Suzanne exchanged glances with the food-service guy, and they both dropped what they were doing.
Suzanne reported to her CO in the logistics division. The CO had a deep crease between her eyes, a hesitation in her step that spoke of confusion. After calling off to make sure they were all there, she had them stand ready for orders. At-ease with her colleagues, the unasked question was on everyone’s mind: who was attacking?
The assumption was: something to do with the Chinese Army base that was nearing completion on the other side of Djibouti. But they were in the dark until someone told them what was going on. And they were at the bottom of the pile of people who needed to know.
The entrance to the secure drone pilots’ work rooms was at the end of the long series of supplies-warehouse rooms. Standing in formation, all they could do was wait. When electric lights went off overhead, they didn’t break discipline, just patiently remained.
The doors to the drone rooms opened, and the pilots and all the techs and support staff emerged. That was odd; if they were under attack, why weren’t the pilots busy flying the drones back from their missions in Yemen, Syria, or Somalia, to assist in defense? Plus, weren’t there drones enough out at the desert airstrip to defend the base, that ought to be doing so?
But the pilots and staff just filed silently out. Of course, no one told the logistics people anything.
A jet engine screamed overhead, descending towards the runway at the adjacent airport. Background noise, on a normal afternoon. But then they heard a shrieking, tearing metallic noise—unmistakable sounds of a plane crashing at high speed, jarring the concrete beneath their feet with its impact.
They glanced around at one another, breaking discipline for just a moment. It was actually comforting to be able to stand right here, where they were supposed to be, knowing that they were doing just what they were supposed to do, as the sirens and distant screams and yells filtered through the cinderblock walls.
An E-3 messenger scurried into the room and carried on a frantic, whispered conversation with her LTJG, pressed a sheet of paper into her hands, and scurried away.
“Garcia. Bradburn. Parrish.” The CO called the three who mostly handled shipments of ammo, medical supplies, and emergency survival kits. “Follow me. The rest of you: dismissed.”
Suzanne followed LTJG Smith to the locked door which led to the supply warehouse proper. Smith ignored the electronic card scanner lock; Suzanne saw that its panel was dark. Smith dug out a metal key from deep within her pocket and opened the door. The four of them walked inside the area where their computers sat in the gloom, their monitors, the CPUs and relay hardware, all dark.
An apprehensive darkness started to infect Suzanne’s mood.
“Ladies,” Smith said, “we have no power. And we have every expectation that we will not get power back in the near future.”
“But the generators—” began Bradburn.
“Generators require fuel. The generators are fucked. Ladies, you three have the best idea of what we have in this warehouse right now. I need you to take paper,” she pointed to a box of copy paper on the floor next to a darkened printer, “and write down as much as you can remember about what we have, and how much. Be as detailed as possible. If you don’t know something, like an amount or a caliber or type or whatever, write ‘unknown.’ Is that clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the women chorused. They walked over to the counter to get pens. The one Bradburn picked up was in a gooey puddle of leaky ink. She noticed just before she grabbed it, avoiding putting her hand in the inky mess. Garcia and Parrish weren’t so observant, and each wound up with fingers stained and sticky. They wiped their hands on their fatigues. Bradburn handed them each a pencil from the cup on the desk instead.
Suzanne shook her head, looked at Bradburn. “There’s no fuckin’ way!”
“Yeah, well, computers are like men, aren’t they? You never appreciate them until they go down on you.”
Suzanne smirked. She could barely remember what she’d been cataloguing before she went to eat, much less creating anything resembling an accurate inventory. This is the US military! This is AFRICOM, the primary US military base on the entire continent… We couldn’t have been caught flat-footed by something as simple as a power failure. Could we? Her stomach growled as she set to work writing down what she could remember.
After an hour or so of the women working this way, heads down, the predictable happened: a medical corpsman came in, slightly rumpled and with a smear of blood on his sleeve, looking for the base hospital’s supplies to treat the plane-crash victims. He had a list scrawled on a sheet of paper.
Parrish looked at him wide-eyed, panicked. Of course she knew where everything was, but there was no way to scan the supplies out; there was no way to keep track of it. But she plainly couldn’t leave bleeding people and burned people and…whatever else…bereft of dressings and casts and drugs and sutures. She hurried to the back and came out with a laden cart.
The corpsman glanced at the signature pad where he would normally sign for the items.
“Just sign at the bottom here,” Parrish said, holding out the list he’d brought her, and he did. She took the list and shuffled it to the bottom of the multi-page stack she’d been working on.
Bull in a China Shop
Hen Li sat. As Chinese prison accommodations went, the tiny room wasn’t uncomfortable. But Chinese prison cells go pretty far in that direction. It was large enough for him to walk, arms extended fully, from one end to the other. The bed was basic, but reasonably restful. There were two buckets: one of clean water, and one serving as the toilet. A silent attendant took them away and replaced them every day.
The boredom was what really got to him. He had been in here for four months now, with nothing to read. He’d been told by some of the old-timers that before the machine sickness—which the Chinese called something which loosely translated into plastic corruption—the residents of the facility would be permitted to sit in a common room and watch CCTV-13 for an hour after the daily meal of rice, vegetables, and occasionally a little fish or gristly meat. But of course, there was no television any longer.
Li thought back to the day, right when it was all starting, when he’d used the secure satellite phone given to him by his old Georgetown drinking buddy, Lee Flatt. He’d squirreled the phone away in his apartment for years. He was a little surprised it took a charge and powered right up, acquiring the satellite signal in a few seconds.
“Lee?” Li had said.
“Li? Hen Li?” Flatt had responded in amazement.
“Yes, Lee, it’s me. Listen: I can’t talk long.” He was pleased to find his English not too rusty. “But I thought you might want to know: the big oil platform Sinopec operates in Bohai Bay just collapsed for no reason. The workers were evacuated due to some unspecified illness the week before. After it was evacuated, they shipped a literal boatload of antibiotics out to it. Then the whole division disappeared from our payroll records. The company is pretending it didn’t happen.” He startled at a movement in the corner of his eye, but it was just someone’s wash blowing on the line. His heart was pounding. “Oh, my God. I’m terrified. I can’t do this! Goodbye, Lee, and good luck.”
Li thumbed the satphone off without waiting for a reply, or for the questions that were sure to come. He took the phone outside, found a big rock, and smashed it into tiny pieces. Then, panting from the effort, he carefully gathered up the pieces, dropping them into several open drains on his way back to work at the Sinopec accounting offices.
He had been skittish as a cat for a few days, afraid he’d be arrested. Then everything began to break down: phone lines, computers, cars. The roads turned to sticky cracking mush and then dissolved into a greyish-black liquid, which puddled on the ground and eventually turned to water. People covered their bicycle wheels with newspaper and rope and old clothing as their tires dissolved; they greased the machinery with shortening. Li still turned up faithfully at the corporate of
fices for a few days, even though he was just sitting with his co-workers and avoiding staring at darkened computer monitors—or worse, at monitors which were infected by their users’ contaminated fingers, slowly rotting outside-inwards.
After a few days of this (perhaps a week; things were changing so fast and he was sleeping so little), three MSS officers in dark suits filed quietly into the offices. As they passed each individual sitting at his desk and hand-writing or shuffling papers—even though no one had any work to do—each man looked at them. A pair of eyes would spark in recognition. The worker would stiffen almost imperceptibly and stare back down at his work as if he didn’t even notice.
Thus, the men crossed banks of open desks and entered the higher-status cubicle area where Li sat. They stopped, standing silently at the entrance to Li’s cubicle. Li sat immobile until one of them placed a hand on his shoulder. He turned in his chair and wordlessly followed the men out of the office building.
Once the interrogations began, Li had found himself unable to resist their brutality. He began to cooperate almost immediately, but they continued to torture him regardless.
After being punched and kicked, he had told the interrogators the truth about the satphone. While they were shocking his genitals and breaking a few toes and fingers, he had told them how he’d noticed the Bohai oil platform collapse and its cover-up.
The next day, the interrogators were gone. He had two new interrogators, who stripped him and poured icy water over his head, then left him in a concrete room with nothing but a chair for days: no light, no water, no food, no toilet. They would return and ask him questions about people he had never heard of, about things he had no knowledge of.
How long it lasted, Li didn’t know. Eventually, a solitary, silent woman in an austere beige dress opened the door. She beckoned him out, and he shuffled after her on quaking legs. She had opened the door to this cell and gestured that he was to go inside, then shut the door behind him, all without ever looking at him.
The clothes within were too big for him, but they were clothes. He drank, washed his stinking body as best he could, rinsing and rubbing his wounds with his swollen throbbing fingers, and then dressed. The plain rice they brought him that night was delectable, even when scooped with broken fingers and eaten through his missing teeth and swollen lips.
Every day was the same. He had no news of the outside world. His light came through thin vertical windows just outside the barred door. There were other prisoners on his floor, but after one pair were hauled out and shot for exchanging messages in a tapping code, they kept to themselves.
He started counted the days with scratches on the wall he made with a tiny pebble he found on the floor, but he was unsure how many days he’d been there before he started to do that. He had four hundred and twenty-one scratches on the wall when the attendant came one day.
“Good morning,” Li said. He expected that as usual, the attendant would say nothing, deposit an empty bucket and a full bucket of water, and leave with his full toilet bucket and empty water bucket.
Instead, the moon-faced, pockmarked old attendant, a man Li’d watched go from pudgy to slender while Li himself went from trim to emaciated, surprised him by saying, “Good morning. And good luck.” Li then observed that the man was empty-handed. The man turned around and walked down the hall towards the next cell, leaving the door open.
A sudden terror struck Li. He was confused and wary. Was this a trap? There were rumors of prisoners being released and then shot “trying to escape.”
His brain, fogged by a year of starvation and lack of stimulation, sluggishly turned over the implications. He rose and walked to the open door, holding his threadbare trousers up at the waist to keep them from falling off. One bare foot went out in the hall; he considered it stupidly, then stepped out with the other. Momentously, he was standing outside his little room for the first time in over a year.
He looked up and down the hall and saw others: wizened and hunched, hair and beards long and shaggy (on the men of course, though there were women as well) long and in disarray, just like his. They blinked in confusion, just like he did.
At the end of the hall, another door stood open; outside it, the light was considerably brighter. All the prisoners made their way slowly towards it, then gathered in the hallway. A small, stinking crowd looked through the glass window at the streets of Beijing below them.
Salt of the Earth
Ryan tightened the lugs on the last wheel and stepped around to the jack handle. He lowered the truck to the ground and stood back. The compressed cotton wadding inside the heavy canvas tires supported the vehicle’s weight. The lack of transportation overseas meant that Texas’s massive cotton crop was going dirt cheap…for now. He walked outside the shelter and took the two mules standing under the oak tree by their bridles. He led them between the traces and yoked them to the bar extending through the front of the truck, where the radiator used to be. Then he climbed in the truck, rolled down the window, and leaned out with his long, tapered whip. He gave it a little crack far above the mules’ backs and they started forward, pulling the truck out into the street.
Lori and Missy walked up the street from the beach just at that moment. Barefoot Lori was wearing a flowered cotton sundress and a straw hat, and carried a wooden tub full of seabutter. Missy had a half-crushed handful of yellow flowers and a wreath of the same blossoms perched on her kinky, curly mane. Her caramel skin stood up to the sun much better than her mama’s, which was good. Lori was always fussing about how she couldn’t keep a hat on the child to save her life. Even with the billowing clouds constantly rolling off the boiling Gulf, enough of the subtropical sun made it through the mist to burn crackers like the two of them.
Ryan pressed the brake pedal, and the reins pulled back on the mules. He stepped out, and the animals put their heads back down to graze on the sparse grasses in the sand.
Missy ran up to Ryan and handed him the fistful of flowers. He scooped her up and held the five-year-old on his strong right arm. “Daddy! We saw a live dolphin!” Missy burst out.
Ryan looked questioningly at Lori. “It’s true,” she said. “It was by itself, but it was definitely a dolphin and not a shark.”
Ryan smiled broadly. “Well, that’s just fine.” He held Missy under the arms and held her at arm’s length, then lowered her to his face to rub noses with her. “I was afraid you’d never see a dolphin, at least that you’d remember.”
Lori set the tub of seabutter in the pickup bed. “Let’s get a move on, honey!” She hopped in the cab. “I’ve got to render some of this before I can fix dinner tonight.”
Ryan handed Missy up to Lori. As he shut the door, he asked, “Whatcha makin’?”
“Greens and seabutter, stewed chicken, and fried potatoes.”
Ryan unconsciously patted his belly as he walked around to the driver’s side. Since the huge deposits of edible fat had begun washing up on the beaches, they all had begun to regain the weight they’d lost in the second winter, after the machine sickness hit. He was actually starting to feel a little pudgy.
It was nice to see Missy’s skin beginning to glow again; she was shooting up like a weed. Lori had talked to the pediatrician, who thought she’d likely catch up in her growth with no permanent harm done. The doctor was mostly worried about the lack of vaccines and antibiotics, but since people traveled less now, she said they probably had some time before diseases started moving in again. She was leaving to visit with some of the yarb women who lived in the country, traveling on what used to be back roads north of Houston, to see what they could tell her about doctoring without drugs. But she’d be back soon, and her assistant was taking care of the local couch monkeys in the meantime.
He once again cracked the whip in the air above the backs of the mules. He never reckoned he’d be a mule driver, a literal cracker like his great-grandpa, but here he was. Funny how things move in circles. The mules leaned into the traces, and they started off down the sandy
track towards home.
Security blanket
Jessica screamed and ran to the basket on the ground.
She had been completely unaware of the strange man. He’d appeared out of nowhere and stolen the alcohol-powered scooter as she gathered purple asters by the path. The asters were strewn now, forgotten on the ground. She sprinted towards the basket that held her infant child.
“Ozark,” she breathed, every millisecond that went by without hearing his cry lasting a millennium. The melon-thump sound of the basket hitting the ground echoed in her ears. She seized the basket, a woven cradle, and turned it over.
There was a bundle of blankets within. Still no sound. But no blood.
She crouched on the ground and began to flip the blankets aside, dreading what she would see. Her baby’s motionless face appeared. Oh, God! He’s dead!
But then he gasped, and his brown eyes flew open. One hand emerged from the blankets, fisted and quivering, and a horrid shriek burst forth from his mouth.
Jessica suddenly felt her eyes fill with tears. She gathered the boy to her chest and squeezed him, momentarily enjoying his wailing before she realized she was hugging him too hard. He might still be hurt. She laid him down on the ground and flipped all the blankets open, exposing his tiny, perfect feet and legs, knees locked as he howled in fury.
No sign of injury. Her worst fear was unrealized; she was just a mother with a crying baby. She picked him up and began to shush and coo him, gradually soothing and calming him down.
When Ozark was finally quiet, she heard the buzz of the little motor bike fading into the distance. She had converted that bike to alcohol herself! Furious, she recalled all the work that went into rebuilding the motor, replacing all the plastic insulators and gaskets with milk-soaked wool fibers. She was sad to lose it, but also angry at herself for being so complacent and distracted. It had been a while since anyone had tried to raid the compound, but that was no excuse for letting her guard down—especially with an infant to look out for.
Eupocalypse Box Set Page 29
