Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass (3 page)

“Joe, Patient Zero may be the only key to unraveling this mess. I’m willing to sacrifice a multi-billion-dollar sub and every man on it for a chance at that . . . and then there’s the tech.”

Joe walked over to the bar and poured himself another finger. “We’ve had tech for seventy years with no vast leaps forward except maybe solid state, some low observability, primitive maglev, and lasers. It took decades to reverse engineer our laughable and oversized jury-rigged versions. Besides, what good is the tech against seven billion walking predators?”

“Those are compelling points, but what else is there?”

“Admiral, we could gather survivors and head for an island. Secure it and live out our days at least a little safer than we are here.”

“Abandon the U.S.? Leave it for those creatures?”

“Sir, with all due respect, there is nothing left on the mainland but millions of those things. Many are radiated to the point of a zero decomposition rate. Even if none of them were exposed to the radiation, the analysts predict they’d still walk around for another ten years or more and be a threat for even longer than that. There is truly no guess on how long they might last. Some are saying thirty years or more.”

The admiral looked through Joe to the wall behind him. He appeared to be in a trance repeating to himself . . .

“Thirty years. Thirty years, my God.”

Joe continued: “Unless we launch a coordinated pincer assault on both coasts and give ’em what for with every man, woman, and able child, we will not take back the continental United States anytime soon, if ever. So that’s it. We are dealing with something that not only infects the dead, but the living as well. We all have it. The only humans left not carriers of the anomaly are the poor bastards on the ISS. We haven’t received burst comms from the station in weeks.”

The admiral’s eyes moved away from Joe to a lit corner of his cabin, where a very old painting of General George Washington prominently hung on the bulkhead. “What would General Washington do?”

“Probably defend Mount Vernon by cutting, shooting, blasting, and cursing. Fisticuffs, if it came to that.”

“Exactly, my boy. Exactly.”

A four-man special operations team sat in the back of the C-130, flying angels twenty-two over southeast Texas. The men stared at the light near the cargo door, tugging at their chute straps, willing the light to turn steady. They sucked on pure oxygen through the aircraft’s O2 system, attempting to remove nitrogen from their blood and maybe avoid potentially deadly hypoxia. They were five minutes out.

The men were not strangers to jumping out of airplanes, but there was something to be said about doing it in the cold dark of night, twenty-two thousand feet over an infested area, with no ground or close air support. You just never convinced yourself that it was a good or worthwhile endeavor. Every man’s extremities shook so hard they could barely connect to the static line. It wasn’t the jump; it was what happened after their feet, knees, ass, back, and then shoulders absorbed the impact of their twenty-foot-per-second descent after hitting the ground. Many of their comrades had completed similar essential jumps to retrieve items or information deemed crucial to the survival of the remaining U.S. civilian population and infrastructure. Some jumpers extracted items like insulin formulas, manuals, and machinery; some were sent into big-box hardware stores looking for lithium battery–powered hand tools. Some went into abandoned fields. Some landed on the roofs of buildings in high-density infested areas. Many jumped into the waiting arms of the dead or incurred a simple broken leg on impact—forcing them to take homemade suicide capsules, pills that didn’t always work as intended.

According to airborne infrared cameras, many were still alive
when the creatures found them, although stunned and slowed by the poison. Ironic . . . every jumper packed their own chute and every jumper cooked their own capsules. Better not to think about that sometimes.

His fellow operators called him Doc. A year ago he was eating sand and 7.62mm in the mountains of Afghanistan, hunting high-value targets. That was before the worldwide troop recall. Only 35 percent of the military forces spread across the globe made it back to the mainland before things went stupid. Doc and Billy Boy, his longtime friend and fellow SEAL, were the last men out of the southern Afghan provinces. They fought hellishly south across Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, where they caught a ride back stateside onboard the supply ship USNS
Pecos
waiting offshore. It was a long swim that day.

Doc sat swinging on a cargo net near Billy Boy and the C-130 shitter curtain. Wearing a puke-green David Clark headset, he listened to the pilot chatter up front.

The pilot keyed the mic and said to the copilot, “These guys have some balls jumping out into the shit below in the dark.”

“Ain’t no fucking way I would volunteer for that shit. Hell, flying this deathtrap is dangerous enough. How many we lost in the past three months? Four? Five?”

“Seven.”

“Shit, seven? We never recovered even one downed aircrew. I wonder if any of those poor bastards are down there somewhere, alive and on the run.”

“I hope so.”

“Me too, man.”

Doc interrupted the chatter: “Can I get an inertial position check?”

The internal communications system from the flight station crackled, “You got two minutes to go time, Doc.”

“Roger that, flight. You guys have a safe RTB, we’ll catch you on the flip side.”

With the lack of available personnel, the four-man SOF team had to hit the wind with no jumpmaster. As each of the four checked the others’ chutes, Doc punched the actuator on the cargo ramp, allowing the icy medium-altitude air to rush into the cargo bay.

After checking his watch, Doc looked directly at Billy Boy just before the light above turned steady. The air was thin and cold as Billy Boy pulled himself out the door into the open sky over Texas. The two other members of Task Force Phoenix, Hawse and Disco, were next. Hawse joined the team after surviving a particularly harrowing escape from D.C. Disco, a Delta operator, was the newest member, reassigned after Doc lost a man in the highly radioactive zones of New Orleans.

Doc saw Hawse disappear out the door and keyed the mic to the flight station. “Last man out in ten.”

He tossed the headset to the front of the tube and shuffled back to the door, his portal and one-way elevator to hell. Looking down at the landscape miles below, he saw the pinpoint evidence of fires, but no clear sighting that the power grid ever existed; it was that dark. While he jumped from the cargo door into the night, he thought of the unstoppable waves of gruesome creatures below. Doc’s parachute deployed, jolting him into focus.

He checked his throat mic and yelled over the wind, “Billy?”

“Right here, Doc.”

“Disco?”

“Check, boss.”

“Hawse?”

“I’m fuckin’ here.”

Doc grunted into the mic, “All right, everyone snap two-ninety, gogs on, IR beacons, too. Let’s try to find each other.”

Through the night-vision goggles, Doc could see the curvature of the earth below. He was well above ten thousand feet and could feel the subtle onset of hypoxia as he descended. Under normal circumstances, jumping out this high, he would be on a portable oxygen bottle. But that was a luxury of the past. Doc hoped that because his team had sucked a little O2 in the aircraft before the High Altitude–High Opening jump, they could avoid some of the side effects.

As Doc shot a glance down to the compass mounted on his wrist, he saw a faint flash below him, then another in a different location.

“I see two fireflies—is everyone flashing?”

“Disco flashing.”

“Billy flashing.”

Breathing a sign of annoyance, Doc said with disdain, “Hawse, goddamn it. What’s the fucking problem?”

“Uh . . . I . . . uh, can’t find my firefly.”

“Did you bring your compass, dumbass?”

“Yeah, I’m on two-ninety. I’m gonna flash my torch a couple times. If I burn you out, you’ll know it’s me.”

“That’s cute, Hawse.”

“I thought you’d like it.”

Doc scanned his field of view and checked his altimeter—eighteen thousand. “I see you, Hawse. Turn off the torch—you’re fucking up everyone’s gogs.”

“Check, man . . . what’s your angels?” Hawse asked Doc.

“’Bout seventeen, why?”

“I got seventeen and a half.”

“Go fuck yourself, Hawse.”

The men continued their parachute glide descent. The temperature was getting noticeably warmer, at the rate of about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit per one thousand feet. At angels 15, Doc called for a hypoxia check.

“Pox check.”

“Disco up.”

“Billy up.”

“Hawes up.”

“Good to go, guys. We’ve got about twelve minutes until we hit dirt. Intel says that the swarm has moved west a bit, in the direction of what’s left of San Antonio. That doesn’t mean that we’re dropping into a tropical resort down there. You can bet that those dead claws will be reaching for your ass before you touch your harness release. Get ’em ready. I want M-4s tapped, racked, quiet, and lasers on.”

The men didn’t speak it aloud but they were petrified as they fell to earth, pondering the worst-case.

What if we’re dropping into a swarm? Smack dab in the middle, undead for a mile in all directions.

No amount of training and operational experience would prepare them for that.

When their boot soles hit angels 10, Doc again transmitted, “Pox check.”

“Disco still awake.”

“Billy up.”

“Hawse cold.”

“Say again, Hawse.”

Hawse said slowly, “I’m gold, er, I mean cold.”

Doc began to ask the standard medical questions. “Hawse, we have eight minutes till feet down. Start saying the alphabet backwards.”

With a bad slur Hawse throated, “C’mon, man.”

“Do it,” Doc insisted.

“Rogerrr. Zee, Y, double U, Vee . . . Shit man, sorry. I can’t.”

“Hawse, you’re getting hypoxic. We’re below angels 10—you should be okay by the time we’re on deck. Disco, Billy, rally on Hawse as soon as you click out of your chutes.”

Disco responded quickly, “Wilco.”

Billy muttered, “I’m on it. Wait, how are we gonna know where to rally? Hawse forgot his firefly.”

Doc snapped back, “Good point. Hawse, turn on your IR laser. It’s the only way we’re going to find you. When you hit the deck, wave it around as soon as you’re out of your harness.”

No response.

“Hawse, goddamn it, acknowledge!” screamed Doc.

A faint, slurred voice uttered, “Raaajer.”

Angels five.

“Pox check.”

“Disco fivers.”

“Billy up.”

Nervously, Doc relayed over the radio, “We better be on Hawse ASAP. We’re just below five thousand and I can smell them already. Four minutes!”

Both Disco and Billy simultaneously transmitted, “Roger that.”

They strained to look for any sign that creatures might blanket their landing zone. They were not yet low enough to see the ground in any detail with their optics.

The goggles provided only the illusion of depth perception. The rules were: keep your eyes on the horizon, knees slightly bent, don’t anticipate the impact. Variations of this were repeated subconsciously as they fell the last hundred feet. The stench of the
creatures was nearly overwhelming as they plummeted down into the dark well of the undead badlands.

•   •   •

Disco was the first operator to hit the deck. He immediately recovered, scanned for threats, and unhooked from his chute. They all suspected that Hawse was likely unconscious or dazed from the hypoxia. Hawse annoyed the shit out of the team most of the time, but they generally respected him—he did escape Washington, D.C., in one piece. More important, none of them welcomed the idea of being one man down on a four-man team. Especially now.

As Disco reached up to adjust the intensifier on his goggles, Billy Boy hit the ground twenty feet to his left with a curse and a soft thud. Doc impacted ten seconds later. They regrouped on Disco and scanned all sectors looking for Hawse’s IR laser. They saw nothing until the flash of a suppressed carbine drew them west to a finger of terrain.

•   •   •

Hawse had blacked out at some point below a thousand feet, not realizing he was headed fast toward a large spruce tree. His chute had caught a branch with a loud crack. He hung there for a few minutes, dazed, until the creature started chewing on his left steel toe boot. Both of the corpse’s bony hands were gripping his foot. His carbine was hanging at an odd angle, forcing Hawse to take a shot with his weak side. After nearly shooting a hole in his foot, he scrambled the creature’s brain on the third shot, crumpling it to the ground like a bag of wet leaves.

Hawse activated his IR laser and started waving it around. After a minute, he discovered that his earpiece had fallen out during the descent. After feeling for the coiled clear wire, he pushed the mic back into his ear.

Doc was transmitting, “I see his laser. Looks like he’s on a hill. Everyone spread out, twenty meters, I’ll take the front with Disco; Billy, you take our six.”

Disco gave the verbal thumbs-up on the order.

Billy replied via radio with only “Six.”

Comm brevity was king in this dead world. Hawse wouldn’t break in on the chatter unless it was absolutely necessary. The men could hear the crack of underbrush telling them they were not alone. They quickly closed the fifty meters to where Hawse hung in his spruce.

Doc’s radio crackled with Billy Boy’s voice. “Tango seven and nine, thirty meters, strength five.”

There were five undead thirty meters behind the three.

Doc gave the order, “Kill ’em, Billy.”

The sound of Billy’s suppressed carbine throwing lead down range was soothing to their ears.

“Tangos down,” Billy reported.

Topping the terrain finger, they could see Hawse hanging in the tree, straining to keep his legs pulled up to his chest.

Shaking his head, Doc said, “What the fuck, Hawse?”

“Man, I blacked out in my chute and woke up to
that
chewing on my boot,” Hawse said, gesturing to the corpse. “What do ya want from me?”