Nightmare Factory, page 8
“You don’t have time for a road-trip south, Boss. You need to get to the med labs.”
She was right; I knew that, but I also had seen the blast. “I don’t think the capital even exists anymore. I saw at least one detonation, possibly two in that direction, Bayou. I’m not sure I would find anything even if I tried.”
The static was back again, her voice sounding very far away and indistinct.
“I can make it down to see that your sister’s okay.” I queued Ada, “Do you have her sister’s contact information?”
“I do, Joe, the information was updated in the last week.”
“Bayou, you there?”
I was met with silence.
“Bayou? Debra? Are you safe? Have you heard from anyone else?”
There was no response, then three rapid beeps signaling the connection had ended.
“Fuck!”
I tossed more supplies into a go bag I’d pulled out of its rack and then added a few more items. I wasn’t sure of the destination, but I damn well knew we couldn’t just wait around here. “Ada, any geo data on her call?”
My AI responded immediately, “Likely southern hemisphere, Costa Rica or Belize.”
“Hmmm…yeah.” Both had seen a lot of unrest lately. Insurgents, gangs, and warlords kept moving into the once pristine tropical wilderness regions. Bayou did a lot of solo work, as she was uniquely equipped as a special recon operator. Generally, though, they assigned her to lead a three-man recon team as advanced scouts for larger missions. Sometimes all of Banshee was included, sometimes not. The entire team was due back in a couple of days because I’d been busy prepping the next full mission. A traditional drop mission into enemy held territory, full body armor and the latest fun toys to deliver death from above. Looked like that one was going to be scrubbed.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
LUX
Lux Reynolds stared blankly out the window, the video game automatically pausing when he looked away. He hated these trips. He loved his dad, just couldn’t stand that they couldn’t all just live together like they used to. The miles rolled by with agonizing slowness. The autonomous car was not the issue. It had all the fun and games, just like home. Even there, his mom worked so much she was barely around. Still, knowing she was back home while he was here in this Georgia place made him sad. Every other month, they packed him into a car for the overnight drive where he would spend a week or sometimes a little more in Atlanta, where his dad now lived with his new girlfriend and her brat daughter.
“Lux?” the NanyBot AI named Marcie said softly from the car’s speakers. “Are you okay?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s not an answer,” her tone growing firmer.
“I’m fine.”
He was eight, and like most kids, his parents were not together. Not divorced, because they had never married, but there had been a legal union.
Marcie clearly wasn’t buying it. She had undoubtedly already analyzed the tone of his voice, his posture on the seat, and all his vitals from the sensors in the comms unit he wore. She muted the slightly annoying sounds coming from the paused video game. “Would you like to talk about it?”
They’d talked before. It did no good. “I need to finish my homework.” School was the one constant no matter who’s house he was at. He preferred attending remotely most days anyway, but this was the last of spring week back at his school in West Charles. It was one of the more fun times as they had outdoor games and lots of fun stuff going on, as soon as they finished the biggest test of the year, of course. This was why he was headed back home during the day instead of at night like normal. His parents liked him to just sleep the entire trip. Being in the autocar was safer than being at home, so they never gave it a second thought.
“You are all caught up with your assignments. Your teacher even sent some personal comments back to you on your homework from yesterday. Would you like me to read them?”
He shook his head. “Just leave me alone, please.” He made sure the please sounded more like a command. Marcie did not reply. Instead, the ambient light in the cabin shifted to a more subdued blue, and the rest of the interior dimmed. She would try to lull him to sleep now, he realized. Because grumpy kids the world over just needed a good nap to make everything great again.
The hills swept past as the car moved farther and farther away from his dad and back toward home. His gaze shifted to the range of far hills. He noticed an odd color in the distance, more like a bubble of violet light than anything. “What’s that, Marcie?”
The AI used the car’s internal cameras to follow his pointing fingers and then zoom out. Immediately, the car slowed. The spectral signature of that light matched only one thing in Marcie’s memory files. A Sapphire II ballistic warhead, a rare relic of the PetroChem Wars. She placed the likely impact somewhere in Tennessee, possibly near Knoxville. She also now had internal reports coming in of other blasts going off. The AI directed the car to disengage from the highway’s traffic pattern and exit the roadway. The car rolled to a stop as several vapor trails appeared in the sky. It was some sort of rockets high overhead.
“I think it is a weapon, possibly a terrorist attack, Lux.” She hated being so blunt, but her programming was quite clear on this. She was in an exposed situation; her circuits could be fried if any of these weapons had EMP generators onboard.
Lux’s sadness was quickly turning to fear. “Wh…what does that mean?”
Marcie was all business. “No time to explain. You are going to have to be a big boy now. If anything happens to me, you need to know what to do, okay?”
He nodded. “What could happen…”
“No time.” Several compartments opened in the car’s interior at once, and the passenger door swung open. “Take the bags in these compartments and move away from the car and into the tree line.” She had confirmed official reports now that the ongoing was indeed an attack and both nuclear and BioGen weaponry was in play. Even if they avoided an EMP blast here, the internet would go down, and the national WiFi mesh was already phasing in and out. She would be offline in seconds. “Lux, I need you to be brave. Don’t stay here with the car.”
Lux looked back at the highway, where dozens of other autocars screamed past at incredible speeds. He never realized they went that fast.
“You must find safety,” Marcie continued. “Other people. Don’t trust the others stranded on the road. They will be desperate. Do you understand?”
Dumbfounded, he nodded slowly. He’d never been without Marcie, couldn’t imagine life without her constant reassurance, in fact. She was more a mom to him that his actual mother. “I love you, Lux. Be careful. The small red bag, leave it sealed for at least a day or two. You have other supplies to last, okay?”
He looked around bewildered, “Last… you mean out here?”
Something screamed above the treetops, a shadow of it passing directly overhead, followed by a massive blast several miles away. The car rocked violently from the impact. “Run…” Marcie began before being suddenly cut off as the car itself burst into flame, all the lithium/magnesium batteries cooking off instantly behind the massive EMP wave.
Lux tried to run, to get away, but he was scared and confused. The sounds of other cars crashing and exploding terrified him, and then he heard the screams. “Don’t look, don’t look back,” he told himself as he scrambled on his hands and butt to move farther away from the intense heat. Then he glanced back toward the road and saw some of those that had been screaming. Burning cars with people trapped inside, cars just like the one he had been in minutes earlier. The scene was awful, much worse than anything he’d ever seen. Not even his dad’s video games, which he sometimes snuck in and played, showed anything this gruesome.
He didn’t realize he was moving, but his body had taken command and pulled him deeper into the nearby woods, away from the fiery inferno. He was shaking from fear; tears and snot cascaded down his face. He kept trying his wrist comms to call Marcie, his mom, or dad… anyone. No one answered. He lay down on the carpet of brown pine needles and pulled his knees up close to his chest. He put fingers in both ears to block out the sounds. The screams had stopped, but the fire and explosions were echoing up and down the highway. Those sounds went on for a very long time. At some point, he fell asleep. That was the only relief he found that day. It only lasted for minutes, or so he thought, because when his eyes opened again it was even worse.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
KOVACH
“Not really looking forward to this, partner.”
My dog just looked at me, unsure of what I was thinking. Dawn was just breaking to the east, despite the carnage of the day before; the sky was so brilliant it looked like a painting. I swung open the heavy doors on my shed and looked inside at the rusting contraption. The truth was, I had little use for a car up here. When I was due back on base or scheduled for deployment, a car, or more accurately, a ‘vehicle,’ was sent to pick me up. There was nowhere close-by to go. Like everyone else, groceries and supplies were delivered to me. I couldn’t even tell you where a food store would be. Driving was not something considered nearly as essential as it once had been. My dad had always owned a car, and his dad had quite a collection. What I was looking at now was the last one of those.
Inside the shed was a classic GMC Raider S pickup with the original mechanical steering and manual transmission. In truth, the thing looked like shit, just old and tired. I’d had dreams of rebuilding it, knocking out the dents, maybe a new paint job, but… well, my time and skills were limited and my desire even more so. Now, this beast might be my only way to get to the labs near D.C.
The truck was as solid as they came; the tires looked to be in good shape. The interior was another matter. That was something I should have handled. The double cab originally would have sat five or six, but now the interior only had a well-worn driver’s seat. I’d need to find at least one more for Sumo to ride shotgun.
First thing, though, was to find the battery packs and make sure the motors hadn’t seized up. I had taken the precautions to line the shed’s walls with wire netting, which should have blocked EMP waves, but they’d obviously never been tested.
The battery trays were ancient looking. Bricks of black rectangles seated in neat rows of ten. Each rack held about sixty of the things, and all I could remember was how heavy they were. These old metal and chemical mix batteries were nowhere near as advanced as the modern power cells, but they got the job done. The indicator lights on each rack glowed green, although it was flickering a bit in two of them. Probably a few more weak units as well. I disconnected the now useless charger. My solar power station in the cabin was still working, but the feed out to the shop had been fried.
It took me a half hour to find all of the dead batteries. I didn’t have any spares, so I just had to bridge those connections with a bit of wire and solder. How did my solder gun work, you ask? Well, that was a bit of cleverness on my part by actually making a fire, heating the metal part of a screwdriver and quickly using that to melt the metal solder in place without burning me or setting the rather explosive batteries on fire. It wasn’t pretty, nor safe, and certainly wouldn’t last. I couldn’t have been prouder.
“Ada, any outside comms?” Looking at the battery tray, I knew I was simply stalling, but did I mention how heavy these batteries were?
“Nothing yet, Joe. A few mostly garbled reports of attacks around the globe, but no word from your command, any other team members, or your father.”
“I’d like to know what else is happening,” I said, bending down to clean the spiders and various debris from the battery wells on the truck. Ada began playing a various mix of broadcasts, all very difficult to understand. Panicked voices mixed in with terrible interference made it almost unintelligible.
“Stop. Summaries only, please.”
Ada’s calm voice replaced the noise with a brutal roll call of the past day’s destruction. “This is based on limited and unconfirmed information. Simultaneous coordinated attacks on the U.S. mainland were carried out by a still unknown enemy or enemies. The most apparent targets were political, financial, technological, and numerous major population centers. At least twenty-three East Coast cities were bombed, seven of which were equipped with low to medium yield nuclear warheads, what we normally refer to as tactical nukes. Another five cities were the apparent sites of dirty bombs that were detonated at ground level. Several seismic impact sites suggest possible orbital kinetic strikes as well.”
Nuclear war had been the stuff of disaster movies since the 1940s. Dropping a nuclear bomb had been the tipping point of something called MAD, or mutually assured destruction, well into the mid twenty-first century. Then very-low yield tactical nukes, or VLYs, began showing up in arsenals. These were very low yield, with damage limited to less than a mile. Also, radiation mediation methods had improved to the point the ground could often be made useable again within a decade or two. The first admitted use of a tactical nuke was against a warlord in West Africa back in 2042, although most agree that Russia had used them several years earlier on an internal uprising in one of the Crimean states. They had proven so useful that now the globe was a freckled maze of off-limits pockmarked nuclear blasts sites.
“As Bayou suggested, these appear to have been launched from commercial ships,” Ada said, continuing with her summary. “Both ocean-going freighters and many that were in port or even at the docks being unloaded. No news is getting out of those cities, but death tolls could well be in the tens of millions.”
“What cities?”
Ada began naming them off. Most were East Coast and the ones I would have expected. Some didn’t seem to make much sense, though, like Bangor, Maine, a site in rural Virginia, Memphis, New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta, and others. The scale of the attack was shocking. America hadn’t been punched like this… well, ever.
“The majority were East Coast, although seven major cities on the West Coast were also partially to completely destroyed,” Ada continued. “Southern Florida was largely untouched other than one of the ten additional Sapphire warheads which struck outside Orlando.”
She knew I wanted to know about where my father was. Orlando was only a few hundred miles away. “Any ideas on the payload in the Sapphires?” That had undoubtedly been the blue glow I saw near the nation’s capital. What I recalled of those missiles was more legend than fact. I remembered they used an unusual dispersal system, and the payloads’ capabilities had a long list of possibilities, none of them good. They hadn’t been specifically banned by any of the more recent treaties, however, any payload they would carry likely was. But hell, what good did having a treaty do now?
“Nothing yet, Joseph. As you are aware, they have a surprising variety of possible uses, none of which are friendly to existing life forms. Most likely would be an engineered bio toxin. The proton blast spreads the payload agent over a large area without damaging it. Therefore, sensitive organic or biological compounds can be in the warhead.”
I was well aware of that fact; my father had filled me in on their reported uses during the PetroChem War, an ugly affair that nearly brought the entire world to its knees. Still, those were mostly isolated skirmishes, nothing like this. Dad had encountered a few missions where viral agents had been in the payload chamber, but more often than not, the Sapphires were simply a ruse to terrorize the enemy. The brilliant blue flare struck immediate fear that they’d been exposed to some deadly pathogen.
I grunted loudly as I slid the second of the battery trays back into place. Back in the day, there would have been a moveable sled to do this, as they were far too heavy for one man to lift, unless you had millions of dollars in biological enhancements.
Sighing, I sat back, still wrestling with the new information on the attack. I knew countless people had been killed, cities destroyed, families ripped apart, but I was a soldier. My focus was squarely on the enemy. Where were they based? What was their weakness? What assets did we have left, and who in the fuck was in command? I needed to kill people and break shit. That was what I was good at. In response, one of the rusty handles of the battery tray came off in my hand.
The so-called Sapphire warheads were a clue. They were rare, supposedly, all destroyed back in the fifties. They were developed from the original research on a neutron bomb. A bomb that would only kill people but not the surrounding buildings or infrastructure. That technology never panned out; they couldn’t get the prototypes to not saturate the blast zone with lethal radiation that rendered the site useless for later occupation. My mind was telling me this was a useful clue, something that might lead to an actual enemy. “Ada, do you have any other information on the Sapphire bombs?”
“A highly unusual radiation signature. Gamma radiation.”
I knew virtually nothing about that other than it came from deep space. “Isn’t that created in like a supernova or something?”
She answered, “That is one way. There are others, including normal radioactive decay and even lightning. It seems someone has developed a way of generating and weaponizing it.”
“Gamma rays are lethal, right? I remember seeing a graphic novel where the bad guy blasts a planet with ‘em.”
“Lethal in large enough doses, although this one seems to have been filtered or altered in some way. I am relatively sure the population in the immediate blast zone would perish, but beyond that, I am less certain of the result.”
I was in the garage until well past Sumo’s feeding time, and he was none too happy with the arrangement. He kept pissing on the tires of the old truck, once when I was behind trying to free up a seized mounting bolt on one of the motor mounts. “Ok. Shit, dude. Come on.”
