by Lund, Dave
Some of the survivors wanted to stay below ground, but Jessie wanted everyone out. That would prevent a Zed that had been missed in the sweep to start up another outbreak. The only persons allowed to stay below ground were Bill and his handful of radio operators. Bill looked like hell, ragged and worn, but he was optimistic.
“The radio chatter is incredible. Numerous survivors asking if we needed more help, offering to make the journey across the country to assist. This facility is a beacon of hope to many.” Bill sat on the dusty concrete floor, noisily eating an MRE. “And the president wants us to shut it down?”
“That’s not the feeling I got. I think it’s more of a ‘we should consolidate facilities because this one has been compromised.’”
“Compromised? Hell, the Texas facility hasn’t even been tested yet. We’re survivors here, like a god-dammed Fort Apache, and we won’t be beat.”
Milan, NM
Amanda relaxed on the worn couch in the hangar before jumping to her feet at the sound of knocking at the side door. Andrew stood aside the door as a voice called out, “Andrew?”
Andrew smiled and answered. It was Jay whom he had met before. Once the door was opened, introductions were made and Jay was excited to meet the president. “We moved the radio into the FBO; did you get to Groom Lake? Did you know they were attacked?”
Amanda answered slightly, “He did, we both did, and were there for the attack.”
“Amazing. Then you know they’re safe now. People from all around the country were saddling up to be the cavalry, to go help. We spent most of today getting an old school bus running and were going to head out tomorrow but Bill gave the all clear.”
Amanda was shocked, surprised, and excited. “What people? Where are they and how many are there?”
Jay motioned outside. “Come to the FBO. We have a map up that we’ve been using to keep track of things. People have taken to giving themselves call signs; we’ve made a list of them to go with the map too.”
Amanda stepped outside. The sky glowed dark red with the setting sun, the mountains looked beautiful, and she hadn’t been this excited about their chances of actually surviving as a country since she had been sworn in as president. After the short walk, they stepped into the FBO, the main office of the small airstrip. The candle-lit interior buzzed and crackled with the radio. She could smell the ionization of the air from the electrical sparking of the radio’s reception. Occasionally, someone transmitted a message quickly, a person who had obviously been an amateur radio operator or an old military man with experience in Morse code. The rest of the time the transmissions were painfully slow with a lot of shorthand being used to shorten the length and complexity of the messages.
Jay pointed out the map and Amanda was amazed to see all the push pins that spanned the country; there were even some pins in Canada and Mexico.
“Have you heard from anyone outside of North America?”
“Not yet, but if they don’t have a radio like this, I’m not sure how they would know to talk to us.”
“There are even some regional communities setup that have some trade days and mutual assistance programs worked out.”
This was all more than Amanda could have imagined. Clint had kept her in the dark for so long that she had no idea that so many people were doing more than just barely surviving.
“What are the details being talked about the attack on Groom Lake?”
“Not much except that Chinese forces had attacked, there was an outbreak, and now some Marines had taken back the facility. Like I said, some folks were discussing getting to Groom Lake to help, others were questioning the reasoning behind being locked into an underground building with no escape. The rest are trying to organize some sort of resistance for the invading Chinese forces.”
“Really? Any other military units besides the Marines at Groom Lake so far? What are they saying that they are doing to prepare?”
“A bunch of vets have put out a call-to-arms, some are trying to rally people in their region to band together as a single community, a couple of guys who I guess are Vietnam Vets started naming their compounds Fire Bases.”
“That’s absolutely incredible; would you be able to transmit an official message for me?”
Jay glanced at Andrew and back at Amanda with a smile. “I would be honored.”
CHAPTER 5
April 9, Year 1
Pahrump, NV
Jason blinked, blurry-eyed. He peered into the darkness and tried to remember where he was. Erin lay on the floor with him, curled up against him with her head on his arm, still asleep. His head hurt and it took a moment to remember the previous night. The two of them sat up sharing a mixture of a bottle of tequila and each other’s deepest secrets, fears, and thoughts. The emotional intimacy was wonderful, the growing hangover not so much. Jason gently slid his arm free and stood slowly. The room felt uneasy but he was able to steady himself against a table. The abandoned strip club was dark and Jason had no idea what time of day it was, if the sun was up, or if it was even morning yet. That’s the thing with strip clubs: very few seemed to have any windows. After stumbling to the restroom, Jason turned away in disgust, not sure why he had tried to go to the actual non-working restroom in the first place. This was their first night away from Groom Lake in a long time; he had become used to life’s simple pleasures like running water and working toilets.
Peeing in a trashcan behind the bar seemed like the reasonable solution, not wanting to try opening the door to the outside for fear of sparking off a situation with the undead. He and Erin would need to do that together, ready to run for it, fight or hide as the situation may dictate.
Erin stirred in the shadows and whispered, “Jason?”
“Over here.”
“Shit, I drank too much last night.” Erin stood uneasily, wiping her hands on her pants. Trying to recall memories lost to a night in the bottle, Erin stuck her hand in her back pocket and found the condoms she took from the gas station. Slowly, her mind began piecing together the previous night.
“Did I say too much last night?”
Jason shook his head, which made his headache worse. “No, it was a special night together. We…I love you.”
Crockett, Texas
Ken put the pencil down and read the transcribed radio message again. Candle-light flickered shadows into the darkness of the room, his shelter more like an overgrown shed than a house. Long before the tiny house movement gripped aimless hipsters, Ken and his friends called such homes what they were to them: hunting cabins. Against the far wall were bunk beds but he was the only one of his group that had arrived at the lodge near Crockett, Texas.
Four weeks after everything went to hell, he arrived in camp and was surprised to find it empty. The following weeks were spent in anticipation of his lifelong friends and hunting buddies arrival, but they never came. He no longer held out any hope for their safe arrival, assuming that they had succumbed to the dead like much of the country had.
This winter was a tough one, unsure if the weather was due to El Nino or La Nina and he frankly didn’t care; what he knew was that it was cold, damn cold, and now that spring in central Texas had arrived, it was now soaking wet and getting hot. Central Texas had four seasons, like much of the world, except that the seasons consisted of winter, wet summer, drought, wet summer, and then back to winter again. There seemed to be two or three days a year of great weather. Today hadn’t been one of them.
Most days were spent laboring to make or fix what he needed, hunting or trying to preserve the game he caught or killed, but Ken often ran out of daylight. Luckily, the days were getting longer. He still had time to have completely reread the heavily worn copy of Lonesome Dove that lived in the cabin and another thick book on the Lewis and Clark expedition. Lonesome Dove was a longtime favorite of his, although it had been a few years since he had read it last. The book on Lew
is and Clark was one he hadn’t read before and he hadn’t realized how important the Native Americans had been to not just the success of the expedition but to keeping the explorers and their crew alive over the winter. The only natives that Ken had found so far in Central Texas were reanimated dead. The Zeds weren’t exactly like the helpful tribes that Merriweather Lewis had encountered in Northwest.
Alone, his friends’ prepper caches had remained untouched, surviving out of what he had stored in their hunting camp and what he trapped, caught, or killed. A conscientious hunter, Ken wasn’t one to waste much of the game he took, but the past few months he had conserved like never before. Antlers were kept not as trophies but for their usefulness as material for buttons, knife handles, and many other things, including trading if he ever had the chance and if there were any persons left alive to trade with.
The hand-cranked shortwave radio was a boon to his optimism, a voice; a real human voice appeared weeks ago, claiming to be in Area 51. He didn’t really believe the transmission at first, but the following instructions on constructing a primitive radio gave Ken a new outlook for the world and his country. Slowly at first, people began transmitting messages back and forth, as the days wore on more and more people clogged the airwaves. It seemed that people were passing the instructions along to others who hadn’t placed a survival radio in an ammo can for protection. Now Ken wished he could go back in time and put all sorts of electronics in metal protective containers and bury them. The camp generator didn’t work and his attempts to repair it had failed—the walkie-talkies didn’t work; nothing electronic worked except for the survival radio. At least he had that.
One of the camp’s ATVs was sacrificed to construct the primitive radio he now stared at after reading the decoded message, again. Ken’s mind spun with the possibilities. He wasn’t sure what the outcome would be but he knew that the beat-up old diesel hunting camp truck that his buddy had purchased at a military surplus auction would be his exit. First, though, he had to dig up the other cached supplies and make a plan and he wouldn’t do that until daylight. The dead seemed to be migrating and too many had spilled off the highway and too near the camp for Ken to feel confident moving during the dead of night.
CHAPTER 6
April 10, Year 1
Pahrump, NV
Heavy diesel trucks rumbled by outside, the low faint noise permeating the cinderblock walls as they passed. Erin and Jason were awake, hungover, but wide awake with rifles in hand. Erin slowly pushed the metal front door open just far enough for a faint sliver of the morning sunlight to pierce the darkness inside. Keeping her face back from the narrow opening and trying to stay in the shadow of the interior, she watched a narrow field of view of the intersection outside. The low rumbling of the trucks could be heard and it sounded like they were moving, but she couldn’t see what or who was responsible for it all.
Suddenly, an armored truck rolled past noisily, the big tires kicking more dust into the already dirt-filled air.
“The fucking Chinese,” Erin whispered over her shoulder to Jason, who stood at the ready. “What about our truck? Should we do something?”
“What can we do? It is hidden around back and looks like utter hell. Maybe they won’t notice or if they do, they’ll think it is long abandoned like every damn other thing in this world.”
Erin knew Jason had a point. Even if they went out the back door and drove off, they would be up against APCs in their beat-up old Suburban. They wouldn’t stand a chance. No, their best bet was to hide and hope their ride, as well as the meager supplies they had left in it, were still there once the enemy forces had passed by.
Transfixed, they watched and waited. Just in the time that they were watching, four APCs rolled by, commanders sitting high in an open hatch on the roof of each. It all looked like archival war film footage, quite surreal to them both. Besides the attack on Groom Lake that killed her mother and then the angst-riddled lashing out at the cargo aircraft unloading the same kind of APCs, neither Erin nor Jason had any experience fighting a real battle. Jason had fought the cult, but as heavily armed and motivated as those crazy people were, they weren’t trained war-fighters like they assumed the PLA to be.It felt like hours and hours but in reality, it was probably closer to about 15 minutes for the convoy to roll by. After the sound of the last truck rumbled in the distance, Erin let the door shut and put a broomstick through the door handles if for no other reason than to feel slightly safer.
“Should we go or wait?”
Jason frowned in the darkness. “We should wait. We know they didn’t stop here, there wasn’t anything that caught their attention, but if we go, then we might run into them.”
“What if it is the same group from yesterday? What if they come back through and recognize the Suburban? They’ll level this fucking building with us in it, I think we should—”
Erin was cut off by the heavy sound of the walls being hit. The dead’s haunting moans resonated in the walls. The sound of the dead hitting the wall sounded like thick bugs hitting a windshield, except that the frequency grew until the din of following dead was a constant roar. The heavy cinderblock walls shook with the onslaught. The bottles behind the bar shook, bar glasses rattled, it sounded like the whole damn place was going to fall in. It felt like an earthquake.
Jason and Erin would have had to yell at each other to be heard over the noise, but they were too scared to do more than sit holding each other in the middle of the main room, away from the walls, away from the metal doors of the front entrance, hiding and hoping that the Zeds would pass them by. The PLA force induced fear just from what they experienced during the attack on Groom Lake, but the fear of the dead came from deep in their bones. After months of dodging the dead, months of losing friends and loved ones, being surrounded by a massive swarm of Zeds was worst sort of nightmare fuel. Tears streaked down Erin’s cheeks in the darkness. She knew her mother would never be doomed to be a mindless drone following a swarm. Erin had made sure of that herself.
Jason and Erin held each other in silence, waiting and hoping the Zeds would pass quickly.
New Ulm, Montana
“We need to go topside and do a fence check,” Dorsey called over his shoulder, looking at the calendar hanging on the wall. Steve had made many pencil notations at intervals for each of the tasks that he had determined to be important. The CCTV security system allowed anyone below ground to see the barbed wire-topped fence surrounding the missile launch facility, but after he had to repair a fence that was rattled loose by a passing band of the dead, Steven made it a point to conduct weekly fence walks to physically inspect his first line of defense.
Clint looked up from the binder holding the launch system modification plans. “Mr. Dorsey, isn’t that something you can complete on your own?”
“Colonel Smith, I could, but it would be safer to do with the both of us and we would complete the task in half the time…then we could get back to work down here. It would speed up your mission objectives for the day.”
Dorsey watched Colonel Smith. He didn’t need help checking the fences, but the task needed to be done and he did not trust Smith alone below ground; he could be locked out for good. Besides not trusting the colonel on a personal level, he didn’t trust that the stated mission was real. Dorsey had one way to try to verify that the colonel was working under presidential order, but he didn’t know how he would get a chance to use the radio or even if the guys in Groom Lake could get a response back to him in time to matter. The longer Smith was with him, the more he regretted letting the colonel into the facility, but now he was either stuck with him or would have to get him out somehow.
Slowly, a plan for each began to form, but Steve wasn’t exactly sure which one would have to happen. He had to get a message out, but first they needed to check the perimeter fence.
Groom Lake, NV
Bexar stood just outside the tent, the air swirlin
g with dirt, but he was on the downwind side of the tent trying to take a leak. The morning was crisp, not too cold, with the sun climbing out from behind the mountains. He knew the day would quickly warm up. They were quickly hurtling toward summer and its oppressive heat, but only if they could live that long.
He heard the rustling of the tent flap and Jessie appeared beside him. Bexar smiled at the growing baby bump, which had progressed past a bump. If it wasn’t for the rifle and spare magazines, he could almost imagine they were camping in the high desert for a fun weekend. A fun weekend this life was not, and Bexar wasn’t sure if he would get to experience a fun or even a lazy weekend ever again. As much as he hated yard work, he had a longing to work in his yard back in Texas, drink a beer, and spend a weekend chipping away at his honey-do list. Bexar shook his head; his honey-do list was simplified: keep Jessie and their unborn child safe. Yes, simple in list, but exceptionally difficult in execution.
“What are you scowling about, baby?”
Bexar realized he had been staring at Jessie. “Oh nothing, sorry. I’m trying to come up with a plan for us, for our baby.”
“A plan like what?”
“I don’t know, I’m not sure, I’m just, well, I don’t know if this is the right place for us to stay.”
“What would be better?”
“I’m thinking we should go to Utah and back to where I was. Guillermo’s group. This is the second time you’ve had to unfuck this place and who do we have left here?”
Jessie thought about Sarah, but she always thought about Sarah. In their short time together, Jessie had felt closer to Sarah than she had ever felt with another woman. Sarah had felt like a sister, even closer than a real sister, and her death left a hole in Jessie’s heart that wouldn’t soon heal. The thought of Erin out on her own, without her mother even if she was with Jason, they were so young and the world was such a ruined place. Tears streamed down Jessie’s face.
