World of Ashes II (27 page)

             
Daniel laughed. He was going to love this bullshit, if love were a thinly veiled metaphor for wishing he were back in DC with nothing but a pointy stick. The choppers landed an incredibly short time later, a look out the window proved he wasn’t yet back at Warren AFB, but was instead landing at a new forward airfield built since the plague spread. The crew chief handed a headset to Captain Sharp, who nodded when explained the reason for landing early.

              The helicopter engines started winding down and eventually Daniel could hear himself think again. The small airbase was filled with ground crew and helicopters under temporary tents that hadn’t been taken out of storage since the invasion of Iraq more than a decade ago. The only genuinely new things Daniel saw were two F-35 Joint Strike Fighters taxying to a short runway before roaring into the air. Then Daniel got it. There was another air threat, probably the Texans again. At this point in his life he thought he might stab the next person wearing a Stetson that crossed his path, but then that’s how you stay mad at someone long enough to fight them. You dehumanize your enemy, and if they’re your own you learn to find something stupid to hate so that you can continue to hate for as long as it takes to win.

              “Sir, what happened?” Daniel bothered to ask.

              “There’s active enemy radar in the area. We’ll be taking a high-speed rail back to the Complex.”

              “What complex?” Daniel remembered his decorum before it was too late, “Sir.”

              “The Cheyenne Complex Community Project. Fancy name for Mankind’s last best hope to survive this plague. That’s where you come in, Private Sawyer. I’m putting together a special operations unit, not like the old ones, but one designed specifically to combat the EV1 threat as it exists today. The CDC is working on an inoculation to prevent future outbreaks, but for now the best we have are boots on the ground, you get me Mr. Sawyer?”

              “Yessir. Is this voluntary, Sir?”

              “If I say yes will that make you feel better?” Captain Sharp stood straight up, making certain he looked down a little at Daniel, who was almost the same height. “Because then sure, it’s voluntary, and might I say
thank you
for volunteering.”

              “That’s what I thought.” Daniel put on a practiced smile.

              “As I was,” Captain Sharp went on while showing his ID to a guard near the fenced off area for military personnel to board a train. “The Envier Quick Reaction Force, or EQRF as I’d like to call it, would be responsible for locating and extracting survivors and jumping in ahead of the main force to ready the battlefield for attack.”

              “How do you ready a battlefield, Sir?”

              “My plan is to quietly set distraction charges and barriers to guide large herds into a bottleneck where our forces will have a more concentrated target to hit. Munitions are running out, and in case you haven’t noticed modern strategies are not working anymore.”

              “We might as well be using Civil War tactics, Sir.” Daniel commented. He was maybe a little too comfortable around officers, something he may have gotten in trouble for several times if he’d not been a reservist.

              Daniel swore he could see the light-bulb come on over Sharp’s head. “Maybe that’s exactly what we need, Mr. Sawyer. They’re a mindless enemy, are they not?”

              “Quite, Sir. But what they lack in intelligence and reasoning they make up for in sheer numbers and determination. They don’t quit, Sir. If they know you’re behind a wall they’ll grind themselves to a pulp before they give up trying to get through that wall, even if you’ve long gone. I figure there’s got to be some way to use that. In Florida the other survivors and I thought maybe using a single ship with guns and drawing them to the water might be a good strategy.”

              “Was it?”

              “I couldn’t tell you, Sir.” Daniel admitted as he saw the shiny silver train approaching. “The Marines blew our boat up before we could test that theory.”

              Captain Sharp nodded. “I read the report from Admiral Marks, the action to prevent Cuba from gaining access to the Crystal River Nuclear Power Plant was a messy one. The Navy had no idea there were survivors in the area. Had they known, Seals would have been inserted and you and your people extracted earlier.”

              “There are… zombies… Sir… What are we doing shooting at each other?” Daniel changed the subject. He didn’t care about how to kill zombies nearly as much as he cared about why or how Americans were shooting at other Americans again.

              Thinking that one over, Sharp finally came up with his version of an answer. “You’d think this would bring people together, wouldn’t you? Bring out the best in humanity, usher in a new era of cooperation and reason. Instead we lose a dozen planes a day to the Texans, another thousand troops join the undead ranks, another half million civilians with them and another ship goes dark at sea every hour. Humanity is tearing itself apart, the zombies were just an excuse to get down to the business of acting like the demented fucking naked space monkeys we really are.”

              “And you think we can make a difference in that, Sir?”

              Sharp didn’t hesitate with that answer. “Absolutely we can, Mr. Sawyer. And it starts with redesigning our tactics, indeed our very goals.” 

Chapter 11

              A bullet train, the last thing someone who’d spent six months running from zombies and sleeping in filthy corners would expect to see zipping through the American West, was a silver plane with no wings. The view from inside probably wasn’t as thrilling as say someone on the ground who didn’t hear the train coming and turned around just in time.

              Captain Sharp was calmly reading a newspaper, another casual and almost bizarre thing Daniel would have to get used to seeing all over again. Daniel had a cup of coffee in front of him too, hot and fresh from the dining cart, but then that was twenty minutes ago. The brown liquid had stopped steaming already, hot food was something he hadn’t gone without for very long this entire time, but that it was served in a porcelain cup with a tea plate below it, for some reason disgusted Daniel. Why was manpower and resources wasted on this?

              “When did we build this? I remember they’d broken ground on the Chicago to St. Louis line like what, last year… Sir? Sorry, it’s been a minute. I’ll work on my decorum, Sir.”

              “Don’t worry about it.” Sharp said, sipping the last of his own coffee. He motioned to the steward to bring him another. “You’ll be promoted to Second Lieutenant, second only to myself, the day after we arrive. Not sure we’ll be back in time for the evening news, which is a shame because the more PR the better.” Sharp finally put down the paper. He preened his stupid looking mustache. “Normally we’d clean you up, make you presentable and up to Army standards, but you know how the PR game is played. We need to make a show of you as a survivor, then we’ll let you shave and get you a new uniform.”

              “Yeah, why the old ‘new’ uniforms?”

              “Plague Victims either can’t tell or done care what you’re wearing. We had lots of ACUs still in stock, not as many of the new ones. Front line units sucked up all the supplies, now more Vics are wearing our cammo than we are. Not to mention Texas is fielding old style woodland cammies now, and every Last Man Standing is wearing every generation of cammo we used to field… It’s a mess. If we didn’t have a uniformed enemy to fight as well right now I’m sure the Brass would have us wearing Construction Yellow.” That was supposed to be Sharp’s version of a joke, but knowing the Army that was all too feasible.

              Daniel pretended to smile. “Well, Sir, thank you for your perhaps premature faith in me, but this is all just… so much.”

              “Premature?” Sharp stopped preening his lip ferret.

              Finding the right words as he looked out the window, the train passed a refugee camp where a construction crew was trying to build a sound and “zombie proof” wall around it, naturally starting with the side that faced the luxury train line. Some smartass had graffitied the wall in an older section,
The Odds Are Never in Our Favor
. Two kids, presumably the ones who thought they were being clever in the first place, were washing it off. Daniel only got a mental snapshot of that, but the image would stick in his mind forever, perhaps even unduly influence his decisions in the future.

              “If we’re being totally honest, Sir… I just lost my best friend, the bubonic plague has turned Donner Party on us… I just want to see my mom. I want to eat pizza till I get fat, play Xbox until my eyes explode, find a girl and fuck till my dick’s sore, then maybe, just maybe, find out if there’s even a vague chance my dad is still alive.”

              “England is dark, son. We get intermittent signals from survivors, a few of their ships and subs have joined the UN Fleet in the Atlantic, but…” Sharp could see he was losing Daniel’s attention. He needed this boy. “I’ll pull some strings. The same satellites that used to work for Google now work for us. Maybe an image could be taken, if the address were provided.” Sharp slipped Daniel a napkin and a pen like they were school kids passing notes.

              Writing down his father’s address Daniel felt like he might as well be signing his soul away in blood. For this favor, and it may not really be a favor but more a confirmation of death, Daniel would owe Captain Sharp more than just his soul. “I put his cell phone number on there too, Sir. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but maybe the NSA can do something with it.”

              The Devil’s Advocate put the napkin in a breast pocket. Suspiciously though, not a single indication of a Combat Patch or a Combat Action/Infantry Badge anywhere on Sharp’s uniform. Just what was his job, and how had he attained Captain during the Global War of Terror without seeing action?

              With only one scheduled stop between the airstrip where they’d landed and home, Daniel was treated to the view of their arrival at Warren AFB while it was still light outside. The place had changed, that was for sure. Hesco bastions and those fake rock soundproof walls one normally sees alongside freeways separated the military installations from a city that was beginning to look incredibly dystopian. With so many more people there now than Cheyenne was ever meant to hold, shanty towns, tent cities, trailer parks that stretched the horizon surrounded the already huge city of hard buildings. Daniel couldn’t tell from inside the pressurized cabin of the train, but he imagined this new American ghetto smelled absolutely as bad as it looked. People lived in the streets, walked everywhere, porta-johns were left doorless or tipped, fires in barrels kept the people who surrounded them warm. Daniel would learn later these barrels served the dual purpose of waste removal.

              Despite what he’d expected, the cool fall wind smelled pleasant and of the open plains again. Wheat, corn, a dozen other crops, all ready for harvest or being processed by a cross section of American Industry surrounding the city proper. Whole factories had been hauled in by train and reconstructed in temporary buildings. Daniel’s attention now away from the shanty towns, he saw a statue being built in the center of a long oval industrial park. A two thirds scale Lincoln Memorial with the Washington Monument and (a clean) pond in between them, went straight through the center of the industrial park. The wastefulness of such a structure when people lived in tents wasn’t the true insult, though. For an astute History student, the way Daniel and his father both were, the final insult was seeing his homeland turned into the American version of Pyongyang. Daniel followed Captain Sharp to the closest door and mimicked his pose, steeling himself for another wave of reporters that could be just as difficult to navigate as a small herd of zombies.

              The doors opened with a nearly silent swishing whisper and the failing daylight cast deep shadows over the gathered crowd. Just as the cameras started flashing and the noise of people speaking into microphones drown everything out the sun dipped below a satellite dish and finally he could see inside the shadows. The closest one made his heart jump into his throat and Daniel completely forgot for one brief moment that his mother was a General and he only a Private and he hugged her as hard as he could after leaping off the train down to her on the ground. Annette embraced her precious, grown but forever baby, boy. The media had a field day with it, and in fact a photographer in the crowd, just a little girl with her bright pink Barbie camera and a reload of black and white film, crawled under the people until she had a front row seat less than a foot off the ground. Her image of the “General Mother” showing General Brown’s human side when reunited with her long lost son, home at last from the Front, won the Pulitzer Prize and was featured on Times Magazine’s front cover the next week.

              All on the platform for the train, introductions and speeches were given by various officers and politicians who’d made a name for themselves since the Envier Plague. The last speaker before Daniel, who had no previous knowledge of being expected to stand up in front of people and talk, was his mother. The speaker introduced her as the Savior of the Pass, a media darling the Administration was all too happy to parade around. First she’d gotten her star, next she’d gotten her son back. The end of the world may have been the best thing that ever happened to Annette Brown.