Invasion USA 3 - The Battle for Survival (3 page)

During the first two weeks after the end of the invasion Martie and Preston hadn’t left the farm. They had not realized how tired they were and decided to take a couple of weeks off from saving the world. Martie wanted Little Beth to become comfortable as the newest member of their family, and time together would be the best way to accomplish that.

By 7:15, the soldiers were walking their first check of the farm’s outer perimeter for the day.

Preston’s alarm made its usual buzzing noise. He hated loud alarms, and he stretched, turned over and snuggled up to the other warm body still parked and asleep in the large and cozy bed.

“Preston,” moaned a sleepy Martie, “either do what you do best, give me a kiss and make me content, or get the coffee machine going.” The 80s-style coffee machine was one of the few gadgets still working in the kitchen. The latest house coffee machine with a computerized control system was now useless. It was replaced by the much older one from the hangar, which had been a cheap buy at Walmart years earlier and still brewed a good cup of coffee.

Preston kissed her cheek, yanked at Martie’s blonde hair gently, sat up, stretched and slid his legs out of the warm sheets, feeling for his slippers.

He reached for his robe and proceeded to aim, in the still dark room, for the bedroom door. Dawn was still several minutes away.

Within fifteen minutes, he was attacked by two happy and tail-wagging dogs, who received a dog bone each for their friendliness, a stretching Smokey who had followed Preston into the kitchen from the dark lounge and who looked around curiously for his treat. Within minutes Preston made two cups of freshly-brewed mugs of coffee.

“Life of the rich and lazy housewives of North Carolina,” stated Preston to the blonde-haired beauty who still hadn’t moved in the California-king sized bed. “Even though we don’t have television anymore you don’t have to go far to find those totally spoiled, rich blondes. We have one right here.”

“Oh shut up, you pompous excuse for a man slave,” responded Martie sitting up quickly, grabbing her top pillow and about to throw it at Preston until she realized that her first order of the day had already been granted. “Oh! That coffee looks wündabar, my wündabar man!”

Preston handed her a steaming cup, slipped out of his robe and slippers and got back into bed next to her.

“It’s been a good two weeks of rest,” stated Preston as Martie looked at him sternly. He quickly realized what he had forgotten—the cookie tin of rusks Martie had recently made to dunk into their morning coffee. Rusks, or biscotti, were a European treat Preston quickly got used to, and he hadn’t remembered to bring the new batch she had baked the day before. He walked quickly back to the kitchen scaring the animals in there by his sudden presence, grabbed the tin on a shelf and feeling the chill in the kitchen, headed back to the bedroom. “I think it’s time we returned to the main stream of our new world,” he stated handing her the full tin and climbing back into the warm bed. “It’s been a great rest and I feel fresh. Do you think we should turn on the radio again and see what’s going on outside in the big wide world?”

“Just let me enjoy my coffee and rusks and then we will discuss getting back into the now useless and defunct world,” Martie replied.

An hour later the smell of bacon drifted out of the kitchen. Martie had breakfast ready and Little Beth arrived, bundled up in a cut-down robe, one of Martie’s old ones. It was still a little too big around the back, but the extra material kept the little girl warm.

The dogs were shooed out of the kitchen and they decided to see if they would have any luck over at the hangar, the soldiers also having breakfast on the go. Oliver had whined outside the side door to the hangar for two years, before Preston added another doggy door so that he didn’t have to let Oliver in during cold winter days, when he kept the main hangar door closed.

Breakfast was quick and it wasn’t long before everybody moved towards the hangar to enjoy a third mug of coffee with the soldiers.

“No visitors, or at least no tracks we could find, Preston,” stated the master sergeant in charge of the men.

“It’s been over a week now since we had our last visitor,” replied Preston. “I think the local population is being adequately supplied and hopefully the locals have forgotten we exist. I’m sure they have other priorities.”

“Oliver and Puppy would have barked if they had found anyone,” suggested Little Beth, sipping from a steaming mug of hot chocolate.

“That’s what we listen for,” added Martie. “We know that the dogs are the early risers in this house.”

“I think it is high time we did a survey of our surrounding area from the air,” carried on Preston. “I’m going to turn on the radio in the house and speak to Buck and Carlos and see what they are doing,” he said to the group. The Air Force radio was always on and tuned into Seymour Johnson Air Force Base to the south and Preston told them to let him know if anything important came over the airwaves.

“We are going to head back to Seymour Johnson tomorrow,” stated the master sergeant. “We are being replaced by fresh guys and are going to miss the comforts of our home here. Darn it! I will have to get back to military life.”

“When did you arrive here, Sergeant?” asked Preston.

“We were the second group in here, Preston. We arrived on the third day of the New Year,” was the answer. “And my team will be the last of the original guys to leave. The C-130 is coming in tomorrow at 08:00 hours with a team of engineers and a bulldozer to clean up the trenches and get your farm back to normal.”

“That will be nice,” added Martie.

“We aren’t going to look like a war field anymore?” asked Little Beth. Martie noticed the word “we,” looked at Preston and smiled.

“No,” added Preston. “It’s time we went back to civilian status again, young lady.”

“The wire perimeter fence on the front of the property is going to remain intact, unless you want the engineers to dismantle it as well,” replied the sergeant.

“I think that since it’s the only easy way in here, the barbed wire should stay for a while longer. I have a weird sense that life in this country is not going to be as peaceful as we hope for quite a while yet,” stated Preston.

“Well, they now have a decent amount of our foreign-based troops back on home soil,” replied the sergeant. “The jumbo jets are still working around the clock and we will have a million troops to keep the peace in a few months.”

“I know,” returned Preston. “But I have this feeling that the country is not over its problems, not by a long shot. There must be millions of dead bodies out there, the food distribution can only be helping a small proportion of the remaining population, and I’m sure that there are areas of this country where we would not like to be right now. Plus, we still have another month of cold weather before the crops can be planted. I think that the good old USA is just seeing the beginnings of her problems.” Preston didn’t realize how correct he was.

Three hours later the two freshly serviced P-51 Mustang engines were being warmed up outside the closed door of the hangar. The airfield was deserted of all other aircraft. Apart from the fuel tanks, there was nothing to see. There was a slight mist in the air and a rising sun, still hidden behind small wintry clouds. Preston’s other two aircraft, his beautiful P-38 Lightning and the work horse, his crop sprayer, were still inside the warmth of the hangar. He had totally cleaned the sprayer tanks weeks earlier before putting it in the far corner of the hangar for its winter hibernation.

There was no snow on the ground, and the trees and the white frosted grass would go back to brown pretty soon once the sun came out from behind the clouds.

The Mustang engines warmed in the frosty sub-zero air, white clouds of hot air coming out of the exhausts, and the pilots let their engines warm up to operating temperature while enjoying the peaceful view. Minutes later they headed off to the southern end of the tarred runway for takeoff.

Above the trees and keeping low to stay hidden for the first couple of miles, Preston and Martie flew over the green canopy, not wanting to attract any interest about where they resided. They didn’t want, or need, any attention from the public.

All roads below them were empty of moving vehicles, except for one old truck going slowly down one of the minor roads. There were still thousands of empty and trashed vehicles on the sides of the major highways, but the actual asphalted tarmac strips had been mostly cleaned up, probably by people wanting to get past. Bigger broken down or crashed trucks could easily be seen far and wide on I-40 and I-95 and as they climbed high into the sky their pin-point dots could be seen far below.

RDU seemed empty and desolate, exactly as they left it a few weeks earlier. Preston decided to call up Joe and ask him to ride into town with one of the ferrets and give them ground cover for a landing at the international airport. Joe, Preston’s farm neighbor, heard them fly over his land and was expecting a call. Joe needed something to do and with David, his good friend and now permanent resident on the farm along with Joe’s five sons, readily agreed to take a drive with all the transportation vehicles they had, to show strength.

Preston told Joe that they would land at the airport in 30 minutes, but first would complete an aerial sweep of the surrounding area before the trucks got close.

An Air Force C-130 came over the radio telling them that he was in their general area outbound from Seymour Johnson to Richmond, Virginia and then to drop several pallets of food into surrounding towns. It was quite a shock to hear someone else on the airwaves and Preston quizzed the pilot on what he had seen.

“It’s the same everywhere we fly,”
replied the C-130 pilot.
“Hungry people, mobs, dead bodies can be seen in most areas from the air. And I don’t mean one here and there, I mean hundreds sometimes thousands blanket the ground, especially further north. I flew for a week out of Andrews into the northern parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and in and around the major areas. Where the snow had melted with warming sunlight, I could see piles of bodies, I think piled up by the civilians to clean up their surrounding areas. It’s going to take months to bury the dead. I hate to see the piles of snow and bodies I saw in Manhattan as well as the thousands of dead enemy soldiers still piled up on the highways around New York and New Jersey. There are many more in the main streets and also east of Manhattan. In places like Brooklyn, square miles of plain civilization are not there anymore. It was horrific just to see the carnage.”

“Are there any cleanup crews?” asked Preston, now flying over Durham and seeing what the pilot had just described, but in much smaller detail.

“There are over a thousand men with all the vehicles they can use or commandeer working daylight hours only, to transfer bodies to body depots. There, they are identifying the dead and then cremating them in a dozen operating crematoriums around the area. I was told that thousands of bodies are being cremated a day, in huge pits and they aren’t even scratching the surface yet, the number of bodies I mean.”

“Thousands a day?”
exclaimed Martie over her radio.

“I’ve also heard that the army is repairing a massive trash incinerator somewhere close by Manhattan. The electronics are down, but they believe that they can get it working in a few days and this trash incinerator will increase the cremation numbers.”

“Wow!” replied Preston.

“I have you on my radar system, you are about ten miles due south of me. I’m climbing through 12,000 feet and you guys look like you are higher than me,”
suggested the C-130 pilot getting back to flying his aircraft.

“Roger that,” replied Preston. “We are heading due west now towards north Raleigh and descending through 16,000 feet. We have seen bodies in and around Durham and we are checking out the area before going into RDU. Over.”

“I flew over RDU day before yesterday
,” replied the C-130 pilot.
“It looked like a January sale there, over a hundred people walking around and taking everything they could. They all scattered like chickens when I went over at 500 feet. So be careful; I don’t think you will find anything left there.”

Thirty minutes later Preston watched as the convoy of two ferrets and David’s English Saracen drove down an empty Highway 540 towards the airport.

“Any excitement down there?” asked Preston several thousand feet above them. “I can’t see anything moving in front of you.”

“Plain boring!”
replied Joe.
“We could ride down 540 on bicycles and be just as safe. Nothing has changed except that I always feel eyes all around me, looking at us mean-like. Now I know what it must have been like hunting in Africa. The roads have less carnage, metal and bodies. We stayed away from Highway 55 and Apex. I don’t really want to go there just yet as I’m sure that the reserves of food in the area are all used up and it’s all down to Air Force deliveries until further notice. I’m sure we will get an answer at RDU.”

The convoy of three vehicles passed peacefully through their usual airport gate and onto the tarmac. The gates were now hanging broken and open at the international airport as the two Mustangs came in several minutes later getting the all clear from their mobile ground control. Both aircraft’s guns were loaded with .50 caliber rounds as well as a couple of old air-to-ground rockets and were ready for any trouble, but it was nice to have ground clearance first.

Preston and Martie stood up, stretched, and worked their way out of the cockpits and down onto terra firma. Joe and David walked up to meet them while Joe’s sons kept their fingers on the triggers of the vehicle machine guns now surrounding the P-51s.

Everyone looked around visually taking in the changes since their last visit nearly a month earlier.

Half the nearby terminal was blackened and burned. A couple of the aircraft Preston had seen on the tarmac on their last visit were nothing more than blackened heaps. The large windows of the air terminal were mostly broken, as well as all of the terminal doors. Even some of the aircraft walkways were broken, and one was even missing. Preston couldn’t understand what a whole one-ton walkway unit could be used for.