River of Night

by John Ringo

  “Sorry,” she said, looking over her passenger without any shame. “You smell worse than I thought—and it’s even more like ass with the windows up. It’s probably been a while since you had a shower, right?”

  “You could say that,” Jason replied. “Since, well, since before I got to Richmond.”

  Richmond was two weeks’ worth of careful hiking to the east. His last real shower had been the morning that he walked out of the apartment that belonged to his infected patrol partner. He’d never looked back.

  Not till now.

  Jason had spent much of the morning shadowing the newcomers from a distance. Seeing the strangers cooperating, sharing what was clearly an improvised uniform and most of all, killing his arch enemy, the infected, had stirred intense feelings in Jason. He’d watched as the three scouted and dispatched several more infected. The internal argument about joining up with anyone again had been fierce.

  In the end, simple human loneliness had won out, and he’d very carefully called out to them while they ate lunch in their car.

  The entire “getting-to-know-you” dance had been akin to two porcupines sizing each other up before mating. Slow and gingerly steps had led to a surprisingly civilized conversation, led by the woman. She’d introduced herself as one Miss Eva O’Shannesy. Once he’d cleared and safed his Remington 700, she even let him hold onto it, earning a couple of surprised looks from the other two.

  Jason had been on his own for so long that the presence of three other people, armed and apparently organized, was making every cop-sense he possessed go off incessantly. Despite the softness of the ride and the emotional comfort of still being armed, he was sitting on the edge of his seat.

  Metaphorically speaking.

  He patted the pliable upholstery again.

  Still, every time he looked up his personal alarms sounded, because even the has-been ex-cop could see that this trio wasn’t quite the land-based version of the Cajun Navy that he’d first assumed.

  “Uh-huh,” Miss Eva replied. “Well, like I said, we’re always looking for talent, the Gleaners I mean. We have a pretty strong team already, but our boss, the governor, doesn’t hold nothing against anyone. He knows that just surviving this far means that a body is pretty competent. And he likes cops, soldiers, doctors, medics, engineers and so on, if they have the right mindset.”

  “Like how?” Jason asked casually, looking out his own window as he said it.

  “Hey,” Eva said, getting his attention.

  Jason looked over to see her studying him.

  “The way you’re patting the seat, you’re either a con or a cop,” she said. “And even after all the shit you’ve probably been through, you don’t have the eyes of a con.”

  Jason studied her in turn, then the two up front. All three had stripped off the heavy, mustard yellow fireman’s turn-out coats, gloves and what looked like bicycling helmets that they’d worn during their sweep. Underneath they wore blue jeans, blue T-shirts and boots. Both men had slid their rifles into improvised plastic sleeves that were pop-riveted to handy interior surfaces, but they retained pistols and knives.

  When they took their gear off, the obvious prison ink and long hair had been a dead giveaway. Much more puzzling was that the driver had forearm tats that included ornate Chinese hanzi and what looked like a winged snake coiling out of his collar while the other had the roman numeral thirteen inked onto the nape of his neck.

  It didn’t take a genius to know that the Triad and MS-13 weren’t natural allies.

  Eva, sitting to his right, had reslung her weapon, and kept it casually pointed across the compartment. The muzzle didn’t quite cover him. She watched him carefully.

  “We take all kinds,” she said, smiling. “But there’s a mandatory interview first.”

  “Who with?” Jason replied, essaying a smile.

  “With the guy in charge,” Eva answered. “Governor Harlan Green. And you don’t want to judge him by us and you don’t want to lie. He can tell.”

  “How’d he get those two to work together?” Jason asked, deciding to take a little risk. Hell, if they’d wanted to, they could’ve shot him back in town.

  “Mr. Green is a no-shit genius,” Eva said, emphasizing her words unironically. “Somehow, very early in the plague, he figured it out. He was some sort of hacker mastermind who did some shady shit back when we had an Internet. When he saw how it was going and where it would end, he took steps to put together a team.”

  “A team of ex-cons?”

  “Well, we’re only ex-cons by courtesy,” she said, keeping her right hand on her rifle’s pistol grip. “You might say we were released early on Mr. Green’s recognizance.”

  There were chuckles from the driver. The dark haired man who rode shotgun said nothing, but his shoulders shook with silent laughter.

  “He supplies the smarts and the plan,” Miss Eva went on.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” the ex-cop said to the somewhat ex-con next to him. “What’s his plan?”

  “I don’t know the details yet, because I don’t need to know,” Eva answered unwaveringly. “But I know this. He’s gonna save the world, or at least our little part of it.”

  * * *

  “No, you can’t kill her, Astro,” Copley said wearily. “You made the rules and she’s following them.”

  “But, but—” Astroga replied, sputtering. “It’s not music!”

  “Feeed theee woorld,” Bua sang, defiantly staring at her Army nemesis while she stretched the lyrics for all they were worth. “Let them know it’s Christmas time again. Fee-aWWWK!”

  “It’s not even Thanksgiving yet!” Astroga yelled at the top of her lungs, lunging over the bench seat for the speaker wire jacked into Bua’s iPhone. “And that’s not music! It’s an abomination!”

  “Don’t make me stop this car!” Kaplan said, warningly. “I will stop it! I don’t like it either, but it ain’t any worse than the crap you picked!”

  “Astro!” Copley reeled her back in by one ankle. “Square your shit away, Specialist!”

  “It’s not even— Wait,” Astroga stopped in mid re-lunge. “You called me Specialist!”

  “Oh shit,” the Army sergeant released his hold on her ankle and she sat back, smiling. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

  “Ha!” his subordinate said with an air of satisfaction, now ignoring Bua. “You recognized the new rank. That makes it official. Even more official.”

  Astroga’s highly irregular promotion scheme during the evacuation from New York had involved access to an Army headquarters shared drive, an open laser printer, a clipboard and a National Guard general in dissociative shock. She’d arranged for a bump upwards for her and their now missing comrade. No one had really challenged her so far.

  And his use of the appropriated rank just permanently legitimized it in her eyes.

  “You know what, this calls for a celebration! Hit it, Bua!” she said, poised for some quality seat dancing. “I’ll even join you!”

  “Feeed theee woorld…”

  “This is so much worse than I expected,” lamented the senior NCO.

  Tertiary Powerhouse Control Room, Tennessee Valley Authority, Region II

  Watts Bar TN

  “That ended better than I expected,” Stantz said, leaning across the table with a grunt of effort. “Hey Phil, stay on, wouldja?”

  Pre-Plague, TVA staff meetings ended noisily, as management and line personnel hustled back to their actual jobs, usually indulging in a little banter on their way back to their offices or trucks.

  This time a sort of stunned silence drifted across the half full meeting hall. Since this was the TVA, with power and to spare, the room was brightly lit. The mood, however, was dark. The announcement of the presumed loss of another dam control center, this time the Nickajack, just two stops downstream from Stantz’s own location near Watts Bar, had dispirited many.

  Mike Stantz, the unassuming regional General Manager for Power Transmission, spared a glance for the
relatively few people in the room. Social distancing rules had been mandated by TVA headquarters in Knoxville only weeks after the plague had been formally declared as a pandemic by the CDC. Between folks who had been infected and the long ago announced option to attend meetings by phone, the headcount for the meetings was lighter than he had ever seen it.

  In this case, exactly three of them remained at Watts Bar.

  Bill Rush, the longtime watershed management officer for Nickajack and Chickamauga reservoirs, slapped his hand down on the table. The sharp smack caused his table mate to glare at him.

  “Give it a rest, Bill!” ordered Mike. At fifty-three, he was among the oldest of the line managers, having dedicated his entire post-Navy career to the TVA. Like most of the full time employees of the public corporation, the mission came first, last and always for Mike.

  He didn’t have a lot patience for unproductive posturing, especially as it pertained to the crisis.

  “Give it a rest?” Rush began to yell, but lowered his voice with an effort. “Six nuclear fueled generating plants, thirty hydroelectric dams, fifteen gas or cogen plants, plus the dinky solar and wind stuff and they want us to walk away?”

  “Stop exaggerating, Rush,” Brandy Bolgeo said pointedly. “No one said to walk away. They said to take steps to preserve the generation and distribution infrastructure while we still have the people to do it. We don’t know what happened at Nickajack or Chickamauga. All we could see was a lot of smoke over their facilities and now all we know is that they aren’t answering the phone anymore.”

  Bolgeo was an up-and-coming engineer who had been moved, somewhat against her will, into a junior management role in the Distribution division. After a great series of interviews, Mike had offered her a relocation package back to Tennessee and away from California taxes and crumbling infrastructure. Her masters in Electrical Engineering was only a few years old but Mike was confident that Bolgeo could manage the living fossils, all male, that populated her department. Most of them were almost ungovernable, but they usually had the grace and experience to be right every time.

  Bill Rush had missed that memo.

  “That’s my point,” Bill said. Clearly still upset, he managed to not raise his voice this time. “They’re giving up. They aren’t fighting it anymore.”

  Mike sympathized with Bill. Everyone was upset and with reason. The unprecedented spread of H7D3 was terrifying. Like many industries, electrical utilities had a real-time view of demand for their product. The amount of electricity demanded by the grid had begun dropping slowly at the two week mark into the plague. The trend had accelerated as retail and industrial consumers scaled back how much electricity they used.

  Four months on, and the flow of gas and coal for the conventional generating plants was all but exhausted.

  “No one is giving up,” Bolgeo said. “We’ve been going since the cities went dark. We kept going when most of the load evaporated. Now we must prepare to address all the possible outcomes. I’m just pleasantly surprised our ‘end of the world’ plan is working at all.”

  “Failing to plan is planning to fail,” Mike retorted. He knew that despite her technical skills, Bolgeo was still a newish employee, having been at TVA less than a decade. “Both of you know that making, managing and distributing power is our religion. We are the Mormon Church of prepared public utilities. We’ve got a plan for everything. All we had to do was dust off our zombie apocalypse plan. It wasn’t even particularly complicated.”

  “Says you,” Bolgeo replied. “You’re not fighting kudzu that grows sixty feet a season. Three months without treatment and line tension is already approaching limits in some places. If we weren’t at the start of the winter season we’d have a problem starting right now. Come next summer, Katie-bar-the-door!”

  “Phil, you still on the phone?” Mike asked as he leaned closer to the black tabletop speaker.

  “Yup,” Mike’s deputy replied. TVA had redundant, internal communications networks, dating back to the Cold War. The phone and cell network problems that had already made the retail networks unworkable weren’t a showstopper and all the dam locations were connected on lines wholly separate from the legacy Ma Bell network.

  “It’s time to finish the consolidation,” Mike said. “Use the big truck to check the yards at the gas and cogen plants. All of them, even if they’ve been picked over. Inventory any remaining spare parts, fencing, raw materials, all of it. I want every spare transformer, power supply, every reel of primary conduit and cable, all of it. Bar stock, round stock, bigs and smalls. Put as much as you can in the yards next at Chickamauga dam and Watts Bar dam. What doesn’t fit there goes into the repair yard outside Unit One at Watts Bar,” he added, referring to the nuclear plant that lay on the Tennessee river north of Chattanooga.

  “What about Sequoyah?” Phil asked, referring to the second nuclear plant in the immediate area.

  “Both nuke plants already sealed and they’re responsible for their own spares,” Mike said. “If they don’t already have it inside their fenceline, they aren’t gonna get it. If you try to get in, you’re gonna get shot. But we’ve got Watts Bar. We can park extra stuff on the repair pad there.”

  The TVA had been slowly finishing Unit Two at the nuclear plant referred to by Mike, but NRC permitting, intermittent protests and congressional deal making had slowed the process to a standstill. Now, absent a miracle, it wasn’t ever going to be complete.

  “So are you walking away from the gas plants?” Rush demanded. He scratched his ribs fiercely.

  “Makes sense,” Bolgeo said, nodding in approval. “The fossil plants need to be supplied externally, and the flow of feedstock stopped weeks ago. Whatever they managed to build up outside is either gone or about to be gone. The nuke plants are already spun down to cold iron. That leaves the dams and those are easy to defend.”

  “Well, easier,” Mike added. “We can move supplies by boat if we have to, and no one has seen a zombie swimming so far. It’s about planning ahead.”

  “No!” Rush yelled this time. “No, we don’t give up! We protect the gas—wait—what’s—we doann’t…”

  He stood and started tearing at this shirt, still yelling incoherently.

  Mike reached into his waistband and withdrew his concealed sidearm. Despite his carry permit, unauthorized possession of a firearm in TVA offices or on TVA property was a firing offense.

  He’d been carrying every day since the announcement of the plague.

  Failing to plan was planning to fail.

  His sole surprise was when Bolgeo beat him to the shot.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Relax, Mr. Young,” Harlan Green instructed his newest guest. “Ms. Eva has already passed to me a précis of your biography, shared by you during your return from her latest run. Although this is in the nature of an interview, I think that it’ll go better if you aren’t sitting on the edge of your chair, ready to spring into action at any moment. If I weren’t interested in you personally, you would already have ceased to be a factor.”

  And isn’t that a warming, reassuring statement of welcome. Jason thought. His glance roved around the surprisingly well-appointed room, pausing on the truly enormous and well-armed man by the doorway before he looked back at his host. At this point, he was so deeply in any potential trap that being ready to jump out of his chair was pointless. With a deliberate effort, he forced himself to relax and lean back in the admittedly very comfortable easy chair.

  It was harder than he expected.

  The military atmosphere that greeted him when his new companions drove into the Gleaner camp was startling. It was clean, for one thing. They had an actual armored truck from the Army, for another. Everyone seemed busy, even the obvious low-ranking laborers digging a ditch or washing vehicles.

  “There you go,” Green said, smiling. “May I offer you a refreshment? We’ve a wide variety to choose from.”

  “Water, just some clean water,” Jason replied. “If this is an interview,
I might as well keep a clear head.”

  “Of course,” his host said, lifting the cover on a small insulated bucket. “Ice?”

  “You have ice!?” Jason said, trying not to squeak. “I mean. Sure, ice is fine.”

  “This is our second encampment,” Green said as gestured about with the ice tongs. “We have been here a while, though it’s nearly time to move on. However, our group has grown and we’ve been able to add a few refinements. Right, Mr. Loki?”

  “Right, Governor Green,” rumbled the huge man.

  Green smiled unctuously and dropped a few perfect ice cubes into an ordinary water tumbler before filling it from a beautiful crystal pitcher.

  “We’re successfully producing limited electrical power running on a combination of generator sets and solar panels,” Green elaborated, passing the glass to his guest. “Maintaining cold storage is important for our supply of vaccine. We’ve actually had to recreate some bureaucracy just to administrate our collection of personnel and equipment, so obtaining computers and people proficient in their use has been necessary as well.”

  “Vaccine?” Jason said, unable to keep his features smooth. “How are you producing it?”

  “We aren’t, not any longer,” Green said, pouring himself a few ounces of a brilliant amber liquid. He sniffed his crystal highball glass appreciatively. “Before the collapse I worked with a laboratory partner to collect and attenuate live virus. A few organizations were using that method, though the federal government didn’t attempt production until it was much too late. It involved killing infected humans for their tissue.”

  “I heard about it, but I thought it was just rumors,” the former cop replied.

  “Of course you did,” Green said, swirling his drink. He gestured with the glass. “Balvenie. The fifty-year-old limited reserve in the original crystal. Before the virus was released a single presentation set would’ve cost upwards of thirty thousand dollars. Now I can collect it from a ruined estate for free. A cheap high proof vodka is actually more useful now—disinfection and so forth. The price of things has changed, Mr. Young. And while the vaccine is very, very useful, it isn’t particularly critical to my plans anymore.”