Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass (13 page)

Kil pulled his coffee cup off the hook on the wall. He was very happy to see that his cup was starting to grow a pretty respectable coffee residue on the inside. Since you did your own dishes onboard there was no risk of his coffee cup being accidentally washed. Most officers made fun of him for this but Kil was prior enlisted and liked his cup with a full coat of old coffee on the inside. Better for the flavor, and this boat’s coffee needed all the help it could get. They were operating on low rations and the coffee tasted on par with dirty dishwater most of the time.

He ordered a powdered egg and cheese omelet from the kid working behind the grill. While his omelet cooked, he scooped himself some oatmeal into a chipped bowl. He’d noticed the cooked weevils in his oatmeal from the first breakfast he’d eaten onboard but decided it was best to imagine they weren’t there. He sat alone at the table, watching the boat’s TV feed. The movie playing on the screen hanging above the dining area was
Logan’s Run
. Kil remembered watching it years ago and laughed to himself at the shiny robot flailing around on the screen, 1970s style.

Captain Larsen—commanding officer of USS
Virginia
—walked into the dining area with his tray of food just as Kil shoveled a spoonful of powdered eggs into his mouth and began to chew.

“May I join you?” asked the captain.

“Yes, sir,” Kil replied, trying to talk and eat at the same time. “How’s it going, Skipper? Anything happening?”

“You know better than calling me skipper—this isn’t a ready room,” the captain said, smiling. “But to answer your question, the ship is still fully mission capable and we’re only a week out from seeing Diamond Head from the sail hatch. The only negative to report is that our communications with the carrier are spotty. We can only connect for a situation report when the fickle HF wave from our radios decides to bounce the right way.”

Kil thought for a moment before asking, “What’s the main objective in Hawaii? I’ve heard the crew rumors about resupply but it seems like a pretty risky thing to attempt.”

“Go on, tell me why you think that,” the captain said.

Reluctantly, Kil began. “Well, for starters, it’s an island. Oahu and especially Honolulu were highly populated when the dead started coming back, and because it’s an island, there would have been no escape from the creatures. It will be very risky to attempt resupply with that many of those things massed in the areas we’ll be operating. Also, I overheard the cooks talking in the passageway. If rationed,
Virginia
has six months of food onboard; that’s more than enough to make it to China and back to Panama, or wherever our port call might be.”

Nodding, the captain said, “Very good. Although this would be classified top secret at one time, I suppose that there is very little security risk in discussing it at the table. Resupply is an objective, but only a secondary priority. We are going to need the ability to monitor the situation as we transit west from Hawaii. We are going to need indications and warnings. We have no idea who or what survived. There may very well be a fleet of Chinese warships operating in the green water off the coast of China. If that’s the case, we don’t know their rules of engagement and without the ability to monitor their intent ahead of time, we could be at a severe disadvantage.”

“What does Hawaii have to do with this?” asked Kil.

“You should know. You’re the former airborne SIGINT guy,” Captain Larsen said sarcastically.

After hearing that, Kil knew instantly. “Kunia?”

“Yeah, you got it. There is a Chinese linguist onboard who will soon find himself as the last resident of the RSOC Kunia facility. Our spook was stationed there two years ago and knows systems. He will be providing support to Task Force Hourglass after we clear out the cave facility.”

“How exactly are we going to clear anything? There are probably eight-hundred thousand creatures on that island, and I bet that underground facility is no different.”

The captain took a long sip of coffee and said, “Last intelligence estimates have Oahu very sparsely populated, maybe two hundred thousand on the whole island.”

Kil replied skeptically, “Where exactly did you come by that number? I’m no census worker, and I know it was outside tourist season back in January when this went down, but that seems just a little on the low side.”

Larsen sat back in his chair and pulled a map from his shirt pocket. “I guess they never told you? Take a gander at that.”

Unfolding the map, Kil saw the answer to his question.

As the captain took the map from Kil’s grasp, he said, “As you can see, a strategic nuclear weapon pretty much ended the tourist season on Oahu forever.”

At that moment, Kil didn’t feel like finishing his powdered eggs.

The stretch of highway near where Doc and Billy trailed was overgrown with tall grass jungles in the median and on the sides. They were deep into the Texas wastelands now, on their way to retrieve a mysterious supply drop, represented by nothing more than a small symbol on a cryptic map. They could see the road every now and again in places where debris stunted vegetation growth. The seasonal freeze and thaw and complete lack of maintenance had converted some sections of the road into gravel pits. Doc recalled the faded remnants of old railway tracks from the 1800s around his hometown.
It won’t be long until the highways go that way,
he thought.

Doc had a map in a clear pouch attached to his left forearm, folded to the area they now traversed. He kept pace count, checking their position every hundred meters.

Doc quietly updated Billy: “One thousand meters to target.”

“Roger,” Billy whispered in response.

They moved along an old cattle trail very close to the highway. There was no sign of the undead; only the night wind and partial moonlight accompanied them.

“Billy, we got an overpass up ahead. We need to get on the road and take it across, man.”

“I don’t like it, boss. Bad call.”

“Well, what are you thinking?” Doc asked, putting Billy on the spot for an alternative. He often did this with his men, pushing them to make quick tactical decisions on the move. He thought it made them better leaders.

“Let’s stay offset from the road a few meters, and get as close
to the overpass as we can, and look down below. If it’s infested, we take the overpass. If it’s not, we take the low ground.”

“Fuck that. Didn’t you see
The Rock
? Never take the low ground,” Doc replied jokingly.

Laughing together at a whisper, they approached the overpass at an offset. Doc was in charge, but he wasn’t stupid; he listened to his people, especially Billy Boy. Billy was Apache Indian and his instinct was uncanny. Billy was cautious like a wolf; if Billy ran, raised his carbine, or hit the deck, Doc would do the same, and fast.

Doc took a look across the overpass with the magnifier on his carbine. The span was packed with cars both above and below. He carefully studied the details through his optic; Billy instinctively covered him. Panning back and forth, Doc could see only a few undead corpses hibernating inside cars or stuck between pileups.

Billy abruptly smelled a wisp of rot on the wind, slapping Doc’s shoulder in warning. Billy clarified the alarm with a silent signal by pinching his nose. Within seconds, they both saw the leading edge moving down the road around a bend in the distance.

“They’re coming. I smell ’em strong now. There’s a lot of ’em.”

“Let’s sit here for a minute and see what’s up. We don’t want to haul ass right into their arms,” Doc replied.

A few stressful minutes later, the choice became obvious. A large, bellowing swarm approached from the north and moved directly at them along the highway running under their overpass.

They had little time.

“Billy, we need to move, now. We don’t want to get trapped on this side of them—we’ll never reach the drop if we do.”

Both operators sprinted, the sixty pounds of kit seemingly light as a pillow as the adrenaline pushed them to the west side of the overpass. They ran perpendicular and above the road. The moans of the approaching horde jolted the creatures nearby out of hibernation.

Billy turned his head over his shoulder to Doc. “Engaging.”

Billy’s suppressed carbine dropped three creatures on the crumbling overpass. Doc followed with shots on two more; he aimed low on the second one, the round passing through the creature’s neck, missing the spine and slinging dead muscle and fat
onto an overpass guardrail. Doc quietly scorned himself for not remembering his gun’s point of aim, point of impact. Like most red-dot optics, his Aimpoint Micro was mounted a few inches above the bore of his M-4, resulting in a low point of impact if not compensated higher at close ranges. He took another shot at the top of the dome, hitting the creature’s switch.

Timers and switches,
Doc recalled. The human body was composed of several kill timers but few kill switches. Hitting a femoral artery was a timer. Hitting the heart or brain was a switch. But that was on a
living
human. The rules were different now—only one switch mattered. The undead didn’t respect timers.

The SEAL accuracy bar had been raised since the dead began to walk. A center-mass switch hit was now a miss; the only valid hit was above the nose and below the scalp.

Doc and Billy quickly moved across the overpass like thieves in the night. Through their NODs, they saw a pileup of cars thirty meters out. They’d need to negotiate this Jenga pile of steel in order to reach the other side.

The first leading edge of the swarm began to trickle beneath the overpass. The main river of corpses approached rapidly. The smell sickened Doc when the wind shifted, pushing those rotting molecules into his nostrils.

Doc knew that the unforgiving and lethal thing about a swarm like this was that the head of the undead snake could be led and altered by anything. Stray dog, deer, a still-functioning car alarm—anything.

“Doc, we might wanna hold here at the middle of the bridge and see where they go. I don’t want to pick the wrong side. Could be really bad,” Billy suggested.

Doc thought for a moment about the worst-case scenario.
What if the swarm split and they spilled onto the overpass from both sides? No factor.
“We need to get over those cars and a few hundred meters ahead. We have about two hours before we have to head back to arrive home before sunup. We’ll wait a few, but I don’t like it. Take a look.”

Both men peeked over the guardrail up the river of undead. Although visibility through the NODs didn’t give them long-distance resolution, they still knew they were looking at a mile-long and
thirty-foot-wide mass of creatures. Neither of them wanted to do the math on that one.

The flow rate of the undead river increased from trickle to stream. Just over halfway across the overpass, Doc and Billy began to low-crawl, not because they needed to, but because they were so goddamned scared. It was like ducking when getting out of a running helicopter—unnecessary, but not really a bad idea either.

They reached the vehicle wreckage. The walking river below was at peak flow, causing the overpass to vibrate. Doc again risked a peek over the side and saw at least a half-mile of moving corpses on either side of the bridge. The things didn’t seem to suspect that potential prey was spying on them from above. Some of the ghouls tried to break away from the pack, but returned quickly, again attracted to the loud rumble of the swarm.

“Let’s take a break and have some chow,” Doc suggested.

“Sounds good. We got at least twenty minutes.”

They tore into expired energy bars and drank the wine of iodine as the bridge shook underneath and the oblivious dead river ravaged down a derelict road to nowhere.

Crusow, Mark, and the other three outpost survivors met in the conference room adjacent to the control center. The station’s military consultants, Bret and Larry, as well as He-Wei Chin, the outpost scientist, stood together, still wearing heavy, ice-crusted cold-weather gear. He-Wei spoke very broken English and was sometimes a source of politically incorrect comedic relief for the rest of the survivors. Before posted in the Arctic, He-Wei was a Chinese national applying for U.S. citizenship status. He had volunteered for duty at Outpost Four to speed up his application process. Expedited citizenship was one of the incentives of arduous duty while serving in the U.S. Arctic research programs. Everyone called him Kung Fu, or just Kung, because of his passable resemblance to Bruce Lee.

Even though Crusow, Mark, and Kung had spent the past several months living with Larry and Bret in a place barely bigger than a modern space station, they didn’t know much about them except that they were military men and part of the mission here before the shit hit the ice.

Many American operatives who were alive before the undead rose up suspected that there were hundreds of covert facilities around the world, many using missions to conceal their true purpose. Outpost Four had been publicly drilling for core samples before the fall of man, but so had every other outpost on the ice—facilities owned by a dozen other countries.

Larry and Bret never discussed their military status but their haircuts and demeanor gave it away upon arrival. Just like all the other fresh meat before, the new crew members would touch
down in a modified C-17 aircraft outside the wintering-over season. There were new faces every time, but the same haircut and attitude remained.

Now Larry was very ill, his condition worsening over the past few weeks. Mark thought that Larry might have come down with a bad bout of pneumonia. They used up half of the outpost’s remaining antibiotics on him with no measurable effect. Larry could barely stand most of the time and Bret was often observed helping him to and from the different areas of the outpost. At least Larry was considerate enough to wear a face mask.

They couldn’t risk anyone else getting sick, especially Crusow. They’d all likely be frozen inside of eighteen hours if Crusow was killed or incapacitated. He was the one who kept the generators running on schedule and also somehow formulated rudimentary biofuel using the dwindling chemicals and surplus food fats on hand. He wasn’t one of the expendables, to be sure.