A Time to Die (50 page)

He’d watched two other pilots do this with mixed results. And always from nearly a mile above them. This was a very different thing to be the one racing at the deck.

“79 knots,” he said and glanced at his ground speed, as calculated by a radar bouncing off the water. It read 141 knots. He would hit the deck with 62 knots to kill in under 1,000 feet. We’re going to die, he thought. His knuckles were white on the control handles so he purposely loosened them.

“I just wanted you to know, we’re all counting on you,” General Rose behind him said in a strange accent.

“Huh?”

“That movie,
Airplane
?” the general prompted. “Remember the guy kept saying that?”

Andrew had to use a bit of his brain to remember, then laughed and shook his head.

“Yeah, I remember now. Leslie Nielsen. Funny.” It seemed like a stupid thing for the general to say at that moment, but he’d seen the way Andrew was hunched over the control like a big hunk of electrocuted meat. The joke worked, and he relaxed somewhat. He was a highly trained pilot. He could do this.

The deck of the carrier bobbed and weaved a little. In the final twenty seconds of approach Andrew worked with it, getting a feeling for the rhythm of the motions. He remembered hearing that snipers had learned to predict those motions to shoot people. His mind was racing as the deck came up.

“You’re too low,” Chris yelled.

“No,” Andrew hissed, “dead on.”

The C-17 Globemaster came in with a speed relative to the carrier of 63 knots. The nose cleared the fantail by eleven feet, the rear wheels slapped down exactly on the edge. The impact was almost too light to feel. Andrew pushed the yoke hard forward as Chris pulled the thrust-reverser levers and slapped all four throttles all the way forward against their stop.

It was 290 feet from the fantail to the emergency barricade. The nose gear hit considerably harder than the main gear, but still not badly so. It hit the deck only feet before the barrier. A net of vertical strips as wide as the flight deck, the nose of the C-17 penetrated the net. Heavy duty Kevlar and polyester weave spread and stretched over the nose and hooked on the wings, the arresting gear working to absorb the strain as the engines screamed in reverse.

This barrier, like the carrier, was new generation and considerably more capable. The netting snapped progressively outwards so the main cables didn’t break. Between the arresting gear and the thrust reversers it felt like stomping the brakes on a race car. All the flight deck occupants were thrown forward against their restraints and the plane groaned like a tortured beast.

The island went past on their right and Andrew gave the brakes their full measure, increasing the reverse G force against the occupants. The yelling of the passengers, both in First class and below, was clearly audible.

Ultimately the plane tore completely through the crash barricade and snapped both cables, but not before it had cut the aircraft’s velocity in half. Riding the brakes hard and engines at maximum power, Andrew killed the remaining momentum… with 320 feet to spare. Chris and Andrew both pulled the throttles back, flipped the kill switches on all four engines and slumped in their seats. He keyed the intercom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard the USS
Gerald R. Ford
.”

Epilogue

Tuesday, April 26

A New Day

The
Gerald Ford
limped back to the flotilla at a stately 27 knots. It was the best she would likely ever manage again. Two main bearings were spun, and a propeller was thrown. Several of the main electrical distribution systems were damaged and still being evaluated. However, if anyone was still not a zombie at Westinghouse, they would be pleased to know the reactors had functioned at 120% for 30 minutes with no ill effects.

All the helicopters that had scrambled to be available for an ocean rescue instead landed on the carrier and began taking off the hundreds of evacuees, injured first.

Only 23 people had been hurt in the landing, and none seriously. The C-17 was in good shape, and currently tied down in the center of the flight deck. Andrew couldn’t bring himself to suggest they just drive it over the side. The bird had saved too many lives. Logistics teams were considering their options.

A helo had taken the senior staff, along with Andrew and General Rose, to a conference aboard the USS
Ronald Reagan
, the only fully operational carrier that hadn’t undergone the Globemaster maneuver, as the carrier crews were now calling it. Andrew sat behind General Rose at the big conference table deep below decks of the Gipper. All the carrier commanders, the Carrier Strike Group commanders, and a few of the larger surface ship commanders were also present. And via satellite link was the Commandant of the Marine Corps, who was currently speaking.

“I took the personal initiative when command authority broke down in Washington to evacuate any and all non-infected Marine personnel and grab as much in the way of materials as possible. I got all the assault ships except the
Bataan
, which was in drydock at Norfolk. All said, about 90% of the throw weight of the Marine Corps combat teams are now on assault carriers or holding Pensacola as our last stateside base.”

“Is there any word from civilian command authority?” General Rose asked, having been out of contact the longest.

“We got flash traffic from the Pentagon 27 hours ago,” a two-star admiral in charge of one of the strike groups said, “it was muddled and we received no confirmation. All attempts to contact secure bunkers have failed. All direct NSFNet traffic is coming back with a failed connection. We don’t know if this is at the node level, a satellite problem, or what. My people are working on it.”

Wade had already found out that currently the entire US military as they knew it was communicating via the civilian Iridium satellite phone network. Units here and there had been contacted through simple telephone calls, though shockingly few. The Navy Admiral continued.

“We’ve attempted to monitor UHF and VHF civilian traffic and found next to nothing. Worldwide shortwave isn’t much better. We’re getting some traffic out of South Africa, and some out of Australia. That’s it.”

“So we’re talking a global loss?” General Rose asked. All the brass in the room looked at each other, and down at the table. It was the most depressing scene Andrew ever remembered seeing in such a group of high-ranking military leaders. “So what the fuck do we do?”

“Take it all back,” the Marine Commandant said. Everyone just stared. “Seriously, that’s our fucking job! We can’t let these… these… zombie things win!”

A Colonel entered and leaned into to whisper into General Rose’s ear. As the senior ranking military officer in contact he was de facto in command. Though he couldn’t order the Navy or Marines around, they listened to him and respected his rank. Everyone looked to him, knowing he’d just gotten some news.

“The resident civilian expert on the plague is here,” he announced.

“Someone from the CDC made it?” another admiral asked.

“No,” Rose admitted, “but I think we should listen to her.” He held up a hand and gestured. A black woman, somewhat overweight, her hair held back in a conservative braid and wearing a lab coat entered. The logo on the coat was a braided DNA double helix with the letters HAARP on it. “This is Dr. Lisha Breda, director of HAARP. Her facility is that oil platform to the west.”

“HAARP, the senior admiral said, “what is that?”

“It stands for the Human Advancement and Adaptive Research Project,” Lisha said. “We had initial contact with Strain Delta over a week ago, and long before the WHO or CDC isolated it. And I’m the one that confirmed its extraterrestrial origin.”

The room buzzed with conversation, and more than a few laughs. She stood there, hands on hips, and calmly waited until Rose raised his hand and it settled. Then he spoke.

“I’m sorry Doctor, did you say ‘extraterrestrial’?”

She nodded.

“So we’ve been invaded by zombies?”

“No General, I’m saying the virus that causes the zombies is an alien one. As in not of this world.” She produced a jump drive from her pocket. “Can you have someone display this, please?”

Rose nodded and a multimedia expert projected the presentation on all the flat panels around the room. She’d assembled the twenty-minute presentation from all her research. From the strange hybrid fox creature she’d gone to see to the infection of Grant Porter, her researcher. It showed her removing part of his brain, and his walking around afterwards, now missing one quarter of his brain and seemingly unaffected. She talked about the second outbreak and realization that all the fish were infected.

The presentation then covered emails and conversations with Dr. Curry at the CDC. When his face appeared and they saw his reaction to her information, the smiles all went away. Especially when they both acknowledged that it was in the air, and in all their bodies. You could have heard a pin drop.

The show concluded with electron microscopic images of the virus in its three known versions, finishing with the one the zombies carried. After that was a before-and-after PET scan of the human brain of an infected. Lisha appeared on the presentation. “As you can see, it fundamentally restructures the human brain. To what purpose we don’t understand, though the result is a cannibalistic and highly violent animal with none of the residual logic functions remaining.”

The lights came up and the room sat in numb silence until Rose spoke at last.

“So how do we fight this?”

“We don’t,” Lisha said. “It’s already won.”

“We can’t clean it out of the food, or something?” another admiral asked.

“You can make fresh food safe if you cook it hot enough, and long enough,” she said. “But it’s hard and risky. One mistake and the food is full of the lethal precursors to Delta.”

“Then again, what do we do?” General Rose asked.

“Hold what we got,” she said with a shrug, “find more scientists. And try to find a way to kill this thing. I don’t have enough people anymore. Many of my best and brightest were infected or eaten. I need more people. Maybe, with enough people and time?” she shrugged. “For now, the only safe food is anything preserved more than 30 days ago and stuff cooked at more than 350 degrees through and through. Water has to be similarly treated, but my people have already come up with a boiler to do that. He says your desalination plants should do the trick. We’ve got simple enzyme tests completed that we can give you to test your water. And you should test it every six hours. Gentlemen, we’ve lost the war against this thing. Now we need to find a way to live with it.”

No one knew what else to say.

* * *

“Any luck with the phones?” Jeremiah asked over his intercom. The boat had pulled up anchor an hour ago and turned back towards San Diego. They’d been so busy that no one had realized there was no contact with the shore. The launch had taken place more than 100 miles out to see to avoid public scrutiny, so no internet signals were possible, not even via satellite. Now that they were closer they should have reacquired satellite, but nothing.

“No sir,” his assistant said. “Oh, a couple of the crewmen caught a huge grouper, a kind of fish? They want to have a fish fry.”

“Sure,” he said absently and waved a hand. Someone might as well have some fun. A little fresh fish sounded good, actually. They’d been eating out of cans for a couple days.

After they’d lost contact with the Azanti, everyone had gone into overdrive to try and regain contact. It was twelve hours before Jeremiah gave up and decided to allow his people to contact NASA for help. But by then the satellite phones weren’t working. Or NASA wasn’t answering. He didn’t like either of those. When they lifted anchor a while ago he went back to his office, had a drink, and examined his saved news feeds. What he saw left him stunned.

“Zombies?” he’d laughed. The world was going insane. Then he glanced at the dead uplinks and scratched the stubble on his chin. The remains of an alien ship sat in a research lab several decks below him, and a weird creature was frozen in a ziploc bag. “Zombies,” he repeated.

It was two hours later when his intercom rang.

“Phones back?” he asked.

“Sir, this is the Captain. We have a US Coast Guard patrol plane circling us and trying to hail.”

“Oh shit,” he groaned, “I’ll be right up.”

On the bridge, he could see the twin-engine aircraft circling slowly, white fuselage and the red US Coast Guard logo clearly visible. The radio was squawking.

“OOE Venture, this is the US Coast Guard, please communicate immediately.” Jeremiah nodded and the captain spoke.

“This is the captain of the Venture, what is the problem?”

“You are steaming towards San Diego. The city is not secure, I repeat, the city is not secure. Heave to and come about to one-niner-seven to rendezvous with The Flotilla.”

Jeremiah gave the Captain a ‘what the fuck’ look, and found the older man returning the same look.

“Coast Guard, what do you mean, not secure?”

“Venture, where have you been the last several days?”

“We were conducting an orbital launch,” the captain said, “we lost comms.”

“I see,” the man in the plane responded. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but the mainland is overrun with zombies.” The Captain sputtered and laughed. Jeremiah took a step back and slumped into the pilot’s chair. “And whatever you do, do not under any circumstances eat fresh meat, or food that was preserved less than 30 days ago. It will spread the infection. Repeat, it will spread the infection!”

At the back of the large open deck of the ship, where the Azanti had launched from, there was the sound of music and laughter. Jeremiah turned and looked that way. “Fresh fish,” he said just as someone screamed. He grabbed the microphone from his Captain.

“Coast Guard, I think we need help?”

* * *

Alison floated backward out of the panel, wiping conductive paste on her pants and closing it back up. “Okay,” she said, “I think we’ve got it.” She grabbed one of the Capri-Sun enhanced water pouches and took a sip. At least she hoped she had it. They’d taken off over two days ago, planning for a four hour test flight. She was beginning to feel like Gilligan, minus the island and coconuts.

“Roger that,” Lloyd said as he brought the main flight controls back on line. “Wake up Alex,” he said and nudged their senior pilot who’d been floating in the middle of the cockpit. The older man woke up, and spun, dislodging one of several feces filled ziplocs from the wall. Alison made a face and tried not to look as Alex taped them back in place.  A four-hour test flight hadn’t meant a toilet was installed. Besides, when the drive was off, there was no gravity. NASA’s zero gravity toilet came in somewhere north of $100,000.

“Everyone strap in,” Alex said. After two days they were all getting pretty good in microgravity. It only took them a minute to maneuver into their seats and strap in. “Lloyd, what’s the reading on the fuel cells?”

“Twenty-six percent,” the man replied. “And CO2 is up another notch.”

Alex nodded. One way or another, they’d better figure it out soon or they’d either freeze, or die of CO2 poisoning. The jury was out on which way death would claim them.

They estimated they were several million miles from Earth. The estimate came from them flipping the ship around and using the MK1 eyeball. The question of whether they’d broken Einstein’s ironclad rule had been made mute by that view. The little alien space drive was much more than a miraculous anti-gravity pusher. Once far enough from a planet, it was a full-fledged FTL, faster-than-light star drive. Worse, it had a mind of its own.

They’d carefully pulled the power after several minutes of watching the stars streak by like an episode of Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry would have been proud, they’d gotten the look right. The Azanti had dropped back to normal space with no fanfare.

None of them knew how fast they’d been going, but after eventually finding and observing Earth for several hours, they came to the conclusion it might be close to stationary, because if it were just below the speed of light they’d have pretty quickly seen the blue-green spot of light get smaller. So the alien drive took them from in excess of light speed to a relative stop in an instant. It boggled the mind and defied imagination.

So they’d oriented the little hash marks etched into the window glass so it was pointed directly at Earth, a distant bluish pinpoint of light, and turned the drive back on. The ship spun 180 degrees and shot away again, quickly blurring the stars to faster than light.