Extermination Day (16 page)

9:45
am EST, January 16, 2038

Greenbrier
Resort

The ominous blue-green cloud was making its way slowly and silently down the hallway of the plush Greenbrier resort, heading for the secure bunker. It had come in through the main lobby, which had been blasted apart during the failed drone attack.

Paulson and the others had been watching it float along via the hotel security video feed before all the screens went blank. It was coming for them. And Paulson was waiting for it with his big-ass gun.

As he stood in the control room, he couldn’t help but compare this moment with other war experiences. In one operation, during Desert Storm in the first Gulf War, he’d been a Navy SEAL tasked with the job of clearing out remaining Iraqi fighters holed up in the Saudi city of Khafji. During that mission, danger was constantly present and death could've come at any time. Now he tightened his hand on his weapon as he pictured his men. He wouldn’t let
this
attacker take out any more of his people. Not as long as he could hold a weapon, aim, and shoot.

Demetrius and several of the other men were finishing sorting through the bags of weapons and ammunition they’d retrieved from the munitions locker.

“We’re not sure what this thing is capable of,” Demetrius said, “so we grabbed Colt Enhanced M4 individual carbines as well as several grenade launchers. There was also one missile launcher that can be used as a last resort. Using it in a closed space, however, is not recommended.” He started laying out the weapons on the table. “We’ll need to take up defensive positions around the entrance to the bunker. Who here has military experience or weapons training?”

A few of the men said they did, and also two women, including Christine, who’d piloted the drone fighter.

“Of you others, has anyone ever fired a gun?”

They rest of the group shook their heads.

“Very well. All of you will move to one of the back rooms as far away from the blast doors as possible. I’ll leave weapons in there with you just in case this thing gets through us. My suggestion, though, is to hide and stay as quiet as possible. That includes you too, Mr. President.” Demetrius stared hard at Paulson.

“You know I can’t do that, Colonel. I have more combat experience than anyone here. And I may be old, and on crutches with a broken leg, but I know how to handle a weapon and fight. I’ll be right there with you on the front line.” Paulson returned the colonel’s stare. There was no negotiating on this. If this was going to be a last stand, Paulson wasn’t going to be cowering
on the sidelines of the battlefield.

“Very well, sir. I don’t like it, but I respect your choice. Just meet me halfway on this. I want you to take up the rear position in the entrance room, close to the door to the next room. That way if things go bad, you can move back and defend the women and other noncombatants.”

Demetrius didn’t say Paulson could retreat and save his own skin, but the message was in there. Paulson could live with that subtle phrasing and nodded his agreement.

“Just one thing, Colonel. I want that missile launcher in addition to the M4.”

Demetrius handed it over with a curt nod.

“Sir, since this thing may be able to breach the door, we should also get everyone back in their bio-suits,” said Dr. Peebles, who had just come in from the medical lab carrying the suits. “The suits have all been scrubbed clean of the virus.”

“Good idea, Doctor,” said Paulson as he grabbed his suit and waved over Farrow and Melinda to put their suits back on.

Demetrius then gathered everyone and gave quick instructions to those with no weapons experience on where the safety and firing triggers were located on their guns. Not much training for someone who’d never fired a high-caliber weapon before, but better than nothing.

Everyone with experience then moved down the hallway into the main entrance hall, where the blast doors were located. Demetrius pointed out strategic positions in the main room and around the entrance to the hallway, where the few military, ex-military, Secret Service agents, and experienced civilians could mount a defense.

They overturned chairs and desks and anything else they could find as cover, not knowing what might help since they had no idea what weapons that thing would have. Others started moving deeper into the bunker, away from the main blast doors.

Demetrius turned to see where Paulson had wedged himself, then he ran back and bent low.

“Watch your back, Mr. President. I don’t know who the traitor is, but I’d bet my left nut he’s gunning for you.”

Soon everyone was in position and waiting for the attack. Several minutes passed and they heard nothing. Paulson had learned to be patient in the military. An attack could occur at any time and you always had to be on your guard. Others in the group didn’t have such patience.

The minutes ticked away and still nothing. Eventually Chilton McIntosh, one of the rich political donors who had tried to buy his way into a bio-suit, jumped up.

“I’m tired of this bullshit!” he spat out, holding his gun in the air. “There’s nothing coming through those blast doors. Haven’t you all figured it out by now? Somebody’s hacked the Stream and they’ve hacked our video surveillance. That floating ball thing is straight out of some video game; it doesn’t exist.”

He shook his gun to emphasize his point.

“You so-called military experts should be planning our retaliation, not sitting here cowering behind tables, hunting ghosts.”

“McIntosh, get back under cover!” Demetrius bellowed.

“Fuck you! I don’t take orders from you.”

“Sit the fuck down now,” Special Agent Jones demanded. “You’re in the line of fire.”

“Line of fire, ha!” McIntosh laughed. “Do you really think that something is going to get through these doors. They’re eight feet thick and built of solid concrete and steel.”

He crossed the room and tapped on the door.

“They’re built to withstand a nuclear blast, you idiot!”

He slammed the butt end of his weapon into the door, and a clanging rang out through the room. A second later something popped, like bacon frying in a pan. Chilton looked closer at one section of the door.

“What the hell? There’s something leaking here,” he said.

He touched the door with his finger and held it up closer to his face for a better look.

“Ants?” he scoffed. “Oww! They’re biting me! Little fuckers!”

He tried shaking his hand to get the creatures off. Behind him the leak in the door grew. Within seconds a hole formed, then another and then another, each one spreading. It was as if the door was being devoured by a swarm of termites.

When the holes were large enough, millions of tiny flying creatures poured through. They hit McIntosh in the back first, nearly knocking him off his feet. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Instead, a swarm of creatures ate their way through the back of his head and shot out of his mouth like vomit.

“Fire!” Demetrius yelled.

And the rain of bullets began.             

The silvery sphere changed shape as it burst through the holes in the door. It was no longer a uniform sphere but looked like a swarm of bees. As the bullets hit the swarm, it shimmered and shook, its shape constantly varying. The bullets did nothing to stop it as it inched forward through the rapidly decaying blast doors. McIntosh disappeared into the cloud, his body melting away in agony.

When Demetrius fired a grenade, Paulson felt the heat on his face. Part of the cloud fell to the floor in a metallic sleet storm, small drops clinking as they hit. But it was only a small part of the cloud, and the bulk of it continued moving forward, down the hallway, coming for them.

Several more grenades hit the main bulk of the cloud, with a little more being destroyed. It was moving too quickly, however, and seconds later it had cleared the hallway and was flowing into the main lobby of the bunker.

The men in front, behind overturned desks, were the first to be attacked. It happened so fast, Paulson could barely take in what was going on. The men were simply covered by the swarm as it passed over them. They began screaming and violently shaking their arms and legs, clawing at their faces. They started to convulse, their heads turning to the sky as the swarm clawed its way down into their throats and eyes. As they fell to their knees, their faces were eaten away, exposing first raw skin, then bloody muscle, and finally bone. Their skulls and skeletons were covered by the swarm and then they were gone, reduced to dust. Most of their clothes, guns, and ammunition remained relatively intact, although in tatters, but anything organic, anything human, was gone. And still the swarm advanced.

It was a horrific sight, even to a man who’d seen many horrors in war. To be eaten alive, to have the flesh ripped from your bones as you watched, that was an atrocity that shook even Paulson to the core. He felt no anger now, and the shock and disgust were starting to fade as fear began to take their place. Paulson hadn’t known such fear in a long, long time. He was beginning to doubt they’d escape, that there was any hope for America.

“Mr. President, go now. I’ll try to hold it off,” Demetrius commanded as the swarm began crawling over him, first covering his face and then digging down inside his eyes. Paulson continued firing his gun, but he knew theirs was a lost cause. The swarm wasn’t going to be stopped by bullets. He had to look for a quick escape and then a place to regroup and plan a new defense.

He grabbed his crutches and retreated as fast as he could into the underground bunker, slamming doors behind him as he ran, the swarm in pursuit. Fear overtook him as he hobbled faster and faster, feeling the swarm tickling the back of his neck, about to overtake him. There had to be a way to stop it. A flamethrower, perhaps, or one of those new plasma rifles? But there was no time. Right now it was all he could do to stay just out of the swarm’s reach.

Soon Paulson reached the end of the line, which was the sleep quarters and the kitchen. He was breathing heavily, his heart pounding, his shoulder aching from the recoil of his M4, his leg throbbing. But he still had his weapon and ammo, including the missile launcher strapped to his back.

Paulson found everyone else still alive hiding in the sleeping quarters. Some were weeping, some praying.

He said, “We couldn’t stop it. I suggest we split up and hide in different places; maybe this thing won’t be able to get all of us. Quick, run! There’s no time.”

Most ran out of the sleeping area to find hiding places, but a couple stayed where they were, not moving, resigned to their fate.
Chad Theobald simply sat in the corner, his arms wrapped around his legs, his bowed head pressed tight against his knees. He rocked back and forth, back and forth, praying quietly. Melinda was still there. She grabbed Paulson and held him tight, sobbing.

“I’m going out fighting, Melinda,” he said as she looked up at him, eyes streaming with tears. “Get behind me.”

Paulson broke away from her tight embrace and headed back out into the hallway. The swarm was waiting, the hum of millions of tiny wings growing louder. It had eaten its way through the last door.

Paulson shut the door to the sleeping quarters behind him, saying, “Melinda, stay inside.” He couldn’t accept that he was powerless to defend those he’d sworn to protect.

He yanked the rocket launcher free and fell onto his stomach, wincing as his leg thumped on the hard floor. The swarm was only thirty feet away. The blast from the missile would surely kill him, but maybe he could damage the swarm enough that it wouldn’t find the others. Enough that it would give up or die or be blasted to Hell.

He pulled the trigger.

The missile flew a short distance, into the heart of the swarm. There was a muffled explosion, some fire and smoke, but nothing like what Paulson was expecting. Only a few parts of the swarm fell. It was as if it had adapted to their weapons or had fashioned a defense. And it just kept coming. A second later, Paulson felt it hit his body.

He looked down at his arm, where tiny blue creatures the size of fleas were eating his skin away. They were crawling and digging in, jaws biting like thousands of tiny needles pricking his flesh. He held up his hand and watched as the flesh was scoured to the bone. The pain was excruciating, then his arm went numb as his nerves were eaten away. He felt the creatures crawling over his face and tried to scratch with his other hand, but as he lifted his arm, there was nothing there, just a bloody stump. He tasted metal and blood as his mouth filled with thousands of the moving creatures. Paulson tried to scream, but couldn’t. The swarm had already eaten his throat away.

Buddy Paulson had lived a long, full life. He fought right up until the end. He was a great leader and a great man. He’d won the respect and admiration of friends and enemies alike. But the swarm knew none of that, nor did it care.

The swarm wanted only to devour and rend flesh from bone.

9:45 am local time, January 16, 2038

Project
Chronos

Gunfire erupted outside the dome. Jeff pivoted, checking every direction, but nothing had made it inside. Several security officers and military personnel were based at the facility, and it sounded as though they were vigorously attacking whatever it was that had breached the base. After a few seconds of rapid machine-gun fire and other pops of various small handguns, the noise stopped. Then there was nothing but silence.

Chen had raced to a control desk and was tapping commands into the interface, leaving Jeff and Holly alone on the platform in front of the doughnut. Jeff looked at Holly; her generally stern face had a look of fear spreading across it.

“It’s coming for us, isn’t it?” she said.

“We’ll be out of here in about four minutes, and then all of this will be just a bad dream.”

The waiting was the worst. Just standing there looking at the empty space in the middle of the doughnut, not knowing what was going on outside the dome, was a killer. The bio-suit was warm, and Jeff was already breathing heavily, fogging up the plastic visor. With a sputter and a booming crack, the lights went out.

“Is that supposed to happen?” he asked Holly. He was regretting not getting more information on the particulars of time travel.

“Just give it a second,” Chen called to them. “We have backup power for the dome and a completely separate power source for the particle accelerator and vortex generator.”

As he finished speaking, the lights flickered back on. More crashing sounds, along with muffled screams, came from outside, and then the dome shook slightly, rocking the entire platform under Jeff’s feet.

Here it comes.

“Dr. Chen! Look!” Holly yelled, pointing up.

A hole began to form at the top of the dome. It was tiny at first, then it started to grow, spreading and eating away like acid. Dome pieces fell to the floor around the platform. One landed at Jeff’s feet, swarming with tiny creatures that looked like greenish-blue beetles. They were feasting on the metal like a colony of ants would devour a piece of bread. Jeff glanced back up at the ceiling. When the hole was large enough, the seething, swarming ball they’d watched on the video feed floated down inside the dome.

T-minus 30 seconds until launch, 29, 28 . . .

The ball paused for several seconds, as if analyzing the setup, just floating in the air, pulsing and shimmering in constant flux. One of the scientists, Howard, hurried out from his workstation and walked up to it. His face was slack with awe, and he held his hands palms out, almost reverently.

“We don’t want to fight you. We can live together in peace. Please, tell us what you want.”

The ball moved closer to him, and he reached out one hand to touch it.

“
Howard, no, you idiot!” Chen screamed.

Howard
touched the ball and then pulled his hand back and turned it over to inspect it. And then he started to scream. The sound was muffled by his clean-suit helmet, but it was still loud enough to make Jeff cringe.

His
glove dissolved away, baring the skin of his hand. He shook his arm, bashed at the contaminated hand with his other hand, but couldn’t dislodge whatever was eating away at his suit.

Then at his skin.

Jeff recoiled when he saw first twitching muscle, then bone, and finally nothing other than the moving, flowing swarm. The horrible process continued up Howard's arm as his screams grew louder. The swarm spread quickly to the rest of his body, dissolving skin tissue, organs, and bones as it went. Eventually his screaming stopped—when there was nothing of the man left.

Jeff drew his foot back to kick away a piece of metal that had fallen in front of him; Holly grabbed his arm and knocked him off balance.

“Don’t kick that. Don’t touch it or go near it. Those are nanobots, just like the virus. Only these are much larger and designed to eat metal or anything else they touch. If you even so much as brush against one, it’ll latch on to you and start eating your flesh, just like it did to Simon.”

Holly was right. The
nanobots were swarming and eating right through the metal inches away from his foot.

T-minus 15 seconds, 14, 13, 12 . . .

The outer reaches of the swarm spread into the room, grazing Holly’s arm. Jeff looked down and saw nanobots crawling on her bio-suit.

“You have to take this off, Holly!” he yelled, and she began ripping the suit from her body. She managed to get it off and throw it to the ground before the
nanobot swarm could chew through and start eating her skin.

“The data drive!” Holly screamed, reaching out again for the suit. Jeff grabbed her and pulled her away just as she touched it. Seconds later both suit and data drive dissolved away.

“Everything is lost!” she yelled hysterically.

Jeff pulled her to the edge of the platform just in front of the doughnut. There was nowhere else for them to go. The swarm was almost there. Then suddenly Chen jumped in front of them. He’d stripped off his clean suit and was using it to desperately swat at the swarm.

3, 2, 1 . . .

Chen tried to balance himself on the platform girders as they were being dissolving under his feet.

“Ahhh!” he screamed.

The
nanobots started eating away Chen’s feet, then his legs. As the upper half of his torso fell to the ground, the dome started to collapse.

A loud
whoosh
exploded behind them, and a strong wind sucked at Jeff’s back. He turned to see the vortex behind him. It was pitch black inside, like a long, deep underground tunnel.

“Come on, Holly!”

Jeff grabbed her by the waist and they jumped through the vortex, leaving behind the crumbling base and the screams of dying scientists.