Resurrection Express (43 page)

“Take it easy,” Heather says, calmly.

I look at her, getting my breath back.

“My
legs
 . . .”

It’s all I can force out.

“Your legs are fine,” she says. “That bullshit about you being paralyzed, it’s not true. They had you on some kind of spinal block drug while you were in there. You’re having hell coming down off it, but you aren’t paralyzed.”

I feel the tingle in my legs again.

“How do you
know
that?”

“I saw your charts, the real ones.”

“What are—”

“No time. Save it.”

She motions to a big man in a high-ranking military uniform, who stands in front of a desk. He’s even scarier than Morales. His face is stitched with age and scars. Looks like he could kick Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ass. The huge screen behind the desk is filled with a computerized topographical map of the southwestern United States. A workstation there, where a tech manages computer interface, backlit like a faceless sentinel staring into a world of artificial dreamlight. A timer at the top of the screen reads three hours and counting backwards—in hours, in minutes, in seconds.

It’s scary, but I’m not sure why.

“Good work, soldiers,” the scarred man says to Heather and Morales. They half salute him in return, nodding their heads. His voice sounds like rough wood. Then he looks right at me. “Elroy Coffin.”

I nod, like he was asking me a question, but he wasn’t. He takes two steps toward me, motions to the wall of monitors.

And says:

“Welcome to the end of the world, Elroy.”

•  •  •

H
e explains that his men were watching the hospital for days after I went in. They had people in the building, but those people had orders not to move on me until the bad guys did.

It was a whole new scam. Of course.

Surround me with lies about how I’ll never walk again. Get me so far down in the zero that I have no choice but to believe it. How many of those doctors were actors? How much of it was really bullshit? Some of them had to be on the level—like the nurse, who had no idea who Richard Sergio was. But they had her number. Fooled us all. They knew torturing me with drugs wouldn’t work—they had to be more original. And these guys were keeping
watch the whole time. Disguised as cops, waiting to see what Jenison’s people would do to me, how far they would go. Bastards, all of them.

I flex my legs.

Tingling there.

Just fine, after all.

Holy shit.

The scarred man sees the weight of his words slam into me as he explains the situation, sees my face contort and reshape itself in disgust, my shock at still being whole like a gut punch from hell. He steps closer and says:

“We’re the good guys. Believe me.”

I manage to find my voice again, and it’s rough. “How do I know that? How do I trust anything now?”

“You saw our fleet on the front lawn, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

“That’s half the air force and all the marines we could find. They’re standing by to attack a fortified position. My men have been given
carte blanche
to deal with our current situation.”

“Okay . . . so who the hell
are
you?”

My voice seems to sting him slightly. He narrows his eyes.

“That’s strictly need-to-know, Mister Coffin.”

Ah, so now it’s
Mister Coffin
again.

Jerks.

I give him the evil eye. “Then let’s say I need to know.”

“Let’s say you need to shut your mouth and count your blessings.”

“Colonel, we don’t have time for this macho crap,” Heather says. “He’s in really rough shape and has no idea what’s going on. We’re lucky he’s even still alive. You can at least tell him your
name
.”

The scarred man snorts. “It’s a security risk. We still don’t have all the facts about this man.”

She’s not impressed. “The
facts
are we’re running out of time, Colonel. Now do you want to fill him in or should I?”

The big man keeps his big game on his face, nods slightly, like he’s humoring her. She has to have a high rank in this room—a lieutenant maybe? Only people with thick stripes get away with mouthing off like that to a colonel. And she was definitely in charge back at the hospital.

She steps closer and lays it down calmly.

“The men in this room and myself are all part of a special team. It’s kind of a mixed litter. Special Forces, Delta, Navy SEALs, Army Rangers—all members of the United States Special Operation Command, the best of the best.”

“You’re the best of the best? I don’t doubt it.”

She looks at me and her face is cold. I can almost hear her speak the words:
I did what I had to do. You don’t have to like it.

Then she says, out loud:

“We don’t have time for this.”

She motions to the big screen behind her.

02:56:00

“
That’s
how much time we have,” she says. “Do you understand what’s happening?”

“Not everything . . . but I can make an educated guess.”

“Don’t ask questions and don’t make guesses,” the colonel says. “We don’t have time for that, either. We’re in the middle of a war and I need your help, son.”

“I’ll do what I can, but—”

“I said keep your questions to yourself.”

“Okay.”

“Now, first . . . how are you feeling? You’re not gonna pass out on us again, are you?”

“I’m groggy. Took a pretty hard hit back there.”

The colonel laughs. “No shit, son. Right in the noodle. Those were maximal bad guys we pulled you away from last night. A major firefight. Almost didn’t get you out.”

Last night?

He sees the question stab my face.

“You’re in Wyoming now. The Francis E. Warren Air Force Base. My men brought you here by chopper.”

“Wyoming . . .”

The words float off into space, consumed by his.

“Normally my bedside manner would be a little more sensitive, but we can’t stand on ceremony. Do you know what Resurrection is?”

I shake my head slightly. I don’t know, not really. I’ve only been making educated guesses. He takes a step forward and pulls a great gulp of air before he lays it on me.

And everything changes.

Forever.

•  •  •

“R
esurrection is a code name for an operation that’s been floating under the radar of the U.S. government for over forty years. They’re like ghosts. Have people everywhere. From street guys like you to places as high as Capitol Hill.”

He lets the weight of his words roll across me.

Then keeps on hammering.

“Part of the objective of this operation was to subvert the tactical defense system grids currently in place across America—it’s all under the umbrella of something we call the Black Box. You know what that means, son?”

“I know a little. I know it’s not about nukes, whatever they had planned.”

“Correct. It’s about something a lot cleaner, but also a lot worse. Have you ever heard of the W79 Initiative?”

“No.”

The colonel waves a hand at Morales, who steps forward:

“The W79 tactical warhead is a state-of-the-art neutron flux bomb. It creates a high yield radiation emission in the upper atmosphere
of a target area which then spreads out like a cancer on the ground.”

“Destroys people and leaves structures intact,” I say.

“Mostly,” Morales says. “You can level half a city with a W79 variant if it’s delivered in the right way. The flux wave acts like an EMP—it’s capable of knocking out power sources for miles. The radiation kills every living thing—it can go through lead shielding six feet thick. But the kicker is that the fallout doesn’t last as long.
Days
instead of years.”

I rub my eyes and shake my head. “Neutron bombs were discontinued in the eighties.”

“You only know that because you heard it on the news,” the colonel says. “These bombs are clean, and clean bombs are silent bombs. Silent, as in you never hear about them. They’ve been in the silos for years.”

Morales pipes up again. “In 2004, the president announced he was discontinuing the initiative, but it was just spin control. What they were really doing was replacing the existing warheads with fresh stock.”

I heave a disgusted sigh into the floor, shaking my head. I’ve always lived with the opinion that Old Georgie-boy screwed up more history than any free world leader on the books.

And now his legacy is complete.

“The tritium in your average old-school neutron bomb has a half-life of just ten years,” Morales says. “When they re-upped, the engineers didn’t leave anything to chance. These new babies are solid state. The most dangerous weaponry on the planet.”

The colonel turns to me. “The grid that controls the initiative is a secondary protocol that floats just under the main set of numbers in Region Eleven. Designed to take out the enemy in the event of an anticipated first strike from the other side.”

“And nobody in the real world knows the difference,” I say.

“Correct,” the colonel says. “The W79 Initiative is actually a Special Ops contingency
against
nuclear apocalypse.”

Morales almost laughs. “You cut off the balls of the guy aiming his nukes at you before they have any idea you’ve hit them.”

“And those Resurrection guys got control of it,” I say.

The colonel nods.

“They developed the prototype system to trick the computers at Cheyenne Mountain right under our noses,” Morales says. “And we had no idea they’d done it. But about two months ago . . . David Hartman blew the whistle.”

Just like I figured.

Hartman knew Texas Data Concepts had been conned into developing the program that would kill us all, and so he used his leverage with the company to seal the thing in a vault so dangerous that it would blow everything back to hell if anyone messed with it. Then he probably used what he had against Jenison and her people. To get whatever he wanted from them, which could have been anything. Girls, power. Or maybe—

“Hartman was no hero,” the colonel says. “He was helping to
fund
those maniacs for years. But I don’t think the old boy figured on them actually
using
the system. There’d been talk in the CIA rumor mill of something like it, a virus in the works that could remove executive decisions from strategic defense.”

Heather tilts her head, her eyes sort of rolling. “They actually called it the detribalization of civilian government.”

The colonel rubs his chin, grumbling. “The idea of something that final was just too crazy for most of us to believe. I didn’t believe it myself. Until Hartman started communicating with us. Started feeding us important bits of information. Enough to keep us interested, anyway.”

“You were talking
directly
to him?”

“We’d infiltrated his organization several times, using deepcover
operatives, but he always managed to sniff us out. Lieutenant Stone was still in his custody when he finally started talking. We learned a lot about Resurrection. Almost everything except for the location of the main bunker. He said we had to make a deal for that.”

“The city underground,” I whisper.

“Correct.”

“That’s where they plan to survive the whole thing.”

“Correct. It’s a fortified complex a mile beneath the surface. There’s others like it all over the world. They’ve been building these shelters for years and years, but this one complex is the mother of them all. It’s armored and way off the grid. It could theoretically survive
anything
.”

“Hartman was on the Express until Jenison forced him out,” I say. “My guess is that he was greasing you guys to sell off its location, not to mention the software. He would have scalped it to the highest bidder.”

The colonel nods. “That’s about the size of it. They’ve got thousands of people down there. They’ve been disappearing them for years. Water-powered hydro-electric generators, independent agriculture, environmental control. We think they may even have some sort of advanced cryogenics system. Some way to keep a select number of live bodies fresh in stasis for decades.”

I see my wife floating there, breathing green liquid, surrounded by her own life essence.

Just beyond my reach now.

The prize that drives me mad.

The colonel senses my gears working, and he almost says something, but I stop him fast: “That’s science fiction. You can’t expect me to believe that they’ve put a whole army on ice.”

He almost laughs.

“I think you
do
believe it, son. You may be a smart one, but I ain’t no fool when it comes to liars.”

“You think I’m lying? You think I’m one of
them
?”

“Anything’s possible.”

He sizes me up again, takes a deep breath.

Takes one step closer.

“Let me tell you a little bit about who you’re talking to, friend. I’m what you call a lifer. Not a veteran. Not a twenty-year man. I’ve been in it since
day one
. Which means I’ve seen action all over the world, from way down in the mud to back here in the war room—and everywhere you go, there’s always some guy who thinks he can get away with something. Some of them are
professional
liars. You buy their bullshit because it’s their job. It works on most everybody. But it never works on me. See, son, I’ve been around since God created the earth . . . and that also means I’ve got a lot of kids.”

He gets closer to me.

Puts his hands in the air, fingers up—all ten of them.

“That’s how many
girls
I’m a father to. And they’re all grown up, every single damn one of them. Women are the best liars. They train you to spot the bullshit and terminate it with extreme prejudice. It takes years to learn how a woman thinks, and you have to start from the moment they’re born. You have to do it over and over, year after year, decade after decade . . . until finally you can smell lies like gasoline in the air.”

He snaps one of his hands into a taloned pointer and jabs my chest.

“That’s how I know you were lying just then. I think you know something you ain’t telling us. So if you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll come clean right now. Or it might just get a little bit unpleasant in here.”