Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass (31 page)

“Don’t worry about it, keep moving!” After making sure that Commie was making safe progress, he joined Rico near the shed. “Man, those fucking things can climb ladders? Not good,” Rico whispered.

“Yeah, not good except that I closed the fucking hatch. One or two of them might be able to climb but that don’t mean they can do algebra or open up hatches while standing on a ladder. It’s your turn, get on the rope.”

“My pleasure, bumpkin. Good luck, Hick.”

“Right back at you, Mexican.”

Huck remained at the top, watching Rico and Commie disappear over the cliff. The sound coming from the shack was louder now.

“Huck, get on the rope, we’re all down. The jungle is moving all around us! Hurry up!”

Huck sped down the rope.

“Should I try to bring the rope?” Huck asked Rex.

“Leave it, no time.”

Rope was one of those things that you didn’t need when you had it and needed badly when you didn’t. Especially now.

With boots on the ground, they trekked north. They were all too young to have ever fought in Vietnam, but now were experiencing the same terrors of jungle warfare against a silent enemy.

The creatures on the jungle floor were largely silent except for the terrifying hissing sounds—an audible warning meaning you were close enough for hand-to-hand combat.

Commie stepped on a piece of debris, probably thrown from the blast event. It snapped like a firecracker in the darkness, inviting the hiss of pit ghouls from all sides. Rex reluctantly gave the order to engage. Camera flashes of their suppressed M-4 muzzles lit their surroundings, revealing the details of demons to the operators’ artificial vision.

Most heads exploded or fell apart, and corpses thumped to the ground for some time. Faint steam issued from their scorched suppressors and M-4 upper assemblies.

They reloaded and pressed on through the dense jungles, eventually punching out of the tree line and onto a road, where Rex stopped the group.

“Okay, I’m gonna make radio contact and revector the UAV to our posit for support. Huck, you and Rico set up a perimeter. Commie, stay close and alive.”

“
Virginia,
Hourglass, we are out of the jungle and on a road. Disoriented but we know we are somewhere north of the cave, two miles maybe. I’m going to turn on IR—please snap to me and advise, over.”

•   •   •

Kil was on watch and on headset when the transmission came in. “We heard you, Hourglass. We’re flying in a circle north of the cave. Lost you under the foliage, leak IR at your discretion.”

“Good to hear you, Kil, IR on.”

Kil studied the Scan Eagle control screen. One of the operators
panned and tilted the camera. Kil could see the IR flashes, near a highway about a mile from the UAV’s track.

“Adjust orbit and get on top,” Kil ordered.

“Yes, sir.”

“Hourglass, we have you marked and are heading for your posit. We’ll be there in one minute. We have you alongside Trimble Road. Set your compass heading due north two miles, until rendezvous State Highway 803, repeat three six zero heading, two miles. Our maps say the terrain is relatively flat.”

“Okay,
Virginia,
we’re Oscar Mike due north to Highway 803. Hourglass is standing by for any tippers. We’re lookin’ for undead locs, bearings, and strength along our way.”

“We’re on it, Hourglass,” Kil confirmed, sipping some warm instant coffee from an old MRE, feeling some guilt about not being on the ground.

He was careful not to show it.

•   •   •

The team moved relatively slowly but steadily across the tropical fields through the darkness, careful with noise discipline, weapons at low ready. The
Virginia
supplied regular radio updates and course adjustments to put them at the highway as planned. A gentle Pacific winter breeze rolled over the field, making the grass dance, reflecting the moonlight brightly into their optics. Nothing moved inside the grass, no legless creature dragging its own corpse, no ankle-snapping animal burrows.

They were at Highway 803 in a short amount of time.

Rex looked over to Huck. “Make the call.”

“Roger.
Virginia,
this is Hourglass. We’re here, what’s our next best vector, over?”

After a full minute of silence the radio keyed and Kil replied. “Okay, we’ve sent the UAV north a ways to scout ahead. So far it’s looking okay, so follow the road to the north. In four miles, you’ll get to a fork: from there, we’ll talk you onto the RHIB. Fair warning, the beach is pretty busy right now. Captain Larsen just came from topside and says that you’re all in for a fight.”

“Copy all,
Virginia,
” Huck acknowledged gravely.

“Chin up, Huck. We’ll make it,” Rex assured the men. “If we have to, we’ll hit the beach half a mile from the boats and swim to them. The North Shore sharks probably keep the water pretty clean with all that smelly shit seeping from those rotting meat bags. Shark jerky.”

They slogged north to the intersection. Cresting a hill, the team observed a gaggle of creatures surrounding a dead tree full of exotic birds that had somehow escaped nuclear annihilation. The moon was bright and the team was upwind. Undead attention shifted away from the tree toward them. The creatures approached in the darkness, noses high as if tracking the team’s scent. They stalked like a pack of wolves, moving quickly. The team engaged the creatures early, dropping three instantly; the remaining twenty undead homed in on the commotion and sprinted to the thumps and flashes of the team’s M-4 carbines.

In a catch-22, the team intensified their shots, killing more creatures, but also quickening the undead pace in their direction. The creatures were fast and focused. The last corpse came so close to Huck, he was forced to pull his leather handled Arkansas Toothpick knife to stab it through the eye socket. Congealed blood and eye jelly splattered his blade before the creature hit the radiated ground. Eventually the team arrived at the fork.

The beeping sync of the radio indicated another transmission was inbound from
Virginia
:

“We have you at the fork, move three two five degrees and I’ll fine-tune you as you get closer to the RHIB. Less than two miles to go.”

“Roger that, Kil. How’s it looking?” Rex inquired.

“Not good, undead strength . . .
heavy
.”

“How many?”

“Hundreds or more along your path.”

Just as Kil had said in his briefing before the mission, the undead had spread to the outer belt of the island a long time before the team’s arrival. They would encounter the highest concentration from this point forward. Rex once more called a quick field meeting.

“Okay, you all heard the radio. We’re in for some serious shit. Commie, no matter what happens, you stay in the center of the
triangle that we will form on the way to the beach. Don’t get outside, got it?” Commie nodded quickly. “Huck, you take the rear. Me and Rico will be up front. We’re gonna move fast when it makes sense and slow when it don’t. Everybody just stay alert and we might just get out of this one in one piece, and not pieces. We’re not dead yet.”

The COG transmitted a message to the carrier ordering Task Force Phoenix to their next target—a crash site co-located with an undisturbed equipment dead drop. Because of the newly found motorcycles, the mission was shortened to only two days as compared to two weeks on foot.

A Warthog patrol sighted burning wreckage on the ground near a parachute two days ago. The COG’s plan was to send the team farther north to an airfield near a known aircraft crash site, but the carrier’s admiral pushed back, citing that a round trip in excess of four hundred miles would result in the loss of Task Force Phoenix and likely compromise the Hourglass mission. The COG accepted this reasoning and retracted the order shortly before issuing the new one.

Doc, Billy, and Disco had now been riding for two days, under the cover of night, edging closer to their goal.

“Billy Boy, how far your beads say we got?” Doc asked.

“Over the next finger of terrain, we’ll see it. Can’t see the smoke because it’s dark, but the Hog pilot said it was still burning during their last patrol at five thousand feet last night.”

“All right, let’s get ready. The sun is coming up in a few. Disco, stop moping because Hawse isn’t here. I knew y’all would get too attached if I sent you on too many trips together. My fault.”

In a rare display of a sense of humor, Billy laughed.

The men crested the hill and dropped to the prone position as Billy looked through his carbine optic.

“I see the drop. There are . . . I count . . . wait a sec . . . I count
about thirty, I think. I can’t use my NODs with the binos so I’m not sure.”

Light teased the horizon, casting a faint orange glow into the valley. The tendrils of smoke from the wreckage blew in their direction, indicating that the team was luckily downwind. Pieces of wreckage were strewn about the aircraft’s meteoric crash path, indicated by a gouge in the earth ending where most of the aircraft now sat forever.

“How far is Houston?” Doc asked rhetorically, pulling his maps from his leg pocket. His finger followed their path of travel and stopped. He double-checked the terrain landmarks, fixing their position. “We’re maybe twenty-five miles north. I didn’t realize we’d get this close. Those things down there might be from Houston—suppressed guns only, I mean it. If you think you might need to pull your sidearm, use a goddamned knife or sharp stick, or your fist. We can’t take a risk this far from home base.”

They knew the stakes at play if they were detected; they could inadvertently bring a mega-swarm on top of them.

“We’ll move slow, ten meters apart. Low-crawl slide down the hill. Billy will take a peek down his optics every few meters. At the bottom we’ll regroup and decide how to advance.”

The team did exactly as ordered. At the bottom, they regrouped and discovered that Billy’s numbers were accurate—only about thirty of the undead moved around near the smoldering wreckage and nearby drop. Billy was on point and moved in with carbine at the high ready. Doc gave the order to engage at two hundred meters. The predawn light was enough to conceal them while the men shopped for heads. They remained low, under concealment, and picked off the dead slowly and methodically, turning the lights out forever on thirty miserable walking shells of flesh. The creatures were not fast, but did show signs of radiation exposure. They were well preserved and moved with intent—likely migrants from San Antonio or New Orleans.

Advancing on the crash site, they observed the hulk of a once-airworthy C-130. It was torn in half, but still smoldering. The back half of the aircraft sat a few dozen meters away on its side with its cargo doors locked ajar from impact.

Hanging halfway out the aircraft door was something they had
not expected to see—a Project Hurricane javelin weapon. The bottom half of the device was identical to the damaged stinger still embedded deep in the ground back at Hotel 23.

“Let’s take pictures and haul ass before it gets too bright out. We need to bivvy high and dry and far from here,” Doc suggested quietly, reaching for the digital camera. “I’m going to get shots of the avionics and payload. Leave the place as is, don’t want any visual indicator that might tip Remote Six that we’ve been here.”

Doc was methodical in documenting everything. He used an M-4 magazine so that the COG and others could mensurate the pictures by including a known size quantity in every photo. With this intel, Doc assumed that the big brains that remained might be able to figure out the origins of the fiberoptic autopilot and Project Hurricane equipment and other strange modifications to the airframe that Doc didn’t understand—and Doc had spent a lot of time in C-130s.

Doc saw something that looked somewhat out of place among the wreckage, a piece of equipment exposed to the elements from the impact—bright orange, rectangular. He quickly reached for his multi-tool, slinging open the pliers.

With pictures done and written intel taken, Doc rejoined Billy Boy and Disco.

“Well, man, what do you think?” Disco asked nervously.

“I don’t know, but worst-case scenario?” Doc replied. “This big stinger was meant for us. Best case, there’s another manned nuclear missile silo with full up systems they were going after. We should take the most conservative response and get the fuck out of Dodge and sleep the day for the trip back. Let’s get to the motorcycles and set up bivvy somewhere high.”

“What’s that?” Billy asked in his typical monotone, pointing at the large orange steel box that Doc lugged on his shoulder.

“This is my luggage. It’s coming back with us, and trust me, it’s worth the extra baggage fee of humping it to the bikes. This here is the little black box for that C-130 over there. Looks like whoever modified that plane didn’t want to take it out and have to account for bad weight and balance. We get this plugged into the right system and it’ll be able to find out where that bird came from.”

The fear from discovering the noise weapon was slightly
diminished by the black box that Doc now had in his possession. They had something real, quantifiable. The unknown enemy no longer appeared so ominous and invincible.
The bread crumbs had been dropped and would be followed,
Doc thought, lugging the heavy steel and composite box up the hill to the motorcycles.

Rex and Rico formed the front of the security triangle with Huck taking up the back end and Commie in the center. They inched forward into the active zone. To anyone watching, the island’s threat pattern looked like a typhoon; radioactive undead circled the outside and the only semblance of peace was the interior. They had the benefit of darkness to shield them from the night-blind dead, but they feared that it might not be enough now—there were too many. Rico had repaired his suit once already with a liberal dose of duct tape, a sober reminder to everyone that whatever radiation remained here was enough to kill them quickly if precautions were not immediately taken.

“Commie, don’t shoot unless they get inside the triangle. You’ll end up hitting one of us if you do,” Rex ordered.