final flourish on the DPV’s front bumper. Two angled pieces of aluminum planking came to a point, and the rear ends stuck out a foot from the side of the vehicle. When Pete had first seen it, he’d frowned and cocked his head in confusion until he’d realized that it served the same function as a cattle catcher on a locomotive—if the Marines driving the DPV had to push through a crowd, it would shuffle anything they hit to the side rather than up and over the hood.

  He stepped closer to the modified vehicle and tugged experimentally on one of the panels. The sailors who’d put it together had done a fine job. If he hadn’t seen the vehicle before, he might have thought this a depot-level option. They’d trimmed the panels to fit and even run a few coats of tan paint over the new material to give it the same color pattern as the rest of the vehicle.

  The head of one of his Marines popped out of the hatch on top in response to his check of the armor. Pete himself jumped a bit in surprise, then shook his head mentally as he gave the other man an appraising look.

  “Sergeant Del Arroz,” he said as he dredged the Marine’s name up from memory. “Everything under control?”

  “Just, uh, doing some final adjustments to the electrical and sound system, sir.”

  Pete gave the enlisted man a bit of side eye, then nodded and moved on. Not sure what’s going on there, but it’s bound to be interesting.

  This, he reflected, was a very different type of war than what he’d fought in the sandbox. The lines were more obvious now—living and dead. You couldn’t count on the living to react in a rational manner, but if they shifted to the other side, it was physically evident. In the Middle East, alliances had shifted like sand under their feet. Yesterday’s friend could be tomorrow’s enemy, and you could never know when someone once-trusted might shoot you in the back. He’d been lucky, on his deployments, to never have lost anyone. But he’d known other commanders who had lost people, to locals who’d once been considered reliable.

  It was obvious that Del Arroz was up to something, but unlike the sandbox, it was guaranteed to be some sort of prank. Unless he missed his guess, it wouldn’t inhibit the mission, though it was liable to ruffle some feathers.

  But, after all, that was what they made senior enlisted for.

  He stepped up next to McFarlane. “How goes it, Master Sergeant?”

  The taller Marine glanced over at him. “We’ve got the supplies loaded. Last hold-up is the sling-load for the DPV, and then we’re mounting up.”

  “Don’t let me keep you—I’ll see you on the roof.”

  He hadn’t known McFarlane for long, but he’d spent enough time with him to recognize the look of surprise that the man tried to cover up. “I assumed you’d be coordinating things from the ship, Major.”

  Pete winked. “You let me worry about telling General Vincent that I didn’t stay in the CIC like a good little boy. I didn’t hang back in the rear with the gear when my boys were overseas. I’m sure as hell not going to do it now.”

  The master sergeant nodded in approval. “Glad to hear it, sir. With your permission?” He offered a crisp salute.

  Pete returned it. “Let’s get this wagon train rolling.”

  April 8, 2018

  Southwestern Illinois

  Z-Day + 172

  Sandy’s explosion had pretty much ruined the house for further occupation. For one, it had shattered all the front-facing ground floor windows. Even the carefully-aimed fire he and Kendra had used to clear out the yard had penetrated in some spots. In that regard, he was glad that Kendra had been correct—the surviving occupants were all in the upstairs of the house.

  That didn’t mean that every door opened to happy endings. Several of the home’s occupants had received scratches or become infected in their flight from the lawn back into the house. They all succumbed to the nanites, as usual. One of the rooms had been empty. Another, to Sandy’s horror, had not.

  In the end, with nowhere else to take the six children—ranging from toddlers to preteens—and four women, Sandy and Kendra made a quick pass for supplies, loaded up two Humvees, and headed south.

  The women rode with Kendra. Two of them showed early signs of pregnancy. All had haunted eyes.

  Sandy had killed Lee’s animated upper half for the second time that day on his way back toward the house. After what he’d seen in some of the upstairs bedrooms, he almost wished he’d taken more time with it.

  But that, he reasoned, was the unpredictability of mankind. Take two otherwise normal individuals, strip away the veneer of civilization, and you ended with different outcomes. You couldn’t predict it, there was no
way to guess who’d go which way until actually presented with that situation. Sandy couldn’t even put it down to socio-economics—were the depravities that men like Carver had committed any different than the apocalypse wrought by Sandy’s highly-educated coworkers? The only difference was the scale. Where the raider crew had engaged in localized terror, Project Guidestone industrialized it, perfected it. He’d participated in the latter—but he’d helped put a stop to the former. Baby steps, perhaps, but steps in the right direction.

  And if Kendra has her way, I’ll be making those steps for a long time.

  He ignored the buzz of the kids in the back of the Humvee and glanced at himself in the mirror. Can you live like that? After a moment, he gave himself a nod and murmured, “One step at a time, I think I can.”

  One of the kids popped forward. “What’d you say, mister?”

  He glanced over. “I said we’re almost there. I’m Sandy.”

  He got a gap-toothed grin in response. “I’m Will.”

  “Nice to meet you, Will.”

  “Are you one of the mean men?” The question came with neither guile or heat, and when he stopped and took a moment to study the boy, he realized that the only expression on his face was one of dull resignation. He wasn’t merely beaten-down—his psyche had been so devastated by what he’d been through that he couldn’t muster even a shred of concern for his own well-being. He might as well have asked if Sandy planned on killing him in the next few minutes.

  He blinked back the sudden rush of tears, and just like that, Kendra’s admonition to make steps toward atonement came into individualized focus. This boy would be his first step. Guidestone had brought Will to this point. Sandy swore he would do everything he could to see that he made it past it.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not. My friend and I, we stopped the bad men. That’s why things got so wild there for a bit. But you’re safe now, Will. We’ve got a place where the monsters can’t get to.”