First Wave (The Travis Combs Post-Apocalypse Thrillers)

Copyright
2014 by JT Sawyer

No
part of this book may be transmitted in any form whether electronic, recording,
mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without written permission of the
publisher.

This
is a work of fiction and the characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, incidents,
or events is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

This book came about as the result of many colorful
experiences working as a fulltime survival instructor. Much of this has involved
teaching field-courses for the military special operations community and many
of their expressions and attitudes wove their way into this story. In addition,
I’ve led many multi-week survival trips, where we were so immersed in living
off the land that the only reality became the group, at hand, trying to find
food, water, and shelter under harsh living conditions. The idea for people coming
off of an extended river trip, and finding their world forever changed, came
from a friend who guides Colorado River trips through the Grand Canyon and had
gone on an extended trip with clients during the tragedy of 9/11.

I’ve blended some of these elements into an
action-packed story that combines bushcraft, fighting tactics, evasion, and self-reliance
in a post-apocalyptic setting.  I hope you enjoy this first book as much as I
enjoyed writing it. Stay tuned for more volumes in the series. You can also get
updates by signing up for my email notices at
[email protected]
or visiting
http://www.jtsawyer.com

Doctor Robert James Pearson lowered the silver-rimmed
glasses on his nose, as he gazed at the clear vial before him. His technicians in
the research lab next to his office had gone home for the day. The only noise
came from the hallway outside his office where he could hear the comforting
footfalls of security personnel doing their evening sweeps in the high-security
facility on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He stroked his thin, grey
goatee while marveling at the precious substance in the vial.

After thirty-eight months of toil in his lab, his research
for the Department of BioDefense was complete. The viral load he, and the other
scientists had perfected in the modified avian flu strain, had passed the
initial series of animal testing and the antidote was ready to use, if
necessary. They had painstakingly taken the original 1918 virus and magnified
its replication capabilities.
This super virus dramatically increases the
onset of necrotizing bronchiolitis while instigating diffuse alveolar damage.
The subject will typically perish from internal hemorrhaging within twenty four
hours of exposure,
he proudly stated in a recent briefing to his funders.

The Biodefense officials had assured him that his
research in neurophysiology and virology was critical to arriving at an
antidote before terrorists could complete their own strain of the new virus.
Now, over three years later, he could wrap up this voluminous project and
resume his work at Stanford. Pearson was part of a six man group of researchers
who conferred through daily videoconferences, comparing research data. They
were the brilliant minds behind the resulting antidote that could potentially
save millions of lives.

As he pondered the accolades he would receive from
his contemporaries in the scientific community, the landline phone on his desk
rang, jolting him back to the present. Very few calls ever came in on this
phone and he picked up the receiver, squinting his eyes and tensing his lower
lip.

The trembling voice on the other end was his colleague
Doctor Emory from Chicago. “Are you alone?”

“Yes. It’s a little too quiet in here, to be honest,”
Pearson said. “Only the security guards and maintenance staff at this hour.”

“There isn’t much time. You need to leave now,” the
other man bellowed. “Take your notes, laptop, and the vaccine with you. Somehow,
the virus has been unleashed in Europe. Soon, it will be on our doorstep.”

Pearson interrupted his friend’s hurried
exclamations, “What are you talking about? How do you know?” said Pearson,
clutching the phone and thrusting his shoulders forward over the edge of the
wooden desk.

“That new agency we met with last week…and that
woman…they came to my office looking for me a few hours ago. They killed my assistants
and took everything,” he paused, his breath racing over the phone. “I escaped
but the others…they’re coming for us all. Get out of there now. You have to
disappear. Go to your fall back location.”

“Wait, what…what do you mean….why would they….” Pearson
paused and his eyebrows scrunched together, as he heard the sound of muffled
gunfire coming from the hallway. His eyes darted to the brown door leading into
his small office. He tried to dismiss the noise as a janitor’s cart tipping
over, or another sound-- anything other than what he had heard. Then, the
rhythmic pattern of gunfire shuttered through the hallway again as he heard
people shriek and collapse to the floor.

Pearson’s face looked frostbitten as his world
constricted. He placed the phone down and grabbed the vials of vaccine from the
desk, along with his laptop, and thrust them into a compact, metallic briefcase.
He could hear the password keypad being activated for the exterior lab wall across
from his office and the sound of a woman’s voice issuing commands. The
familiar, swishing sound of the first set of air- locked, lab doors opening,
followed next. With a white-knuckled grip on the briefcase, he pried open his
office door to see three armed men and a woman with a black vest enter the lab.
The first series of doors closed behind them.

Pearson swung open the office door and bolted in the
opposite direction, heading for the stairs. His tan blazer fluttered like a
cape as he ran down the stairs to the emergency exit. He entered the security code
and the pressure-sealed door opened to a dimly lit parking lot. After the door
slammed, he stopped and turned around, then activated the biohazard alarm for
the building. He didn’t wait to see if his actions were successful in sealing
the intruders inside as he sprinted for his black Volvo. As Pearson sped
towards the security gate, he could see the door ajar on the checkpoint booth. The
security guard, a portly man he had greeted each morning for years, was lying
face down amidst a blood sprayed console.

As he raced away, he kept waiting for the roar of
police sirens heading to the facility but there was only the expanse of the
lonesome, desert road enveloping his car. On the seat beside him was the silver
briefcase containing the vials of vaccine.

His constant, furtive glances in the rearview mirror
matched his racing thoughts.
If the virus could be contained in Europe then
there might still be hope of preventing it from turning into a catastrophic
pandemic. But how long had it been?
If quarantine was unsuccessful, then
widespread fatalities would commence within two weeks.
He reflected on the
recent meeting that Emory mentioned.
That icy-eyed woman, with the neck scar,
said her employer would be overseeing vaccine distribution in the event of a bio
attack. How was she involved? What was she doing at the lab?

Twelve miles later, the two-lane remote highway ended
at a T-section as the last glimmer of sunlight streaked across Pearson’s pale
cheeks. The faint lights of vehicles driving on the interstate could be seen in
the distance. A hundred yards down the road, a green sign indicated Albuquerque
to the east and Flagstaff to the west. Reluctantly, he edged towards the west
entrance ramp. This would be the safest direction for now and perhaps offer a
chance to salvage humanity’s future.

Travis Combs was brushing flecks of sand from the
side of his face as he sat up on his thin bedroll by the shoreline of the
Colorado River. He turned and looked over to his left where the rest of the passengers
were still sprawled out asleep. To his right, the rafts were tethered to a row
of cottonwood trees alongside the camp kitchen and coolers. Even with the sun
having risen an hour ago, the inner walls of the Grand Canyon were painted in
an orange and red hue, silhouetted against an indigo sky.

The morning silence was penetrated by the voice of a
canyon wren, whose melodic song floated down the cliffs. The last few days had
been quiet with very few rafters on the river. The warm night had hardly
required entry into his sleeping bag, and Travis had slept in faded khaki
shorts and a cotton t-shirt that was nearly threadbare in the shoulders. His faint
black beard was well groomed- one luxury he afforded himself on this trip.

As he stood, he caught the movement of three bighorn
sheep making their way up an incline a few hundred yards away across the river.
The clamoring of their small hooves on the rocks echoed off the canyon walls.
All
my years of rappelling cliffs and traversing mountains around the globe and I
could never walk with that kind of grace,
he thought.

Travis rolled his shoulders around in an effort to
loosen them up. At thirty-four, too many airborne jumps and arduous missions in
third-world settings, had taken its toll on his otherwise fit body. He had
achieved the rank of Staff Sergeant in the 5
^th
Special Forces before
serving the last three years as a SERE instructor, teaching others the skills
of survival and evasion. Now, with his discharge a few months behind him, it
was time to unwind and live without a schedule, and no one to command.

A few feet away, Katy, a fair-skinned, strawberry
blonde from Ohio was sitting up and let out a miniscule yawn, as she crawled
out of her blue sleeping bag.

Travis stood up, raising his fists skyward in a
stretch and then walked behind some boulders to relieve himself. He headed back
down to the beach by the rafts to fire up the camp stove and brew a pot of
silty, cowboy coffee. He inhaled the crisp, desert air and sweet scent of cottonwoods,
and realized it was the first time in months that he had slept through the
entire night.

Pete, the official trip leader, came over to get the
griddle warmed up. His tan skin and shaggy blond hair was typical of the
professional guides who spent four months, each season, living in the sun. Pete
dug his hand inside the cooler and pulled out a few of the last bags of
dwindling food. They had been eating gourmet meals each day and the last
breakfast on this twenty-two day river trip was going to be no different, even
if the omelets were mostly cheese with a few of the remaining powdered eggs
mixed in to the fray.

Pete glanced over at Travis who was inhaling the
aroma rising off the coffee pot. “So now that you’re done with service, are you
going to keep that stubble head or let it grow into a long mop again like you
had after high-school?”

“Who knows amigo? Other than taking my son on his
first big-game hunt, I haven’t thought about what I’m gonna do after this. I
know a decent cigar is on the list as my supply ran out, day before last.”

“You should really smoke a pipe, like me. It will
add some sophistication to your looks,” said Pete.

It had been twelve years since they guided a river
trip together through the Grand Canyon. Pete was a lead guide for the family-run,
River to Rim Rafting Company,
based out of Flagstaff. Like most
professional river guides, he had worked his way up through the ranks the only
way possible- through logging month after month, season after season in all
manner of weather, rafting the Colorado River. This was one of the more tame
trips at season’s end and, with only a handful of clients, Travis had jumped at
the opportunity to spend time afloat with an old friend.

Travis had worked as a guide for a few seasons
during college, before joining the Army. Other than a few firearms training
courses he had attended in Prescott, he hadn’t been in the southwestern
wilderness in many years. The tension that was strung like a taut web across
Travis’s face at the start of the trip, on September 5, had begun to melt away
as he relaxed into the flow of life on the river during the past few weeks.
Having Pete in command while he sat back and did kitchen duty was a luxury he
relished
.

Despite being surrounded by mostly urban types on
this trip, and immersed in the tranquility of the Canyon, Travis still felt the
need to look over his shoulder. He reflexively selected his nightly bed with a
boulder backstop and knowing all the exits to high ground. He felt naked
without a pistol on his side, even though he had a hefty, fixed-blade strapped
to his hip. He had enjoyed sleeping under open skies again without the jarring
sound of mortar shells or gunfire, but it was only the last few days that
allowed him to get out of the habit of studying the cliffs and mesas from a
tactical perspective.

Katy walked barefoot on the wet sand over to the
breakfast buffet. “Don’t know how you boys ever get used to having this much
grit in your cup of
Joe
,” she said.

“You talkin’ about the sand or the coffee grounds?” replied
Travis.

Katy smiled and grabbed a cup of the thick, black
elixir, dowsing it with a generous helping of brown sugar. “Is it a slow time
of year for you guys usually?” she said looking at Pete. “We’ve only run into
one other river party in the past four days. I expected we’d be fighting for
campsites each night with other rafting groups.”

“You never can tell from year to year, especially
given the economy or that flu in the news that was shutting down travel in some
parts. Who knows? Some years we’re nuts with back-to-back trips and other years
some of us guides are looking for work in town,” Pete said with little
conviction in his voice.

Travis, who was wiping down the folding table, thought
back to one of the river groups they encountered a week earlier. The leader
said they were preparing to have one of their members evacuated via helicopter,
as he was suffering from seizures and internal bleeding. Though Travis couldn’t
ever recall seeing anyone with such blue marbled skin, in the brief look he got
of the patient as they floated past their camp.

With breakfast nearly complete, the five other participants
slowly extricated themselves from their bedrolls and came over to feast.
Afterward, they began breaking camp and stowing the items on board, while Pete
and Travis lashed everything in place one last time. The takeout was only four
hours down river and the shuttle driver at Diamond Creek beach would be waiting
with a batch of fresh donuts and cold beer, a river rafting tradition.

An hour later, they were floating through the
serpentine gorge. As they paddled, Jim, a thinly built man from California,
asked Pete about the geologic layer that ran through this part of the canyon
and why they hadn’t seen anything like it before. Jim was the one person in the
group who required constant hand-holding and always complained about the food,
the weather, or the insects. He said on the first day that he was a college
professor on sabbatical. He seemed more comfortable lost in his own thoughts
than in socializing with the others.

Pete leaned forward while continuing to row. “Well,
the formation changes significantly in this cross-section. We are much deeper
in the overall canyon and lower in elevation from where we started. The layer
just above this is where the ancient Anasazi had their cliff-dwellings. That
rock layer is also famous for its miles of underground caverns,” he said,
slowing his paddling rhythm.  “Not far from here there’s a tourist trap, where
you can take an elevator down ten stories into the caverns for a guided trek. A
hokey, roadside attraction but the tunnels sure are cool.”

The rafts made their way through the sculpted inner passage
of the canyon, winding past thickets of tamarisk trees lining the shoreline.
“It sure has been peaceful this past week. I haven’t heard a single plane fly
over the whole time,” said Katy, who was in Travis’s raft.

“That’s true now that you mention it,” replied
Travis, looking upward, pausing on a mid-oar stroke.

The party of three women and three men, along with
Travis and Pete, arrived at their final takeout point at Diamond Creek beach
around 1130 am. After anchoring the rafts, everyone began moving gear thirty
feet up under the shade of a rustic picnic area along the beach.

Fran and Mark, the only married couple on the trip,
began pulling out coolers and cooking items. They were from Georgia and had
both recently retired. Evelyn, who was a high-school principal from Washington
in her early fifties, grabbed the life vests and oars;
LB
, a short
fellow from New York, of Puerto Rican descent, lugged the bedrolls and camp
gear. Jim merely grabbed his own pack and sat in the shade, watching everyone
else work despite their glares.

Over the next hour, Pete, Katy, and Travis began
letting the air out of the rafts and stowing the rest of the items.

“The shuttle drivers should be due in from Flagstaff
any time,” said Pete. “But the river ranger who stays down at the beach to
check permits, is nowhere in sight. Maybe he’s taking a snooze in his truck.”

After everything was neatly stacked, the group took
a shade break under a grove of nearby cottonwood trees where Diamond Creek
merged with the Colorado River. Travis walked up the road to look around and
then returned twenty minutes later. “There are no fresh tracks on the road or
in the immediate area and it hasn’t rained here in over a week. Not sure why
we’re not seeing any tire tracks or any sign of the river ranger?” said Travis
wiping his brow. 

Pete’s face winced slightly while he brushed his
blonde locks out of his eyes. “Not sure to be honest. The vans are usually here
hours before us. Could be the road is closed temporarily from recent flash
flood damage and they’re only letting in the shuttles. Either way, I’ll get on
the SAT phone and give the main office a ring.”

After a few minutes of silence on the phone, Pete
stowed the device in his pack and shook his head in Travis’ direction. “Those
devices are temperamental anyway,” said Travis. “I couldn’t stand using them in
field operations. Hell, my smartphone is more reliable than one of those. Just
give it a try in half an hour.”

After downing some lunch from the remaining food,
they decided to keep the group busy the rest of the afternoon doing an
inventory of the gear and gathering firewood, in case night came without word
from the river company.

A few more unsuccessful attempts on the SAT phone
led Travis over to his friend’s side. “I think we should implement Plan B and
send out some hikers at first light. The rafts are already deflated and we don’t
have enough food to take the group three more days downriver to Lake Mead.”

Pete concurred and, with the sun setting in a few
hours, he told the group that he and Travis would trek to town the following
morning and send a van back for those staying on the beach. Whoever wanted to
come along on the hike was welcome.

Pete couched his anxious tone and uncertainty in
guidespeak. “The nearest town is only sixteen miles south and three thousand
feet in gradual elevation from here. You have already done more arduous day
hikes throughout this trip than anything this walk out will throw at you. And you’re
all part Billy goat by now,” he said putting his hands on his hips. “Halfway
back, there’s a spring nestled in a grove of mesquite trees off the side of the
road. We should be able to replenish our water bottles there. It’ll take us
most of the day to get to Route 66 and the town of Peach Springs. From there,
we can send a van back to get the rest of our gear and anyone choosing to stay
behind. We will head out at a few hours before sunrise to get a jump on the
heat, and should be to town by 4 pm.”

Everyone nodded and agreed to make the hike out
together. As the light faded from the canyon walls and everyone gathered around
the campfire, Travis readied his gear. It was similar to what everyone was
carrying but with a few specialized items from years of desert living. He
jammed his trusty Alice Pack with six quarts of water and then did a review of the
remaining items: electrolyte tabs, shemagh, sunscreen, first aid kit, Mora
knife, headlamp, poncho, 20’ of 550 cord, spark rod, signal mirror, Iodine
tabs, two remaining protein bars, sunglasses, brimmed hat, faded gloves, and a
Ziploc with a soaked, cotton shirt. He would don the latter garment during the
heat of the day to keep cool. From a side pouch, he pulled out a faded photo of
his ten year old son Todd.
Hope he had a good end to his summer. School must
have started by now. Can’t wait to for the coming elk hunt we’re going on.

Sliding the picture back into the leather wallet, he
grabbed the pack and stowed it
next to his bedroll. He sauntered over to
the fire and sat next to Katy who was brushing her silky hair, which held the
faint smell of peach blossoms. Travis noticed the slight curve in her red lips
as she looked at him. He recalled her comments from the first day when she
mentioned that she was on the trip “to get away from the shackles of city life
and reconnect with the raw forces of nature.” Her jade green eyes and thick
lashes were overshadowed by newly formed squint lines from living in the sun
and her delighted look seemed far removed from the high-strung city girl he met
weeks ago.