Carlie Simmons (Book 3): The Way Back (14 page)

Chapter 32

The four-hour flight on the C-130 from
Coronado to Fort Lewis was a smooth ride as a high-pressure system cloaked the
west coast. Carlie kept shaking her head, wondering if their ordeal was really
over and, despite her being a seasoned air traveler, she still shuddered every
time she heard the engine roar or the wings rattle. They had all bear-hugged
the pilots and flight crew and bellowed out a victory cry after the plane
landed at Coronado but it still all seemed so surreal and everyone sat with the
same dazed expression on their furrowed faces.
Are we really on our way to a
military base? Is our long, spirit-draining trek actually over?
She glanced
down at her sunbaked hands and just wanted to thrust them over her face and
weep but she still needed to maintain her composure in front of the group. How
she longed to sink into a bed and turn off an actual light switch in a private
room of her own where she could lose herself in her own thoughts.

As she looked out the window at the
whitecaps on the Pacific Ocean below, she barely noticed a medic making his
rounds. The youthful, blond-haired man sat down beside Amy and unfurled his
blood-pressure cuff. 

“What can you tell us about White Sands?”
said Shane to the young man. “We couldn’t get through to them.”

“Shit, that base went dark over two months
ago. I guess you lose track of time when you’re hanging out on a beach in
Cancun,” he said with a chuckle. “Bad joke, I know. It’s just seems like a helluva
place to ride things out for a couple of months if you have to.”

Carlie glanced at Shane and the others,
who were smirking.
Two months
—
has it really been that long?
“And
what about the president and his daughter? They made it to Ft. Lewis, right?”

The medic’s face froze and he looked down
at the metal flooring. “Air Force One made it out but the plane went down in
Idaho. They’re all gone. There was a general and some doctor on board too but
no one survived.”

Carlie felt like a red-hot javelin had
been thrust into her side. She leaned forward, trying to breathe, but her ribs seemed
to compress.
Eliza is dead…and her father. Everyone perished while we were
rotting in that tropical hell.
Her eyes raced around the cabin.
No, that
can’t be. There must be some mistake.

The medic interrupted her tortured
thoughts by tapping her on her shoulder. “Can you roll your sleeve up so I can
check your vitals?”

Shane put his hand on her arm and helped
roll up her sleeve. “I’m sorry, Carlie.” She heard his words but felt numb and didn’t
even feel the blood-pressure cuff constricting her arm. She looked across the
cargo bay at Pavel, who was sitting opposite her.
I hope that all of these
months of suffering were worth it.
When the medic was done she leaned her
head forward into her hands and tried to push away the image of Eliza and the
others on board Air Force One.

Before landing, the tall medic moved up
beside the group and explained the safety protocols. “Since the outbreak at
White Sands, all military bases have implemented security procedures for new
arrivals and for existing personnel to prevent a catastrophic breach of the
entire base. Ft. Lewis is now divided up into four wings that are all
self-contained and separated by electric fences and concertina wire. Should one
area be compromised, the other wings will remain intact and operational. You
will be taken to D-Wing for decon and another checkup by my colleagues. After
that, you’ll be escorted to your rooms to rest and get some chow before meeting
up with the sec-def or whomever he assigns to your debriefing.”

“Wait, Secretary of Defense Lavine is in
charge here?” said Shane.

“Yep, he was visiting the base when things
went to hell and has been there ever since. He’s not just holding the reigns at
Lewis but the entire country.”

Shane scrunched his eyebrows together.
“Man, that guy is just a comfort princess—he’s got no real-world experience on
the battlefield.”

Matias shook his head and then hung his
head low. “Now I really feel nauseous.”

“Yeah, the world just got a whole lot
scarier,” said Carlie.

The medic rolled his eyes and snickered.
“Geez, you guys sound like the rest of my unit when we’re sitting around the
card table at night. Now Lavine’s ears must be burning even more.”

Chapter 33

After arriving at Fort Lewis, Carlie and
her team were taken to D-Wing where everyone underwent an anti-viral shower and
scrub down, followed by an inspection in the quarantine section. Afterwards,
they were taken to the medical lab for a thorough physical exam. Upon
completion, everyone was shown to their private rooms where they were provided
with new clothes, boots, and toiletries.

Like the rest of her group, Carlie was
told to meet in the conference room down the hall when she was finished getting
dressed so they could each be debriefed individually. All she wanted to do was
sink into a cot and fall asleep but she knew that they were probably looking at
an afternoon or more of intense debriefing.

She was the first one to arrive in the
conference room and was met by Sergeant Major Duncan who introduced himself and
then sat down across from her. He quietly thumbed through a manila folder, occasionally
stopping to glance up at her.

“The notes from my men on the air
transport crew indicate that you were Secret Service on a special mission
coming back from…” He paused to squint at the next words, “Cancun, Mexico.”

“Well, when you say it like that, it
sounds like another taxpayer-sponsored campaigning event abroad.”

He feigned a smile and then leaned forward,
placing his elbows on the table. “It also says here that you have on your team
two former DEA agents, a paramedic, a former
Soviet
scientist,” he said
with a frown, “and, I’m quoting here, ‘a MacGyver-type character with all the
bullshit one-liners to match.’”

“Yeah, that would be Jared—he’s a…” she
said, shaking her head. “Never mind. I can see how this must look. Sergeant Major,
you’re probably as baffled by our arrival here as I am that we even made it. I
am here though, and prepared to answer any questions you have, so fire away.”

“First off, you knew the unlock codes for
accessing our secure frequency here. Tell me more about that for starters.”

“I was working under a directive issued by
General Adams at White Sands. We had clearance from the president to infiltrate
Cuba after learning of a connection between the virus at Ground Zero in our
country and a route of transmission on the island of Nuevo Gerona. We expedited
the rescue of Pavel Dimitrikov, who was the leading Soviet researcher working
on the original viral strain. He is the key to a vaccine along with any intel
that was on that laptop that we procured.”

“What laptop? Can you be more specific?”

“The laptop that was in General Adams’
possession. It was a CIA encrypted device that may have held some answers to a
cold-weather facility in Alaska that houses the original strain of the virus.”

“New Orleans, Cuba, Cancun, and now
Alaska. That’s a lot of globetrotting the president had you undertaking at a
time when our resources were stretched thin within the military. Mexico,
though, that sounds like a good time, working on your tan on the beach for a
couple of months.”

Carlie leaned back and crossed her arms,
giving Duncan a chilly stare. “Look, the fact that you’re in 1
^st
Special Forces, and a Sergeant Major at that, is reason enough for me to
believe that you’ve got more brains than the sec-def and could probably be
running this place. But frankly I am so exhausted right now and also getting so
pissed at comments about
living the good life
on a beach in Mexico that I
would like to just punch the next person in the fucking jaw who says that to
me.”

“Ms. Simmons, you can stand down,” he said,
sliding the papers from the manila folder across the table towards her. She
glanced down at the papers and saw the same story she had just rehashed spelled
out in formal detail.

“What the hell, you knew all this and…”

Duncan raised his hand, palm out. “I just
needed to be sure your story meshed with the classified papers that I had in
front of me—what little we got from General Adams before Air Force One went
down. I don’t know you or any of your team and it’s not as if we can pull up
SAT imagery from two months ago to confirm your whereabouts. The fact that you
had unlock codes to our frequency was a good first step to confirming who you
were but I wanted to meet you in person and hear your side of things.” He ran a
hand through his hair and leaned forward. “No offense about the Mexico comment.
I can’t imagine the deprivation you’ve been through since the
USS Farragut
went down and all the
deeks
you’ve had to deal with out there. And if it
makes you feel any better, you’re not the first person who has wanted to ‘punch
me in my fuckin’ jaw,’” he said, rubbing his chin.

“So can we get on with business then, and
how we can help, or do you need to yank the chain of everyone on my team?”

“You’ll suffice,” he said with a lopsided
grin. “But I do want you to provide a full briefing of what you know along with
Pavel’s account of his work so we can correlate that intel with our own
findings,” he said, getting up and walking around the table and extending his
hand. “Now let me try this again, Ms. Simmons. I’m Sergeant Major Ron Duncan and
I want to welcome you to Fort Lewis. I look forward to working with you and
your team.”

She slowly extended her right hand and
exchanged a handshake. “It’s just Carlie unless you give me a hard time again,
in which case it will be Ms. Simmons, Jawbreaker.”

Duncan laughed and reshuffled the papers,
placing them back in the folder.

“So, ‘deeks,’ that’s what you’re calling
those things?”

“That’s what my men and I call ’em, which
is short for ‘decomposers.’ Now, the sec-def prefers the term ‘inorganic mutant
combatants’ but that never really took.”

Carlie shrugged her shoulders and blew a
strand of hair off her nose. “Of course that’s what he’d prefer. I’ll have to
tell that to my team, they’ll get a kick out of such an idiotic term.”

Duncan sat back down and grinned. “Carlie,
I can see that we are going to get along just fine.”

Chapter 34

Eliza stepped onto the wooden porch of
Darcy’s small cabin and looked out over the rustic encampment below. Eleven
other timber-framed cabins made of Douglas firs encircled a spring-fed pond
that was roughly the size of a basketball court. Brown cattails lined the edges
and a firepit was off to the right near a wood shed. The former Forest Service
logging camp was designed to be off-grid and was equipped for handling the
living needs of a small group. The air was heavy with the smell of resinous
wood from a nearby woodpile of freshly cut spruce logs.

The camp was nestled in a valley of thick
conifers and a mist hung over the mountains to the west, its canopy illuminated
by the rising sun. They had taken a circuitous route along old logging roads
that eventually turned into narrow jeep trails followed by a two-mile hike
along a seldom-used path to reach the place. The only evidence that anyone was
in the rugged wilderness area became evident from the sound of someone chopping
of wood as they walked into the camp, much to the surprise of the other
eighteen residents.

Eliza marveled at the setup, which
reminded her of a pioneer village she had been to in Virginia on a school
fieldtrip in younger days. Across from her cabin was a smoke shack used for
preserving venison, trout, and wild game that had been procured from the
surrounding forest and rivers. A tool shed with an overhanging porch held an
assortment of axes, wood-splitting mauls, shovels, picks, drawknives, and
sharpening tools along with shelves filled with nails, drill bits, and
hand-powered tools. Next to the pond was a clothesline, a galvanized laundry
tub, and primitive washboards.

There was even a rustic shower house made
of local stone with a cedar-shingled roof. Near the rear was a 55-gallon water
drum that was painted black and had a pan underneath it for adding hot coals
from the campfire.

Darcy stepped onto the porch and rested
her hands on the railing beside Eliza. “It’s not home but it’s close enough.”

“How did you come to be here?”

“My ex-husband and I worked for the Forest
Service and stayed here on woodcutting projects many times while fighting
fires. After my homestead east of Yakima was overrun by creatures, I came here
with a few friends. The rest of the folks are either locals or survivors we
picked up on runs to different towns in the area. Most of us were already
pretty self-sufficient when the world went to hell so it wasn’t a stretch to be
up here. The others are adapting. And there are two other remote camps like
this spread along the eastern flank of the mountains but we don’t see each
other much given the difficulties of getting around in this terrain.”

“And you’re gonna stay here through the
winter?” Eliza said, rubbing her arms and shrugging her shoulders as a cold
breeze blew past them.

“These cabins are winterized. All we need
is to shore up more firewood and then increase our hunting efforts to lay in
plenty of venison and trout for the coming months. We’re already behind the
eight ball on that and need to intensify our work in the coming month before
the heavy snows arrive.”

“What can I do to help? I don’t really
know anything about the outdoors other than a family camping trip I went on as
a kid and that was in an RV.”

“You seem pretty hardy and that’s the most
important thing. The rest we can teach you. Why don’t you come down to the main
fire pit in an hour when we all meet up and we’ll see who needs the most help
with their projects today.”

Eliza liked Darcy even though she had a
hard time trying to figure out if she would have been a Democrat or a
Republican, an irritating assessment tool that had been ingrained in her since
childhood and that she constantly tried to overcome. Eliza felt Darcy was a
cross between a hippy and a redneck with her mannerisms and expressions but
felt at ease around her nonetheless. She could tell by the older woman’s
calloused hands and weathered face that she was no stranger to manual labor in
the elements.

Darcy looked at her. “Everyone here has
had to leave behind their old lives and begin anew. But I’m just curious—you
have a subtle Boston accent yet you said you were from Arizona.”

Eliza turned away and stared out at the
pond below. “I was going to college in Arizona, in Tucson actually, but I’m
from the east coast originally. You have a good ear; my family was from
Boston.” Eliza felt a pang of concern as she thought Darcy might have
recognized her. The last thing she wanted was for everyone to be looking to her
for answers—what was the government doing to help out survivors, where had the
virus come from, or why hadn’t her father prevented all of this from happening
in the first place. She clenched the railing lightly, hoping that Darcy
wouldn’t have a sudden flash of insight and blurt out Eliza’s background to the
others.

“Well, it’s just good to have you with
us,” said the older woman, who walked past her down the steps. “You’re welcome
here as long as you like.”

Eliza went back inside and grabbed some
extra clothing and her gloves then stowed the ruggedized laptop in a loose plank
in the rafters behind a thick wad of cotton-candy-like insulation.