Tomorrow's Dawn (Book 4): Gathering Storms

by Wohlrab, Jeff

  It took several more days for Jensen to check over the nine tubs brought up from the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama. Colonel Strenke had expected more, but several of the ones his men had found were in the process of being rebuilt and couldn’t be moved. The men had taken the guns and solar panels from the immobile vehicles in case they were needed for the nine functioning ones.

  While he worked on the tubs, he showed Jessica how to operate the heavy-armored vehicles. He explained where the titanium was thickest, how to target enemies using the screens in the cockpit, and how to monitor remaining energy in the batteries. When she got frustrated with the complex submenus, she spent hours painting the tub she would be driving. Surprising Jensen, she chose purple and green with glitter.

  While they worked on equipment, Daniel had set up shop in the nearby Memorial Chapel. He had been tasked with gathering intelligence and setting up surveillance in the surrounding area. Since the engineers had restored electricity to the entire area, he had a lot more to work with than he had in Highlands, where he’d been stuck using only a noisy generator.

  Men had already taken several of the pews out of the church and replaced them with chairs and tables for Daniel to set up his equipment. Various televisions and monitors formed an almost unbroken circle around him, which would eventually allow Benton to monitor both surveillance cameras set up around the small town as well as some broadcasts from further south.

  With the limited manpower, video surveillance would help to vastly increase their monitoring capability of the surrounding area. Weirdly enough, for a town of only a few thousand people, there was a company which did security installations and had several wireless setups. Security cameras were scavenged from a Lowe’s Home Improvement on the east side of the expressway and more computers and routers were picked up at a Best Buy in Waynesville.

  The electronics selection was extremely good, despite the widespread looting which had taken place over the previous months. It seemed most people were more concerned with daily survival and food than they were about stealing electronics and networking equipment, especially with no power. Some of the larger 8K televisions and gaming consoles had been removed, but for the most part, the store had been untouched.

  Daniel was probably most excited about a pair of high-end noise cancelling headphones that he found in the manager’s office. He checked the shelves, but they weren’t even sold there, so he had to settle for the secondhand headphones instead of picking up a new set. For the first few weeks, anytime somebody saw Daniel, he was headbanging to old rock favorites.

  From the outside it looked ridiculous. He had shaved part of his head and now sported a mohawk instead of the bald or ‘half-fro’ look he’d been rocking in the past. As he moved between the systems, routing power and setting up networks with a fierce expression on his face, he looked like an angry giant getting ready to destroy Tokyo.

  In reality, he was just jamming out to music from bands like Sevendust, Godsmack, Stitched Up Heart, and one of his new favorites from just before the virus, Casket of Serenity. When he really got into it, his voice could be heard booming throughout the chapel. It made him chuckle to think of all the hymns which had been witnessed by the high rafters compared to his growling renditions of Five Finger Death Punch.

  Marcy just had to laugh when he tried to hit the high notes, and Mixi’s voice had even started to grow on her when he pumped the music through surround sound speakers, despite her best efforts to hate it. The lack of activity on the cameras spread throughout the town and his improving relationship with Marcy had him supremely upbeat.

  Even Dave seemed like a new man. He spent his days working on cell towers or training with Colonel Simmons and went back to Analiz each evening, who had slipped into his room on their third night in Lake Junaluska and stayed. The two were rarely seen apart.

  During the evenings, the three couples usually hung out around a campfire enjoying each other’s company and telling stories about their lives before the virus. Dave, Daniel, and Jessica had all known each other well from working at Fort Gordon, but they were still surprised at what they didn’t know about each other.

  Dave had been part of the math team at his high school and earned a National Merit Scholarship, which he had turned down to join the Marines at graduation. He enjoyed some good-natured ribbing about how turning down a full ride to college proved that he was dumb enough to be a Marine.

  Analiz admitted that she’d only known a few words of English when she came to America at the age of eleven and had learned most of what she knew from watching action movies. She’d had a crush on Jason Statham, even though he was almost four decades older than she, and she watched his movies regularly.

  That generated plenty of gossip about other hunks from their childhood, since Analiz and Jessica were about the same age and Marcy was only a few years older. Alexander Skarsgard, Channing Tatum, Ryan Reynolds, and Chris Hemsworth all got more than a few giggles and knowing looks. Eventually, after Jessica had gushed about Jason Momoa, a man who looked nothing like Jensen, he spoke up, “Okay, okay, we get it. Can we talk about something a little less emasculating?”

  Jessica laughed and sat on his lap with the flames flickering behind her in the early evening air. “Aww, you’re my honey. I’m pretty sure they’re all dead, anyway, so you don’t have anything to worry about.” She looked back at the other women and in a stage whisper said, “And they’re all at least fifty years old now—if they’re still alive.”

  Jensen smiled. “Well that’s good to know. That’s even older than Daniel. He’s got to be in his forties at least.”

  “Ass! I’m thirty-seven—we’ve been over this,” was Daniel’s immediate reply.

  “Thirty-seven, the first time, or like, thirty-seven again?” Jensen prodded.

  “Thirty-seven the first time. And if you want to make it to thirty-seven yourself, you should probably lay off.” Daniel flexed his arms and the light and shadows of the fire made him look even more cut.

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re big and tough. I thought all intel weenies were skinny dudes with pasty white skin and big glasses who lived in their moms’ basements. How did you end up with the smart kids?” Jensen inquired.

  “Test scores,” was his answer.

  “Test scores? Like IQ tests?” Jensen asked.

  “Nah, I decided I was going to enlist in the Air Force, didn’t even care what job it was. When I took the ASVAB, I scored in the 99th percentile. My recruiter started drooling all over himself like a Saint Bernard and asked if I’d take another test called the DLAB.” He pronounced it dee-lab. “It’s a screwy test designed to see if someone would be good at learning languages. I scored really high on that one, too, so they made me a linguist. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “So why did you want to join the Air Force?” Marcy asked him. “Did you have family who were in the Air Force or something?”

  “Nothing like that. I was the first one in my family to be in the military as far as I know.” Daniel shrugged his big shoulders. “It was the quickest way out. My neighborhood was starting to get bad. One of my cousins got killed in a drive-by and I didn’t want any part of it, so I went to my recruiter. I could have just as easily been a deep-sea welder if there were deep-sea welding recruiters in town.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear about your cousin, man.” Dave said.

  “I was pretty broken up about it for a while, but now?” He looked around as if assessing the whole world. “Everyone got hit with a drive-by. Everyone lost family members. Everyone is suffering. I’d rather enjoy the time we have left than think too much about what we’ve lost.”

  The mood came down a bit after that and the couples scooched a little closer to each other, as if holding onto something good.

  Jessica was the first to try to lighten the mood. “Look on the bright side. We have each other, we’re hanging out next to a beautiful lake in a mountain resort town, and nobody has tried to nuke us in a couple of weeks. I’d say things are
really looking up.”

  Dave chimed in. “I think it would be perfect if only we had some beer.”

  “Funny you should mention that,” Marcy said. “If everything goes well, we should have beer in a couple more weeks. I managed to get some fermenting yesterday.” She held up her hands. “I don’t know if it will be any good—I don’t really have the right equipment—but it should at least resemble beer.”

  Daniel pulled her close and gave her a big kiss. “That’s incredible! I love you.”

  She whispered back, “I love you, too.”

  Chapter 28

  When Jensen stepped out of the hotel the next morning, he saw a strange sight. The semi-truck with the greenhouse on it was parked at the far end of the parking lot and men were unloading it. The last time he’d seen the greenhouse had been at Franklin High School next to the football field.

  He walked over to get a closer look and recognized Colonel Strenke directing the activity.

  “Hey sir, what do you have going on here? Getting ready to plant a vegetable garden?”

  The older man laughed. “Good morning Jensen. No vegetables. This is going to be our weed garden.”

  Jensen frowned. “Why would you want to grow weeds? I thought the idea was to eliminate weeds.”

  Strenke smiled. “Not weeds, weed. Medicinal and recreational marijuana have been legal for years throughout most of the United States, but the military has been banned from using it.”

  “You’re serious? You brought a greenhouse here from the school to grow marijuana?” Jensen asked in astonishment.

  “Damn right, I did,” was the almost instantaneous reply. “Consider it natural medicine if you’re opposed. We only have so much ibuprofen or acetaminophen before it’s all gone.”

  Jensen considered that for a moment. His initial inclination was to denounce the plan. After years and years of having guys stare at his dick while he was pissing into a bottle for a drug test, it was weird to think of a senior ranking official not only encouraging smoking pot but supplying the infrastructure to do so.

  “I’m not opposed, I guess. I’ve heard it’s a really good treatment for folks with PTSD and the like. It’s just so weird to hear a colonel tell me he’s setting up a pot field in the parking lot of a borrowed hotel.”

  The older man laughed again. “I’m not sure I’m really a colonel anymore, though I suppose I would have retained the rank if I retired, so maybe I’m a colonel. I’m also thinking ahead. We’re going to be fighting and getting injured. I don’t have a lot of faith in essential oils or acupuncture. Marijuana is proven. Hell, if you find some opium poppy fields out there, grab some seeds so we can make codeine or morphine.”

  Jensen was taken aback. “Just what sort of contracting did you do in the Army?”

  “Mostly services contracts. A lot of the day-to-day operations got contracted out to the private sector for half of the results and ten times the cost.” He indicated the steadily growing stack of greenhouse panels which were individually labeled to show their location on the building. “If we can get something growing in there to make laudanum or something similar, we can use it to treat pain.

  “It wasn’t my idea though. A young woman named Brinkley Adamson came up with it when she saw the greenhouse back at the school. She was a combat medic and apparently spoke to doctors overseas who were more familiar with the products.”

  “So you’ve got a doctor who wants to grow marijuana and opium poppies to treat the wounded?” Jensen shook his head, “I feel like I just stepped into crazytown.”

  “Nah, crazy is someone putting a deadly virus into supposedly beneficial vaccines. Crazy are world leaders deciding to nuke other countries for no reason at all. This is just realization of our true position and the imminent lack of medicine,” the colonel answered.

  “I wish we still had Emmy,” was Jensen’s reply. “She was a botanist, I think. I know she ran a flower shop.”

  “What happened to her?” Strenke asked.

  “She got sick when Aaron came to visit. Actually, we had four people get sick from the virus. Only Daniel survived,” he answered. “If we hadn’t gotten the antivirals and ventilators from the college, he probably wouldn’t have pulled through either.”

  Strenke gave him a strange look. “You’re telling me the reason Snead’s men were able to find you and try to kill you is because you were trying to save Daniel?”

  “Yeah, I’ve thought about that. If we hadn’t picked up those computers, we wouldn’t know how the virus started and Snead’s men would never have found us. We wouldn’t know Snead was behind it and he wouldn’t be trying to kill us,” Jensen responded.

  “If you had it to do all over again, would you?” the colonel asked.

  “I’d do it a hundred times. We don’t know if getting those supplies even saved Daniel; he might have pulled through on his own.” Jensen looked off into the distance and carefully weighed his words. “But that mission was how we found out about the source of the virus, and Snead’s attack was the only reason we found out who was behind it. As much as it sucks to lose so many good people and everything we had, I’d do it again. Yes.”

  Jensen thought about the timeline, which seemed so long ago but was just late spring. Aaron, a retired Special Forces operative, had visited their cabin on the mountain to check on his friends from Dahlonega. Unbeknownst to him, he was carrying the supervirus, and four members of the team at the cabin had fallen ill.

  Jessica had gone with Jensen to find antivirals and respirators at North Georgia Technical College, which they thought was a CDC treatment area. Instead, it had been a testing facility for the virus before it was introduced into vaccinations in the fall of 2031. The computers they had recovered led Snead’s teams to the mountaintop, and the survivors of the strike group had confessed they were working for the Senator.

  Everything since then was a blur as they went on the run. Snead nuked the college and the mountaintop to destroy any evidence, and Jensen had almost joined the list of dead when he was trapped inside a dead armored vehicle by a fallen tree. They had been attacked again in Highlands only a few days later, saved then by Colonel Simmons’ men.

  It was enough to make Jensen laugh out loud, a bit maniacally.

  His sharp bark caught Strenke by surprise. “Whoa buddy, what’s so funny? Is it nervous breakdown time?”

  Jensen pointed toward the semi and the greenhouse. “Most of us are dead, not just from our survivor group, but most of the people on the entire planet. We’ve been attacked, nuked, and chased through the mountains. The growing drugs thing just made me realize how far gone everything really is.

  “Look at us,” he continued. “We’re taking over hotels in a picturesque mountain town which may never see another tourist. We’re calmly discussing growing drugs like Afghani warlords. There’s artillery in the mountains around us pointed at the roads in case Snead’s men come for us again. Ane, we have to figure out how to get enough food to get through the winter. It’s like the 1400s again, but with electricity and modern firearms.”

  “No Jensen, this is different,” Strenke said. “In the 1400s, none of this had been accomplished. The main goal was to survive. Ours is not. We’re going to survive. Our goal is to make the world okay again.”

  “How do we do that?” Jensen asked.

  “It’s simple. We kill Snead,” Strenke told him. “It’s not our role to restart farming. Farmers will do that. We don’t have to get universities going, professors will do that. We don’t have to restart industry. We don’t have to do anything except remove the obstacles preventing Americans from doing what they do best. Right now, Snead is the obstacle, so we kill him.”

  The lines on the colonel’s face gathered up around his eyes as he grinned. “You’re still young enough to do something else with your life. For me, this IS my life. Declare an objective, carry out objective. Rinse and repeat. And my objective now is to eliminate an obstacle to freedom so the American people can begin to recover from t
his terrorist attack.”

  Jensen looked down at the ground and shoved his hands into his pockets. It couldn’t be that simple. There was too much to be done. The colonel’s commentary on playing his role made sense, though. He had a degree in chemistry, which he barely remembered, and he knew war, which he couldn’t stop remembering.

  So what was his role? Maybe it really was that simple. He hadn’t been around to start the steam age or invent the polio vaccine, and those things had happened. Jensen knew how the chemical reactions worked to allow the solar panels to power his tub, but he hadn’t invented them. America was amazing because of the capabilities of individuals who specialized in their thing, not because Jensen could do everything.

  But he could do HIS thing.

  “When do we start?” Jensen wanted to know. His determination was evident.

  The lines around the older man’s eyes scrunched up even more as he broke into a wide grin. “Oh, we’ve already started, I just need to know how many of those tubs are operational.”

  “Only six of the nine are fully operational, even after we swapped out extra parts to try to get them working. Two of them have nonfunctioning grenade launchers and I can’t figure out why. It’s nothing obvious, so it could be a fried chip or circuit somewhere, which I can’t fix. The commander’s solar panel on the last rig won’t charge,” Jensen recited.

  “All of them are at least partially mission capable, but with some restrictions,” said the man who knew the most about the titanium-armored scout vehicles. “The targeting systems booted up and passed the system tests, but we won’t know for sure how well they’re working until we get into live fire.”

  Strenke received the news calmly. “Better than I expected, actually. Six fully functional tubs are six more than we had before, and as long as the guns still work, they’re a legitimate threat. Walk with me.”

  The colonel turned and started walking back toward the entrance of the parking lot. Jensen hesitated for only a second to process the sudden change and quickly followed. He noticed fresh white paint on the walls and columns of the hotel where the graffiti had been. It didn’t match what was already there, but it was certainly an improvement.