by Lund, Dave
Chivo nodded and looked at Bexar, who looked at Cliff. “How are we going to split the trucks up?”
A slight glint of contempt flashed in Cliff’s eyes. “I have the longer journey, so I’ll take the one with the windshield, and you guys will have reached Groom Lake before I’ve even made it halfway. Chivo has the Berretta. How are you set for ammo with that big bitch?”
“I have about two dozen rounds left for it.” The ridiculously large 50-caliber long-range sniper rifle had served Chivo well in The Basin, as similar rifles had in a number of clandestine missions during the past twenty years.
“Good, I have one of the Nikon spotting scopes, you guys take the other. The food we split three ways.” Cliff pointed to the three duffle bags lumpy with canned goods and other non-perishable food stuffs. He glanced at his watch. “If you two leave now and shag ass you might make it halfway before sunset, but Yo-Yo motherfuckers.”
Cliff picked up one of the bags of food and walked out of the garage, shutting the door behind him. Outside they heard one of the trucks start and idle for a moment in the driveway before two shots could be heard over the engine, followed by what sounded like an air horn.
“What the shit?” Bexar said to an empty garage, Chivo already running through the door with his rifle raised. Bexar followed quickly. There was a muffled shot and the air horn stopped, the silence now feeling louder than the horn blast had been.
Reaching the driveway, Bexar saw Chivo standing at the curb, rifle up and slowly turning in place, scanning every open direction. Their truck, the one with no windshield, sat with two flat tires, a punctured air horn in a can obvious in the snow of the front lawn.
“On your left,” Bexar called as he raised his rifle and took a position next to Chivo, not knowing what threat his friend had seen, but without having to say so, taking his slice of the pie, his portion of the area to scan for threats. Bexar held his rifle at the low ready and slowly scanned left to right. “Seriously, fuck that guy, what is his problem?”
“Guess I should have shot him when I had the chance. His outlook is very simple; it’s binary, on or off, one or zero. In his mind we weren’t for him, following his plan, so we were now against him.”
“Really? He’s that simple? I thought you super-spooks were more intelligent than that.”
“He’s not a super-spook, he’s a conditioned machine. If A then B, then C, otherwise go to plan E and F, it’s very linear and that’s how guys like him are trained.”
“But he trained you.”
“Sure, but I was Special Forces first, taught to be creative and adapt, be flexible to achieve a mission and that with new intel sometimes missions can change. That’s why we were tasked with difference missions out there in the real world. He would never have been able to befriend the village elders in the ‘Stan.”
“Then what is your mission?”
“First to live long enough to find new wheels, and then it’s to live long enough to make sure you make it back to your wife.”
“After that?”
“Don’t know yet, mano, but I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”
“Shit, got a dead one.” Bexar raised his rifle.
“Same here, actually quite a few.”
“Stay or go?”
“Go. I’ll keep things fluid out here, go inside and grab the food bags, toss them in the bed of the truck.”
“But …”
Dozens of dead streamed into the open from between homes.
“Go mano, go fast!”
Bexar turned and ran into the house and to the garage, shouldered the bags, grabbed the big case with Chivo’s sniper rifle, Chivo’s other bag and his bag, before trotting outside in more of a heavy waddle as Chivo, now standing in the bed of the truck, began opening fire on the closest approaching undead. At a quick glance, Bexar guessed there were at least fifty stumbling to the siren call of the air horn that Cliff had left for them.
“OK dude, you drive.”
Bexar looked at Chivo a bit sideways. Anticipating the look, Chivo interrupted Bexar’s unspoken statement. “Fuck the tires, mano, pop smoke and extract. Head to the school we burned down.”
Bexar turned the ignition over, and to his surprise it started. He’d assumed Cliff would have pulled the distributor wires or something else like that. Chivo slid into the passenger seat, riding rifle as it were, took advantage of the missing windshield and helped clear a path as Bexar drove as fast as he could with the two passenger-side tires shot out and flat.
Within a block, large chunks of the ruined tires were being thrown from the wheels, the rims sparking on the asphalt as they drove, but even though the amassing herd of undead turned to follow, they were quickly gaining safety in the increased distance.
Radio Hut, Groom Lake, NV
Headphones plugged into a radio panel, Bill sat, listening intently and writing quickly, filling page after page on his yellow pad of paper. Flipping back to the first page, he used the tip of his pen, ticking off each character in rhythm as he listened. He pulled the headphones off his ears and called out, “Hey Major Wright, check this out.”
Wright slid the proffered headphones over his ears and listened, brow furrowing. Bill handed him his notes, which he followed in rhythm to what he heard. Wright removed the headphones and handed them back to Bill.
“OK, but what is it, who is it? What does it mean?”
Bill chuckled. “You’re supposed to tell me what it means, and it’s a numbers station.”
“What’s a numbers station?”
“They’ve been around since the Cold War started; they’re transmissions on shortwave bands that read letters, numbers, sometimes both. A lot of conspiracy theories in place as to what they were or what they meant, but before the attack there were a number of people who spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. My best guess is that they meant nothing at all and were in place to obfuscate real communication channels, or were one-time cyphers for spies, secret agent types.”
“Besides being creepy, how is it that it’s still going on? There isn’t much of a world left to need black-cloaked spies and such.”
“Major Wright, your guess is good as mine. All I know is that this wasn’t being broadcast before and now it is, so either some secured system woke up and began an automated run, or someone turned it back on.”
“Is it ours? Where is it being transmitted from?”
“Major, I have no idea, and to geolocate the signal it would take more than we have here, multiple sites, people … basically the short answer is that we can’t.”
“What about the SSC?”
“Haven’t asked them yet. The last message that came across the computer screen from them said that they would be off the net for about two hours this morning, and they haven’t checked back in yet.”
“How long has it been?”
“Almost two hours.”
“Well, send a request and wait. Let me know if they don’t respond in the next two hours or so, but spend that time verifying that our connection still works. As many problems as we’ve had recently, I’m not sure how long we’ll even be able to do that.”
The room went dark, the hum of computers stopping instantly. Digital displays blank, radios silent, complete darkness engulfed the room before the eerie glow of the emergency lighting clicked on. Wright cursed and walked out the door, pulling a small tactical flashlight out of the breast pocket of his old-style woodland-patterned BDUs. Flickering twice, the main lights came on for a few seconds and went dark again. Airmen, flashlights in hand, were under the consoles pulling the power plugs from their sensitive equipment and computers, wary of a surge destroying the electronics when the electrical system restarted.
Civilian Berth, Groom Lake, NV
“This is the women’s dormitory. Sarah and Erin, you are welcome to stay here. Jessie, you are welcome to stay here until Bexar returns and then you can move to the married couple’s housing.”
Erin looked at the woman giving
the tour. “What’s the difference?”
The women smiled. “The male and female dormitories are basically open squad bays with rows of bunk beds; the married couples’ housing is basically the same except that there are curtain partitions between each of the berths. That and most married couples push two of the bunk beds together to form a sort of full-sized bed.”
Sarah looked at Erin and shrugged with a crooked smile, as if to say, “It’s just me and you, kid, no special housing for us.”
Erin looked blankly at her mother, then at Jessie, Jessie’s stomach, and back to the woman. “Good, then we can help take care of Jessie as that baby gets closer to coming.” A thin smile escaped to her lips for a microsecond.
The woman opened the door to the women’s dormitory, explaining the artwork on the wall as the “town’s logo” and how each of the dorms had split into towns, each with an elected leader, Jake being the overall civilian leader elected by all who lived in Groom Lake at the time. “There are no taxes, no crime, and the neighborhoods are friendly, if close together,” the woman remarked jokingly. Bathed in harsh overhead lighting like a Fortune-500 partition farm, the rows of dark metal bunk beds seemed to extend forever. In the next instant the room went pitch black, the gentle hiss of air moving through the HVAC and filtration system becoming noticeable in its absence. In the darkness they heard a few women curse, a couple laughed, and one by one little beams of light pierced the darkness, islands of glowing electric life.
Brit grimaced. “This just started happening in the past few days. So far they’ve been temporary. Should be no more than ten minutes before the electrical system restarts and everything comes back online. When we leave here I’ll get you all some of those LED flashlights and spare batteries.”
The emergency lighting flickered on just as the overhead lights powered on then off, on and then off again. None of the women moved, although they could see the flashlights moving in the darkness of the dorm. Erin, weary of the situation, raised her rifle, Jessie drew her handgun, holding it in the SUL position, and Sarah raised her rifle, the three of them turning away from each other, standing back to back. Their tour guide, left out of their circle, looked at them in a mix of surprise and horror as the lights came back on and stayed on.
“You don’t have anything to worry about; we are all perfectly safe down here.”
Barely audibly, Erin hissed, “Then why can’t you keep the fucking lights on?”
The woman laughed nervously. “Tell you what, let’s take you down to the storage floor, get you some of those flashlights and see if we can find something that might make you all feel a little safer.”
Jessie looked at Sarah, who looked at Erin and back to Jessie. Without a word spoken, Jessie holstered her pistol, Erin thumb-flipped the selector on her rifle back to “SAFE,” and the three of them let their tour guide step through the door first, either oblivious to the danger, unwilling to accept that there could be danger, or just that confident that there wouldn’t be any danger.
Over her shoulder, Jessie whispered to Erin, “Think she gets a commission on the sale?”
“No, but I bet her business card has her fucking picture on it.”
“Shush you two,” Sarah hissed back. “Besides, she would have told us about the great schools and shopping in the area.”
Jessie snorted, stifling a laugh as she stepped through the door, the woman standing in the hall looking a little suspiciously at the three new arrivals.
“Uh, sorry, I think my allergies are acting up ‘cause of all the perfectly filtered air,” Jessie managed to say with a straight face as their tour guide walked down the hall towards the stairwell. Erin playfully kicked Jessie in the back of the calf, Jessie stopping in place momentarily, causing Erin to walk into her. They both giggled.
“Children, behave,” Sarah whispered. Their friendly post-apocalyptic realtor didn’t seem amused; she walked through the metal door to the stairwell without waiting for the three, who hurried to catch up, curious what the storage floor entailed.
SSC, Ennis, TX
Clint and Amanda walked side by side northward along the park’s main road, back towards the front gate, which they’d ruined by crashing it the day they arrived. Not much was said between the two. Other than the reanimated dead they had to put down in the neighborhood, the park was relatively quiet, although Amanda had nearly shot a dog as it came crashing out of the brush and stopped to look at the new intruders. It sniffed the air and its tail wagged slightly before it turned and ran back into the woods.
“Pour guy. Man’s best friend is eaten by the man after death, but it looked like he knew we weren’t dead.” Amanda thought about her dogs that she’d unwittingly abandoned in her Arkansas home, before taking a deep breath and screwing down the lid on her memories and emotions.
“You know, Amanda, during all the briefings we had on the Yama strain we discussed civilian populations and we never thought that any significant number of household pets would survive. The analysts believed that either the animals would die of exposure and starvation in their pens, homes or yards, or they would be eaten by the reanimates. Looking back, we should have brought in an expert in animal behavior to study how the survivors would adapt and if they could be a help or hindrance to the survivors. For now, I would assume that any animal we encounter is no longer friendly to anything still on two legs, and will most likely run away, but I wouldn’t test my theory for fear of getting mauled.”
As they approached the front gate on their left, Amanda glanced at the first building, which was an office. Across from the office, under an awning, stood an RV which the park host would stay in. The three main lanes of travel in and out of the park were deserted. The gates stood open, not that it mattered, and the exit roadway was a bit of a throwback design with directional spikes to deflate the tires of anyone attempting to drive the wrong direction. Great against a vehicle, not so much against reanimates stumbling through the open area.
“Clint, we never cleared these buildings.”
“I did.”
“What, when?”
“Right after we first arrived. I’ve already made the same loop we’re taking now.”
“You bastard, why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“Really? We’re going to play that game now? You’re like a malfunctioning robot, specific voice commands only and then the response is truthful only if you feel like it.”
“That’s not fair; I’ve never lied to you.”
“Not telling me is the same as lying. You’re the secret agent, I’m the President, regardless of our involvement, and we have to be on the same page of the same book for the same mission. When we go back down below we are going to have a very long and detailed talk.”
“Fine … yes ma’am.”
“For now, tell me about the rest of your tour of the grounds up here. What do we have to do to secure it?”
“We either have to run all new fences or we can fill the gaps with some HESCO, but we don’t really have the man power to do either.”
“What is HESCO?”
“They’re like giant moving boxes with a wire frame on the outside; fill them full of dirt and they’re nearly a solid wall … think of them like big sandbags that you fill and stack.”
“Do we have any?”
“Yeah, I don’t recall the exact number but we have a significant amount. Quite a lot of them actually.”
“How do we fill them?”
“Usually we would use a front-end loader.”
Quickly becoming more annoyed at Clint, Amanda snapped, “And do we have a front-end loader?”
“We do, we have three of them in the motor pool storage area.”
“How long would it take us to secure our gaps with the HESCO setups?”
“Probably just a couple of days at most, but it would make us a target. Anyone who sees them would know that something is up at the park. Part of the reason for my resistance is that we have to remain i
nvisible, a secret; we can’t have survivors coming here for help or a handout, and we can’t support them.”
“We can’t support them or you don’t want to support them?”
“We can’t because it compromises your safety. Groom Lake is swarming with people now, hundreds of them, and they already had an uncontrolled outbreak in their facility. I promise you it will happen again. We can’t take that chance with you. The other six facilities are dead, full of the dead. As far as Cliff and I have been able to find out, our two facilities are the only two left. He opened his up for business; with you here we have to keep this one closed to the public. Period. After he gets here then we might be able to work on establishing a secure area near here for survivors, but not until then.”
“Wait, Cliff is coming here? What about the group we sent to save him?”
“They’re supposed to be coming back with him. Only Bexar and Chivo survived, but that’ll be two more people we can put to work, but two people who are trained but expendable is better than the unwashed masses descending on our facility and jeopardizing everything!”
“Expendable! What do you mean …” Amanda’s raised voice was silenced by the unmistakable feeding call of the dead, the rasped moans announcing to all that a live meal was to be had.
Emerging out of the woods to the north on their side of the park’s fence were a dozen undead. They crashed through the brush in a stumbling march, determined to feed.
Clint spun towards the threat. Hunched back, rifle up and feet rolling gently with each step, he made way towards the approaching dead, taking them out one by one, each shot muffled by the suppressor. Amanda moved quickly to the right and forward to take a firing position that didn’t have Clint in her line of fire. As mad as she was at him at the moment, she wasn’t going to kill the only man she knew who could run the facility, the only one who, at the moment, could help her achieve what she had decided her real mission was to be.
