Beyond Armageddon: Book 02 - Empire (17 page)

The transport shuddered as if absorbing a glancing blow. The fifteen men buckled into seats groaned a collective gasp.

Jon scrambled to his feet, opened the cockpit bulkhead, and staggered into the nose cone where a solitary pilot wearing bulky navigation goggles struggled with the controls.

Through the windshield, Jon saw the red eyes of the Goat-Walker. He felt them look right at him; regard him.

“This was no accident,” he muttered but the pilot could not hear; he grunted and growled as he tried to control the rapidly ascending craft. “That thing was sent to stop us.”

Streaks of energy slammed into the monster’s head. It roared again.

“Hold on,” the pilot warned and he reversed thrust, pushing the ship out over the lake, away from the bank.

Jon sat—fell—into the navigator’s chair. Through the window, he saw the two tankers take off. The Goat-Walker saw them, too. It struck at one, missing as the ship shot out of reach. The second failed to escape; a hoof smashed into its mid-section, exploding the purification equipment and tossing the craft into the icy waters of
Lake
Edouard
.

“Oh Christ,” Jon’s pilot muttered. “Oh Jesus Christ.”

The white nose of the tanker ship bobbed straight up and then slipped into the dark waters. As the transport moved off, darkness swallowed the banks of the lake where their camp had been moments before.

Reverend Johnny’s voice piped through the radio on the console. “All flights, report in. Is General Brewer on the line?”

Jon leaned forward and punched the transmit button.

“Yeah, I’m here.”

“We made it, Jon. That was close.”

Jon thought of the soldiers left behind and the tanker ship drowning in the lake.

“Yeah, we made it.”

–

           
“Sir,” Casey Fink woke Jon from a light sleep. “We’re about ready to touch down in Hopedale.”

           
“What? Already?”

Jon stood and stretched. He walked along the row of seats then opened the sliding cockpit door. Daylight glared in through the windshield.

           
“We’re heading in for a landing, Sir,” the pilot informed and Jon felt the ship descend.

           
A frigid bay split Hopedale into two distinct parts. To the north, the city proper including its primary claim to fame, the historic Moravian Mission House.

           
The southern end of that bay was less developed and dominated by a primitive shipping dock comprised of wooden planks and buildings set upon a piled stone foundation.

           
With a harbor deep enough to accommodate heavy tankers, Hopedale served as an ideal place to rendezvous with the
Newport News
.

           
In any case, the Eagles descended on to a flat, open area between low rolling hills north of the dock. The landing gear sank into soft ground. After a few moments, the doors opened and the travel-weary troops disembarked.

           
A biting cold chased away their weariness. While still August, a wet, chilly breeze cut through the men’s BDUs. Several returned inside the transports to retrieve their arctic gear.

           
Jon left most of the men and Reverend Johnny with the Eagles and took Casey Fink and a small force to the docks.

           
Gentle mountains overlooked the bay while grassy bush and rocky beaches covered most of the coastline. Calm water sloshed and curious seabirds squawked beneath a canopy of white clouds. A salty, marshy smell blew around on the wind.
 

           
At the dock waited an intimidating beast from the deep. It stretched more than a football field in length from bow to stern and was certainly a predator.
           
The
Newport News
, a Los Angeles Class nuclear submarine, had been one of the best and most modern attack boats in the
U.S.
arsenal before something other than Soviet bombers or Chinese ICBMs destroyed the country.

           
Jon and his small team approached the dock as a group of sailors moved to meet them.

           
The lead man wore a Navy Captain’s uniform and a leather military jacket. He sported thin streaks of gray in otherwise brown hair, but most of that remained tucked under his cap.

           
The two groups converged and eyed each other cautiously.

           
“Captain Farway?”

           
The man with the brown hair and cap nodded. “General Jon Brewer, I presume?”

This time Jon nodded.

           
They knew each other only through a few radio transmissions and written dispatches. Jon had little time to worry about boats when focused on fighting a land war.

           
Most of the naval forces, including the two nuke subs in their arsenal, worked with Gordon Knox for use in intelligence gathering. Unlike the bulk of “The Empire’s” military forces, original crews manned most of the ships. Arguably, the Navy survived the Apocalypse better than the other services.

           
The Captain extended a hand and smiled.

           
“I’ve heard a hell of a lot about you, General. I hear you know how to get things done these days.”

           
Jon accepted the shake.
 
“We give it our best.”

           
“I think it’s fair to say that so far your best has been much better than anyone else’s. Still, I guess you’re needing a ride?”

           
Jon replied, “I want to go see Santa Claus. Get my list in early, you know?”

           
The Captain and his sailors chuckled.

“Then what are we waiting for?” Farway asked.

           
Jon turned to Casey Fink and ordered, “Go round up the men and start moving supplies down here.”

           
Fink took a step but paused as Farway said, “Oh, one other thing. I hope your guys aren’t claustrophobic. You see, General, we’re spending most of this trip under the surf. You’re going into a big metal coffin. It’s tight in there.
Real
tight. And you hear things, too. Sometimes it’s just the currents, maybe a whale. But these days, well, these days there are things you hear down there that just aren’t right. Being on a sub for days on end, why that was always enough to put a little shake in a man’s hand. These days it’s enough to drive a man to crazy thoughts. So the question is, can you handle it?”

           
Jon looked at Captain Farway, shrugged, and told him, “I have a four year old daughter.”

           
“Oh,” Farway considered. “Then this should be a walk in the park.”

           
General Tom Prescott gazed at the ruins of the destroyed compound with a dozen soldiers standing on his flanks and his mobile command post—a modified version of an M113 armored personnel carrier—parked in the driveway.

           
At one point, the compound had consisted of several smaller buildings surrounding a large one protected by a chain link fence. The area covered several hundred square yards in a lightly wooded area off an access road in the shadows of the
Appalachian Mountains
.

           
Whatever purpose the compound served went up in ashes and smoke a long time ago, several years at least. Smashed and burned piles of rubble stood in place of wood and stone buildings, the chain link fence torn and flattened.

To the General, it resembled a thousand other country homes and estates he had seen along the
Appalachians
as they secured the expanding Empire’s western flank.

           
He noticed human bones scattered in the debris. Again, a sight he saw on a daily basis. Certainly not worthy of pulling him away from his tour of the captured Radford Army Ammunition plant, one of his force’s most important objectives as they cleared the area around Blacksburg, Virginia.

“Captain Rhodes,” he asked in a tone that did not hide his annoyance. “Pardon my French, but why the heck am I out here staring at rubble?”

“This is just the introduction. You might want to follow me, Sir.”

           
Rhodes
directed General Prescott around the piles of debris to a wooded and rocky slope that ascended into the mountains.

           
The posse of soldiers led by the two officers walked along an overgrown path into the woods, pushing their way through low-hanging leaves belonging to short white and dark green Striped Maple trees.
Prescott
stumbled over something.

           
“Holy shit,” the General shot when he saw the obstruction.

           
“That’s just the first of them,”
Rhodes
referred to the old, dried mess the General tripped over.

           
“Is that…is that what I think it is?”

           
“Yes, Sir. You might want to take a look around you.”

           
The General did as his Captain suggested and surveyed the forest surrounding them. Among the rotting leaves left over from last autumn and wildflowers competing for what little sunlight sneaked between branches, he saw mounds of something familiar. Years old, so old that they blended in with the forest floor, hidden by time and wind and falling leaves and rain.

           
“Sweet Jesus.”

           
“Dozens of them, Sir.”

           
The General scratched his head. “We need to call the boss. He needs to see this.”

           
“Oh, that isn’t the punch line, General,
Sir.”

After years of service with Rhodes, including time in the U.S. Army prior to Armageddon,
Prescott
knew that when his best officer emphasized ‘Sir’ it meant he was nervous or disturbed or really interested in drawing attention.

           
 
Rhodes led
Prescott
further along. The trees thinned and the upward slope eased into a small plateau set in the side of the mountain. That flat space ended at a big wall of earth. There, partially hidden under the roots of a massive overturned Hemlock tree, waited an opening.

           
A cave.

“Now I know you have to go in there,”
Rhodes
said, “But you’re not going to like it.”

           
Prescott
instinctively swallowed hard and asked, “Why is that?”

           
“Because you’re going to lose a lot of sleep from now on,
Sir.”

–

After bidding Jon Brewer farewell, Trevor nearly fell asleep in the big comfortable chair behind the oak desk in the den, but JB walked right in carrying colored paper and a box of crayons to work, once again, on illustrations of the great war.

           
With his nap thwarted, Trevor spent the morning reviewing status reports on civilian and military operations. Those reports consisted of complaints from command posts and cities and distribution centers that had been raided for supplies. Those supplies had been transferred in the middle of the night to outfit Brewer’s northern expedition as well as to build a stockpile of food and munitions to support Southern Command’s encirclement of the Hivvans.

           
Settlements previously categorized as ‘low’ on food now faced critical shortages. Military units down to their last two crates of ammunition were suddenly down to their last
one
crate of ammunition. Tanker trucks in transit to the west or east or north turned away in favor of a southerly direction toward operating centers established by the 1
^st
and 2
^nd
Mechanized Divisions.

Before lunch time, Trevor was forced to hang up on the military Governor of western Pennsylvania, endured what sounded like Yiddish swearing from the manager of the Cape May County Distribution center, and successfully dodged two visits by Evan Godfrey and one by Eva Rheimmer.

The shortages and squabbling for any morsel of foodstuffs or ammunition made the name he chose for their new nation—
The
Empire—sound like a joke. He wondered if he had made the right choice. Perhaps something like ‘the barely capable band of savages’ or ‘one step above starving republic’ might have better fit. He did not feel like an ‘Emperor’.

Trevor used the pretext of reviewing military updates as an excuse to hide behind a closed door in his second floor office (the old
Command
Center
). Unlike the reports from the rest of ‘
The
Empire’, the info coming from Southern Command sounded good.