Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass (22 page)

“Look at that thing. Looks fresh,” Disco commented, staring at the corpse.

“Concentrate. Keep your distance; it might be hot. Intel said that the bombs preserved ’em—twisted.”

Hawse cleared the door, removed the brush and the camouflage netting, and tossed the rubbish aside. The two double-timed it back inside Hotel 23, ignorant to the dead that might be watching from the tree line, and the evidence they left behind—a cleared launch door that could be seen by anyone or anything that spied from above.

“Status?” a voice called out from the shadows.

“Well, um, the cities are now what I would consider uninhabitable.”

“Elaborate.”

“God, what the fuck do you want me to tell you? D.C., New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Seattle . . . nothing to elaborate. They are all dead!” The operator hit a sequence of buttons on his touch screen and a satellite view of an island metropolis appeared. He manipulated the zoom while the ominous figure over his right shoulder looked on.

The operator panned and zoomed to Manhattan.

Scattered debris and sporadic fires defined the scenery on the screens. Slow figures lumbered through smoke, moving about in the streets. Faster movement caught their eyes as a small group of survivors armed with baseball bats were weaving around the creatures and between abandoned cars.

The orbital mechanics of the reconnaissance satellite above New York caused the viewing angle on the screens to skew oddly.

Both men silently watched the survivors.
Doomed.
The phenomenon was spreading too quickly and there was nowhere to run. The Lincoln Tunnel billowed smoke from both ends. Fighter aircraft had already destroyed the bridges in a failed attempt to keep the contagion from spreading, locking the barn after the horse had bolted.

It was being reported by remaining news feeds that even those
who had died from natural causes were turning. The men at Remote Six had no answer for this phenomenon. The data analyzers could only propose one solution: Everyone exposed to the open air must contain a dormant rendering of the anomaly.

The dark figure standing over the status screens was known as God. Real names were a useless and forbidden taboo here. The codenames that were given in the tank were used to loosely represent the positions of the people to whom they were given.

God began his career in the Central Intelligence directorate of operations, developing and executing black-ops programs inside the United States. He had been trained by the best, the nastiest. His long-dead mentor had the dubious but extremely classified honor of creating the playing rules behind Operation Northwoods—a plan to execute false-flag attacks inside the U.S., murdering civilians and blaming it on radicals in order to garner American backing for the military invasion of Cuba.

God was the prodigy of true tyranny. His shadow organization had fronted the startup money that gave birth to Google and other DARPAnet giants. At the highest levels of compartmented intelligence, his agency, in partnership with NSA, had pure and unadulterated access to all—private email, individuals’ Web searches—everything. God’s old identity had been erased and replaced with a star on a wall somewhere in Virginia. Shortly after erasure, he was ordered to command what only very few inside government officials knew as Remote Six. God only knew the rest.

Many covert think tanks in and around the Beltway region dealt only in information. Remote Six did that, of course, but they were also an executing entity. They could make decisions, carry out kinetic operations with the resources and power granted to them by fearful elected officials—people that didn’t want to get their hands dirty and didn’t want to know the details. This covert decision node was not located anywhere near the District of Columbia—it existed far from the political radar and influence of any Beltway bandit or dreamy-eyed, newly elected politician. Remote Six, established before World War II, had been a variable in everything from dropping the atom bomb on Japan, to assassination of key NVA leaders in the Phoenix Program, to similar and more recent destabilizing operations in the Middle East. Remote Six made the big decisions. The
three branches of government ensured the balance of power and illusion of Constitutional leadership, but covert entities like Remote Six pulled the strings behind the wizard’s curtain.

Twin advanced quantum computer systems existed deep underground inside Remote Six, under God’s control. Multiple and redundant quantum hologram storage drives held every piece of the human knowledge base from how to make fire to the technical details of the Large Hadron Collider, and far beyond.

Every song ever written and every movie ever made was stored and archived here. The entire Internet was regularly crawled and chronicled on the quantums’ storage as well. When humanity fell, precious scientific knowledge and art would not.

An incoming message indicator flashed on the flat panel, addressed to Chief of Station. God walked over to the flashing screen and ordered an aide to print the document. As the message spun off the printer, God began to read.

Situation dire and unrecoverable. Request R6 option package, uploaded all viable options to Pentagon II Situation Room LAN.

God laughed out loud, imagining the president on the other end of the transmission at the alternate site in the Shenandoah Mountains sweating fucking bullets. He would do what was asked of him, for now. God would feed the quantums.

Possibilities of viral origin: 90.3%

Possibilities of other origin: 9.7%

**Error of +/- 2.4%** lack of data input.

Would you like another analysis? Y/N

—

INPUT US population: 320,520,068

INPUT infection Rate: 100%

OUTPUT based on infrastructure conditions, national supply inventories and archived weather data.

Possibility of undead majority within thirty days: 100%

Possibility of undead majority within fifteen days: 94.3%

Would you like another analysis? Y/N

—

INPUT US population by city|top fifty

INPUT interrogative: How many cities in order of high population will need to be destroyed to hold undead minority at day thirty?

OUTPUT based on 55.2% conversion day twenty.

Cities destroyed to maintain undead minority at day thirty: 276

OUTPUT based on undead density in vicinity of city center and accurate deployment of thermonuclear weapon(s).

Would you like another analysis? Y/N

God had his calculations—the quantums were never wrong. Every time they went against the automated output, it bit them in the ass, hard. Even in situations when dissenting against the quantums seemed the only viable choice, time eventually proved the computer’s AI prescience. At the first decade of the twenty-first century, the quantums advised against going to war with Iraq, and later, warned against any stimulus injection into the collapsing economy.

The twin bastards were tied into the Internet, SIPr, JWICS, VORTEX, NSAnet, and every foreign network on Earth, even if brute force decryption on the fly was required. They crawled information in real time and could make frightening assessments on problems that no one knew existed. The quantums even tied into the RF spectrum, analyzing cellular and other radio traffic. They were designed to understand human speech and output based on normal speaking syntax. It was rumored by some inside Remote Six that the two quantums working in tandem might accurately predict the future out to six months by crawling the various nodes, connecting key subconscious phrases in high numbers of Internet user text input.

Another report would soon arrive on God’s desk, subject line
Horizon
. Oh, yes, God knew everything about this little skeleton. His directorate had been in contact with the Mingyong scientists via encrypted correspondence. All Horizon Program intelligence would later be analyzed and assimilated into the quantums despite the best efforts of Chinese Central Military Commission cyber-defense agents. Not now, though. He had cities to destroy, by proxy.

One klick off Hawaii

It’s go time. The special operations team just departed. The Scan Eagle UAVs are airborne, and Saien and I are monitoring the IR feed. Although gyro stabilized, the picture isn’t even close to the quality of Predator. The upside is that these little UAVs can be launched from the deck of a submarine with little maintenance and fuel required to keep them running.

I received a relay from Tara earlier today with some updates regarding the goings-on onboard the ship. She was also nice enough to send John’s chess moves along with her message.

I love her, and I realize it now more than ever. I wish I could get over whatever it is that keeps me from expressing it more outwardly, even on this piece of paper.

Being away this long only magnifies my feelings, as there is a gaping hole in my chest where I left a piece of myself back on the carrier. I will be doing everything I can to make it back in one uninfected piece so that I may hold her again.

Although I’m not typically the emotional type, seeing those men leave for the mainland made me feel for them. They might not be as lucky as I’ve been. I almost feel guilty, as if there is a finite amount of luck in the world, and I used it all up. To clear my mind, I’m going to sneak back to my quarters and enter John’s chess move and strategize my next move until I’m needed. His most recent chess move looks strange. I’ll have to try and figure out what John meant. In his other moves he would send something like:

John to Kil: K to 3C

His latest move was a series of combinations that looked like:

John to Kil: W&I p34 w34 BT p34 w55
—and the combination goes on for quite some length.

I’ll need to spend some time looking at the board to see what he meant. He sent too many combinations to be only one chess move. Maybe something was garbled.

Maximum pull-ups: 10

Push-ups: 90

1.5 mile treadmill run: 10:58

High above the Earth, a triangle-shaped aircraft was moving at Mach 6, its sensors tuned to the situation on the ground in the People’s Republic of China.

“This is Deep Sea checking on station, Bohai, over.”

The transmission sounded mechanical and muffled as the pilot spoke into his oxygen mask.

“Say angels, Deep Sea.”

“Deep Sea is angels ninety, Mach six point one.”

“Roger that, Deep Sea, moving a little slow today. How’s the view?”

“Cameras are slewed, no changes since last mission. About twenty percent of Beijing is still on fire, no sign of unconventional detonation in sensor range. She’s still intact, Home Base.”

“Roger that, think you’ll have time to make a Moscow run today, Deep Sea?”

“Home Base, that’s thirty-two hundred nautical miles as the crow flies. I can be there in thirty-eight minutes. Priority one?”

“No, Deep Sea, not pri one at this time.”

“Roger Home Base, I’ll stay on COG pri one tasking here.”

“Understood, Deep Sea, just seeing if you had the time.”

The black aircraft continued its hypersonic patrol of the Bohai regions of China. The pilot pointed the multispectral camera at Tiananmen Square for optic calibration and began to switch from electro optic to thermal. The hundreds of thousands of moving and walking undead registered cold. The pilot then began to enter the passkey on his multi-function display to access the coordinates of the facility—a place known by the pilot to hold something deep in its bowels so classified that the mere unauthorized knowledge could get him killed—even pre-anomaly.

Soon, perhaps in a week, Task Force Hourglass would be entering the Bohai, and subsequently Chinese waters. The pilot would be tasked with one final priority, one mission in this area during the incursion, in support of Hourglass. After that it wouldn’t be
safe, considering what he knew might be planned for their exfiltration.

Continuing on its reconnaissance track, the bird took thousands of digital photographs and high-resolution video that would be analyzed and transferred to the remaining COG. That in turn would be trickled down through military leadership to Joint Task Force Hourglass for mission planning. Knowledge of this aircraft’s existence and even its capabilities was buried away inside its multi-trillion-dollar black-budgeted special-access program, from a time when government acronyms and codenames mattered.

Dr. Dennis Bricker wiped the sweat from his face with his smock, adding another stitch to the child’s elbow. Jan assisted, as she knew the patient well.

“Danny, you need to be more careful. The ship is a dangerous place. You could have just as easily split your head open.”

Danny wouldn’t meet Jan’s eyes. Jan had become an aunt to him during their months of survival together at Hotel 23. “I’m sorry, Ms. Jan. I was just havin’ fun and playin’ zombie.”

“Playing what? Why would you do that?” Jan asked as Dr. Bricker looped another stitch, causing Danny to wince in pain.

“Ouch!” Danny jerked a little. “Well, we play it because it’s fun. Makes my friends not as scared at night.” Bricker listened, analyzing Danny’s words and mannerisms.

“Scared of what, Danny?”

“Scared of the zombies on the ship.”

“Danny, honey . . . look, they’re not here. They’re far away, on shore.”

Bricker looped the last stitch and said, “Okay, young man, we’re all done. I don’t want to see you down here for stitches again; we’re almost out of thread and I’ll be using staples on you next time. Got it?”

Danny’s eyes widened at the thought.

“Thanks, Dr. Bricker. Thanks, Ms. Jan. Can I leave now?”

“Yes, honey, we’re all done,” Jan said reassuringly.

Danny hopped off the table and pulled his T-shirt back over
his head before walking out the door. The rhythm of his feet indicated he was running as soon as the door closed.

“He’ll be back,” Bricker predicted.

Jan sighed. “Yes, I know.”

“You know, Jan, that’s not the first talk I’ve heard of those things aboard. This ship is over a thousand feet long, over two hundred and fifty feet wide, and goes nearly seven stories underwater. Lots of room. There are places I’ve never even seen.”