Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass (2 page)

Two hundred thousand undead on the mechanic’s side of the Panama Canal bellowed at the sky. A gray military helicopter zoomed over at one hundred knots, trailing the canal southeast. The mechanic reacted instinctively to the engine noise, reaching up as if it might pluck the great bird from the sky and eat it cold. Frenzied with hunger, it followed the whirlybird, eyes locked onto the flying machine. Ten paces later, the creature stepped over the edge into the canal waters.

The canal’s twisting form was no longer filled with brown muddy water and transiting ships. Bloated, floating bodies now blocked her once-busy shipping route. Some of the disgusting forms still moved, not yet dissolved by the Panama heat and humidity or mosquito larva—infested waters. The countless hordes on one side of the canal roared and moaned at their undead doppelgängers on the other in a Hatfield and McCoy feud spanning the great divide.

•   •   •

Before the anomaly, the world was fixated on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, phony government U3 unemployment numbers, spot gold prices, currency indexes, and the worldwide debt crisis.
The very few that now survived prayed to go back to a Dow 1,000 and 80 percent unemployment; at least it would be something.

The conditions on the ground had degraded exponentially since the first case of the anomaly was documented in China. Early in the crisis, the surviving executive branch of the United States government made the decision to nuke the major continental cities in a bid to “deter, deny, or degrade the undead ability to eliminate the surviving population of the United States.” The cities were leveled by high-order nuclear detonation. Many of the creatures were instantly disintegrated in the process but the tradeoff was catastrophic. The dead outside of the comparatively small blast zones were zapped with so many alpha, beta, and gamma particles that the radiation eradicated any bacteria that might enable decomposition, preserving the dead for what scientists estimated at decades.

A few scattered human survivors remained though, and some military command and control was still in place. An operation was at this very moment underway to uncover the chain of events that brought humanity to the brink, maybe beyond.

Behind closed doors there was talk of possibly engineering an effective weapon of mass destruction against the creatures, as there were not enough small-arms ammunition or people to pull the triggers left on the planet. Behind thicker closed doors, there was talk of other, more nefarious things.

•   •   •

The helicopter pilot screamed back to the passengers, cheek full of chewing tobacco, “Three-zero mikes until on top the USS
Virginia
!”

The helicopter’s internal communications system failed to function as advertised months ago. It was now only good for cockpit communications between the pilot and copilot up front.

The pilot was easily in his sixties, as told by his gray hair, deep crow’s feet, and old and battered Air America ball cap. The rider in the copilot’s seat was not part of the air crew—just another member of what was known on the flight docket as Task Force Hourglass.

Pilots had been in short supply over the past few months, most of them lost on reconnaissance missions. The remaining airworthy military aircraft were constructed of thousands of complex moving parts, all of which needed to be rigorously inspected and maintained, or they would soon become very expensive lawn darts. The old pilot seemed to enjoy the company of having someone in the right seat, someone to die alongside if things went too far south, which was frequent.

The rider appeared jumpy and hyperaware of his surroundings. Wearing an overly tight harness, his hand on the door latch and his eyes on the master caution panel, he nervously scanned the helicopter instruments. The rider risked a glance at the ground; they were flying low and fast. An optical illusion from the cockpit put the helicopter nearly level with the canal banks on either side. The creatures screamed and thrashed loudly as they fell into the water, unable to compete with the deafening engine noise. The rider easily but involuntarily filled the gaps with his imagination, hearing the songs of the dead from below. The permanent PTSD gained from the past year’s events pushed forward in his consciousness. He instinctively slapped his side, feeling for his carbine, preparing for another crash.

The pilot took notice and squawked into his headset, “Heard about what happened to you. Chopper went down in the badlands.”

The rider keyed the microphone on his headset. “Something like that.”

The pilot grumbled, “You just transmitted on the radio. Key down to talk to me, and up to talk to the world.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it; I doubt anyone heard it anyway. Only those things around. Lots of fellow pilots walking about down there now. These runs keep getting more dangerous by the sortie. The birds are falling apart, no spare parts . . . What did you do before?” the old man yelled into the headset over the whine of the neglected turbine engines.

“I’m a military officer.”

“What branch?”

The rider paused and said, “I’m a navy lieu—uh, a commander.”

The pilot laughed as he said, “Which is it, son? Lieutenant is a ways from commander.”

“Long, boring story.”

“Son, I doubt that. What did you do in the navy before?”

“Aviation.”

“Hell, you wanna fly the rest of the way?”

“No thanks. I’m not exactly the best helicopter stick.”

The pilot chuckled at this. “When I was running small fixed wings low over Laos before you were born, I didn’t know how to fly one of these, either.”

The rider looked down at the undead masses below and mumbled, “I didn’t think we were flying anything over Laos.”

The old man smiled and said, “We weren’t. But how do ya think all them Phoenix Program snipers got close and personal with the NVA brass? By humping their bolt guns a hundred miles through the jungle? Shit . . . if you think Phoenix was only active in Vietnam, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Panama down there to sell ya!”

Both men laughed over the loud thumping rhythm of the spinning rotor blades above their heads. The rider reached into his pack for a piece of gum scavenged from a military MRE, offering the pilot half.

“No thanks, plays hell on my dentures and I’m all out of Fixodent. Who you got back there with you anyway?”

The rider frowned at the old man. “They don’t tell you anything, do they? The Arab-looking guy is a friend of mine. The others are SOCOM, or some of what’s left of them anyway.”

“SOCOM, hmm?”

“Yeah, a few frogs and such. I’m not sure I can tell you much more than that and to be honest, I don’t know much more anyway.”

“I understand, you wanna keep the old man in the dark.”

“No, it’s not that, it’s . . .”

“I’m kidding, no worries. I had to keep a secret or two in my day.”

A few more rotor-thumping minutes passed before the pilot pointed his wrinkled finger forward to the horizon and said, “There’s the Pacific. The coords to the
Virginia
are on that kneeboard card. Mind punching them into the inertials?”

“Not a problem.”

After the coordinates were entered, the pilot altered course a few degrees starboard and maintained heading.

“What’s your name, son?”

“My friend back there calls me Kilroy, Kil for short. What’s yours?”

“I’m Sam. Pleasure to meet you, even though this may be the first and last time.”

“Well, Sam, you sure know how to keep spirits high.”

Sam reached up, tapped the glass on the upper gauge panel, and said, “You know the risks, Kilroy. There ain’t no tellin’ where you’re goin’ in your little black submarine. Wherever it is, you can bet it will be just as dangerous as right below us. There ain’t no safe zones anywhere.”

A United States aircraft carrier, one of the last fading symbols of American military might. There were others, but those had been anchored offshore months ago, abandoned. One carrier was even reserved as a floating nuclear power plant, providing gigawatts of electricity to withering military island outposts and some remote coastal airstrips. Previously known as USS
Enterprise,
she was now officially renamed as Naval Reactor Site Three. A small contingent of power plant engineers was all that remained of her former five-thousand-sailor crew. Not all of these behemoths were accounted for. A handful of the steel giants had been trapped overseas when the alarms sounded and society collapsed. The USS
Ronald Reagan
sat at the bottom of the Yellow Sea with most of her crew undead, still floating through the black compartments of Davey Jones’s locker. In the beginning, there was blame to cast and throw about like blacksmith anvils—that is, while men still lived to cast it. There was chatter via classified cables that the USS
Ronald Reagan
had been brought down by simultaneous attacks from several North Korean diesel submarines in the days just after the anomaly. No one really knew for sure. The USS
George HW Bush
was last seen dead in the water near Hawaii. Visual observers from a nearby American destroyer reported that the undead creatures swarmed her decks—she was now a floating mausoleum and would remain so until a rogue wave or super typhoon sent her down to Poseidon.

Some of the surviving crews from the remaining carriers had been recovered and consolidated onboard the USS
George Washington,
still on active service in the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. military diaspora continued.

•   •   •

The hundred-thousand-ton USS
George Washington
cut through the Gulf waters, maintaining a patrol box ten miles off the infested Panamanian coastline. The Continuity of Government still remained, its primary orders clear and concise.
Recover Patient Zero by any means necessary
.

Admiral Goettleman, Task Force Hourglass commander and acting chief of naval operations, sat in his stateroom eating breakfast, watching the ship’s cable TV network. A loop of
The Final Countdown
had been playing over and over again for the past week. He’d need to call someone about that, or maybe he’d let it go.
Perhaps the crew enjoys watching an aircraft carrier travel back in time with the opportunity to change history.
A loud knock on his door signaled Joe Maurer, a CIA case officer and his aide since the beginning of this mess.

“Good morning, Admiral,” Joe said cheerfully, but somewhat insincerely.

“Mornin’, Joe. Our boys make it to the
Virginia
?” Admiral Goettleman asked, chewing his final bite of powdered eggs.

“They will shortly, sir. The radio room reports that they are over the Pacific and zeroing in on
Virginia
’s beacon now.”

“I wouldn’t be an admiral if I didn’t worry about the weather. The helo reporting any bad chop?”

“No, sir, smooth waters, good air. Got lucky today, I suppose.”

“We’re going to need to save some of that luck. Hourglass has a long way to float. I’m deeply concerned at how all this is going to play out. Despite that I’ve asked you a hundred times, what are your thoughts? Ground truth, no bullshit.”

“Admiral, they’ll need to get there first. Assuming they survive the transit to Pearl, the Kunia operation in Hawaii, and the long transit to Chinese waters, the worst will still be in front of them. The lights are out around the world and we’ve received no communications from any of the Chinese Military Regions since last winter. The country has gone dark. We don’t have the HF radio operators to monitor the band. We could have missed their transmission a dozen times and not known. We’re short on Chinese linguists. If our people did receive their transmission, we have maybe five folks onboard that could interpret. Let’s say it’s a given that the team makes it across the Pacific to the Bohai and up the
river. Then what? You know how bad it is in the continental United States. We had maybe three hundred twenty million people a year ago. Kinetic operations up to this point have attrited some creatures, but the nukes didn’t exactly help the cause.”

Listening to Joe’s commentary, Admiral Goettleman went back in time for a moment, to the decision to nuke the population centers. At the time, even he had agreed with that decision. From the bridge of his ship, he had heard the cheers from the crew as the nighttime fireballs lit the sky and rocked the targeted coastal cities. Hell, he’d clapped and yelled, too. The great mushroom plumes differed vastly from old nuclear-testing stock footage. All colors of the rainbow coursed through the pillar below the massive mushroom cap. Great blue lightning beamed and zapped throughout the thrown vertical wall of city debris, dust, and human remains.

“How’s our research into the New Orleans specimens progressing?” asked Goettleman.

“Well, sir, you read what happened on the Cutter
Reliance
. We have SIGINT cuts from overhead with good geolocs of hundreds of radio transmissions out of New Orleans and other nuked cities I can brief you on. The transmissions originated after the detonations occurred. All intelligence indicates that those bastards are just about unstoppable in moderate numbers. Higher cognitive function, agility, speed. It’s not only their bite or scratch that can kill you—it’s the radiation from those high-yield nukes shooting from their corpses. The Causeway and Downtown specimens are no different.”

“I was hoping for a little good news, you know,” Goettleman said, almost sadly.

“We still have propulsion, fresh water, and some food, sir.”

The admiral forced a smile. “I guess that’s something.”

Joe took a drink and coughed, saying, “The men on that chopper getting ready to bungee into the drink don’t even know what they’re going after.”

“They soon will. The intelligence officer on
Virginia
will see to that.”

“Sir, I know we’ve discussed this but my stance has not changed. Telling them everything could complicate things on some level. Patient Zero, if they can even locate it, may not be worth retrieving to them. They may perceive it as a waste of time and resources.”