Green Fields (Book 4): Extinction (34 page)

True enough, what looked like your run-of-the-mill barn doors hid a wide concrete ramp that led underground, faintly illuminated by strips of lights. The soldier signaled us to drive on while he remained behind. I wasn’t quite sure if this was a good idea, but the barn itself didn’t look too sturdy. I could probably drive the Rover right through a wall without damaging the car too badly. At the bottom of the ramp, maybe three hundred feet in, a cavernous room opened up, and this was where it got interesting.

As abandoned as the area above had been, down here there was a lot more going on. The bustle wasn’t as bad as in Dispatch, but I saw several vehicles—two of them Humvees, if I wasn’t completely mistaken—and lots and lots of spare parts of any kind on shelves lining the walls. Someone was busy welding, the bright sparks making me look away immediately, and as soon as I stopped and got out, the sharp scent of metal and ozone tickled my nose.

We already had a small welcoming committee waiting for us—two soldiers in full gear, another in fatigues but without body armor, and Dom. On screen he hadn’t looked that young, but he couldn’t be much past twenty-five. That immediately gave me a pang of self-consciousness—I’d been a year older than that when I’d defended my PhD thesis. Not that such things mattered now, but it was hard to shake off the feeling that someone had undercut my academic career. I’d kind of gotten used to being the highest educated, most-qualified scientist around. Then again, if that had really mattered so much to me, I should have stayed in Aurora.

The man in the fatigues stepped up to Nate and me, resolutely shaking our hands without a hint of hesitation, although I was sure that he hadn’t missed Nate’s marks. “Commander Jericho Wilkes,” he introduced himself. “Let me welcome you to the Silo. I’m head of military operations here.” He introduced the other two soldiers as Petty Officers Stanton and Meeks, his aides. “And Mr. Curran here you’ve already met, I hear.” He glanced in Dom’s direction. Stanton—barely reaching to my shoulder, but looking all the more grim for what she lacked in height—and Meeks—a rather jovial seeming guy who I wouldn't have pegged as military if he hadn’t been in full gear—ignored us, while Dom offered a small, amused smile. I was trying not to gawk at the sheer size of the hangar, but it was easily rivaling the hangar in Dispatch, if shaped like a dome toward the top. Most of the others didn’t bother hiding their fascination.

“You got a neat hiding hole here,” Nate offered, his attention quickly returning to Wilkes again. “SEALs?”

That assessment made me scrutinize the grizzled commander once more. He certainly didn’t look like I’d always pictured military leaders. Rather than keep his hair short, he had his graying mane tied at the nape of his neck. A vicious-looking scar bisected his chin and narrowly missed his left eye on the way up to his temple. Scruff covered his chin and cheeks, and although he must have been pushing fifty easily, there was lean muscle underneath his fatigues. If I’d met him on the street two years ago I would have pegged him as the typical midlife-crisis rocking former hippie, now on the fitness trip of his life to make up for all the time wasted chasing his corporate dreams—if not for the look in his eyes. They had a certain hard quality to them that I’d come to know all too well from my companions. He gave a curt nod at Nate’s question.

“Ranger cub yourself, Dom here told me. Don’t worry, took our geek squad a full five minutes to hack into the database and get your files. Those of you that have files.” Pia and Andrej shared twin smirks.

“We still have personnel databases to hack?” I asked, not quite taken aback but still wondering.

Dom shrugged. “In the few minutes every hour when the remaining satellites are passing overhead we do. There are still a few data centers with cloud access up and running, but we estimate that they will one by one go dark within the next five years. That’s why we’re trying to rescue any available data on-site. If you want to know more, you have to ask some of our comp science guys. I have more interesting things to bore myself to death with than that.”

Wilkes snorted but left that uncommented.

“Thanks for bringing in the samples. We’ve been posting requests since we thawed out in spring, but so far no one has been insane enough to actively go hunting for any kind of zombies, least of all the strong ones. Shame that you couldn’t bring in one still kicking and biting, but I guess I’ll have to send out my boys and girls on foot if I want some data about how best to off them.”

Nate gave me a look that was short of condescending, but then I still didn’t feel like I’d been wrong to protest our mission to go to Sioux Falls weeks ago.
 

“We might have some intel on that for you,” he explained to Wilkes.

“Much appreciated. But first, let me show you around,” the commander replied. At his murmur his aides disappeared, while Dom remained with us. “You can leave the cars right here. No one will touch them. Feel free to coordinate with our guys if you want to do some repairs.”

“You mentioned something about upgrades?” Nate asked.

Wilkes smiled. “Of course. Hiro?” At his holler, a head appeared from behind the welder’s mask at the other side of the hangar. “Get Kasumi and show our guests the prototypes. We should be back from the tour in an hour or so.”

“Yes, boss,” the welder acknowledged and went right back to work. No idea how he’d even heard that Wilkes was talking, let alone understood him.

It took a few minutes until everyone was ready to leave the cars. My paranoia was slowly withdrawing into the dark recesses of my mind, exactly where it belonged. That said a lot, considering that we were several feet below ground, with only a dome hewn into the bedrock, supported by iron struts, keeping us from being buried alive. That everything was dimensioned for heavy machinery probably helped, as not even the tunnel Wilkes led us into made me feel claustrophobic.
 

On the way over to the command center, Wilkes explained that the Silo used to be an Atlas-I missile silo and launch facility. One of those that had officially never existed, explaining why, technically, it was on the ground of the Glacier National Park. A backup plan should the Russians manage to destroy all the missiles stationed farther south and elsewhere in the country. Then technology had outpaced the structures and the silo had been decommissioned, yet remained a training facility—also used for recreational purposes, I learned—since then. Dom explained the latter with a sheepish grin. At my raised brows, he shrugged.

“When the shit hit the fan, I was camping in here with some buddies of mine. Half of us Berkeley alumni, the other MIT. We’ve been doing this every year for almost a decade. Twenty-three nerds with supercharged paintball gear, one weekend of all-out open war. Just so happens that the Commander and a few of his friends had a similar idea, only camping out above-ground. Made sense for us to bury the hatchet and band together to make the best of it when we heard the news. The Commander managed to get the news out that we were staking out here, and more marines came flocking to us. The rest is history.”

It took me a few moments to get the implications of that.

“Have you even been above-ground since then?” I asked.

“Of course,” Dom replied, but the guarded look on his face told me that it hadn’t happened very often.

Nate picked up on another detail. “Did any of you come anywhere close to any zombies yet? Not sure how bad it was before the winter, but we barely saw any in the last two days.”

Wilkes shook his head, while Dom protested. “We sent out a few of the marines with cameras that we had with us for the paintball fight. So technically—“

“You know shit squat,” I finished for him before he could further embarrass himself.

“We encountered some,” Wilkes explained. “But we made sure to set up a wide perimeter, and keep it intact from day one on. We’ve managed to bolster our numbers from forty people to over a hundred in the first few months, sending short range radio bulletins whenever we could. Some of our people came from as far as Seattle and Portland, and they got quite the tales to tell. But those that started out here? Why do you think they had a fist-fight over who got to don the hazmat suits? All two that we have here.”

Dom accepted his criticism without comment, but used that last bit to launch into yet more explanations.

“After the silo was decommissioned, it went into private ownership in the seventies. One of our math guys’ uncle owned it. Technically he still owns it, but no one heard from him, so he’s presumed dead. Who knows? Guy was a true conspiracy nut and prepper. We put a lot of work into the Silo since we started rebuilding, but he had some impressive storage units already full of everything we needed during the first weeks. And a lot we’ll likely never need, but there’s space aplenty to keep it all here. You’ll see.”

And see I did—a lot more than I had expected. But who would have thought that their command center actually looked straight out of a space movie? Including an entire two-story tall wall filled with monitors? With electricity enough to keep most of them running all the time, and even enough to spare to watch movies? We lost most of the guys to that display, and I myself had a hard time not lingering. Giving up entertainment had been the least of my concerns last year, but now that it was suddenly back on the menu, it was hard to keep dieting. Nate and I ended up being the only ones who finished the tour with Wilkes and Dom, and I couldn’t fault the others for staying behind.

That was almost as impressive as the aforementioned “maintenance closet” that they’d converted into a lab, complete with what looked damn close to a real biosafety level three, if not level four lab. Dom explained that they’d converted the antenna silos into lab space, building the separate required air control system from scratch. All I could do was gawk. From the outside, of course, because I couldn’t just waltz in there without the necessary gear. Dom seemed mighty proud of their accomplishments, and as I watched the two people inside go about their work, I couldn’t help but feel that old temptation rear its ugly head. Damn, but if they actually managed to get a BSL-4 lab working, the possibilities were endless…

Except of course for my conviction that all the experiments in the world wouldn’t undo the cataclysmic events that had almost wiped us off the face of the earth.

“I’d offer you to stay but I’m not keen on rejections, so I’d rather not,” Dom observed dryly as he watched me tear myself away from the observation window.

“You think I’m stupid for being out there rather than wanting to lock myself in here?” I guessed.

He took his time answering, and I wondered if that had anything to do with Nate and Wilkes, who’d stepped aside to chat quietly between them, probably to one-up each other with their war stories.

“I do believe that someone like you could make a difference, but I agree with you that it’s still debatable if we can make a difference at all.”

His doubt surprised me. “Not sure you’re doing the right thing here?” Through the window, the heap of body parts that the scientists extracted from the various containers looked even more grim than usual.

Dom gave a grunt that could have meant anything. “I’m a bug guy. Can’t really do much about viruses, you know? But even if I could, I think we’d do much better if we’d try to conserve the scientific advancements of the twenty-first century rather than try to reach for the stars. Ever wonder what will happen in a few years from now when all our vaccinations have worn off? No reason to reinvent the wheel when just manufacturing enough wheels to keep everyone healthy who can still use them is a possibility.”

That he echoed some of my deeper-seated fears just made me like him even more. “True. So, have you started growing your penicillin garden yet?”

“What do you think?” he jeered. “We even use some of the fungi and yeasts that we’ve managed to cultivate to make cheese and beer. Beer was actually the first thing we managed to produce ourselves. After the moonshine, of course. Don’t tell me you spent the entire winter sober?”

“Actually, we did,” I admitted. “Only used the booze we found in houses and stores for cooking and disinfection. I know, how perfectly puritanical of us.”

“Probably makes a difference if you’re the only one who can science the shit out of something,” he replied, still grinning. “The marines insisted on getting half of the first batch of ethanol for weapon maintenance and cleaning. I think they would have commandeered everything if they’d dared annoy us. The rest our doc and med students needed. Luckily, we had a lot of grain fields to harvest, and for this year we have enough potatoes planted to stock up for at least two full seasons.”

Wilkes scoffed at that, interrupting his talk with Nate for a second. “The taters are for consumption, kid. Besides, even if you run that distillery of yours day and night, it will be spring again by the time you’re through a quarter of our yield.”

I couldn’t say that I’d seen a single field out there that could have yielded anything fermentable, but then I hadn’t paid attention to that. And there was the issue with the mines.

“You really have your operation planned out here,” I observed.

Dom nodded. “The only advantage when you lock a bunch of smart guys in with a bunch of practical guys. Lots gets done, and that with the least effort possible. Which reminds me. For the future, I should probably print you a map with the possible open vectors of how you get to us. We rotate the mine fields regularly, but once you know what to look for, you can decipher this week’s active plan for yourself. Sounds like we’re all a bunch of conspiracy nuts here, but we already had to use the system twice to make sure no one got any weird ideas.” He taxed me with a considering look. “You’re not getting any weird ideas, right?”

I was hard-pressed not to grin at him. “Wouldn’t you say that it’s a little late for that concern?”

“Tamara vouched for you. As did a bunch of other guys,” he said. “Which reminds me. I should probably not tell you, but Brandon Stone wasn’t too keen on having you here. Ethan blabbed on you, apparently, and we got a rather pissed-off memo an hour after our video conference was over. Not that we care, but you should know. You didn’t make any friends when you walked out on that offer to take over their lab. At least not with the management.”