The Warriors' Ends- Soldiers of the Apocalypse

by Keith T Jenkins

  “Boot’s shooter shot!” he says to Culver.

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “Someone busted it . . . up there. Falling down . . . go boom! I dropt it next door.” He looks at Culver, saying, “Special Delivery – sorry Babe!” He smiles at her, saying, “It is Babe; isn’t it?” His eyebrows rise and fall.

  “Shit!” says Mike.

  “That way!” says Boot, pointing again down the hall.

  Just then, there is an ear paining BOOM from outside. Griffin comes running in, shouting, “They took out the generators, sir.”

  “What do you mean, soldier?” asks Lundt.

  “Well, a rocket came up the western ravine and blew the windmill to shit, sir.”

  “Get upstairs, Mark! Start those buses. Without the generators, this room will run out of power in less than an hour. We can’t power those particle field generators unless the coaches are running.”

  Schwarz turns quickly, followed by Griffin, spreading the news to start up the buses. In less than a minute, all of the buses are running. There are also three wagons with a couple of fuel barrels going from bus to bus, topping of the tanks, and getting new barrels. They should have enough power for a while, even able to drive these coaches for a few days, if need be.

  Seeing soldiers running over the presumed dead soldiers, Mark barks out the order to, “Charge the curtain!” But Boot is ahead of him on this. As soon as Boot sees that the buses are all running, he orders the buses to ignite their particle wave barriers at twenty percent. This raises the curtain to fifteen feet, which is above the buses.

  Mike knows that the room is almost useless now, so she orders everyone to drop all the satellites they can into the enemy at any front, “Clean out the skies, boys and girls.” Then, when that is all but done, she gives the order to prepare for evac, waiting to be told the condition outside.

  Mark sees that the enemy could access the coaches from above, runs to the opening of the big room, shouting, “More power! Close the loop! The buses are exposed from above.” So Boot cranks it up to sixty percent, creating a dome effect over the buses. As the particle curtain raises it is attracted to itself, or more correctly, it is attracted to the opposite side of itself, creating a sort of coned dome. Boot is managing it from the bunker, but the power source is in the buses. Once the dome is secure, once the flow is steady, the power level can be brought down to about forty percent, maintaining the dome about twenty feet above the motorcoaches. The dome is closed just in time, because as the curtain rises, there are grenades launched, all of which are deconstructed on a molecular level, before they can pass into the circle. Some are detonated above the shield, in hopes of blasting shrapnel into the encampment, but without joy for the senders.

  The troops advance on the dome, not taking any fire. There is not current active resistance on the hill, so they scramble closer. They attempt to shoot at the buses, but their bullets fall as dust to the ground. The more they fire, the less they take any heat, the faster they advance on Zarephath, and the closer they get. Soon, there are a couple of hundred soldiers, close enough to see the faces of their enemies, shoot at the buses in plain view, but still having no power in their results. Worse than they could have imagined, Boot sends a power pulse to the daisy chained particle generators, causing a feedback of wave intensity, creating a blast to the outside of the curtain.

  In a quarter of a second, the blast reaches out across the top of the hill and down the first valley, with a particle wave hugging the ground between two and five feet from the dirt, decimating anything in that three foot tall kill zone, reducing it to random flying atoms. Guns, guys, and garb, with all their tools and toys, are missing that three-foot section, across the crowd for about two hundred fifty feet. Laying on the ground, suddenly, are the feet, shoulders, and heads of the warriors in range of that terrifying weapon. There is a discernable range to the weapon, having a hard line where it ends, with zero damage immediately beyond.

  Some of the attacking soldiers remain, though some are injured, just by holding on to decimated weapons, some have lost their hands or fingers, being at the very end of the range of the particle burst. At that moment, all are leaving the area as quickly as possible, fleeing the next volley. One of the sergeants of the 101st says he has seen this kind of equipment before, that he trained on how to use it back at Campbell.

  “If we can destroy the curtain generators – those things that look like basement lights – we can get access, and bullets can get in.” So that is their plan. Some of the guys have grenade launchers on their M4’s, which they load up and launch. Their aim is not as good as had been hoped; getting expert medals is easier on a closed range than on a terror-filled battlefield.

  Mark sees what they are attempting, realizing that eventually they will get it right, he calls out to the rest of the professionals, “Shooters to the ready. They will be coming at us in a short-short.” Shouting into his comms, Mark informs the bunker, “There is a flaw in the design of these shield generators.”

  “What’s wrong with them,” replies Culver.

  “Part of each emitter is outside the shield,” Mark tells her. “Eventually, someone is going to hit one and we will lose cover.”

  All the professional soldiers but Lundt come from below, the new arrivals are picking out their favorite weapons from those laid out beside the coaches, standing with their backs to the coaches, waiting and praying, preparing for the curtains to come down, and steeling themselves for the fight to get very personal. Another blast of the curtains brings another wave of destruction, reaching just a little farther than before, farther by twenty feet or so, touching a few more men, reducing their forces. But those remaining launch another volley of grenades, many of which hit the ground prematurely, some hit the curtain’s surface, vaporizing upon impact, some detonate before the curtain, burning up the shrapnel before entry, and a couple of them land in close enough proximity to damage the generators by a couple of the buses. The east side is exposed at two buses, and the curtains around the others drop to about twenty feet. There is a gap!

  “Evac now!” shouts Mark, and people begin flowing out of the Command Center, into the other coaches. “Mike! Get everyone into a coach of any kind, we got this!” he says, meaning that his people will tend to the oncoming warriors. There are a couple dozen or so ex-US forces with MP5’s and Sig Sauer P226’s at the ready. As soon as the curtains go down on the two coaches, the men come out from behind the buses, drop to the ground, firing into the aggressing crowd. Some of the men and women get into the buses, standing by the doorways, shooting anyone they can.

  Boot has accessed a folder he built with a billion bytes of data, in an extensive script worm, designed to work in all known environments. He drags it to his desktop, waiting confirmation that the bug out is happening. He looks around, hearing Mike bark orders, and executes the worm. There are over seven hundred nuclear silos and subs around the world, and one at a time, every ten to thirty seconds, the worm hacks into one, gives the appropriate codes, launching a missile at the nearest military installation or metropolis. Some of them land on the location of their launch, so that a sub launching six of them would have the last one hit the sub.

  NORAD doesn’t exist in an hour, and neither do any of the major points of defense for any of the First World nations. Civilization is disappearing, except in Israel. Their world is being destroyed the old fashioned way. But, between the revival and the attacks from the north, the conversion is almost complete, and will be by midnight.

  Rita has managed to get a blanket, talked Lundt into laying on it, and she has half a dozen young men carry that blanket out of the bunker. They take him into Rita’s coach because it is the closest one to them with a large access door. “Take him to the bedroom,” she says.

  “Close the doors!” shouts Mark into a microphone to everyone in general, then “Open your left side emergency windows! Active shooters, run to those windows.”

  Realizing what is to be done, the
doors of the coaches all close and begin taking heavy fire though the holes in the curtain. The outside shooters begin running to the safe side of the coach – though safe is an exaggeration. Griffin takes a round in the shoulder, turning to run for cover, and Grubic gets one in his foot as he is trying to get into one of the windows, from a bullet coming under the coach. Mark feels a round tear across his arm, and getting Lundt into the coach, Rita discovers that a bullet had apparently shattered on the hinge of the door she was entering, and has punctured her derriere. It is a dozen or so small holes, creating a speckled circle blood pattern on her white jeans, like a bright red flower.

  “Damn!” she says. “I should not have been wearing white today.”

  Cheryl is already in the driver’s seat, with Reggie on the RIO.

  “Go north for twenty miles,” says Rita.

  Mark looks at her as if she’s, maybe tetched!

  “Trust me!” she says in reply to his glance.

  “Twenty miles!” shouts Mark to Cheryl.

  As Mark and Rita’s coach pulls forward, the others follow close behind, breaking off the particle weapons as they go. Some of them drag along for a few hundred feet, but the cables snag under the rear duals, and the connectors are soon torn free. The mini-guns on the roof’s edges are swirling about, pointing at the enemy, spitting bullets, knocking down their aggressors, by tens and twenties at a time. As they clear the first ridge, all weapons go lateral, pointing directly to the rear of the motorhomes, rising to level, sliding into the bodies, and the covers glide into place. After about two miles, they see that there is no one following them, so they stow their personal guns, driving on, like a high-speed wagon train to wherever they go, steadily forward in Evasion Mode.

  Twenty miles tick off quickly, and Cheryl brings the lead coach to a stop in a park side parking lot. The others follow her in, stopping in a three lane wide formation, four coaches deep. Rita exits the coach first, without a word, heading over to the empty playground, where she climbs to the top of the slide. She shouts, waving the whole group over, and they follow as a murmuring rabble, until Boot whistles so loudly that a taxi should be stopping soon.

  “Skills,” he says to Culver, bobbing his eyebrows up and down.

  Conclusion

  He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.[35]

  “Today is E-Day, people.” Rita seems certain about this.

  The crowd begins a little grumbling and murmuring, asking how she knows. What makes her think she knows something? She cannot tell them that.

  “I believe that the war is about over, that a new age is about to begin, and I even believe that all those missing people are about to come back. I believe it will be soon, about nine o’clock in the morning here . . . but the world is going to change.”

  “Why nine o’clock?” asks Kacy.

  “Why should we believe you?” comes a voice from the rear.

  “All you gotta do is wait for a few hours to pass, and shortly after that, you will know if I am full of crap, or if I am right.”

  “But why nine o’clock?” comes the question from Kacy again. Everyone is thinking it.

  “Because that is about the time for sundown in Israel, marking a new day.” She looks carefully around the crowd. “We have nearly eighty people here, who have been fighting, in one form or another, for several hours. I suggest we eat and talk about it.”

  There is a little more grumbling by some of the crowd, to which Boot replies with a whistle, saying, “I can wait a little while. What’s wrong with you?” He sticks out his lower lip, pointing at many nay-sayers in the crowd. “I know who I am! Do you?” he asks. He looks at his watch, snaps his fingers, and over his shoulder, at the ends of the horizon, a mushroom cloud appears. He looks at Rita, saying, “We got their attention.”

  Mike and Mark concur, getting votes from Lundt, as a leader, and some consensus among the rest. They have foodstuffs for about fifty people, enough to last well into spring, so they break out the MRE’s, sharing to everyone.

  Boot comes to sit by Culver, asking, “Ready to go home?”

  “What do you mean?” she asks, in return.

  “When the world changes, we go home!”

  “What do you mean, home?”

  “You know, that place we belong forever.”

  “Will that be tonight?”

  “Tonight, no . . . tomorrow . . . morning . . . soon enough,” says Boot.

  “How does this work?” Culver asks him.

  “I dunno!” says Boot. “I just know that in a moment we will be gone, and in another moment, we will be back.”

  “Huh!” she puffs, not quite as a question, and yet not a sigh either. “Maybe, you should tell me how we get there.”

  “Look at the sunset,” he says. “Almost pretty as you.”

  “You really think I’m pretty?”

  “You are everyone I never knew I really wanted to see each day. You wanna know how to get home?”

  She nods her head and smiles at him, so he tells her.

  Rita says to Mark, “You know, Babe, this is where the rubber meets the road; don’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tomorrow is the end of the world as we know it now, and the beginning of something similar, but completely different.” She looks at his face, holding both of his hands. “There are about to be no nations, no presidents, no Ayatollah’s and no . . . well, no anything that stands in our way all the time.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We are hours away from a genuine, benevolent monarchy, like nothing you have ever seen or even imagined, and I want to make certain you will be there.”

  “I’ll be there, Babe. Right by your side,” he says, with all confidence.

  The sun goes down and it comes up again, rising high over the farthest mountains. Breakfast has been had and people with timepieces are eagerly watching their wrists.

  “It’s nine o’clock,” says Mark, wondering why nothing has happened.

  “What time is sundown in Yerushalayim today?” asks Rita.

  “Dunno!”

  “Well, there ya go.”

  What they don’t know is that, at fifteen after nine, their time, there came from billions of graves, a stream of light and matter, rising into the sky, soaring toward Yerushalayim, where they are reassembled above the city in a spiraling flow, upward, into space. After the cemeteries are clean, those who had been buried in the past three and a half years are also gone, in the disappearance of the dead, believers first. Those who were dead believers during the earlier disappearances went during those previous disappearances.

  The dying dead of the chosen people disappear. Across the Valley of Megiddo, across the surrounds of Zarephath, and across the world, they convert to ash, flutter apart into dust, swept up by the wind, as if by some super-global vacuum. In the next moment, about forty-five of their sixty suddenly disappear by sparkling light, also streaming eastward.

  Then the non-believer dying dead, are separated at a molecular level, sweeping the battlefields, and the trails of dying dead around the world. Next, at twenty after nine, local time, left standing alone are Lundt, Grubic, Mark, and Teague, among the few. They stand in wonder, not knowing the meaning of it all. Grubic’s children are gone, as is his wife, and one of Griffin’s wives is still there, crying for her loss of her other two. Lundt stands alone, looking about in shocked amazement. A couple of the nerds from Zarephath are still there, very uncertain what has just happened, but Mike, Culver, and Boot were definitely gone. For several minutes, many looked for the missing, but to a non-result.

  In a moment, there appears a charge of hundreds of people in all manner of vehicles, storming up the road from two directions. It is an attempt to destroy the only opposition they can find. There are soldiers, bikers, and even some of the people from towns like Sabine, all wanting to be the winners of some horrible calamity. No one wishes to be t
he loser of anything, much less of everything. They seek retribution from the only remaining people who have given them trouble, who seem to be free, or who have something – anything to steal.

  The final removal is for those who decidedly hate the Truth, and they are swept away in a hurry. That group even includes a couple of the people in this traveling caravan of hope. The oncoming horde of vengeance-seekers and thieves becomes an empty circus of freewheeling, screaming, disconnection of crashing cars, trucks, and tractor trailers. There are only an old Subaru and an ancient Suburban, and a half dozen derelict others, still driving toward the crowd. The other vehicles have cruised off course, coasted to a stop, or run into something, even their co-combatants’ vehicles. It is a conflagration of confusion and catastrophe.

  The remaining vehicles slow their roll, stabilize their courses, coming to a stop, shocked, terrified, totally bewildered as to what just happened, and why all those other vehicles coasted to a stop or crashed. Stopped now, hands gripping the wheels as if hanging on for dear life, they slowly ease up, glance around, open the doors, and they each only get two words out, usually in the same order, “What the?”

  They don’t know why all those people disappeared, why those drivers and their angry mob are gone, even if they were sitting next to them, or even holding on to them when it happened. They don’t know why they were chasing after the others, and they don’t even know why they all stopped, except to say that they didn’t know why to continue. Dumbfounded, they sit and stand, walk and even lay down, crying.

  The whole atmosphere flashes for a moment, a bright light from across the sky to the ground, in a steady stream that takes almost no time, but there is no aftereffect of blindness to anyone there. In fact, the opposite is true. Those with glasses suddenly do not need them. Those who walked with a stoop, or had to be carried, like Lundt, suddenly find themselves without injuries, disorders, illness, or disability of any kind, even age. All have twenty-twenty vision, excellent hearing, a spring in their step, and the body of a thirty year old, in near perfect or maybe perfect condition. Some of them had been afflicted by health issues, even when younger, but now . . .