Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass (18 page)

Though there were no more undead foes hiding in the darkness, Crusow began to panic. At the very least, he always had his knife for protection. He frantically went for the precious Bowie, bracing his boot on the creature’s head, giving him leverage as he
yanked it from the skull. He cleaned the blade as best he could, stropping it on the creature before sliding the heirloom back into its custom leather home.

With his anxiety and feelings of defenselessness temporarily abated, he sat down on the ice, warming his numb left hand on the flickering fire. He would need to rig two more loads of bodies before beginning his dog-powered climb back to Outpost Four.

With Bret gone, Crusow planned to strip his corpse and leave him down here at the bottom of the gulch. He didn’t have it in him to butcher Bret for fuel, and didn’t really think anyone else would be up to the task either.

He clumsily took the radio from his pocket and keyed the transmit button while he looked up into the sky, toward the top of the gulch. “Mark, we have a situation here.”

There was no answer.

Crusow’s fear swiftly returned. His thoughts ran wild about the creatures that Mark and Kung pulled topside on the first load. Ice-climbing the sheer face in front of him would be a death sentence without a top rope.
What if their brains were not completely destroyed, like the thing that tore Bret’s up? What if—

The radio crackled. “This is Mark, what’s going on, you okay?”

“No, man, I’m pretty damn far from that. Bret’s dead. One of the frozen things down here killed him. I had to finish the job.”

Mark keyed his radio but said nothing for a few seconds. “Uh, how in the . . . I’m sorry. Are you okay, man? You ain’t bit, are you?”

Crusow blasted back, “No! Let’s just get these things up topside. I’ll explain it to everyone when I get back. Let’s just get the job done. I’ll strip Bret, throw his shit in his pack, and send his gear up with two more bodies. The temperature is dropping and I can only handle another hour or so down here. That’s enough time for two more loads, not counting myself.”

“Okay, I’ll radio Larry and tell him to have some tea and hot soup ready. He’ll need it, too; he ain’t getting any better. Listen, I know this isn’t the right time to bring this up with what happened to Bret and all, but we have a request for support from the ship.”

“I can’t imagine we’d be able to do much of anything for them. We’ll talk about it topside. One more thing,” Crusow said.

“Go ahead?”

“Don’t get those bodies near heat unless you’re damn sure they’re full-on dead, got me?”

“Yeah, I got you. We’ll make sure.”

Crusow began to follow his plan, checking all the bodies at the bottom for head trauma before sending them up the sheer ice face to Mark. He gave most of them a hard chop to the head for good measure, taking out some anger on them. Still deeply shaken, his hands vibrated almost uncontrollably as he rigged the bodies and Bret’s kit to the ropes. It was nothing a half dozen rations of whiskey wouldn’t fix. Bret wouldn’t mind.

One day from paradise.

We will have Oahu in sight tomorrow evening. Hard to believe I have been writing in this journal since the beginning. Sometimes I go back to the first pages, because on those pages are remnants, hints of what things were like before. Sometimes I need to remind myself of how things were so that I can hold on to some of it. It would seem foolish to most.

Saien and I have decided that we like it better when the submarine is submerged. The damn waves knock the hell out of the boat, rocking us back and forth as if we were sitting in a kayak during a hurricane. One of the crew members tells me that submarines were not designed to cruise on the surface, their shape is not conducive to surface stability. We surface only when we need to transmit on shortwave, which is daily, sometimes twice per day.

I’ve put in some time in the radio shack and have been successful at establishing comms with the flagship and John on occasion. John told me yesterday via shortwave that another station might be coming on line to help with relays, somewhere in the Arctic. He’ll pass a frequency list and schedule soon.

We have a complement of Scan Eagle UAVs onboard and will be launching them tomorrow to recon the island before the team goes in; that is, after the techs set up the
launch and recovery gear. I’ve spent a combined one hour in the same room as the SEALs and don’t even know their names. Don’t really care either. They stick to themselves, go to the gym, eat, and hang out exclusively, like a fraternity. They seem to look down their noses at Saien and barely notice I’m here. Probably just another officer getting in the way as far as they are concerned. I can’t say that I envy them going feet dry in Oahu. I think the plan is to patrol the island coast and park the boat off the North Shore. From that point, the team will ingress along Highway 99 to Wheeler Army Airfield and then to the Kunia facility, where they’ll secure it, bring up the systems, and drop off the resident expert before exfiltrating to the sub. Two days of operations sitting off the coast of Oahu, then we’re headed farther west to Chinese waters.

Maximum pull-ups: 8

Push-ups: 68

1.5 mile treadmill run: 11:15

“They’re back,” Hawse told Disco as he reached for his M-4.

Although he was pretty sure it was Doc and Billy, Hawse didn’t take a chance. While escaping Washington, D.C., he’d witnessed the undead open doors and climb stairs.

Hawse was the only special operator to make it off the North Lawn alive. He vividly recalled the day he’d escaped.

Hawse had been forced to go full auto on White House grounds, fighting waves of creatures, clearing the way for the vice president and first lady to escape to the helicopter. He shot everything he had from the door of
Marine Two,
just before the dead toppled the black iron perimeter fences and overran the White House. Flying over D.C. with some of the last remnants of national command authority, he looked upon the nation’s capital for the last time.

The creatures looked like maggots crawling over cars and through houses, over the corpse of D.C. Weeks before the creatures took the North Lawn, FEMA had raised the Woodrow Wilson drawbridge and demolished the other links that spanned the Potomac, cutting off Virginia from D.C. and Maryland. Despite these extreme initiatives, the anomaly eventually crossed the Potomac. From the affluent homes in Northern Virginia to the ghettos of Suitland, Maryland, the undead reigned. No more Republicans, Democrats, or other ineffective factions. The politics of death ruled America now. Virginians fared far better than those in Maryland; the draconian gun laws in place before the anomaly assured Maryland’s quick decimation. The dead were gifted the benefit of so-called gun-free zones, the same benefit that lunatic gunmen and thugs enjoyed before the undead walked the streets.

Doc and Billy were now at the door, bringing Hawse back to reality.

Hawse held his carbine up to the low ready as the door wheel spun around from the other side to the open position.

“What’s the secret pass phrase?”

“Fuck you, Hawse,” Doc said, stepping through the door to the control center.

“Correct, you may enter,” Hawse pronounced with a terribly fake British accent.

Both Hawse and Disco noticed the extra gear the returning men packed in.

“Well? What happened out there? Sun is coming up in an hour—we were starting to get a little punchy in here thinking about going out there after you two assholes.”

“We missed you too, ol’ chap,” Doc said in his own horrible fake accent.

Doc and Billy debriefed the other two on the happenings on the way to the drop, including the mile-long undead river that flowed beneath them on the overpass.

“You guys must have had to change your diapers after that one,” Disco said.

Billy was never much of a talker—when he had something to say the team listened. “I’ve never seen so many in one place. This was worse than New Orleans. You weren’t there for that, Disco. You never knew Hammer, we lost him there. Good operator. One lapse in noise discipline and me and Doc would be part of the river right now, coming for you.” As usual, there was no emotion in Billy’s voice, but the words hit their intended target.

“What’s that gear all about?” Disco asked, changing the subject.

Doc pulled the documentation from his leg pocket and tossed it at Disco as he began his explanation. “It’s sort of like that crowd control foam that they were going to give us in Afghanistan before the shit hit the fan. The only difference is that this stuff cures to concrete hardness in a couple seconds, instead of just being sticky. There is a compound that
de-cures
the foam, and here it is.” Doc held the bottle of clear liquid up so everyone could see.

“What are we going to do with it?” Hawse asked. “I guess I mean, what good is it? What can it do that my M-4 won’t?”

“Can your M-4 stop a hundred of those fucks in less than ten seconds and create a concrete wall of bodies in the process?” Doc said.

“Well, if it works. I don’t want to be the one in front of a swarm trying this thing out for the first time,” Hawse added.

Billy glanced down, checking the action on his M-4, and said, “I hope we don’t have to use it at all. Doubt it would have stopped that river we saw. Maybe slowed it down.”

The words set in with Hawse for a few moments before anyone spoke.

“What’s the plan now, Doc? From the sounds of things, it took all night and a near-death experience to bring back a gadget that we might never use,” Disco said.

“You may be right, but me and Billy grabbed some intel from the drop that we’ll all need to analyze. There was documentation in the equipment boxes and another drop map that we can cross-reference with the one we have. My point is that we got more than the gadget.”

Doc pulled the recovered documents from an outside zipper pocket on his pack. “I’ve only had a second to look at this stuff, but check this out.”

Doc pointed to a map with a transparent overlay showing all the previously executed drops. “When you compare this new map to ours, we see some pretty big differences. This new map has quite a few more local drops listed than the one we jumped in with. There seem to be a couple places within twenty klicks, mostly north of Hotel 23. Disco, you and Billy send the SITREP to the ship. We only have a few minutes before sunup. Make it happen.”

“You got it, boss man,” said Hawse.

Hawse and Billy left the conversation and headed over to the SATcom burst terminal to transmit a short report on last night’s mission.

Doc continued, “So when we look at the date stamp of both maps, we see that the drop we reconned last night happened right before the noise device was dropped on Hotel 23. So the question remains: Why would the same organization that brought a swarm down on Hotel 23 drop a prototype weapon that could be effective, at least short term, against a swarm?”

“I’m not sure we’ll ever find out or if it even matters at this point,” Hawse said, placing the map back down on the desk.

“It may not matter, but these maps can tell us something. The drops seem to occur around the same time of day every time. If the aircraft that drops the gear takes off at the same time from the same airfield for every sortie, we might be able to find the originating airfield, at least within a few hundred miles using some basic math, a map of the U.S., and a straight edge.”

“SITREP transmitted, boss,” Disco said.

“That was quick.”

“Well, I only say what needs to be said. They’ll ask a dozen questions no matter what I send. Might as well put the basic SITREP down and wait on the flood of questions. I shut down the circuit though. Don’t want any RF tempest leaks giving us away.”

“Good call,” Doc said. “We’ve been lucky so far, but don’t count on that to last. The next item on our checklist is to spin up that nuke, run the diagnostic program, and make sure we’re ready for the new coordinates. Don’t ask because I don’t even know where they’ll be.”

“What if they’re U.S. coordinates?” Hawse asked seriously.

“Depends on the target. I hope they’re not, but if they are, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Hawse briefly thought of the Constitution, displayed in its bulletproof case in downtown D.C., surrounded by the undead.

They were closing fast. Danny attempted escape by scurrying under the air circulator in a large fan room; he wasn’t sure exactly where, as things were foggy and seemed to move at an odd pace. The creatures were unrelenting and pursued with determination. Danny’s knees were raw and bloody; it seemed to him that he had been crawling for miles.

He felt the cold grip of death on his heels. The creature’s meatless claw closed around his foot and squeezed like a vice. Danny could no longer move forward; the thing was dragging him back for the kill. A peculiar-looking rat watched him with glowing red eyes from a dark corner.

Danny thrashed, screaming loudly, saving himself from the landscape of nightmares—the clutches of the sandman.

Someone shook him, tugging him the rest of the way back to reality, to the safety and security of a grandmother’s arms.

•   •   •

“Danny, wake up, hon. You’re dreaming, just dreaming. Wake up.”

Danny struggled under his blanket until sure it was his grandmother that had him.

“They’re on the ship, Granny!” Danny exclaimed, still visibly shaken from the nightmare.

“No, hon, they’re not onboard. They’re far away on land. We’re safe—just try to calm down and breathe.”

“Granny, I heard them before. I was on the back of the ship, hiding. I heard them,” Danny said, sobbing.

“No, honey, they’re not here. Just calm down and try to go back to sleep,” Dean said, petting down Danny’s cowlick.

“Yes they are, I know what they sound like. I remember. I remember the water tower. I remember Mom, Dad—”

A knock on the door interrupted Danny before he could go down that dark road of memory. Dean tucked him back in bed, kissed him on the forehead, and went to the door. She cracked it to see who was calling at such a late hour. Tara stood outside in her nightgown.