The Lazarus War: Artefact (40 page)

He made himself a protein shake while Tango dutifully sat next to him in the kitchen. After the shake, Lee put on a pair of athletic shorts, because there was something privately disturbing about doing calisthenics in the nude. He knocked out his sit-ups, push-ups, felt lazy as he looked at his chin-up bar. Then felt guilty and did the pull-ups. He turned on the sunlamp while he did these. It wasn’t the same as the sun itself, but it was better than nothing. Being in a sunless environment could mess with your head and your health.

After that he made some egg whites and toast with peanut butter. Then fed Tango. He made some coffee and took it to the computer. He didn’t sit down. Just touched the mouse. The screen saver vanished. The homepage of CNN.com was still displayed. It had not changed.

Just to make sure, Lee refreshed the browser window. This time it gave him an error message about the site being down. He checked the status of his Internet connection and found it displaying a good connection. He tried Yahoo! and managed to get the home page, but it was still the same old news.

Nothing posted since June 28. He drank his coffee in silence. It was 1030. He sat down in his computer chair, lifting his feet onto the desk. He rested the warm coffee mug on his bare chest and regarded a flat, rectangular metal box to the right of his computer screen. It contained his mission brief. This was the predetermined contingency plan given to him directly from the Office of the Secretary of Homeland Security. It outlined in detail what they projected the situation would be like on the thirtieth day. Due to the sensitivity of the information contained, Lee was not authorized to open the box until forty-eight hours after his last communication with command.

Frank was Colonel Frank Reid of the United States Army, assigned as liaison between the Secretary of Homeland Security and the forty-eight “Coordinators” stationed in bunkers in each of the states across the Continental US. Lee was stationed in North Carolina.

Colonel Frank Reid was command.

At 1200 hours today, he would have to open that box and read its contents. That would be it. Project Hometown would do what it was meant to do. He could only assume that the other forty-seven Coordinators had not received communications from Frank either and would also be opening their boxes at their respective forty-eight-hour marks.

The thought of it scared him shitless.

He drank the dregs of his coffee, grabbed a water bottle, and sat down on the couch, facing the gigantic TV. He turned it on and scanned through the cable channels. TV had gone much sooner than the Internet news. Most channels had been displaying an emergency broadcast screen with a ticker at the bottom looping the same information: the major metropolitan areas that were under evacuation order and which FEMA shelter to report to for each area.

Now the channels displayed blank blue screens.

Lee sank back onto the couch and stared, unsure of what he was waiting for. Perhaps for the channels to start transmitting again. Perhaps for his computer to chime, informing him that Frank was on the other line. Maybe he was just waiting to wake up from a bad dream.

The blue screen staring back at him felt surreal. He shook his head. Frank would call. He had to call. A virus couldn’t knock out the United States government. There were scientists, whole departments whose sole purpose for existing was to identify and eliminate these types of threats before they even became a problem. He wondered fleetingly if this were a joke, but dismissed it. Colonel Frank Reid would never play that tasteless of a joke. Lee didn’t even think Frank would play any joke at all.

He didn’t strike Lee as the joking type.

Something was keeping him from calling. The Internet signal could have been damaged or destroyed where Frank was, causing him to be unable to contact Lee for the past two days. Techs would be working overtime to reestablish contact with the Coordinators so Frank could tell them to hold off on reading their mission packets.

In the meantime, Lee had no idea what to do with himself. He would usually busy himself with a book or a movie, but watching a movie seemed inappropriate and he would not be able to focus on reading a book with his mind running through scenarios of what the hell was happening in the world outside his bunker.

He drank the rest of his water bottle and went to his treadmill. He left the incline flat and brought it up to an eight-minute-mile pace. He needed to waste some time and planned on running for a while.

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