Final Dawn: Season 3 (The Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Series) (3 page)

Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | David Landry

9:30 AM, April 21, 2038

Movement from behind Mr. Doe caught Marcus’s eye. Before he could stop himself, he glanced at it, though Mr. Doe didn’t appear to have noticed thanks to the sweat, tears and dirt coating Marcus’s entire face. Marcus felt his heart jump as he made out the blurry form of Rachel, who was slowly walking up behind Mr. Doe. Her footsteps masked by the sound of the helicopter, Rachel was armed with only a shovel, though even a momentary distraction was all Marcus would need to finish out his plan how he had intended.

“Hey.” Rachel’s voice was weak and strained. “Doe.”

Mr. Doe turned quickly, whipping the pistol around to face the new voice behind him. Rachel was just a few feet away, though, and lashed out with the shovel. The metal end collided with Mr. Doe’s left arm, knocking him off balance, though he still retained the pistol in his right hand. Unable to keep a grip on the shovel in her weakened state, it flew out of Rachel’s hands, clattering to the ground far out of reach.

A cold sneer, the first—and last—sign of emotion in Mr. Doe came as he leveled his gun at Rachel. As he opened his mouth to speak at her, a shot rang out. Looking down at his hand, he immediately questioned whether he had inadvertently fired his weapon or not. His finger was not on the trigger, though, and the lances of pain in his back and chest verified that the shot did not come from his gun.

Three more shots rang out in rapid succession and Rachel dropped to the ground as two of the rounds passed through Mr. Doe’s body, tumbling end over end out the other side. The final round passed through his heart, lodging in his ribcage, and sending him toppling to the ground. He fell flat on his face, like Marcus had done, but instead of trying to move or roll with the impact, he stayed where he had fallen.

Behind where Mr. Doe had been standing, Marcus was on his side, his gun still pointed at the body in front of him. His arm was shaking violently and his breathing was labored as the red stain on his shoulder slowly spread down his chest. As Mr. Doe succumbed to his wounds, his body gave a small shudder. In that same instant, the whine of the helicopter grew louder as it began to lift off from the ground on its own. Presumably controlled by an autopilot system linked to a dead man’s switch on Mr. Doe’s person, the helicopter rocketed away, though a distant explosion was heard a moment later, accompanied by a plume of smoke far in the distance.

Rachel and Marcus stared at each other over the body of Mr. Doe, neither of them speaking as they each caught their breath and tried to recover from what had just occurred. The sound of footsteps came from behind Rachel, who turned to see David slowly walking up on them, holding a piece of torn cloth against his arm. He stopped over Mr. Doe’s body and examined it before nudging the corpse with his foot. Satisfied that Mr. Doe was finally dead, he leaned down and removed the pistol from Mr. Doe’s death grip before sitting down next to Rachel and Marcus.

“Huh.” David snorted as he looked at Mr. Doe’s body. “That was sort of anti-climatic.”

Marcus started to chuckle, holding his shoulder through the pain. “For you, maybe.”

Rachel stood up and hobbled over to Marcus. She knelt down next to him and examined his shoulder. “It looks fairly clean. It passed right through, so you should be okay. We just need to clean it up and bandage it before an infection sets in.”

David got up before Rachel and headed back to the train. “I’ll be back with the medical kit in a minute.”

Rachel nodded her thanks and watched him walk off, waiting until he was halfway back to the train before speaking to Marcus.

“It was you, wasn’t it?”

Marcus looked Rachel in the eye, still feeling no small amount of shame over what had happened. “I didn’t know, Rachel. I was just looking at the computer and something popped up. I can’t even remember what it said at this point.”

Rachel nodded slowly and patted his arm gently as she sat down next to him to wait for David to return. “I know you didn’t know, Marcus. For the time being, let’s keep it between you and me. David’s already strained enough as it is about your… well, whatever it was that happened before. He doesn’t need to know about this; it won’t do him any good.”

Marcus nodded and leaned his head back against the ground. The sunlight overhead was warm on his face, though the distant black clouds rolling in signaled that it wouldn’t last for long. “I can’t believe this guy’s dead. I mean, really, I thought it’d take more than this to kill him.”

Rachel sighed and stared at Mr. Doe’s body. His suit was wrinkled, torn and marred with dirt and a red stain on the ground was slowly spreading as his blood flowed along the path of least resistance. “I think it’s a rather fitting end, personally. After all he did and all I’m sure he was still trying to do,
this
will be his final resting place.”

“Sorry it took so long; this was all I could find.” David held up a clear plastic case filled with bandages, gauze, basic surgical tools and a small variety of medications. With a chunk of metal still embedded in his arm, he moved gingerly, not wanting to accidentally trip and drive the shrapnel further in. Rachel took the case from him and opened it, removing a pair of gloves, a small bottle of iodine, and several bandages and a roll of gauze. She motioned for David to sit next to her and then cleaned the area around the shrapnel, instructing him to keep his arm still despite the pain. After liberally dousing it with iodine, she gripped the shrapnel with her gloved hand and gently began to pull it out.

Rachel was by no means a medical professional, but her guess that the shrapnel hadn’t penetrated far into David’s arm was correct, and the metal was quickly out. Following that was more iodine and a quick wrapping of bandages to help minimize the bleeding. After tending to David, Rachel turned her attention to Marcus, though there wasn’t much she could do for him except clean both sides of the wound, bandage him up and put his arm in a makeshift sling. With all of their immediate injuries cared for, they all walked slowly back to the train and climbed inside.

“So,” David said at last, “What’re we going to do now?”

Leonard McComb | Nancy Sims

11:48 AM, April 21, 2038

The energy on the command deck of the Arkhangelsk was electrifying. A hum was in the air, carried on the backs of the crew members who hurried back and forth as they prepared the ship for its most dangerous mission yet. Although the ship had an official top speed of forty knots, Commander Krylov had ordered them to increase it by a minimum of fifty percent in an effort to get to the gulf as quickly as possible. They could launch the missiles before reaching the gulf if they had to, but they would not be in radio range of the area for a few more days. Without radio contact with Rachel, Marcus and David, they would have no way of knowing precisely where to target the missiles, assuming they would have to use them at all.

“How can you be certain that your companions are still alive?”

Commander Krylov and Nancy were standing around a chart table in a corner of the command deck, poring over a map laid out in front of them. Seated next to them with a pair of crutches leaning up against the wall, Leonard raised himself up as much as he could in his chair to get a view of the map as he responded to Krylov’s question.

“The last radio contact we had with them was before we hit Anchorage, but we got cut off, presumably because of the storms.”

“Storms?” Krylov looked puzzled.

“Oh yes,” Nancy answered, “these massive super storms. Haven’t you seen them?”

Krylov shook his head slowly. “No, we haven’t seen anything of the kind. But we haven’t been on the surface much as of late. Once we detected those nano-robots on our scanners, I decided it would be wiser to stay submerged.”

“Well, whatever they are, they’re huge. They take days to pass by, and they’re covering huge spans of surface area, with fairly short breaks in between them.”

Krylov sighed and looked back at the map, running his index finger along a path that had been drawn and redrawn several times already. “Then we’ll just have to make our move and hope that we can reach them once we get closer to the coast.”

A shudder came from somewhere deep in the bowels of the submarine and Krylov stood straight, looking across the command deck at the face of a nervous crewman. He shouted at the crewman in Russian and a quick response came in turn. It had pleased Krylov, apparently, because his demeanor relaxed and he leaned forward on the table once again.

“The engines are now running at one hundred and fifteen percent. We’ll be at one-twenty-five within the hour.”

“Can this old thing handle that?” Leonard looked mildly concerned as he asked the question due in no small part to the ominous low frequency vibrations that were coursing through the vessel.

“The Arkhangelsk may be old,” Krylov said, with a slight note of warning in his voice, “but she’ll get us there. Right now we need to focus on what’s going to happen once we breach the canal and reach the gulf.”

Redesigned six years earlier, the Panama Canal had received a complete upgrade for the modern age. Twice as wide as it had previously been, the canal was nearly completely automated and its pumps operated off of a combination of geothermal and solar energy. The only human input required to pass through was to activate a control station, though the task was trivial compared to the larger goal. Once through the canal, the Arkhangelsk would have to travel as fast as her crew could push her to reach radio range with the area that Leonard and Nancy presumed Rachel, Marcus and David would be. Without direct communications with them, the crew on the sub would have no way of knowing if—much less where—they should be firing their missiles.

Leonard sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “Just get us in radio range of Marcus and Rachel, Commander, and we’ll be able to tell you exactly where to put the missile.”

One of the command crew rushed to Krylov, a computer in hand, and placed it on the table. “Sir,” he spoke, in English no less, “we were able to reach the satellite. We’re getting live imagery now.” Krylov tilted the screen of the laptop so that Nancy and Leonard could see. Images scrolled slowly through the screen, showing roiling storms over the western section of the USA.

“Wait a second, that’s the satellite that Rachel and David were accessing.” Nancy couldn’t help letting the slightest bit of an accusatory tone slip. “How did you get this?”

Krylov held up the data stick they had taken from Leonard and placed it on the table next to the laptop. “Whoever put this together included access instructions for the satellite; it was designed that way, Ms. Sims. The person who made this wanted whoever found it to have full access to every resource left.” Krylov pressed a button on the laptop and an image on the screen froze. “And it’s a good thing, too.”

A massive storm was sweeping in toward the coast, directly toward the Arkhangelsk’s position. Looking across the bridge, Krylov shouted at the crewmen, raising his voice above the groans of the ship. “It’s time to submerge, gentlemen. Take us to five hundred!”

Shouts of affirmation came back and the submarine began to tilt forward, racing downward at a steep enough angle that Nancy and Leonard both clung to the table with white knuckles. Krylov smiled at them, remembering what his first voyage on a sub had been like, and wondering what was going through the heads of the two American civilians who had found their way onto his vessel.

Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | David Landry

5:58 PM, April 21, 2038

After talking for a few minutes about what they were going to do next, Rachel, Marcus and David all fell asleep on the floor of the locomotive, their bodies succumbing to the effects of both their wounds and exhaustion. With the train tracks both ahead and behind the train destroyed, they had to quickly face up to the fact that they weren’t going to be going anywhere. The destruction of the APC eliminated any hope of continuing on with it, as well, and the likelihood of finding any other vehicles nearby that would be in working condition was slim at best.

The first to wake up, Marcus quietly exited the train with Sam, walking slowly down the length of the train in the last few minutes of light they had. Night was nearly upon them, along with the edge of another set of storm clouds, and Marcus wanted to be certain that they hadn’t missed anything. Flashlight in hand, he scanned the interior of the train cars, the doors of which were still rolled open from when the creatures inside had been trying to attack them.

Most of the contents of the boxcars were unrecognizable to Marcus, except for the few cars directly behind the locomotives. In addition to holding Bertha, the front few boxcars also held a variety of workman’s tools, thick metal rails, wooden ties, spikes and—in the fourth car—a large amount of gravel for smoothing out uneven surfaces. While Marcus had seen the contents of a few of the boxcars previously, he had been under enormous stress while doing so, and this was his first chance to check them out in a relatively calm environment. Clenching his teeth, he pulled himself into the second boxcar, trying to keep his shoulder as still as possible.

Marcus played the flashlight over the interior of the darkened boxcar as Sam sniffed around his feet, growling at two dead creatures that were hanging out of the open door on the opposite side. Thunder rumbled in the distance, causing a shiver to run down Marcus’s spine as the eerie atmosphere of the train began to affect him. Shaking the feeling off, he continued looking through the supplies, nurturing the seed of a plan that he had been forming since shortly after he had shot Mr. Doe in the back. Moving on to the next train car, he found that it was filled with more rails and ties, and between all of the supplies he had seen, there looked to be enough to lay down a half mile or more of track with little or no difficulty. From Marcus’s estimation, the amount of track that had been destroyed in front of them by the missile was no more than thirty feet in length.

It
’ll never work
, he thought,
but stranger things than this have succeeded so far.

Walking back to the locomotive with Sam behind him, Marcus heard Rachel and David’s voice before he saw them. As he rounded the corner to the front of the train, he saw the two of them standing near the destroyed section of rail, gesturing between it and the train behind them.

“Oh come on, David. It can’t be that hard.”

“Are you serious? One of those ties is several hundred pounds on its own. And none of us are in the best of shape, either.”

The pair turned and looked at Marcus upon hearing the sound of gravel crunching underfoot. Smiling, he nodded toward the damaged track and spoke to Rachel. “So you had the same idea, eh?”

David threw his hands into the air and walked back toward the train in frustration. “You’re both insane!”

Marcus watched David walk back to the locomotive and climb back inside before turning back to Rachel. “What do you figure our chances here are?”

“Based on our track record, I’d say we’ve got a pretty good shot. It’s not like we have any other choice, though. Going on foot is a no-go, and finding a vehicle that’s still operational that could hold Bertha is a fool’s errand.”

“So is trying to lay down thirty feet of railroad track when none of us have any idea how to do it.”

Rachel gave Marcus a half-smile and walked a few feet forward, to the edge of where the track had been damaged. She wobbled slightly as she walked, and Marcus could see that she was still fighting through a large amount of pain. The shallow crater in front of her was several inches deep, down to the bottom layer of gravel that the railroad ties rested in. The major damage hadn’t been to the ground, though, but to the ties and rails themselves. Pieces of the wooden ties were scattered around and in the crater, and several short sections of rail were missing as well. At both ends of the crater, where the rails were intact, there were a few feet of mangled, twisted steel loosely joined to the intact sections of rail by screw spikes.

“Come on now, it won’t be that bad.” Rachel patted Marcus’s shoulder as she circled around him, walking the perimeter of the crater. “It’s not like we have to make it perfect. If we can fill this hole in, get a couple of ties to put down in the middle and nail down a few lengths of rail on each side, we should be okay.”

Marcus gestured to the long trail of train cars behind him. “Somehow I doubt that half-assing a railroad track is going to get that thing across.”

“Well,” Rachel mused, “what if we disconnected everything but the locomotives and the boxcar holding Bertha?”

Marcus kicked a large piece of gravel into the shallow crater, nodding as he considered Rachel’s suggestion. “I guess that would be easier, but won’t the AI be expecting a full train to arrive?”

“We’ll burn that bridge once we come to it. For now, let’s just see if we can do the impossible. Again.”