A Time to Die (35 page)

“Commander!” the watch officer yelled. “Mass incursion under way!”

The sweeping wall of the modern information center was a massive collection of LCD monitors, configured to be as many ‘windows’ as necessary. A myriad of views routinely cycled on the wall depending on what was currently going on. A senior agent stepped into the command room and put on a headset. “Put it on the big screen,” he said. The man loved doing that, it reminded him of Jean Luc Picard.

The display wall split and a big middle section showed one view from a Global Hawk. What appeared to be a solid wall of army ants moving across the landscape. The room was always abuzz with conversations between operators and field agents. In moments it fell almost completely silent. No one, not even the oldest agent, had ever seen anything remotely like this before. “What the fuck is that?!” someone yelled.

The senior agent turned and almost ran from the command center, turning into the first office he reached, closed and locked the door. He activated that room’s computer, and inserted a thumb drive. The screen flashed and cleared from the normal eagle emblazoned CBP logo to a simple blue screen and the prompt “Lockdown?” He typed Y, and pressed ‘Enter’.

He took a special wireless phone from his pocket and pressed a speed dial. A moment later someone answered. “Director’s office.”

“Sector 9, Wildfire,” he spoke into the phone. “I say again, Wildfire.”

“Sector 9, acknowledged. Lockdown in effect?”

“Affirmative.”

“Monitor and stand by for orders, Director out.”

His orders complete, the agent put the phone back in his pocket and returned to the floor. Already his operators were yelling about all outbound communications being cut. He ordered them to continue monitoring all inbound data and record observations. Two more Global Hawks spotted hordes coming northnorth. Then another passed over the Rio Grande River and found it choked with bodies, thousands more climbing over the corpses. Another drone watched from above as Brownsville was destroyed.

* * *

“The order is Hatchet, repeat, the order is Hatchet.”

“Roger that, base, Hatchet.” The communications officer took the little piece of paper and inserted it into the slot marked “Code Group”. Lights flashed and a computer card appeared. He took the card, slid it into another slot and one of a dozen miniature armored doors popped open. He removed the contents, three manila envelopes with red stripes, and climbed to the flight deck. “Orders, Sir,” he told the Captain. “Orders, Ma’am,” he repeated and handed the copilot a set as well.

“Deliver the other set to the ordnance officer,” the captain instructed as the comms officer headed aft. “Copilot, open your orders.”

“Roger that, opening orders.” The copilot’s eyes were sharp, her jaw set as she tore the special plasticized paper envelope open and removed a laminated card. It had a word matching the one printed on the envelope. “Hatchet”. “Confirmed coded order Hatchet,” she said.

“Pilot confirms,” the pilot said. At the same time he grasped the cards and bent, splitting them along the perforations and pulled them apart revealing another paper card inside. They removed the cards and compared the numbers against a list each held in their thigh boards. “Pilot shows strike package 21 Zulu.”

“Copilot confirms, 21 Zulu. Does the ordinance officer confirm?”

“Checking,” the man behind them locked in the ordinance seat replied. They could hear the sound of his code card breaking. “Confirmed, 21 Zulu.”

“At least it isn’t nuclear,” the copilot hissed under her breath.

“Yet,” the pilot said, then went back to his command voice. “Ordinance, follow weapon selection.”

“Roger Captain, order reads strike package of all on board precision guidance iron without release of ALCM. Coordinates as follows.” He read off a series of numbers, the pilot and copilot jotting them down for backup.

“Confirm package and coordinates,” both the pilot and copilot confirmed.

“Navigator, set course,” the copilot instructed.

“Turn to heading 226 and descend to flight level 250, sir.”

“Heading 226 and fight level 250,” she repeated. The captain just nodded. He was punching into his own navigational aid. When the target location came up he sucked air through his teeth.

“Barney, you got eyes on the rest of the wing?” he asked their radar operator.

“Roger that, Skipper. All but four are turning to match our course.”

The captain’s jaw muscles bunched as the copilot completed the turn and began their descent. 

“Orders sir?” the copilot asked. He glanced at her, into her blue eyes and sighed. What else could he do? He’d known her for ten years. She was only second seat today because Major Lugo was down with kidney stones. Her own plane sat on the field still in Minot. If he didn’t go through with this, she would. “Begin the bomb run,” he instructed.

The B-52 descended until it was at 25,000 feet, racing along at nearly 500 miles per hour. Her crew quickly went through the routine to ready the 60-year-old plane to do what it had done so many times before. It barely resembled the plane that had rolled off the Boeing assembly line in St. Louis so many years before. Her avionics had been completely replaced three times, engines twice. Just about every rivet and bolt had been redone five times, and she’d flown more miles than the space shuttle Atlantis. Her wings, once crowded with eight engines, now only had four, but also four weapons pylons had been added in the 1990’s. Now each pylon carried ordnance. When the Buff had lumbered into the air twelve hours ago with only one third of a load of fuel to let her take off with more ordnance, she’d had more firepower on board than any four WWII B-29 bombers.

“Ordnance, we’re ten miles out, report,” the Captain called.

“I have ten distinct designators operating in the target zone. Selecting to spread out payload across all designators. Fire coordinator has acknowledged the fire mission. Approach looks nominal. Two minutes to release.”

The Captain glanced at the weapons control board to confirm what had been selected. There was a rotary magazine in the forward bomb bay which held five ALCMs. That magazine was dark, and he was eternally grateful for that. The ordnance held by those missiles had not been detonated over another human being for eighty years.

“One minute to drop,” the ordnance officer said.

“You have the bird,” the captain told him, and relinquished control. For the last fateful minutes of the run, the bombardier would have control of the plane. It only made a few minor adjustments before the entire craft began to shudder as dozens of bombs were electronically released. Computers controlled the release to keep the plane from becoming critically destabilized. Anyone watching would think it was disintegrating as all those bombs on external mounts fell off like a fly shedding chiton. The elevators compensated as the plane dropped dozens of tons and naturally tried to climb away.

“Bombs away,” the ordnance officer announced, also telling the pilot that control of his plane was returned.

“Acknowledged,” the captain said, “coming around to 110.”

“Roger that,” the co-pilot said and the huge bomber banked around. They both looked out the windows and watched as their bombs were joined by those from the other planes in their flight, popping their packages at low altitude to become thousands of submunitions, and carpeting the city of Brownsville Texas with innumerable red flash of destruction.

As cities began to go dark sporadically across the country, conflicting orders were given to military units. Some were told to help civilians evacuate and were caught up in infection outbreaks. Others were told to cut off the spread by interdicting travel routes out of cities, effectively sealing the fates of hundreds of thousands. That was until the hordes of infected eventually rushed in on the horrified National Guard units with blood in their eyes and dripping from their lips. Plans that were designed to control pandemic outbreaks of terrestrial diseases were completely useless against a plague whose very product was already seeded within the food chain, in the air, the water, and further spread by bite of any infected animal more than a few pounds in size.

People in power began to think the only way to survive this would be to run, hide, and wait it out. They put plans into effect which had been drafted for just this sort of situation. Very well paid experts were contacted and evacuation plans put into effect.

Near Lexington Kentucky, in the foothills of the Bluegrass Mountains, one particularly well stocked enclave sported dozens of armed guards, a warehouse full of supplies, and completely off the grid power. Each living area even had a Jacuzzi fed by a closed cycle water system. The enclave had a world renowned chef on staff who arrived hours before his guests. His larder was fully stocked in advance, but he took the extra effort to stop in town and pick up a case of Atlanta Bluefin tuna, caught just the day before, with the plan to serve a welcoming meal to his guests of rare tuna steak with dill sauce and arugula salad. Late arrivals that night were met with infected guests and staff, hungry for more.

Many government bunkers fared better, their food supplies being laid in long in advance from frozen and preserved foods. Others brought along fresh food and suffered a similar fate as the Lexington enclave.

Finally, in the afternoon, the CDC sent out their carefully worded and politically correct advisory about how Strain Delta was in all fresh foods. People should avoid fresh meat at all costs. If it must be cooked, it should be cooked until nearly charred. The virus could survive temperatures of up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit. All dairy was off limits. Those with special dietary concerns should consult the first and second appendix. A list of those items of halal and kosher diets were likewise included. Etc, etc. Of course, by the time the announcement went out most news services were only broadcasting repeating warnings to stay in your homes and avoid all people who appeared to be infected. The CDC announcement was classified as news, and went out on very few channels.

The only ones who successfully got all of the details, including vectors and ought-not of the virus were US military units still capable of listening, and ham radio operators. The latter passed it far and wide as quickly as they could. Any possibility of stopping the lightning-like spread of Strain Delta was grasped like a rope to a drowning man. Many simply didn’t believe what they were hearing.

Chapter 23

Monday, April 23

Evening

Andrew returned from the darkness, and instantly wished he could return there. Consciousness returned in a wave of pain and nausea that made him groan and clench his eyes closed. Everything hurt from his head to his toes. He tasted blood and finally forced his eyes open.

His vision from one eye was blurred by blood as he looked around at the shattered glass and instruments.

“Oh, right,” he groaned, “I crashed the damn thing.”

Andrew could hear sounds from behind him. Someone moving in the rear of the plane. He also smelled smoke, and that’s what finally got him moving.

Shortly after their successful Specter mission against the zombie hoard attacking the farm house, they’d lost most of their engines. Landing wasn’t the problem because gravity would take care of that. The problem was surviving the experience. He’d deployed all of the AC-130’s considerable flaps and dropped into as smooth of a glide path as he could manage while desperately searching the terrain for a clean space to land.

“What’s happening?!” Chris had yelled from the back.

“We’re crashing,” Andrew yelled back.

A low hill loomed, and Andrew jammed the throttles forward. The one good engine screamed to 110% power, the smoking one exploded into flames. They cleared the hill by a few yards, cutting several treetops as they skimmed the ground. The bottom of the valley a couple miles ahead was as good as they would get. He remembered lining up and dropping the gear.

“Brace for impact!” he’d screamed out just as the thunderous crash of the plane’s expansive undercarriage thudded down onto hard packed scrabble and miniature boulders. He’d swept the master fuel cutoff just as the nose of the plane hit a particularly big boulder, and his head hit the yoke.

“Anyone alive back there,” he croaked as he slowly extracted himself from behind the control yoke. The only thing that felt broken was his head, and that was really only a cut over his left eye and maybe a mild concussion. The restraints had certainly saved his life.

“Some of us are,” Chris called from the rear. Andrew glanced at the co-pilot seat where he’d last saeen Chris to find it empty now.

Andrew shuffled out from behind the controls and to the rear of the cockpit. The plane was sitting nose down at almost a twenty-degree angle making him climb towards the now akimbo cockpit door.

He pushed through the door and found the rear section of the plane in worse shape than the forward. The crash had basically sheered the plane in half just behind the wing. Only Chris and his gunner Wade had been strapped into a seat. Everyone else had been at the mercy of the crash forces. One entire sheared section of fuselage was splashed with bright red dripping gore. The open sections visible through the damage showed broken terrain, scattered broken airplane and boulders. Somewhere a part of the plane was burning, luckily not their part.

“He alive?” Andrew asked, pointing with a shaky hand towards where Wade was slumped over the control console.

Chris was kneeling next to a body pinned under the rear of the massive breach of a 155mm gun. He was trying to find something to check the pulse on and failing. Andrew knew it was a wasted effort just by the blood all over the decking around the body.

“I think so,” Chris said. “What happened?”

“You were up there, you don’t remember?”

“It was kinda fast. After we hit, I made sure you weren’t dead and came back here.”

Andrew nodded. “Lost another engine, went down hard. Best I could do.”

“Hope it was worth it,” Chris said and indicated the carnage around them.

“The general said there were a lot of people in that house. Dozens.”

Chris nodded and moved over to Wade. Andrew carefully made his way towards him. The other man took note of all the blood on the pilot’s face and cocked his head.

“You okay?”

Andrew reached up and touched the wound, his fingers coming away with sticky with partially congealed blood.

“Yeah, just a cut.”

Chris nodded and checked Wade again. He was alive, just unconscious. As Chris felt his pulse the young man began to come around.

Andrew started to gather equipment. The guns and ammo he’d had just enough forethought to rack next to the crew hatch when they’d hastily boarded. One of the 9mm pistols was holstered on his hip (along with a two-magazine pouch), and Chris had an M-16 over his shoulder. The same one he’d used to shoot out the rope gizmo in the hangar.

“Your guns empty,” Andrew said and gestured at the rifle. “You use that whole magazine?”

“Not my kind of rifle,” Chris grumbled. “I need a shotgun.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“What the fuck happened?” Wade moaned, acting like he’d been mauled by a Bengal tiger.

“We landed at Dallas International and now we’re going to get a fruit smoothie,” Andrew mumbled.

“Really?” Wade asked.

“We crashed, dipshit,” Chris said as he helped the twenty-something undo the complicated buckles of the retraining safety harnesses.

“You suck as a pilot,” Wade grumbled.

“Blow me,” Andrew snapped as he found the backpack full of ammo and other stuff he’d salvaged from the fire station. All the time he’d been going over the final moments of their flight, their altitude during the CAS run on the house, direction they’d flown, how he’d fought the controls and the engine failed, and how long they’d stayed in the air before crashing. As he considered he mentally calculated distances based on their speed, and was becoming quickly alarmed at how short a distance it was. No more than ten miles, probably a lot less.

“We need to get out of here,” Andrew announced.

“Shouldn’t we wait until your Army guys come rescue us?” Chris asked. They all turned at the sound of a guttural yell.

“They won’t be the first to get here,” Andrew said and grabbed the other M-16 from the weapons rack. He checked the magazine and press checked it before verifying it was on safe. “Come on, let’s roll.”

“We just fucking crashed,” Wade whined as Chris pulled his somewhat overweight frame to his feet.

Andrew threw the release on the passenger door and pushed. It only barely moved.

“Leave gamer boy and help me,” he yelled at Chris.

“Can’t we just climb out through the back?” Chris asked. He reached Andrew and pushed, the door groaned and opened a few inches. From the back of the plane, through all the debris of the gunship, they heard thrashing and grunts. Wet, meaty sounds of flesh being torn.

“What is tha—”—” Wade started to ask an instant before a blood-curdling scream rendered the darkness through the shredded debris of the after section.

“They weren’t all dead back there,” Chris gasped. In the red lights of the gunner’s section his face portrayed horror.

“They are now,” Andrew said and shouldered the door with all his might.

“We’re going to die in here,” Wade moaned. Through the debris in the aft, the first of the crazies were observing them with eyes full of anger and hunger. Inexplicably they began to crawl through the razor sharp fragments of cables and titanium, oblivious to how it shredded their hands and arms.

“Not if we can get this fucking door open!” Andrew snarled. “Now get your fat fucking ass over here and help us!”

Something in what he said got through to the man who stumbled over and threw his weight against the door. It was enough. The combined effort caused something to snap and the door fell outward, breaking one of its hinges and hanging at an extreme angle.

Andrew nearly fell face first, barely catching himself and dropping to the scrabble in a crouch. He struggled to get his rifle off the sling as the other two men dropped down next to him. Chris had the other M-16. Wade was wide eyed in borderline terror.

“What the fuck do we do?!” Wade jabbered. “We need to help the others!”

“Which way is northnorth?” Chris asked.

“We were goingnorth when we crashed,” Andrew said. He gestured with his rifle past the front of the crashed plane. Both men turned that way.

“Hey!” Wade yelled. “What about the others?”

“They’re dead,” Andrew said.

“We have to help them!” the gamer insisted.

Andrew stopped, listened to the rending, grunting, animalistic sounds coming from the rear of the wreck and shook his head.

“We HAVE to,” Wade almost moaned.

“Fine,” Andrew said. He slung the rifle and slid his pack around. He pulled out a Beretta 92F. Pulling back the slide, checking that there was a round in the chamber, then set the safety. Wade watched with his eyes huge in the near darkness of the moon. Andrew held out the gun. “Take it,” he snarled and Wade instinctively took it. Andrew pointed at the safety. “Flip that off and pull the trigger.”

“What, you want me…”

“Good luck,” he said. He took the other extra handgun, did the same safety check and handed it to Chris. The man expertly double-checked the condition and slipped it into his waistband.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said. They both got ready to head northnorth.

“You can’t just leave me here,” Wade complained.

“We’re not dying with you,” Andrew said and turned to walk away. “It’s that simple.”

Chris looked at Andrew and Wade, then nodded and followed the pilot. Wade stood for a moment, looking at the gun in his hand like it was an alien lifeform.  The other two men were dwindling into the darkness. Wade turned and looked to the rear of the wreck. Growling and tearing sounds were becoming less and less. He could now hear movement through the brush and feet shuffling in the hard baked scrabble. He turned and ran to catch up to the other two men.

* * *

Vance ran as best as he could, FN assault rifle gripped against his chest, tactical vest thrown on over his jacket. All the preps of his house had cost thousands of dollars and thousands of hours to complete. The only thing he’d never found the time for was exercise.

His friend Tim was a few steps behind him, an identical FN assault held in both hands. Back at the retreat their wives were rushing to lock the house down. Closing shutters, crating dogs, and preparing their own weapons. Belinda was probably beside herself with worry since it had been her husband outside when they’d heard the shot.

Vance tried to consider the possibilities of what had occurred. After working for a day to finish the new LP/OP in the dry streambed, Harry had volunteered to stand watch on the ridge while the two other men went in, ate, and washed up. He was only just part of their group, but as an ex-Marine Vance didn’t consider it a risk. The man had his shit together. It wasn’t until the shot rang out that he realized he’d never pulled out an extra field radio and given to the man. They’d tried for a panicked few seconds to reach him on either of the LP/OP wired phones with no response. So Vance and Tim had grabbed guns and gear and run out the door.

“It’s fucking dark out here,” Tim huffed behind him.

“Won’t help if we break an ankle trying to find him,” Vance agreed. “Shot was east, can’t be far.”

“BOOM, BOOM!” Two more shots rang out.

Tim let out a stream of expletives as both men dove to the sandy ground, carefully holding their rifles to avoid getting dirt into the actions.

“Who’s there?” Harry’s voice called out. “Identify yourself!”

“It’s Tim and Vance,” Tim called back, knowing Harry would identify his voice better. “Coming in!”

“Clear,” Harry replied. “Checking fire!”

The two men got up and rand towards the sound of the other man’s voice. They found him about a hundred meters from the ridge LP/OP. He was lying prone behind a boulder with his custom Sig Sauer SSG3000. Both men dropped down next to him.

“What do you have,” Vance asked, trying to catch his breath.

“People,” Harry said.

“What? You just shot some people? Why?”

“They’re not ordinary people,” Harry insisted, changing out the five-round box magazine on his rifle. It was a hideously accurate rifle, especially with the twelve-power scope Harry had attached. But its bolt action and five-round magazine were considered a detraction by many tactical firearms fans.

“Why?” Mike asked.

“Look,” Harry said and handed over his NVG monocle. Vance took the light amplification night vision scope and looked through it. He could see a half dozen people standing about a hundred meters away, and three on the ground. None of those on the ground were moving. He swallowed as the NVG showed wet stains on all of their torsos.

“I just see people,” Vance said, beginning to get mad, and scared. The new guy Tim brought in had just murdered three people on his property. None of them appeared armed. In fact, they were all just wearing street clothes. Christ, one of the bodies was a woman, and one of the six standing there looked like a kid!

“Just fucking watch them,” Harry growled.

Vance sighed but put the instrument back to his eyes. They were just…standing there. Just standing perfectly still. But what are they looking at? All six were looking down at one of the dead people, then in unison they all looked right at Vance.