First Wave (The Travis Combs Post-Apocalypse Thrillers) (5 page)

“What about you- has the military been your life so
long that you’ve forgotten how the rest of the world works?”

“The military was indeed my only world. Being
deployed three hundred days a year doesn’t exactly nurture a marriage. Some
couples in the special operations community make it work, but they’re the
exception I think. My wife could only take so many,
‘I love yous’
from
abroad and, after the birth of our son, it always seemed like I was an intruder
in our house after I’d return from a mission. My unit was the only stable
family I’ve ever known.”

“Then why’d you get out?”

“Ah, the quality of food really declined and my
government sponsored vacations were growing stale.”

“Come on, I’m serious Trav.”

He looked up at the walls. “Well, I didn’t want to
show up at my son’s high-school graduation one day and say, ‘
Remember me.
I’m your dad
.’ Now, here I am a thousand miles from him not knowing what
he’s even been going through or….if he’s alive,” he paused to rub the back of
his neck. “Plus, I thought we could salvage our marriage. My wife told me a few
months ago, before we separated, that I should take this trip and try something
else that didn’t center on raids, kicking in doors, and shooting bad guys.
Guess that didn’t pan out so well.” He lightly shrugged his right shoulder
which was stiff from an old injury. “Yeah, I was also hoping to do without any
more joint and disk damage too.” Looking over at Katy he said, “Why don’t you
get some sleep. I’ll be over by the tunnel entrance and will wake you in a few
hours.”

As he got up she said in a low whisper, “For what’s
it worth, I’m glad you’re good at shooting bad guys.”

The dream was always the same- gunfire, barking
dogs, and the acrid smell of spent cartridges coupled with the dust from
shattered adobe. His mind raced back to a recurrent nightmare, seared in his
mind from a nocturnal raid in Afghanistan. Most nights, the images unspooled in
his head causing his sleep to be a series of disjointed nightmares,
interspersed with occasional slumber.

In his briefing that evening, the Sgt. Major said
the intel indicated there would be little resistance guarding their target. Despite
the nightly routine of doing another kill or capture mission for high value
targets, Travis never let himself sink into complacency or let his awareness
lapse. The actual dynamics of a raid have certain principles in common but each
mission is its own beast. They only had a few more weeks left before returning
home and he and his unit hadn’t seen much daylight during the past sixty- eight
days of constant missions. His nocturnal world was one seen through the green
prism of night-vision goggles. Perpetual life in the dark made him understand
how Arctic peoples were sometimes driven mad from lack of sunlight during their
long winters, and he had yearned to see the sun cresting over the Rockies again.

Three units were involved with Travis’s taking
point. The infil to the quiet neighborhood that night was without incident. The
scene that unfolded after the house doors were breached meant four in his unit
wouldn’t be seeing their families again, including Travis’ best friend, Doug.
He was standing beside him upon entering the kitchen, at the rear of the house,
when the firefight erupted. Minutes later, after the dust cleared, he stood
next to the riddled body of his friend. Travis hardly felt the pain of the
round that had torn through his own arm while looking at the room beside him
and the staircase ahead, both of which were choked with a tangled mass of dead
extremists, fallen soldiers, and nearly a dozen of the unit’s dogs.

The morphine, later given to him by a medic, did
little to numb the hole in his bicep. Instead, he felt nauseous and a
constricting emptiness in his soul as he was evac’d to the chopper. Just hours
before they left the base, he and Doug had swiped stories about their kids, while
enjoying a cigar. Now, the world had changed forever as another brother was
gone.

“Travis, wake up. It’s OK. You’re OK,” said Katy’s
calming voice, as he shot upright from the cavern floor where he was sleeping.
His hands were pale and he could feel sweat running down his cheek, the
nightmare still fresh in his mind. Katy was kneeling next to him. The river
trip had soothed his memories but the images of that one night, years ago,
muscled their way back into his being.

She placed her hand on his as he looked up into her
eyes. He took a deep breath and nodded, trying to think of something humorous
to say but not finding the words. She reached over and gave him the picture of
his son that had fallen from his grasp while he slept. “You will see him again
Travis. You have to believe that.”

He gazed at the photograph and then raised his eyes over
towards Becka who was curled up against the rock wall asleep.
Helluva world
for a kid to grow up in. Helluva world.
He tucked the photo in his pack and
glanced at his watch. It had been close to six hours since they had stopped to
sleep. Cool air was floating over the ground, while the rest of the group lay
silent.

He patted Katy’s hand and then rose slowly working
the kinks out of his legs and walked over to where Pete was resting. “Let’s go
scope out those other passages,” Travis said. They moved over to the opposite
end of the cavern to examine the two routes. The one to the left was narrow
with a low ceiling and a flow of warm air moving through it. The right passage
was much wider and had a slight decline. Both had ceilings that were riddled
with the same type of stalactites and rock knobs they had just passed through.

“Better A or B?” Travis said. “Any thoughts my
friend?”

Pete ran his forearm across his head wiping off some
dust. “Well, if you subscribe to the principle of diurnal winds, which indicate
that warm air flows down canyon during the day, then we should probably take
tunnel A,” he said, pointing to the left entrance.

“Nicely put, professor. I just hope this passage
doesn’t get any tighter,” said Travis.

“A vending machine at the end with some cold beer
would be nice, too,” Pete chimed. “I just finished the last of my water and
everyone else is probably running on empty about now.

“Let’s get everyone moving,” said Travis. “You take
the lead again. Keep Jim close- that nail-biter is the one most likely to
panic.”

The group gathered up their belongings and shuffled
over to the narrow entrance. Evelyn’s headlamp was flickering from low
batteries creating a strobe effect on the cavern walls. “Give yourself some
space from the person in front of you,” Travis said. “Unless you’re the lead
dog, the view’s all the same. One by one, they filed past him and insinuated
themselves into the wiry tunnel.

During the next two hours, their spirits rose a
little with the prospect that the inflow of air meant the mouth to the outside
world was nearing. The mounting curves and shallow ceiling in the tunnel
required them to go from a squat to a low-crawl. The serpentine passage twisted
one last time before ascending, revealing a glimmer of light ahead, as it
opened into a small cavern about twenty feet in diameter with a ten foot
ceiling. In the vaulted ceiling were tiny fissures that filtered in slivers of
sunlight. The cavern floor was damp and gave off the smell from recent
precipitation. Besides the insect tracks weaving through the wet soil, their boot
prints were the only ones present. On the opposite side of the tunnel, they
could see a three foot archway with a row of tightly stacked rocks held in
place with weathered cement. Strewn about the ground next to the archway was a
rusty shovel with a broken handle.

“Is this a prehistoric burial chamber?” asked Evelyn.

“No, it’s an old mine shaft,” said Pete. “Probably
sealed up long ago to protect someone’s claim, or to keep out the local kids.”

Travis studied the entrance.
Could be a single
wall or a forty foot thick tunnel of boulders.
He glanced up at the ceiling
and visually probed the small quarter-sized cracks.
Looks to be about two
feet thick.

The shafts of sunlight flickered in the cavern and
he saw dark clouds parading overhead. The monsoon season had ended a week ago
but the region still saw the intermittent storm roll in from the west coast.
Eighty percent of flash floods happen between noon and eight p.m. His watch
indicated it was four p.m.
This weather could dance around the area all day
or pound us with biblical rains.
He looked back at the tunnel they had just emerged from and back at the
ceiling. He thought about the half-sticks of dynamite in his pack.
It might
be enough to take out the ceiling but what would it do to the structural
integrity of the tunnel where we’d have to seek cover?
The cavern was
turning grey as the dimming sunlight was obscured by cloud cover, followed by a
low rumble of thunder.
Nothing like the present to make a decision for you.

“If that thunderstorm above pummels the region, this
cave is going to turn into a frothing cauldron of quicksand. Our best bet is to
blow the ceiling and climb out.”

“Where do you propose we go to avoid getting crushed
by all the falling rocks?” said Jim.

“You’ll have to crawl back in the tunnel while I
plant the dynamite and blast the ceiling,” said Travis.

“I’m not going back in there to be trapped in this
mausoleum.”

“That’s fine; you can stay here with me. I need to
stand on someone’s shoulders to place the charges anyway and you’re just the
right height.”

Jim looked back at the tunnel. “Well actually…I’d
rather be in there with the others in case they need my help.”

Travis’s lower lip revealed a disgusted smirk.
“Pete, take the group about thirty feet back into the tunnel. If anything
happens to me and this route is impassable, you’ll have to guide the group out
to that other tunnel we saw. LB and Katy, you two stay with me. You’re going to
get in a back workout supporting my weight so I can reach the ceiling. Once the
explosives are set, you can join the others.”

Pete motioned the remaining band into the tunnel
while Travis pulled out the weathered dynamite sticks from his pack. These were
small sections about six inches long but they would serve to destabilize the
rock ceiling enough to cause collapse. He unwrapped the two sticks and placed
them in the side BDU pocket of his pants.

“This should take me about two minutes to secure the
sticks so you’ll have to keep me steady, alright?” Katy and LB nodded and
dropped to a squat. Travis pushed off of Katy’s leg with one boot and onto LB’s
shoulder with the other while anchoring his hand on a slab of rough rock in the
ceiling. Both bearers grimaced and shifted under his weight while struggling to
maintain their balance. He could hear the rain increasing in tempo atop the
cave and droplets began trickling down the open fissures.

With the two sticks of dynamite placed a foot apart,
he retraced his footsteps down the ladder of weary limbs. The chamber had
darkened considerably and more rain was starting to run in along the crevices. The
fuses were long enough for Travis to light them from where he stood. He removed
a lighter from his shirt pocket. “Head back into the tunnel. If this goes as
planned, we’ll be climbing outta here and start working on our tans again. When
you hear me say,
‘fire in the hole,’
cover your ears. These charges are
bad enough with ear-protection let alone in an echoing cave.”

As soon as Katy and Pete were tucked away, he lit
the two fuses then dove into the tunnel entrance. A few seconds later there was
a rolling drum-like sound as a wave of dust choked the narrow passage. Everyone
was coughing as flecks of dirt and debris glinted in the light of their
headlamps.

A few minutes later after the air settled, light
shone through the passageway. They retraced their steps back to the small cavern
which had a waist-high pile of rocks in the center below a four foot diameter
hole. Travis shook his head and wiped a flour-like coating of dirt off his
face. He grabbed a few stones off the ground and lobbed them up at the ceiling
to make sure there weren’t any loose sections.

A driving rain was pouring in, as lightning
illuminated the cavern like a wave of camera flashes. The limestone walls were
glistening as rivulets of water poured down them, filling the interior at their
feet.

“Let’s go. There isn’t much time. Pete, you first,
so you can help everyone else up,” he shouted over the increasing din of
thunder. LB and Travis climbed atop the rock pile and gave Pete a boost up as
he yanked himself over the lip and then sprawled flat on the surface, while lowering
a hand down to Evelyn. Becka and Katy went next. The water was cascading into
the cave now as LB and Travis tried to maintain a foothold on the angular heap
of slippery rocks. The cavern floor had become a broth of sticky clay causing
Jim to sink in past his ankles while trying to avoid the swift-moving torrent
plummeting into the tunnel. Jim unearthed his boots from the brown muck and
staggered up to the rock pile as the swirl of water rose around them. They
grabbed him under the arms, beneath his cumbersome pack, as he struggled to
stay upright.

Jim removed his pack and attempted to hand it to
Pete but his grip was unsteady and he fell backward, dropping the pack at the
water’s edge with a splash. With terror-stricken eyes, he reached for it, but
missed, while Travis grabbed him by a belt loop, tugging him back. “Let the
pack go, damn it,” shouted Travis, in the deafening roar of water. Jim pushed
Travis’s hand away and made a desperate lunge for a shoulder strap, as the pack
swirled by the rocks beneath his feet. At the last second, LB shot forward, grabbing
Jim’s shirt and yanking him back to the diminishing cusp of the rock pile,
while Jim clutched the pack against his silty shirt.

LB pulled him up, while they both looked down the
roaring black tunnel, whose mouth he had come close to entering. With wide eyes
and heavy panting, they felt the rain hammering down into the shrinking cavern.
“We have to go, come on!” Travis shouted. He grabbed Jim by the arm and pushed
him to the top of the rock pile. “Get your ass up there now.”

He and LB coaxed Jim’s limp figure up towards waiting
arms. With the water’s edge lapping at his boots, Travis motioned LB to climb
up on his shoulders and ascend. After LB crested the rim, Travis leapt up and
grabbed Pete and Katy’s hands. He could feel the rock pile slide out from under
his encrusted boots, as a whirlpool carried away the remaining foundation.