Day by Day Armageddon (26 page)

  On the night of the 8th, something caused the un-dead at the front of the complex to move away for a few hours. Watching on the cameras outside the front complex, I could see their attention diverted. Their rotting heads swivelled around in that familiar expression of food for the taking. The hundreds in view of the camera faded into the night. What they were after, I do not know. William and I have a theory that it could be the same person or group of people that shot at me in the aircraft. It only makes sense that they would scout this area, considering its obvious value for sheltering.

  More chatter on the HF band. I was able to make out the following words:
Band, offensive, and perimeter.
I am not certain the order they were spoken, or the context in which they were used, however they could mean many things. We have a few thousand rounds of ammunition from the weapons locker, but I don't think we could repel intruders if we were grossly outnumbered. If they breached the complex defences, they could defeat us.

  The girls have been learning how to aim the carbines, however I feel it necessary for them to get some actual live fire time with them to be at least semi proficient. It would be lunacy to do it anywhere near the complex, as it would only draw them to our position and they would see us flee back inside the fence. I will begin preparing for a daytime outing with Jan and Tara in order to make sure they can fire the assault rifles
when
the time comes.

  I overheard Jan teaching Laura some basic mathematics. I suppose with no school around for her to attend, it is not a bad idea for Jan to keep Laura learning. Annabelle is getting fat from lack of exercise and lack of real dog food.

  Took the girls on a little outing on the 1lth. Hiked out about one mile around the complex so that we could see the main entry doors in the far distance. It was William, Jan, Tara, and myself. We took Jan and Tara out so that they could become more proficient with the M-16s that we had acquired from the weapons locker. Instead of wasting ammunition, we decided to aim for the un-dead at the complex for target practice. We eased inward toward the main entry area until we were about five hundred yards away, and within a clear field of vision.

  I was spotting with binoculars while William kept a scan behind us. The Jan and Tara were already loaded and carried extra magazines. It was now time for them to actually get to fire the weapons. They pulled back the charging handles, and I heard the clicks as they released, shoved the round into the chamber. They took aim. I plugged my ears with 9mm rounds, and pulled up the binoculars as they fired. With nothing really to aim at, they fired at centre mass in the crowd. Through the binoculars, I could see some of them fall, while others had brown dust blowing off of them in places where the rounds hit. They weren't the only ones here for target practice, it was MY turn.

  William, Jan, Tara and I waited as the massive formation of the un-dead began moving toward the location of the gunshots. The girls continued to pick off the stragglers as I loaded the M-203 mounted to the M-16 I was carrying. I had never fired a grenade through one of these before, but I had carefully read the manual over and over the past few days.

  A group of at least three hundred was making their way toward our location, with a straggler here and there around the formation. There were more than this behind that group that finally got the picture something was happening and they too started our direction. The first group was about two hundred yards away when I fired the grenade. Not knowing the characteristics of the weapon. I over compensated and fired between the group of three hundred, and the larger group behind them. I killed some from both groups. The girls were still firing, aiming for headshots. William was still checking our flank, trusting us to be his forward eyes.

  I slid the second round into the launcher. This time my aim put the grenade into the centre of the nearest group. The round exploded, and fragged at least fifty of them. The concussion knocked half of them on their ass. It was like watching dominos fall on themselves. Sure enough, many of them slowly lumbered back onto their feet. Now that I knew the capabilities of this weapon, and the girls had some real world experience with the M-16, it was time to head back. We disappeared into the tree line and circled back, hidden by the foliage, we returned to the complex.

  We are now under siege. This morning at around 0530 hours we heard a loud noise from above, and within minutes started hearing those familiar thumping sounds, very similar to the sound heard when the lone un-dead Air Force officer fell into the open silo. I lost count of the thumps.

  Must have been twenty, maybe thirty. John, Will and I went to the control room and reversed the surveillance recording to a spot on the hard drive just before the loud noise. On the screen we saw the source of the original noise. A tow truck, similar to the trucks that tow tractor trailers, was chained to the cipher lock gate/chain link fence. I could tell the driver had put the hammer down due to the mud and grass they were throwing up behind the tires. The gate, and a ten foot section of fence instantly uprooted out of the ground leaving a fifteen Soot open space in the fence. The tow truck was all but surrounded by un-dead as it sped off into the night. We could see them pouring into the perimeter, tripping over the downed fence section.

  We switched back to normal monitoring mode, but it didn't do much good. I caught the last few seconds of seeing five men put potato sacks (or something like it) over the cameras. Why didn't they destroy the cameras? The only camera left is the main front access camera. I assume they either didn't see it, or the dense population of un-dead was too great in that section to deal with it.

  We heat intermittent sounds from topside, but really have no way of knowing what is being planned.

  I theorize that if we were to open the silo access doors, we would have a small army of beaten and battered un-dead to contend with. I can hear the sounds of their muffled pounding even now. They want out of their cylindrical prison. That isn't entirely true. They really only want one thing.

  Another thing that is on my mind was why didn't they just drive the huge tow truck right through the fence? It would have been safer than getting out and attaching a chain to both the fence and the truck. Unless… they were trying to minimize damage to the compound. John is working the main camera. He can see vehicles moving behind the mass of un-dead. Just when they get into plain view, they turn off the beaten path toward the back of the complex where we are. John counted six vehicles in all, excluding the tow truck. The sun was just coming up. Right now, it is quiet. It is going to be a long day.

  I don't know why we didn't think of this before. They placed bags over the cameras to disable, not destroy them. John switched the camera view from normal to thermal. We were able to see any and all living human movement through the cloth bags as if they weren't even there. We have been panning the cameras back and forth, getting head counts on their numbers. Their orange and red glow can be seen swarming around numerous vehicles in their group. Multiple gunshots are apparent. As they fire, I can see the hot flush of their muzzles through the thermal cam. Their weapons don't look military. They look more like hunting rifles.

  They keep moving, drawing the dead away from this area, then back again. I suppose they can't stay in one place due to the overwhelming number of un-dead in this area. They seem to be systematically herding them away, then back. Pretty ingenious. I suppose they have been surviving on the run since the beginning.

  I bet they had been casing us for days, and they may have even been outside when we were testing our weapons. I don't hear any cutting tools or anything that would lead me to believe they were trying to force entry. The main camera in the front of the complex is still fully functional and shows an empty parking area on night vision mode.

  These marauders have successfully cleared out our front door for us, but I have no idea if they are just waiting in the shadows to kill us at first opportunity. I placed my ear against the steel silo access door. I could hear them shuffling and moaning and beating the walls on the other side.

  On the night of the seventeenth, they made their assault. We were watching on thermal cameras, and also on the unhindered front main camera when it happened. They brought crews of men to the launch bay pit where many un-dead had already fallen in. John's thermal cam had "whiteout" after a few minutes in the vicinity of the silo launch bay. After ten minutes went by, I used my gloved hand to feel the lower silo access door. The door was very thick and sturdy, but the heat from the fire on the other side was immense. They were burning out the un-dead in the pit. They wanted down below, and on the other side of the door I was standing at.

  We had to formulate a plan. John told me that he saw on thermal, just before the whiteout occurred, four men carrying a large box toward the broken area of the chain link fence. It was probably some sort of cutting tool. Over the previous 24 hours (night of the sixteenth, to the seventeenth) I had observed them continuing to use the herding tactic to keep the un-dead manageable.

  They had also brought a large eighteen wheel gasoline tanker with their convoy. We saw this on the satellite image, before it became cloudy. I now estimated that their numbers to be fifty men, and nearly twenty vehicles.

  We monitored the citizens band radio for any intelligence. We could definitely hear them communicating. The code they were using sounded very familiar. Much like the brevity code we were hearing on the radio a couple of weeks ago. It might as well have been Chinese. It didn't matter at this point. Judging by the thermal whiteout, the fire was still raging. I had to think of a way to get topside without detection, and then somehow disorient them to the point of surrender. It was going to take all of us to pull this off.

  Here was the plan:

  I instructed Jan to make a radio call to the marauders at a certain time. The call was to inform them that this was an official government base, and that there are more than a hundred armed soldiers based here, all well armed. If they did not pull out, the soldiers would be authorized to use deadly force. She was instructed to make the call on the marauder's frequency exactly forty-five minutes after we left the compound.

  John and I remembered back to when we first came to "Hotel 23." We slept in a small, enclosed chain link fenced area with a large manhole lid on the inside. In our days since the discovery of this place, John, Will and I found out that it was, in fact, an escape scuttle, designed as a redundancy exit if the others were knocked out. It was quite a ways from the silo doors and main entrance, and chances are, it went unnoticed.

  The girls armed themselves with the carbines, and the shotguns. I instructed them on the proper use of the shotgun in a steel living area. If they aimed the shotgun down at the floor at approximately 45 degrees, the twelve gauge pellets would ricochet and destroy anything in front of them in the steel passage. I was taught this tactic in anti-terrorism training designed to repel terrorist boarders from U.S. Naval vessels. They didn't even have to see their target in this place.

  I grabbed the M-16 with the M-203 launcher, all the ammo I would need, a blanket and my NVG's. John and William took M-16s and two M-9 pistols, and the binoculars. We headed for the emergency exit, approximately 1/3 of a mile down a dark access tunnel.

  Some of the bulbs were burned out down here, and I constantly had to switch to night vision to lead John and Will to the hatch. John's hand stayed on my shoulder as I led them through the darkness. I could smell the fear in the air. We were all afraid. No one wanted to kill another human being, but this was our survival at stake.

  We could take no chances with those that wished us harm. We were at the hatch. Jan would be starting her watch countdown now. I checked the time. It was 2155 hours. At 2240 she would be making her radio call. We couldn't risk using the hydraulic motor to open the heavy hatch. Everything in this place had a backup it seemed. We cranked the hatch open exactly two feet with sixty-two revolutions of the manual crank handle. There was no moon and it was cloudy out that night. I could see the distant glow of the silo fire just over the hill near from the fence we were in.

  Together we climbed over the razor wire fence, using the blanket I had brought from the complex. We were on the other side. There was no un-dead movement to either side of us at this side of the fence. We low crawled up the embankment to level our vantage point with the bandits. There they were. Using the binoculars, I started a head count on them. I counted forty-five in all. Many of the vehicles they were driving looked rather expensive. Many had Land Rovers, and full sized Hummers. They were all gathered around the fence near their vehicles and the large fuel truck used to re-supply them with dead dinosaurs.

  At this point I was at a loss. We were grossly outnumbered and would easily lose in a fire fight. All we could do was wait for Jan's radio message and hope they would pull out. It was 2215… I could hear them talking faintly. I switched back on my NVGs to check the darker areas outside the burn of the silo fire. Funny, I could see the bags illuminated by the infrared beam of the camera inside them. The bags on the cameras looked like a green version of those old propane camp lights that used the cloth back and propane to generate light.