Outbreak: Boston, page 1
For my friend, Sgt. Thomas Sweet.
Be seein’ ya, man.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my friends, SSgt. Michael P. Johnson and Master Sgt. Charles Wayne Russell (USAF, both of them) for being my high speed technical advisors on all things Air Force.
Thanks to SSgt. James Russell (ARNG) for running the D20 Modern game that turned into this book.
Also, thanks to my friend Wesley Meadows for letting me bounce ideas off him.
You guys all rock harder than back flippin’ ninja monkeys popping wheelies on flaming motorcycles. And I realize that doesn’t even make any sense.
Outbreak: Boston
By Robert VanDusen
Chapter One
12 May 2011 21:35 hours, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Boston, Massachusetts
Amy woke with a yelp and looked around, thoroughly confused for a brief moment until she could get her bearings: slight chill plus buzzing florescent lights that made you look like you had a pretty serious case of jaundice plus dry air equaled the computer lab in Physical Science building. She was short with a lean, muscular frame but the young woman was ‘mid-deployment hot’ (her hips were a little too wide, legs a little too short, just a shade too much muscle to be really attractive to most men but after three months in the desert she was fighting the guys off with a stick) and she knew it so she did not even really try: she dressed in faded Levis and old tee shirts most of the time. From a distance, someone observing her might think she was wearing reddish brown gloves until you got closer and saw that the skin of her hands, neck and face had sunburned, healed and sunburned again repeatedly.
She turned her attention to what woke her, namely the buzzing cell phone in the pocket of her hoodie. It was almost summertime and it sure seemed to feel like it outside to everybody else, but it felt kind of chilly to her: it averaged well over a hundred and twenty degrees in the shade when she left Iraq. With one bronzed hand she dug the phone out while she dug a large crusty piece of gunk out of the corner of her dark brown eyes with the other.
"Outstanding." she muttered quietly, sighed and stabbed the green button on the screen of her Smartphone with her index finger. "Hello, Lieutenant Anderson. How are you, sir?" She groaned inside, trying to hide her dislike for the man. Her Air Force Reserve section had come back from Camp Freedom, a little Forward Operating Base with an airstrip just outside Mosul a little bit over a month ago. She had completed Airman Leadership School before her deployment but somebody, somewhere down the line screwed up the paperwork holding up her promotion to Staff Sergeant. She had a pretty good idea who might be responsible for the foul up too…
"Airman Frays" the lieutenant began quickly. She imagined him wherever he was, puffing up with self-importance as he spoke. "Call your points of contact, grab your battle rattle and get to the airfield TIME: NOW."
The urgent tone of the man's voice instantly squashed any personal feelings against the man. The young woman put the phone on the table next to the keyboard and pressed the speaker button as she hurriedly saved what little work she had actually managed to get done before dozing off. "Roger that, sir. I have you on speakerphone." she answered, eyeing the phone suspiciously. "What's going on, sir?" A million bad scenarios ran through her head as she pulled some stray locks of chocolate colored hair back in to the bun on the back of her head. She could practically feel the sand crunching between her teeth.
The man let out an exasperated chuff before he could stop himself. "Don't you watch the news, Airman?" he asked, clearly sounding upset with her. "You'll get a briefing when you get here. Get here. Now."
With that the phone went dead on the desk next to her hand. She frowned and put it away, wondering what the heck she was missing anyway as she hustled out of the Physical Sciences building and into the humid night. It had been raining more or less constantly for the past three or four days and the moisture still clung to the air. After the past six months in the desert, Amy couldn't help but take some time away from her class work to walk in the gentle drizzle and enjoy the feeling of it on her face. Jacob, her R.A., went with her sometimes. There was also that epic game of Ultimate Frisbee that he had dragged her to that seemed to take up the better part of an afternoon…
Now she could not afford the luxury and hurried across the quad, through the parking lot and up to her dorm. A lot of the dorm rooms and parking spaces were empty. It sounded like somebody had thrown a bottle at the far end of the lot followed by a lot of yelling. Amy crouched instinctively at the noise, looked around to ascertain the direction of the sound then ran up the stairs to her dormitory. There was nobody sitting at the security desk in the foyer. She shook her head and sprinted up to her dorm room on the third floor, taking the stairs two at a time.
Amy jammed her key in the lock, opened the door to her room and ducked inside. She paused and stared at what was on her roommate's side of the place, or rather what was not there on her roommate’s side of the place: the dresser drawers hung open, the closet empty with the door half open. Thankfully, her closet was still closed and locked and her dresser looked like it was just as she had left it. When she returned to school a week after the welcome back ceremony Amy had found that Janice, her roommate, had apparently gotten some of their things confused and all mixed together.
Amy crossed to the small communal television resting on the cheap press board TV stand and flicked it on. She was unsurprised to see that it was tuned to the Fox News Channel. Janice was active in the campus Republican Committee and she was thrilled to have an Iraq War veteran as a roommate. Amy, however, found herself…somewhat less than ecstatic with the arrangement.
While Janice and her yuppie scumbag gel head friends were partying, eating everything in the fridge (whether they paid for the food or not) and making a mess of the place Amy was too busy trying to catch up on her class work to do little more than sleep, work out at the gym for an hour or two and hopefully grab a bite to eat in the dining hall.
Then there was the time Janice's dumb jock boyfriend of the week blew up a twenty gallon sized trash bag and popped it next to Amy's bunk while she was asleep. She had rolled out the bed and ran head first into the wall trying, out of instinct, to make it to the cement shelter that had been outside her connex. Amy wanted to slug Janice when she got mad 'because you can't take a joke'. In retaliation she had thrown Janice’s laptop across the room as she stormed out instead of decking her.
She took a bottle of water out of the small refrigerator, measured out some into a large travel mug then set about making some coffee. Amy grumbled angrily when she saw that Janice had used up the last of her half and half then put the empty carton back. At least there was still plenty of sugar. As the coffee brewed Amy checked the butter container in the door of the fridge. "Ha!" she cried triumphantly: the little thief didn't find her hidden cache of flavored creamers she'd filched from the student union at breakfast yesterday and carefully squirreled away.
The coffeemaker sputtered and spat as it finished filling the carafe with that wonderfully hot and life giving stuff. Amy sat on her bed, blousing her boots and half listening to the talking head on the screen across the room. What she heard was not that good, something about some new jumped up meningitis bug or something, and she wasn't entirely sure that she wanted to hear the rest. She recalled hearing rumors about something like that while on deployment, but it was in Asia or Africa or someplace. She had never given the scuttlebutt much credence because, well, while it was pretty common knowledge that they got a censored version of the news there was not even a peep of it in her email or anything like that. They could not censor her private email and Facebook, could they?
Either way, it did not make much of a difference: neighborhoods on the south side of the city was currently on fire and the TV kept showing her the same police car getting smashed up by a bunch of people wielding bats and pipes. “Time to go.” Frays muttered to herself as she flicked off the television and started towards the door.
She slapped her beret on her head and studied her reflection in the mirror by the door to make sure it was on right. Amy frowned at herself then slung her rucksack over her shoulder and picked up her duffel bag. She paused outside Jacob’s door and knocked a couple times, hoping to get to say goodbye then hustled down to her little Ford Ranger pickup truck in the student parking lot when he did answer. Amy frowned as she pulled away from the parking lot.
Frays had made it off campus with reasonable ease, but Route 2A North was a mess. She had called the eight people on her list three times each, which was easy to do since she hadn't moved in thirty eight minutes according to the clock on her truck’s dashboard. She was not at all surprised to find that none of them answered and nobody seemed likely to call her back. Amy drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, her ears already ringing from the reaming she was sure to get.
She grumbled to herself and began absently flipping through radio stations trying to find out more about whatever the heck she was probably going to be dealing with. The problem was that there didn't seem to be much to tell but of course that it didn't stop the talking heads from throwing wild speculations and half baked sounding theories: Muslim extremists, Iranian agents or good old fashioned act of God seemed to be the top three.
And to make matters worse, she realized that she had left her cup of coffee sitting on the top of the fridge back in her dorm room.
She dug through the storage space in the truck’s armrest, trying to find the connector for her MP3 player so she could listen to something besid
She made it a quarter mile or so down the road before she found what was causing the traffic jam. The shattered, smoking remains of what looked like three cars choked the four lanes of the expressway. A large man in a State Trooper uniform loped over to her vehicle with an irate look on his face. "The hell are you doing?" he growled, one hand going to the butt of the pistol holstered on his belt. Amy's gut tightened into big knots. “Didn’t you see the goddamn signs?”
"My flight got recalled, Trooper." she said quickly as she pointed to her Security Forces armband on her bicep. She dug in her pocket and flashed her badge. "I gotta get to Hanscomb Air Force Base right away. What's going on?"
The policeman's scowl deepened, even though Amy didn't think it was possible. "Go on, get out of here." he muttered as he waved her on. Amy shakily released a breath she did not realize she was holding as she motored away from the wreck. She had seen the look on that policeman's face before, in the eyes of the grunts guarding the gates of the FOB and sometimes her fellow airmen. He had wanted to shoot her and was more than a little irked that she didn't give him an excuse.
Thankfully the road was more or less clear the rest of the way to Hanscomb Air Force Base. She felt something almost akin to relief as she showed the men guarding the gate her ID card and got waved inside the perimeter. The encounter with the State Police had left her wanting to be safe (or rather safer would probably be a better term) with her fellow airmen.
Frays pulled in to a parking space at the rear of the armory and muttered angrily under
her breath. There was a loose gaggle of men and women in uniforms beginning to form into lines and columns perhaps ten yards away from her truck but it was perhaps a third the size it should have been. She slammed the door of the truck and ran to where her flight should have been assembling.
A man who vaguely resembled a refrigerator in ABUs scowled as she approached. She had been surprised to learn that he had played defense for two seasons with the Boston Bruins (Carl, her little brother, would not give her a moment’s peace until she had gotten him to sign his rookie card) and had eight combat deployments with a Vehicle Operations unit under his belt before coming over to the Reserves. Amy thought he looked like Steve Rogers, Captain America’s alter ego, with his square jaw, blond crew cut and bulging muscles. She had considered making a pass at him when she had first gotten to the unit until she had learned that he was married with two kids, twenty years her senior…and her Flight Sergeant. In the three years since then their relationship had settled into one of friendship and mutual respect.
"Glad you could finally make it, Frays." the big man grumbled as Amy fell in to his left. "Did you call everybody else?" He glowered beneath the brim of his patrol cap.
"Sorry, Sergeant." she answered quickly. "I called and left messages but nobody answered." Amy took a quick look around. There were maybe thirty or forty airmen in formation where there should be a hundred and fifty, not counting the airmen currently on deployment. "Doesn't look like they were the only ones."
Master Sergeant Emery tapped Amy's elbow, drawing her attention back towards the front of the formation. Captain Forsythe wandered awkwardly from the back exit of the building to stand before his airmen. The highest ranking people available stepped forward to fill in for their missing superiors and called their flights to attention then conducted roll call. There was an Airman First Class standing at the front of the other squadron. Amy bitterly shook her head. When that was done, Captain Forsythe gave them the command to stand at ease.
"As you have probably heard, the governor has declared a state of emergency." said the Captain as he slowly paced back and forth in front of the formation. "There is heavy rioting in south Boston and the disturbance is spreading across the river and into the suburbs." The man stopped and turned his gaze dramatically towards the men and women before him. Amy was not surprised to learn that the Captain had been an amateur actor in his youth.
"We are to draw weapons and live ammunition. Personnel qualified with grenade launchers and shotguns are to draw less than lethal countermeasures." the captain said quickly as he continued pacing. "Charlie Flight, you’ll be moving out by bus to a staging area west of the city where we will assist local law enforcement in restoring law and order to the area. You'll receive your assignments when we arrive. Now let's going!"
The response from Frays and her fellow airmen was probably not as enthusiastic as their captain wanted, but they still filed in to the armory and began to draw their weapons and other supplies. Amy hustled out to her truck and grabbed her gear before signing out her M4A1 carbine with under slung M203 40mm grenade launcher as well as her M9 pistol. The young woman put a fresh battery in her carbine’s Aimpoint red dot sight with 3x magnification module and made sure she had a couple spare batteries not only for the sight but also the illuminator clamped onto the weapon’s hand guard. She shrugged into her body armor and buckled the pistol belt of her LCS as Sergeant Emery approached, already decked out in his own field gear. She had felt a little underdressed when she first stood next to him, as the big sergeant carried not only the full complement of gear, but a six shot 12 gauge Mossberg 590 pistol gripped pump action shotgun in a scabbard on the back panel of his LCS with nineteen spare rounds of ammunition for it on each shoulder strap. Her only additions to her basic issue kit were the Blackhawk! SERPA drop leg holster on her right thigh (a birthday gift from her parents as her unit’s standard issue drop leg holster had a flap, making drawing the pistol a huge pain when you really needed it), a Saint Joan’s medal (from Father Greg, her hometown priest) and a Combat Life Saver kit on the left side of her LCS.
The man awkwardly held the handle of two green ammunition cans in each hand. Amy took two of them, cracked the lead wire seals with her multi-tool and tugged open the cans. The two of them made nervous small talk as they pushed rounds into their magazines and stuffed them into carriers on their harnesses. Amy went back to the arms room and signed out a rubberized canvas bandoleer containing a half dozen CS grenades for her launcher which she slung across her chest like some old timey outlaw. Sergeant Emery and Frays went into the office to fill their camelbaks and canteens from the water cooler. Once they had their water, Sergeant Emery did a hands-on check of her gear and the two of them went out the back door to wait for the bus.
Amy immediately started to loathe herself for having those two cigarettes on the way in. An itching, crawling sensation climbed up and down her spine when it wasn't busy running laps and doing backflips inside her skull. It didn't help that about a dozen of her fellow airmen stood around in loose groups with thin blue clouds of tobacco smoke drifting up into the sky. Sergeant Emery was by her side. “Ya know, I almost thought that we were gonna go back to The Sandbox.” he said as he pulled a pack of Marlboro cigarettes out of an old ammo pouch on his LCS. He offered one to his subordinate who accepted it with grateful resignation. He lit hers then his with his silver Zippo before snapping the lighter shut with a flourish. “Somehow this seems a lot worse.”
“I know.” Amy said quietly as she exhaled a plume of smoke. A look of alarm passed over her face as she dug out her cell phone. “Goddamn it. I need to call my parents and let them know what's going on.” The big NCO smiled at the surprised expression on his subordinate’s face: Frays was a two mass a week Catholic and rarely swore, though she did occasionally let a cussword slip.
Sergeant Emery nodded and moved off to talk to some of the other NCOs as Amy scrolled through the contacts list on her phone. She pressed a couple buttons and the phone started to ring. Frays nervously tapped her toe as she waited for someone to pick up.
