Fail State, page 8
part #2 of End of Days Series
THUMP.
The children screamed as two figures launched themselves at the hood of the car, one of them landing on it with a loud bang. It was a man in a business suit, but the suit was dusty and torn and his face was sunken and authentically mad.
"You have to help me," he cried out, his voice muffled by the closed windows.
Tammy tried not to look into his eyes as she yanked the steering wheel around and gave the accelerator a taste of her boot. The man snarled, like actually fucking snarled at her; she was sure of it. Like he was some sort of animal or something. Another loud bang sounded from behind.
She’d hit something, or someone.
"Mommy noooo!" Liana cried out.
Tammy shut her mind to everything but getting them turned around and gone. She could see where this was going to end if she fucked it all up. Hundreds of people would swarm the car in moments, pile them under and finally drag them out. Then they’d likely tear each other apart trying to get control of it. For half of a heartbeat she saw it happen, inside her mind. Saw the human wave breaking over the top of them, pulling the little ones out of the backseat, pulling them apart in the frenzy.
Another bang and another flailing body landed on the hood. It was a younger man this time, and he started fighting with the first guy for position. Tammy jammed on the brakes and the sudden jolting stop threw them both off the vehicle. That merely allowed her to see how many more were coming on. All of them, it seemed. They would be buried in seconds.
“Hang on everyone," she yelled, before crunching the shift into reverse and stomping the gas pedal hard.
The Oldsmobile shuddered and lumbered over a couple of bumps. She ignored the screams. It was easy to do in the uproar of more and more desperate pursuers surrounding the car. She mashed the horn. It seemed both stupid and necessary. What else was she to do?
“Fuck off all of you just fuck off!" Roxarne cried out, pounding at the passenger side window with her fists. A grotesque freakshow of nearly inhuman faces surrounded them. Haggard, angry, desperate. Lips skinned back from teeth, spittle flying, eyes rolling.
The children screamed. The car skewed and lurched and bumped over yet more unknown obstacles. And then they were free, reversing at speed back over the crest of the hill. A few determined souls kept after them, but Tammy had the road now and she was able to throw the car into an emergency brake turn that whipped them around in a half circle, pointing them back to where they had come from.
She poured on the gas and sped away without ever looking back.
10
The Plague
They had quickly settled into a routine, partly by design but mostly of necessity. Rick insisted on patrolling far beyond the edge of the camp all night, every night. He also insisted that while he was securing the approaches, someone remain on guard at the camp while the other two slept in shifts. It was a sensible arrangement and nobody took issue with it. James, having lived and worked on a ranch until leaving home for college had acquired his outdoor skills early, under the exacting eye of his father and the leading hands. He could set up and break down a campsite just as efficiently as Rick, but never having had the convenience of MREs or the luxury of an army field kitchen to call on, he was also a better than average outdoor cook. He took charge of ensuring they were well fed each day, and he insisted on tidying up afterward with a fastidiousness they were all getting used to. Mel, a city girl her whole life, nonetheless retained the practical realism gained in her previous job as a London copper. After Darnestown it was she who had argued for each of them to carry a personal weapon at all times. And when she wasn’t helping James gather food, or standing her watch over the camp, she took responsibility for everyone’s health and fitness, instituting a regime of strength training and cardio workouts that left James and Michelle sweating and shaking like leaves in a gale the first couple of times they attempted them. She also insisted the two ‘cube farm cripples’ practice basic unarmed self defence with her for another hour each day.
With no outdoor skills to speak of, Michelle Nguyen fell back on what she did know. She gathered information and she calculated their prospects of survival.
Sometimes this meant talking with other travellers they met in the park. There were a lot of families camped down the Valley. Many of them refugees, or more accurately escapees from the city, just like her little Scooby gang. Two groups of school kids had also been caught out on Zero Day. One group had driven out in their bus the morning after the attack on the campsite to the west. The other was still bivouacked around a small pond about a mile to the south.
No cops or even park rangers ever came to investigate the shooting.
Most days she scanned the car radio listening for newscasts, overseas bulletins, or the national emergency alert system.
The latter was the least useful, consisting mostly of canned recordings, a week out of date, reminding citizens of limits on cash withdrawals, federally mandated food and gas rationing, and curfews in dozens of eastern cities affected by food riots. Michelle knew that on the west coast the list of affected cities would be different, but the alert system used Specific Area Message Encoding to target the broadcasts down to the county level. There were repeated warnings about travel restrictions to what Homeland had designated as ‘stronghold cities’; a dozen or more of them, chosen as best she could guess for their smaller populations, defensibility, access to reliable nutrition and proximity to significant ground combat assets.
It was all being sold with an upbeat can-do message, but to a professional realist like her it sounded grim.
After dinner, but some time before sundown, Michelle sat in the driver’s seat of the Sierra, a note pad and pencil in hand, as she carefully scanned up and down the FM and AM bands. Her take from the daily survey was getting thinner. When they’d driven away from Rick Boreham’s cabin, she’d been hopeful that in spite of the wild violence at the Darnestown food market, things would not fall apart. That the centre at least would hold.
Now, rolling up and down the dial, she had no doubts about the desperate situation they were in. They had good elevation at their campsite in the Canaan, and when they’d first arrived six separate radio stations had carried the emergency alerts.
That number had since dropped to three. A datum point that was more informative than anything within the recorded messages.
She flicked through the channels, stopping at every live signal. Most were small operations. A lot of tiny transmitters down in the Bible belt had filled the spectrum abandoned by larger commercial operators. After a couple of days listening to half-starved preachers furiously polishing their Revelation boners, Michelle had learned to flick over the religious whackjobs as quickly as she did the older emergency alert system messages. That didn’t leave much. There was a rap and hip hop station that never dropped off the air, but it was a robot operation like the EAS. No human staffers, at least not in the studio.
Still, she felt a small thrill of relief when her fingers found DJ Khaled kicking it out at 98 on the FM dial. She listened quietly to Gold Slugs for a little while, letting her thoughts wander. The sun had dropped towards Table Rock at the western end of the valley, throwing long shadows down the basin of the Canaan. She could see James and Rick in the rear view mirror, standing by the edge of the forest, deep in conversation, while Nomi sat patiently by her master, awaiting his command.
In a few minutes, she knew, Rick would bend over, scratch the dog behind the ear, and tell her to “Guard the house.”
As far as Nomi was concerned, their small campsite was ‘the house’ now.
Then Rick would disappear into the trees, until dawn tomorrow.
He was carrying the AR-15 he’d taken from one of the men he’d killed at the market, extra ammunition that James had bought back in Clarksburg, a protein bar, water, and a small thermos of coffee. He was dressed in dark clothes and a heavy, camouflaged jacket.
James wore blue jeans, a checked shirt, and his boundlessly sunny optimism. Her heart swelled a little at the sight of him.
Michelle tweaked the dial again. Static and white noise. Another tweak, for more of the same.
The big metro stations had been dropping out with increasing frequency for days. She noted which ones had gone quiet since her last radio check.
WBBM and WBEQ, Chicago.
WBMV, Mount Vernon.
KDKA news radio out of Pittsburgh, and the last of the AM shops in Scranton.
All dead air now.
WBIG in Aurora was still going strong, though. “The Big One” had pivoted from its usual fare of shopping, farm news and local sports to a solid slate of hyperlocal civil defense alerts and stern warnings to outsiders to stay the hell away or be met with lethal force under Executive Order 14101.
Ten days since the Chinese had launched their first cyber strike and Michelle still could not quite believe how devastating it had been. She understood that other hostile actors, both state and non-state had piled on in the chaos of the opening salvos. But still… she had been tasked with threat assessment by the National Security Council and they simply had not seen this coming. Not like this.
Who would have thought something as medieval as siege and starvation would work on a society where three quarters of the adult population were clinically obese, and most of them morbidly so?
James O’Donnell.
That’s who.
Michelle stole another glimpse at him in the rear view mirror. James was patting Nomi and smiling as he chatted with Rick, who looked like a private military contractor who’d somehow taken a wrong turn and badly lost his way. What on Earth was James smiling about? And what could he be saying to crack the granite facade of Rick Boreham’s impressively stoic features. Even from this distance Michelle could see the merest grin shining through as the deep worry lines over the former soldier’s eyes faded just a little, for just a few moments.
She almost sighed.
James.
He’d warned them of the attack in the last crucial hours before the Chinese collapsed America’s civilisation. Its banking and communication networks, and most critically, its food distribution systems. He warned her bosses back in Washington of exactly what could happen. And they had listened. But too late. And here they were now, hiding out in the wilderness as vast armies of starving refugees poured out of the great cities and hundreds of millions of people turned on each other over scraps of food. And there James was with his weirdly boyish grin, as if he could not be happier to be anywhere than right here, camping out with friends.
She’d thought she understood him when they’d first met. But he was not the money market data-nerd Michelle had hired as a consultant to write a report on the trade war.
The fucking trade war?
Jesus Christ things changed quickly.
Michelle had just completed another sweep of the dial while her thoughts wandered to James, as they so frequently did now. She was rolling back to check in with DJ Khaled when a crackling, far away trace of a refined British accent caught her ear. She adjusted the tuning knob on the SUV’s entertainment system, thought she heard it again, inched it back just a fraction, and there…
There it was.
“…BBC world Service. I’m… casting from emer… …vernment pledged to restore… army authorised to… martial law…”
The connection dropped out, disappeared in a wash of atmospheric interference.
Michelle cursed silently and leaned into the console, as though she might somehow drag the signal out through the speakers with her own hands. Her anxiety had focused in with laser-like precision on that far away voice. She twitched the tuning knob one way and then the other.
Nothing but electrostatic hiss and crackle.
“Come on,” she muttered, trying again.
“…reports of the Chinese Army deployed in Beijing and Shanghai as a flu-like plague sweeps through the Asia Pacific region, but with particular virulence on the Chinese mainland.”
Her heart had quickened with excitement when she’d captured the fragile signal from the BBC, but now it pounded at the mention of a possible pandemic in China. Her head swam for a moment and she lost the signal when her hand slipped on the dial.
It came back, however, clear and at full strength for just a few seconds.
“…blamed the shocking speed of the contagion and the high mortality rate in China’s densely populated urban centres on foreign devils and evil adversaries. No US government spokesperson was available for comment. The Chinese media, however, has been quick to blame enemies closer to home, with many accusing the Japanese of tailoring the bird flu virus to specifically target Han Chinese ethnic communities…”
The signal disappeared again, this time for good.
Michelle fell back in the seat. She was sweating and trembling just a little.
As hard as it had been to accept just how swiftly and completely Beijing had swept the legs out from under its American foe, she had even more trouble accepting that somebody in the chain of command above her had authorised the use of a bio-weapon in response.
This bird flu had to be a weaponised virus.
She was sure of it. Beijing would be too.
She leaned forward and searched for the BBC signal but it was gone. Whatever quirk of the upper atmosphere had allowed her to capture it - gone too.
Michelle rubbed at her upper arms where gooseflesh had broken out.
The valley was deceptively quiet.
She knew there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people hiding away down there and scattered along the rim of the bowl-like geological depression nestled in higher reaches of the Allegheny Mountains. Some had been camping in the National Park when everything went sideways. Others were undoubtedly nutjob preppers and survivalist weirdos who couldn’t quite believe their time had come. But most would be people like them; small parties with the good sense and even better luck to get out of the cities before it was too late.
How long did they have before the first real human wave broke over the edges of the Canaan?
There were more than fifty million people living the northeast corridor of the US. And more again if you threw in the millions of Canadians just over the border and across the Great Lakes.
How many of them were heading towards their little campsite right now?
She had no idea and no way of finding out. The satellites were dead, probably raked from the skies by Chinese or Russian missiles. It was insanely frustrating.
“Michelle? You okay?”
She jumped at the voice.
Melissa had come up beside the SUV and Michelle hadn’t even noticed.
“Sorry,” Michelle said, her voice cracking just a little. “Lost in my thoughts.”
“Anything on the radio?” The Englishwoman asked, nodding at the console.
Michelle Nguyen’s breathed shuddered out of her.
“Same old shit,” she said.
She almost left it at that.
Many years of keeping the government’s secrets had not prepared her for sharing with outsiders. But she forced herself to break the old habits of thought. They hadn’t worked so well recently, and they could get her killed in this new reality.
“There was one thing,” she said. “I think we need to talk about it. Is Rick still here?”
Mel Baker shook her head. Her teeth shone white through a wide grin. She always looked happy when talking about Rick.
“Nah, sorry, luv. He’s gone. Like a bloody shadow into the night, he is. You ready to do some training? We’ve got an hour or so before it’s really dark. I can take first watch. You’ll be tired, promise.”
Her grin faded when she saw the look on Michelle face.
“What’s up, babe?”
Michelle just stared at her, searching for the words.
Finally she said, “Things are going to get much worse.”
11
Nobody walks away from three bags of Doritos
Not much had changed at Brad Rausch’s auto-shop since Jonas first called out there, the morning of his second day in town. The smash repair joint had impressed him then as something of a fortress, and Rausch was not put to much trouble fortifying it further. He’d boarded up the windows of the glass-walled office out front, and the steel gate to the lot in back was now closed and chained up. But that was it, as far as Jonas could see.
“Yo Brad. It’s me, Murdoch,” he called out from the road, loud enough to startle a few birds from the tall pines and fir trees that crowded up to the edge of the property line.
“Jonas, bro! Up here. Check it out, man.”
It wasn’t Rausch.
Jonas craned his head back and to the left, following the voice to find Chad Moffat peering out over eight foot of corrugated iron sheeting, waving a shotgun in the air. A chain rattled and the main gate screeched open.
Rausch wore a pistol at his hip, like Jonas, but he also carried an AK 47 knock off. Or, hell, maybe it was the real deal.
“Come on in, Jonas” he said. “Don’t like to have the place open too long.”
Rausch did not open the gate very wide and Jonas had to squeeze past him on the way through. As always, Rausch smelled of hand-rolled tobacco, pulled pork and sour sweat. Jonas had wondered early on whether he’d smell of lentils and potato soup, like everyone else in town. But one night camped out here, knocking back a bottle of Jack he'd pilfered from Al Barrett's place set him straight on that. Rausch had a big freezer full of wild pig meat, and a diesel generator to keep it going when the power went down.
The power had gone down on the fourth day.
"You're early,” Rausch said.
"Got an Emergency Committee meeting later this morning," Jonas explained, looking around for Chad. He found him climbing down from something that looked like a swimming pool lifeguard tower. Whatever it is was, they’d turned it into a serviceable firing platform to give them coverage of the road and forest outside the walled compound. Chad hurried over with a big dopey grin on his face. Big and dopey was Chad's natural state of being. Jonas was amused to see he was still wearing his samurai sword. He'd never seen him without it.
