Scorched Earth: Book 2 in the Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series: (Zero Hour - Book 2), Page 2

  “So, what are you looking for?” she asked.

  Javier turned back around and stepped forward, through the trees. “Checking to see how close to town we are. We’re trying to get a car,” he said.

  “So we can go to Connecticut.”

  “You got it, kid.”

  “What’s in Connecticut?”

  Javier looked back at her. “Jackson’s got some family and friends there. Says they’ll be able to put a roof over our heads, at least for a little bit.”

  He noted the look on her face, a mixture of uncertainty, confusion, and despair.

  “What’s the matter, kid?” he asked, dropping down into a crouch so he could look her eye-to-eye.

  “I want to go home,” she whispered.

  “I know, buddy,” Javier replied. All he could picture was the apartment Mel had shared with her parents, a low rent, beat down skeleton of a living quarters, with threadbare carpeting, a mishmash of yard sale furniture, and not much in the way of comfort. But to Melinda it had been familiar. It had been hers. It had been home. Now, her home was gone. Her home and her parents, and likely her entire city. It was a lot for a ten-year-old to absorb.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I miss my home, too,” Javier said, staying down at her level. “All of us in this group are missing our homes. It’s all right to miss home and to miss your parents, okay? It doesn’t make you a little kid.”

  She smiled sheepishly and nodded.

  “All we can do is make the best of it. This will be an adventure. A trip. Who knows, maybe we’ll even find some toy stores along the way, huh?”

  Melinda beamed. “Do you think so?”

  “Sure. We’ll keep our eyes open. If we find one, I’ll get you something special. Something to keep you company along the way.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Mom and Dad never could buy me too many toys. I’m kinda getting too old for them, anyway.”

  Javier narrowed his glare in mock outrage. “Never too old for toys, kiddo.” He pushed himself back upright and glanced back through the trees, walking a little deeper into the woods. Holding out his hand behind him, he let Melinda wrap her fingers around his and follow him through the wilderness. He glanced through a section of thin branches and saw a narrow, winding dirt road cutting a path through the woods, just over an embankment.

  “We’ve got a road,” he said. “And where there’s a road, there’s a town.” He looked back to Mel who returned his grin. “Come on, let’s go tell the others.”

  ***

  “I can’t believe you’re showing me this sword work,” Jackson said, shaking his head. “I mean you were honor guard and now you’re acting like you’re some crazy samurai or something.”

  The sun was nearing its crest in the eastern sky as they stood in the gentle, sloping clearing of grass. A ring of trees encircled the area, pressed back from the opened hilltop, leaves gently rustling in the morning breeze. Unseasonably warm temperatures were still in the air, shifting the breeze from potentially chilled to a pleasant warmth, a fact that Jackson was thankful for. Javier had strode off several minutes ago to see how close to civilization they were, with Melinda close in tow, and Jackson stood on the grass, his closed fists pressed to his hips, watching Clark work.

  It was a living contradiction, Clark a large, fifty-something year old man, looking about as graceful as a drunk rhinoceros. But when he had the sword in his hands, it was like he was thrown back twenty-five years, his legs coiled, his arms tensed and locked, and his body moving with a strange, lumpy fluidity, moving forward and back, hands whipping through the air as the sword blade slid noiselessly.

  “Listen, you ungrateful punk,” Clark replied, his face twisted into a smirk. “You rather I just let you swing this thing around until you cut off something you might need later?”

  “Nah, man, I’m impressed,” Jackson replied, chuckling. “I mean seriously.”

  Clark shook his hand and drew his feet together into a standing posture, then turned and tossed the sword to Jackson. He scrambled from the rock he was sitting on and barely snatched the hilt from mid air, letting the blade swing down and hack a chunk out of the grass.

  “You guys play with your swords all you want,” Broderick said from several feet away. He was also sitting on a large rock, one of the tactical rifles clutched in his hands. He was examining the structure of the weapon, running his hand up and down, then slid the magazine out to review how much ammunition it held.

  “This is all the ancient weaponry I need.” He shouldered the rifle, letting his finger touch the trigger guard, careful not to get too close to the trigger itself. It was the CZ Scorpion Evo 3 semi-automatic that he held, one of the rifles they’d taken from Javier’s friends after the untimely execution of Major Chaboth. Broderick leaned in toward it, following the curve of the carbine with his eyes, wondering not for the first time, if this was in fact the gun that had shot her. The gently sloped fore-end was ridged with metallic rails along the top of the weapon, mounted with Picatinny rails and a thick, sixteen-inch barrel. Looking at the twenty round capacity magazine, Broderick could see that a couple of bullets were missing, nine-millimeter rounds by the looks of it. Any time they’d stopped for a break, he’d checked out some of the weapons that had ended up in the canvas bag with them, and while the Evo looked the most advanced, he went right back to the familiar M4, mostly because of its fully automatic capacity.

  The rest of the rifles in the bag looked like they’d been appropriated from a sporting goods store or a gun shop, and would have been available in semi-automatic only.

  “That thing looks like it packs a punch,” Jackson said, nodding toward the Scorpion.

  Broderick shrugged. “It’s all right. Not as nice as the M4, that’s for sure.”

  “So, you’re a gun guy?” Jackson asked.

  “Well, I’m Army,” Broderick replied. “Geneticist, first and foremost, but had to get some field ops under my belt before I could join with the team. Not as talented as Zorro over there, I’m sure.”

  Clark smirked. “Did my twenty with the USMC, bud. And yeah, I agree, the Scorpion ain’t got nothing on the old M4A1. Give me one of those any day. I’d like an M-16 even better.”

  “I’ll remember that if we run across one,” Broderick replied.

  Jackson moved across the grass, balancing the sword in his hands, taking a few more practice swipes.

  “So where are we, anyway?” Broderick asked, glancing around the clearing, looking at the thickening tree line, drawing away from the center.

  “That’s what I’m hoping Javier can find out for us,” Clark replied. “We’re somewhere west of the Blue Hills Reservation. That was our first stop. We’ve been walking steadily, but not quickly.”

  “And the plan is still to look for a car?” Broderick asked.

  Jackson looked over as he slashed through the air. “That’s the plan. Javier is scouting to see how close to any civilization we are. We’ve been following trails out of Blue Hills to avoid running across anyone we might not want to meet. But soon we’re going to have to shift to main roads or we’ll be walking through these trees for weeks.”

  Broderick nodded. “I need to get to Fort Detrick. They need to know what’s happening on the ground.”

  Clark nodded. “What about that other guy? Sergeant Davis you called him, right?”

  “Yeah. Dean Davis. Ex-Marine like you, he was our military liaison, and obviously he’s gone a little off the rails. That’s another reason I want to get to Detrick, who knows what he could be telling them.”

  “Just get me to Aldrich first,” Jackson said. “From there, do what you want.”

  “I’m just along for the ride,” Clark replied. “I don’t much care where we go or how we get there, I’m just glad to be out of the city before it went completely sideways.”

  Broderick nodded, standing from the rock, letting the rifle rest there at an angle. “Without a car we won’t be going anywhere real soon.”

  Jac
kson nodded. “We also don’t want to draw a lot of attention to ourselves. Who knows what’s going on in other parts of the country. I thought I heard that this weird super flu was hitting New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York, too.”

  “Super flu is a misnomer,” Broderick replied. “That’s not what this is.”

  “Well, then what is it?” Clark asked. “I mean, you talked about it a bit before, but not in much detail.”

  Broderick shrugged again. “Honestly, not a whole lot of detail to reveal. From what we can tell, it’s a genetically engineered biological weapon. Very sophisticated. Disturbingly so, actually.”

  “Sophisticated how?”

  “From what little I was able to gather before everything went south, the weapon acts almost like a computer virus. Programmed to attack certain genetic structures.”

  “Uh, that’s crazy,” replied Clark. “Since when did that even become possible?”

  Broderick adjusted his posture, trying to avoid shifting into teacher mode. “The world of genetics has opened wide in the last few years,” he said. “A lot of things are possible these days that were science fiction a few years ago.”

  “What countries could do something like this?” asked Jackson. “I mean, you called it a ‘weapon’, right? Someone had to actually build it and fire it, right?”

  Broderick nodded. “There aren’t many countries out there with this capacity. The list is frighteningly small. This wasn’t some offshoot, this was something state sponsored by someone.”

  “That’s not good,” Clark said. “But why start so small? I mean, it sounds like things are spreading, but it also sounds like if this is what caused the plane crashes, that was pure coincidence. Not planned. Right?”

  “I have no idea. There’s so much I still don’t know. I need to get back to headquarters and try to unravel some of this.”

  “And that’s Fort Detrick?” Jackson asked, sliding the sword back in its scabbard.

  “That’s Fort Detrick,” Broderick replied.

  “Then we need to get moving,” Clark said. “Let’s pack up and see what our boy Javier has got for us.”

  “Your boy Javier found an access road,” a voice said from behind Clark. He turned and saw both Javier and Melinda emerging from the trees.

  “Single lane dirt road. Just over an embankment, probably a hundred yards that way,” he pointed the direction they’d approached from. “It looks well-traveled, I’m guessing it leads to some kind of civilization.”

  Jackson nodded. “Good. Great job, you two. Let’s check it out.”

  ***

  Buried within one of the myriad sub-basements of Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland resided one of the most advanced and elaborate command centers in the northern hemisphere. As the world progressed beyond the underlying nuclear threats of the Cold War, a much tighter focus was turned toward biological and radioactive weaponry. Attacks that could be made from small, mobile groups, not a vast, destructive assault from an enemy nation state. Terrorism was the true threat, and those same terrorists had the potential to carry along with them deadly radiation or viruses, something far more subversive than a theoretical missile dropping from the sky.

  As the Centers for Disease Control expanded their reach into a more global anti-viral organization, the United States government decided that this kind of strategy also required a military arm. Not an organization that was simply devoted to halting the spread of deadly pathogens, but an organization that would seek out and destroy enemy groups that might be using those same pathogens for evil means.

  Team Ten came into formation in the years following the September 11th attacks, a top secret mobile strike force designed as a unique marriage between the science arm of the CDC and the military arm of the United States military, forming a coalition of sorts, a defense mechanism created to battle back anyone who might choose biological or chemical weapons as an attack agent against domestic targets.

  Year after year the threat of these kinds of attacks seemed to diminish, and the secret budget allocations for Team Ten diminished along with them, but their core command center hidden away deep below Fort Detrick remained top of the line and next generation. Using the United States Army Medical Research and Institute of Infectious Diseases as their cover, Team Ten maintained their robust research and development department, even though they’d been forced to scale back their military operations. They managed a dozen field operations throughout any given year, and gathered a wealth of intelligence, but as of yet, none of that intelligence had led to the direct incarceration or prevention of a specific attack.

  In spite of their activities, the team was never called out on the carpet and, in fact, almost no one was aware of their very existence. Most days, their command center was a quiet hustle and bustle, operatives and scientists coming and going, moving quietly throughout other parts of the building, doing work connected to, if not directly related to, the prevention of biological attacks on the United States of America.

  After the events which began in Boston, Colonel Garrison Reeves doubted their command center would ever be that quiet again.

  “Lieutenant Burns, see if you can get Corporal Gentry on the horn. He’s with National Guard up in New Hampshire. I need some kind of status update from their neck of the woods, now.”

  “Yessir, Colonel Reeves,” Lieutenant Leeza Burns replied, adjusting the frequency on her communications rig, then pressing the headset to her ear. The command center was a small room, but tightly packed with equipment, a full wall of communications gear sitting in front of Lieutenants Burns and Hayes. On the left several secured wiring racks stood at attention, contents sealed within closed and locked cages, green lights flashing from the narrow shelves of equipment. A door in the wall on the left side of the room led to a darkened hallway, branching off into a few smaller conference rooms. At the rear of the command center, steel counters emerged from the wall, surrounding a pair of built-in sinks. Various laboratory equipment was scattered about the tables in organized fashion, everything from simple microscopes and flasks to power analytics PCR workstations and complex thermal cyclers. Short for polymerase chain reaction, the PCR equipment allowed for amplification and duplication of genetic samples, assisting research scientists in analysis and examination of minor changes or impacts to genetic structure. The PCR workstations were huge, dark colored boxes with built-in hoods, each one flanked with the smaller thermal cycler next to them on the table. Anyone who was unfamiliar with the technology would have thought they stepped forward several decades into the future, even though this particular equipment had been in use since the latter days of the twentieth century.

  “Hayes, I’m expecting a call from Frank Nabers at the CDC. Please let me know immediately when he dials in,” Colonel Reeves said.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Lieutenant Hayes. She kept her eyes on the comm screens ahead of her, juggling signals coming in and out, a vast web of coordination between dozens of units in the field, desperately trying to figure out what was going on. Not many calls terminated at their console—after all, their team wasn’t supposed to even exist—but she assisted in connecting teams together from afar. A glorified switchboard operator, she often thought to herself, and today she was like the only person handling all five Burroughs of New York.

  Reeves stepped away from the bank of communications consoles, crossing his arms over his broad chest. He cupped his scruffy chin in one hand and drew his fingers away, surprised at the growth on his face. He couldn’t remember the last time he wasn’t clean shaven. That’s the kind of week this was starting out to be. Blurred figures charged back and forth across the command center, a flurry of movement, the complete opposite of how things usually ran in this sub-basement level of the military institute.

  His eyes darted from body to body as they flew around the room, sliding over the tiled floor, weaving in and out of other passing bodies, moving from console to console, stopping to talk amongst themselves. Most of the men and women were in dress
greens or dress blues, a unique coalescence of several different military branches, a collaboration almost unheard of outside of this small corner of the world.

  A woman bowed her head lightly, whispering “excuse me” as she passed by him, moving toward the communications station where Lieutenant Hayes was sitting. She turned and looked up at her and they chatted briefly.

  “Havestock!” the colonel barked, gesturing toward a man in army greens, turning away from one of the PCR workstations.

  “Sir?” he asked, striding toward him.

  “Still no response on the transponder from the Blackhawk?”

  “Nossir,” Havestock replied, shaking his head. “I just got back from checking with comms upstairs and cross-referenced regular emergency calls as well, so far nothing to cross-reference their location.”

  “Do we still believe Team Ten went down?”

  Havestock nodded. “There appears to have been a brief distress beacon signal seconds before contact was lost. According to the final report from Butch, she was heading back to pick up the team for exfil.”

  Reeves nodded. “We need to get more birds in the air,” he said quietly.

  “The whole city’s blowing up, sir,” Havestock replied. “Is that even a viable option right now?”

  “We have to make it a viable option, Corporal,” replied Colonel Reeves. “If Team Ten was on the ground, and we know they were, they would have hit Ground Zero. Their point of extract was about three kilometers from the first reported site, which means they had some time to capture data from the first reported victims of this incident. That data could be critical to any hope we have of fighting this thing.”

  “Understood, sir,” Havestock replied. He started to turn back toward another bank of communications consoles.

  “Hold up,” Reeves said, clasping his fingers around Havestock’s shoulders. The corporal turned around.

  “Sir?”

  Reeves took a step closer. “There’s a good possibility Team Ten has been lost,” he said quietly. “In spite of that, we need to put our best foot forward and retrieve that data, okay? That should be our primary responsibility. They were all carrying platinum shielded containment cases. I'll forward the specifications to the retrieval teams; getting those back to us is priority number one.”