Ghosts: Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (8 page)

Suddenly finding himself facing emotions he’d been stuffing
for far too long, he started to close the laptop’s lid, but stopped short when
he heard Nash mention the Omega Antiserum.
Nash being Nash
, he thought.
Show him something she knew would tug at his heartstrings. Get him on his heels
and then lower the boom.

Stifling his feelings, he hinged open the lid and saw Nash
staring him in the face. Judging by the desk, barely visible under reams of
paper, and the plaques on the wall behind it, she’d recorded the video in her
office. He watched and listened with rapt attention as she talked about the scientists’
many failures in replicating Fuentes’ antiserum. Her gaze wandered all over as
she described how they’d lost dozens of Omega-infected soldiers and airmen even
after administering the antiserum. Then there was a long pause as she stared
straight into the video camera.
Collecting her thoughts for the sales pitch
,
thought Cade. He imagined the lifeless lens staring back at her and the
mesmerizing red light, blinking incessantly, reminding her time was mankind’s
enemy.

After the pause she began listing the successes—of which
there were far fewer than failures. No matter how quickly the antiserum was
administered, Slow Burns—victims who had suffered superficial bites away from
major blood-delivering arteries—seemed to fare better than the quick bleeds.
Another variable factored into a victim’s chance of survival, Cade noted, was
the person’s sex and body size. For some reason, no matter their age, males
responded to treatment better than females. And people who used to shop at Big
and Tall stores—male and female—also had better odds at survival. Through it
all Nash rattled off numbers and percentages, most of which Cade didn’t pay
close attention to. There was one word that he’d been waiting to hear but never
did. And it troubled him greatly. Twenty minutes worth of footage meant to show
him how far things had deteriorated across the nation. Then sixty sentiment-filled
seconds to show him what used to be and presumably, one day, could be again.
All followed by the lengthy rundown on the Omega Antiserum during which the
word
perfected
never passed her lips.

But she wasn’t finished. Scooting closer to the camera, Nash
looked over each shoulder. Satisfied she was alone, she let spill the real
reason she was contacting him.

During her spiel the main word that leapt out at him was
volunteer
,
yet, inexplicably, his mind subconsciously inserted the word
expendable
.
As quick as that thought came it was gone and he was in her shoes and feeling
her pain. Rapid-fire, Cade weighed the risk versus reward of the mission
against one another in his mind. Then, after a millisecond of sharing in the
pain, and with the scale tipping toward reward, he was decided and already rifling
through the center console for pen and paper. And as the recording finished
playing he filled a piece of paper emblazoned with the Denver Nuggets’ logo with
rendezvous times and GPS coordinates and other pertinent details. Finally, when
Nash had finished speaking and she pitched forward and rose to approach the camera,
Cade noticed that her brow and upper lip were dappled with small shimmering
beads of sweat. And further darkening her navy blue uniform top, two half-moons
had spread under both arms.

Once the video quit running, Cade closed the laptop and,
cradling it under his arm, popped the door and climbed to the ground. With
Duncan dead in his sights he waded through the grass and said, “Forget the
truck. Get the bird ready.”

From under the hood, his upper body shrouded in shadow,
Duncan said, “When are we launching?”

“First light.”

“When are we coming back.”

“Undetermined,” replied Cade.

Duncan bowed his head and stepped down off the front bumper.
He wiped his hands on his shirt and said, “What about Brook?”

Cade said nothing.

Duncan watched the former Delta Operator, carrying the laptop
in one hand, carbine in the other, as he strode toward the satellite dish in
the center of his crop circle. “Why don’t you go inside and hook the laptop to
Logan’s antenna?”

“Doesn’t work that way,” Cade called back over his shoulder.

Duncan shrugged and removed the oil dipstick from the
engine.

With the afternoon sun warm on his neck, Cade knelt and coupled
the computer with the dish. He booted up the Panasonic and started the uplink
sequence. When it was complete he logged his response to Nash’s overture and,
before he could second guess himself, quickly hit
Enter
.

With Duncan’s words still resonating, Cade broke the dish
down and snugged each component into its proper slot and secured the case.
What
about Brook?
Mulling over those three words, he lugged the equipment across
the clearing and took everything inside the compound with him.

Across the clearing, Daymon emerged from the trees carrying
two scrawny squirrels by their tails, the carbon fiber crossbow slung across
his back. He approached Duncan and tossed his kills to the ground. “What’d Cade
have to say?” he asked.

Duncan said nothing. He regarded the rodents, then arched a
brow accusingly and looked a question at the dreadlocked man.

“For the effin dog, numbnuts,” said Daymon, tucking a stray
dread behind his ear. He shook his head and fixed his gaze on Duncan. “
Really
?
You thought I was going to
eat
those tree rats?”

Duncan shrugged. He hinged back under the hood, the shadow
hiding the shit-eating grin spreading on his face.

Muttering, Daymon scooped up the carcasses, adjusted his bow
and, walking slowly, started off in the direction of the compound entrance
following the same beaten path in the grass Cade had taken.

Nash had been staring at the computer screen for so long that
her eyes were itching and dry. There was a dull ache between her shoulder
blades—the least of her maladies. Every dozen seconds a lightning bolt of pain
would strike behind her eyes, the beginnings of a migraine headache that if left
unchecked would grow into a debilitating monster.

Ignoring the half-full bottles of over-the-counter
painkillers lined up on her desk blotter she instead rose and crabbed around
the desk and hauled open the squeaky top drawer of her government-issued filing
cabinet. On tiptoes, she found her last bottle by feel and fished it out.

Pausing by the wall containing photos and framed pieces of
paper proclaiming her many achievements, she plucked one off the wall and
stared hard at the 8x10 glossy trapped under glass.
Better days
, she
mused.
All gone by.
She etched the image into her memory and replaced it
on the wall.

Back at her desk, she cracked the seal and spun the cap off
the bottle of Don something or other—the good tequila she’d finished weeks ago.
The bottle of so-so Anejo tequila she’d just finished sat on her blotter. Wondering
if the cloud of depression would lift long enough for her to mount an
expedition to procure some more, she tossed the empty into the wastebasket with
the others. Then she poured herself a shot and hefted it towards the wall and
the photos there. “To you.” Crinkling her nose, she downed the clear liquid and
refilled her glass.

The message from Cade was still front and center on the
laptop screen, the news there simultaneously good and bad.

A few keystrokes later and the reply was gone. A couple more
quick taps by Nash and up popped an ominous-looking home page with the words
National
Security Agency
front and center. Below the red letters were a whole slew
of warnings pertaining to things like need-to-know and detailing how high a
security clearance one had to possess to proceed any further. Save for
President Clay and a handful of others sheltered in place around the CONUS,
anyone with a pay grade and security clearance high enough to allow them access
to the NSA servers housing the top-secret PRISM data collection program were still
missing and presumed dead.

Bite my pay grade,
thought Nash as she once again did
something that before the collapse was totally unthinkable to someone without
the proper security clearance. Feeling a shudder of anticipation ripple up her
spine, she keyed in the password given to her by the President and in seconds
was in and navigating her way to the servers that contained metadata concerning
virtually every electronic communique made before, during, and after the Omega
virus swept the globe. Fifteen hundred miles away in a climate-controlled glass
building in Fort Meade, Maryland, the sixteen-character password was received and
verified by a Cray XT5h supercomputer nicknamed the
Black Widow
. There
was no perceptible lag between keying in the President’s only daughter’s name
and a series of numbers and letters and the screen’s change from dire warning
to a host of different avenues leading to a slew of highly classified information.
Nash moved the cursor and selected a link with an innocuous header reading Data
Stores. A fraction of a second later she was granted access to a separate
firewalled server bank containing an ungodly amount of metadata surreptitiously
collected from Google, Facebook, YouTube, Microsoft, AOL, Skype, Apple, and
every major cell provider in the world. That the facility was still up and
running didn’t surprise Nash one
bit
. She smiled at the pun. A
bit
was a minuscule amount of memory compared to the nearly limitless storage
available there and elsewhere around the world. But Meade was still up and
running and that’s all that mattered to Nash. Before the outbreak it was
reported widely via FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests that funds had
been allocated and released to build a 150-kilowatt-power-generating substation
on the premises in Maryland as well as a vast NSA-run data storage facility at
Camp Williams in rural Utah. And knowing the secretive nature of the DoD and
NSA and all of the other alphabet agencies as well as she did, Nash believed
the construction of the substation had been finished and was up and running
well before the funds were even requested. The latter probably coming as a big
case of CYA after armies of government bean counters were unleashed in order to
account for every last red cent immediately following the worldwide banking
crisis that started in 2007 and peaked in 2008. And since Nash had firsthand
knowledge that Camp Williams had fallen to the dead just days after the first
cases were reported, the data center slated to be constructed there was a moot
point even if ground had been broken and construction had started unbeknownst
to the congressional gatekeepers overseeing it, or the American taxpayers funding
it.

She scrolled past the date now called Z-Day by those who’d survived
it and saw the numbers of captured communications fall off exponentially from
tens of millions of intercepts a day down into the hundreds of thousands. Then
just a week after that awful Saturday when the dead began to walk, the
collecting of private data all but ceased including all outgoing calls and data
usage from the particular number she was searching.

Freezing the scrolling list of phone numbers three days
prior to the current date, which was the last time she’d accessed the servers, she
cued up the first capture on the list. At 12:34 AM Eastern time someone tried
calling out from a device bearing a West Virginia area code. Probably a prepper
with a solar charger for their phone who happened to be lucky enough to have
holed up close to one of the few cell towers with its own solar backup system.

Finished hypothesizing, she scrolled slowly through the list,
keeping a vigilant watch for a certain area code. There were only a couple of
hits before she got to the current day’s date.
Nothing new.
And she
wasn’t really surprised. For over the past week since she’d first started
snooping around the NSA’s servers she’d conjured up a hundred different
scenarios why the number she was hoping to see wasn’t still active, none of
them positive.

After downing the tequila, Nash slammed the Panasonic shut
and leaned back in her chair, eyes fixed on the photo, fingers drumming a slow
funeral dirge against the armrests.

***

Thirty minutes later, the phone Nash had taken to calling
the
bad phone
jangled. Picking up between the first and second ring, she
cradled the fire-engine-red handset between her neck and shoulder, stated her
name, and then listened as the President spoke.

***

Five minutes later, President Valerie Clay wrapped up her
call and told Nash to relay words of praise from her to the 50th Space Wing—the
seasoned group of airmen at Schriever whose job it was to keep the nation’s few
remaining satellites aloft and continually beaming images of a world fully in
its death throes back to Schriever.

Nash hung up the
bad phone
which had once again lived
up to its newly bestowed moniker, snatched up the sleek black handset and
dialed the Satellite Operations Center.

A young female airman named Jensen, one of Nash’s brightest,
answered at once. She listened to the instructions while copying them word for
word into a logbook.

The entire exchange lasted just a few seconds; however, the
implications, if what President Valerie Clay’s last remaining intelligence
asset had asserted was true, would be felt for quite some time and possibly open
up a whole new front in the war in which the nation’s very survival was at
stake.

Nash said a silent prayer as she replaced the black handset.
She consulted her watch.
Forty-five minutes.
That was how long she had
to wait to see if, for the second time in an hour, she would be doing another thing,
totally separate, yet also unthinkable to her before Z-Day—rooting for the
dead.