The Fallen (14 page)

“I am just stating the facts Sir,” said Zakorski, “Whatever it was I believe it came from beyond high-earth-orbit; maybe some kind of natural occurrence.”

That was twelve days ago.  Since then little more about the origins of the event had become clear to her or any of the other staff manning the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station.  What had become clear was the scale of the devastation the event had caused.  They had lost contact with Vandenberg Air Force Base; and the much nearer one - Peterson.  When they first sent out patrols, in full bio-chemical protection, they came across electrical fires and the ‘injured’ as they were calling them.  But after a few days, the ‘injured’ had become the ‘walking wounded’, then later the running wounded.  On the eighth day, a two-man patrol failed to return and had not been heard from since.  Rumours spread around the base of the chaos in the town, with stories of cannibalism and mass rape.  Order at the Mountain had become harder and harder to enforce, with some of the men refusing to go on patrol and others demanding to be allowed to go on leave to search for their families.  Two of the local recruits had returned from patrol with one of their wives and the other’s children.  The General had taken the woman and children in but thrown the men into the brig, telling the garrison that anyone else who brought wounded into the Mountain would be shot, along with any ‘guests’.  On the tenth day, the guards on the main gate shot and killed a technician who was trying to escape the base in a jeep; afterwards it came out that he had a pregnant wife and they lived not far away at Woodland Park. 

Four ‘affected’ soldiers from the small garrison outside and the General from Peterson, who had been retrieved by a patrol, were being kept under observation to see if they recovered.  In a manner of speaking they did.  By the end of the first day they had ‘woken up’ but were almost totally mindless, by the end of the second they were crawling and grasping for any food they were given, by the end of the third day they were starting to stand and by day four they were walking, but babbling incoherently.  After the Peterson General was bludgeoned to death by the others they were kept in isolation from each other.  Eleven days after they had been brought back they were able to understand commands and carry out simple tasks and some could repeat words and ask for things, such as food.  Still their level of understanding was not much beyond a chimpanzee or an intelligent family dog.  They had none of the self-control normally present; they were unpredictable and prone to aggressive and uncontrolled emotional outbursts.  Zakorski had been watching their development with growing unease.  Reports also came in that many of the city residents had survived the first days, most likely thanks to heavy rains providing ample drinking water in the streets and dampening the fires.  But disease was now taking its toll, particularly as the survivors had quickly taken to eating the rotting dead. 

The Mountain originally had supplies to last a full garrison in comfort up to thirty days and if rationed, much longer.  In addition the Mountain had been operating on ‘warm standby’ – meaning they had only had a skeleton crew and caretaker garrison; most of the previous NORAD functions had been moved to Peterson a year before.  Once the General had found out that Peterson was down, he had ordered patrols to bring back as many supplies from there as they could.  In that sense they were more than secure and the Mountain itself was impenetrable once the blast doors were closed.  That wasn’t what worried her.  The General had control of things for now, but how long would that last?  If there was one thing she believed about the military, it was that it needed orders to follow; orders from a civilian command. But that command was now silent.  They had repaired the damage to the radio masts outside but still had no contact with any other ‘survivors’ beyond the mountain. 

“Captain Zakorski,” said the voice of her Second Lieutenant, “There are two men outside the front gate, one of them says he knows you.”

“What, survivors?” she replied, initially more surprised that anyone else had made it than by the fact that one of them knew her.

“The General asks that you go to the front gate.”

She got up from her desk, put on her side-arm and set off to the gate.  The Cheyenne complex still awed her, it was huge, a virtual city inside a hollowed out mountain.  Even with parts of it mothballed it was still impressive and the corridors buzzed with activity; men cataloguing stores now being stacked in corridors and repairing vehicles in the large depot.  It took her nearly ten minutes of walking at a quick pace, to reach the main gate, where the General was already waiting, looking at a video monitor.  “Do you know these men Captain?” he said, pointing at the screen.

One of the men on the screen looked familiar and was saying to the guard, “Za-kor-ski, no I know she works here, she is my friend yah?”

“Your friend?” said the General.

“Uh not friend, Sir, but I do know him, the other one I don’t know.”  Of all the people left in the world.  Under normal circumstances she would have been angry, but the sight of him made her feel good for the first time since the event.

“Well they seem to be unaffected,” said the General, “a little ratty maybe, but unaffected,” he motioned to the officer near him, “Let them in.”

The heavy steel blast door of the main gate opened slowly to the sound of a warning siren.  Two dishevelled figures were silhouetted in the daylight shining through the entrance, one pushing what looked like an antique motorcycle.

“Marius Hemalstein,” she said without extending her hand.

“Is that all I get? My colleague and I have been on quite a journey.  By the way I really was planning on calling you but there was this problem with the end of the world.”

“Shut the fuck up,” she said, smiling and then pointing at the other man, “Who is this?”

“This is Brian Wyndham, he is my esteemed colleague from S.E.T.I. – or should I say that along with myself, he is all that is left of that once great institution.”

“The alien guys right?” said the General, “Great.”

“You weren’t told?” said Brian.

“Told what?” said the General.

“We convened an emergency meeting,” said Brian, “We thought you would have got the message through the official channels, or whatever it is you guys use.  We think we know what caused this.”

“You know what caused it?” said Zakorski, “Well that’s a hell of lot more than we know, tell us everything.”

Marius and Brian explained all they knew of the event, which they called the
swathe
, and what they had seen on their way to Cheyenne.  Their current theory was that the swathe was some sort of cloud of heavy particles, like radioactive iron-filings held together in a magnetised web; individually too small to penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere.  The devastation was in part caused by the interaction of these particles with the Earth’s own magnetic field, causing an electro-magnetic pulse, although they conceded that there was more they didn’t know about the swathe than they did.  From the account of their journey they were lucky to have made it to the Mountain alive.  After escaping from a hospital and seeking refuge in a country club for three days, they had made their way back into town under the cover of darkness to find most of the inhabitants had been killed by smoke from the huge fires that had torn through the city.  They had retrieved Marius’ motorbike from a hospital parking lot and taken it to a repair shop where he had somehow fixed it using only spare parts that had been kept ‘protected’ in metal boxes.  They admitted to killing people on their way, including a boy in a boat, a mechanic and several more on the road who had attacked them when they stopped to rest at a house outside Salt Lake City.  They were armed with shotguns they had found at the country club skeet shooting range but had run out of ammunition by the time they were halfway to Colorado.  After that they did not risk stopping, other than for what little siphoned gas they needed and they had relied on speed more than anything else to get them to the Mountain alive. 

“But why here?” she asked.

“Because this was the only place I knew for sure had protection against EMP,” said Marius, “Now do you have cold beer, some food and a couple of beds, I think we now need to pass out for a few days?” 

The General nodded and she took Marius and Brian to their quarters; bunks at least were in plentiful supply due to the smaller than usual contingent at the Mountain.  She brought them some food and soft drinks from the mess and left them to sleep.

Returning to the General she asked, “So what do you think Sir?”

“You think those boys were telling the truth Captain?” he said.

“I know Marius at least works at S.E.T.I. and from what I know of their monitoring capabilities, they could have detected this swathe.  It makes sense Sir.”

The General looked thoughtful.  “So it’s everywhere then.  God help us.”

“What now?”

“Now?” he said, “Now we have two choices, we either hole up in here indefinitely or we start clearing the city.  And I never was one to stay on the defensive.”

“Clearing Sir?”

“Clearing out the savages Captain.  If we can’t train them then we need to neutralise the threat.”

“But Sir, they’re, they’re getting better it seems to me; they are learning, they are even speaking,” said Zakorski.

“Don’t seem that way to me Captain,” said the General, “Have you been outside the Mountain?  Those aren’t men out there; more like a bunch of vicious monkeys spreading disease and fear.  You saw what the ones we brought back did; they just tore him apart, I saw them rip his goddamn jaw off.  I almost shot all four of them right there, perhaps I should have.”

“But the wife and kids of the soldiers in the brig, they seem more docile Sir.”

“Well I disagree Captain, that little boy is as feral as they come, but I do believe the woman and the girl have stopped attacking their cell.  Is that progress?  You tell me.” 

“What are our orders Sir, I mean standing orders for something like this?” said Zakorski.

“Orders?” the General laughed, “Well standing orders in the case that contact with the civilian leadership is lost, would be to eliminate the enemy and maintain order; and that is exactly what I intend to do Captain.”

“But Sir this is different, this is…”

The General walked away from her, down the tunnel into the darkness. “That will be all Captain.”

She felt uneasy; the military without orders was like a dog without a leash, you had no idea what alley it might run down.  Back in Afghanistan, stuck out on the border with Pakistan, her Air Force mobile radar detail had been embedded with a platoon of marines in a remote outpost.  Her team was supposed to be monitoring Taliban movements and passing them on to the Second Lieutenant in charge of the marine platoon.  The problem was the Second Lieutenant had his own ideas about how to deal with the insurgency.  He said he didn’t need Air Force gadgetry, just his rifle and his men.  After the second massacre occurred, one of his men couldn’t take it and had Skyped his parents, who in turn had called in the brass.  By that point the platoon had turned a minor insurgency by a few radical jihadist outsiders into a major insurrection by the local population.  She’d seen a marine gun down two old men with long grey beards who’d fearlessly charged the outpost brandishing a single Martini-Henry rifle between them.  Like many others in the surrounding villages they’d lost everything; their family, their homes.  When she’d first arrived she’d had tea with the same men and remembered how calm and good-natured they’d seemed, they were no radical Talibs, of that she was certain.

When the brass finally arrived to clear up the mess they called it ‘a breakdown in the chain of command,’ and sent all the officers to ‘Clear, Hold, Build’ training to teach them how to deal respectfully with local communities.  A
breakdown in the chain of command
, not the insane actions of a commanding officer gone bad; it was a subtle admission she thought.  Was this what most of her brothers in arms would be like if they too were left to their own devices for too long?  While the senior officers were investigating, she’d taken the opportunity to request a transfer and at the end of her tour she’d wound up in training for NORAD.  She didn’t go to authorities when she figured she had PTSD; drinking and running was her therapy and it was a therapy so common it would slip under even NORAD’s radar.  She knew the Air Force didn’t genuinely care about her mental health, but they did care who had access to their most sensitive facilities and she knew they regularly pulled the ‘private’ medical files of all active personnel. 

She was glad that Marius and his friend had turned up when they did, even if the news they brought confirmed what she had already suspected.  The military was on its own - and they would soon need to start thinking for themselves. 

Chapter 24

Tim drove through the gates of the US embassy compound, located on the empty outskirts of town.  It looked deserted, but after his experience at
The Lion Den
he was cautious.  Without turning off the engine he got out and slid the heavy steel gate shut; it weighed a ton and must have been twelve feet high, with sharp spikes running across the top.  The guard tower to his left was eerily silent.  

The embassy had been built to withstand an assault by a group of committed terrorists but he had no idea how it would hold up against a frenzied mob.  He went back to the car, Sarah was looking at him through the window, apparently trapped with no idea how to undo her seatbelt or open the door.  He drove around the length of the wall; higher than the gate, it seemed secure. 

The compound consisted of half-a-mile square of the red-brown dirt that made up South Sudan and was littered with embassy vehicles, small one-story residential buildings, storage sheds and rows of shade trees.  In its centre stood the main embassy building; three stories high with no windows at ground level and a pool off to the side, the water brown, caked with a film of dust.  The building shimmered as if it shouldn’t be there.  As he circled around some trees to the front of the building he saw something that at once horrified him and yet gave him new hope.  A pile of fifty or so charred bodies lay smouldering on the embassy lawn.  He picked up his gun and got out, walking over to the main entrance.  The door to the embassy had dried blood smeared on and around the handles and the ground was stained dark where drag marks led to the ghastly heap.  He tried pulling but the doors were locked.  He was about to try shooting them open when he heard the sound of banging behind him and a frantic voice yelling, “Open the gate! Open the Gate!”