Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile (9 page)

If these men were still U.S. Marines, following the Uniform Code of Military Justice, then I was still a commissioned officer and still their superior. If anyone still followed the rank structure of the military, it would be a Marine. In all my limited encounters with the Marine enlisted men in my military past, they had always stood up to address me when I spoke to them. The gunnery sergeant had said himself that there was no officer available topside and that he was the senior man present.

He was lying and didn’t know it.

I was, in theory, the senior man present.

As I stood there with my back to the door, staring at the card in my hands, I saw Dean reach over and take the ID card and look at it. She carefully examined the military ID and looked at me.

She said, “Looks a lot like you, sailor.”

I smiled back at her and said, “Yes, it used to be me.”

She replied, “It’s still you, it’s just that you lost your military bearing and it looks like you need to shave!”

I thought for a moment that she could be right. I had done some bad things since January, but that didn’t change the fact that there were military units still active and I was still a military officer. My unit was destroyed, probably with no survivors. I knew this; I had flown over my base and seen it with my own eyes. The base had been overrun, then later nuked. Game over. For all I knew, I was the only one left.

I called the group together and discussed what I planned to do. They all gasped at the thought but eventually agreed that it was the only real way to handle the situation.

It was 0500 hrs this morning before I woke up and switched on the lights. I took my shower kit and began the laborious task of getting myself together. As I passed my old quarters, the door swung open and Dean stepped out with a pair of scissors from the control center office.

“Can’t have you going topside without a haircut.”

I laughed and made sure my towel wouldn’t fall off in front of her.

“I suppose not, Dean.”

She had cut Danny’s hair when he needed it, and she made sure to tell me that he had never complained. My hair had grown long and far out of military regulation in the past months. I had shaved it off three months ago, but I had not touched it since and it was rather long. It was unlike me to let it get this way. The end of the civilized world was a decent excuse, I thought, but Dean wouldn’t have it. Like a master barber, she restored my head to unwritten aviation officer regulations (just a little longer than that of the enlisted men).

As I finished up in the shower and hacked my thick stubble off, I looked in the mirror. I looked presentable for what I was about to do. I had no dress uniform or officer’s sword, but I would make do. With my towel wrapped around me I walked my way back to my quarters. Outside my door were my boots, shined to perfection with a note in child’s writing: “I hope you like I shined my dad’s boots before—Danny.”

He must have come in and retrieved them while I slept. I leave the door open so that I can hear if anything is going on in the walkway. I must be losing my edge, or he must be a very quiet kid.
I thought back to when I had seen Danny urinating on the undead at the tower. What a funny sight.

I put on my clean flight suit, with rank on my shoulders and name patch on my chest. I pulled my garrison cap out of the leg pocket where it had been for six months and put it on my head. I walked out of my quarters in uniform, prepared to meet the Marines. It was 0550 hrs and I could see on the cameras that the sun was coming up, making the clouds to the east shine with an ominous orange tint.

I keyed the radio. “Gunny, are you there? . . . over . . .”

After a short pause, a tired, haggard and perturbed voice came back, “Yes, I am here, and I have been here all damn night.”

“Good, now clear your men away from the silo opening, I am coming up.”

“We’ll be waiting on you at the top . . . out.”

Armed only with a sidearm, I went to the access hatch that led directly into the silo. John and Will covered me with their weapons. It took three of us to spin the wheel and open the hatch, as all the heat and explosions had expanded and contracted the alloy. As soon as the hatch opened, a flood of light shone down from above and dust billowed in. John and Will quickly dogged the hatch. I hadn’t seen the inside of the silo close up for quite a while. There were bits of burnt bone and clothing all over the bottom. Lots of teeth were scattered on the deck. There must have been quite a few creatures down here when the marauders started burning them. The walls were blackened from all the explosives that had been detonated during the past twenty-four hours.

The men at the top could not yet see me, as I was near the bulkhead at the bottom. With cold anticipation I stepped into the light and began climbing up the ladder to the top. The ladder was covered in ash. I kept climbing. The sound of “Holy shit!” signified that I had been sighted. I kept climbing until I reached the top. The gloved hand of a USMC gunnery sergeant reached out to help me over the lip of the silo doors. I stood there and looked him in the eye. He squared off in front of me and rendered a sharp salute. I returned it with the same bearing and he dropped his. He immediately led me to his tent and a handful of staff sergeants followed.

“Sir, we had no idea, I . . .

“No need for that, Gunny, you didn’t know I was an officer and I wasn’t going to tell you until I had to.”

A question-and-answer session followed, and I told him my story from day one. I left out the part about my XO ordering me to report to the base shelter. I told him that I was probably the last surviving member of my squadron and that I had been surviving and picking up others when I could. It was then that he ordered the staff sergeants to leave the tent.

He leaned in close to me and with a very quiet and nervous whisper said, “Sir, I have not seen an officer for months. All of our ground-pounder brass was ordered to an undisclosed location months ago and we have not seen nor communicated with them since. Basically, they left us to die in the open out here. I have been tellin’ the men that the commanding officer was alive and issuing orders directly to me via secure radio. It is not really lying, considerin’ I have been receiving orders from an Admiral Goettleman, onboard the flagship USS
George Washington.
They are starting to doubt my word. I had to keep the men’s morale up. How would they fight or even work as a team knowing their unit’s superior officers left them in the open to die and were probably dead themselves?”

We both sat there. I pondered what this implied. My concentration was broken intermittently by gunfire as the men fended off the undead.

“What are you telling me, Gunny?”

“Sir, I’m telling you that you are the first officer I have seen in a long time, and we need you, if only as a mouthpiece leader for the men. Leader or not, I just need you to play the part or this whole thing is going to unravel quick-like and blow up in everyone’s face.”

“Gunny, in that case, this place, Hotel 23, will be
my
command. You will need to stay and send most of your men back, along with your most trusted staff sergeant.” He agreed. I told him that I would address the men while he decided who stayed and who didn’t.

Over the next half hour, I stood on an ammunition crate and watched the faces of the young patriots who looked on and listened.

“I am the commanding officer of this stronghold, and I need a few good men.”

This was met with aggressive applause.

“About six and a half months ago, something really rocked our world. Now no one really knows what it was that happened, but it doesn’t really matter what it is.”

I didn’t think I sounded that great, but the men disagreed with their whistles and clapping.

“The way I see it, we may run out of rounds, but we still have sharp sticks! It may take a long time, but we won’t give up. We’re going to save as many as we can and we are going to put the hurt on those
things.

“I want you men to never forget that you are in the United States military. I don’t want to hear any talk of there not being a United States. That is nonsense. Our Constitution may be sitting there in D.C. just fine or it may be burned up, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead like those things out there. We will still support and defend till the end.”

This was met with cheers and claps and also led to a crowd of men gathering around the Gunny, volunteering to stay here at Hotel 23. The sun was now rising over the tree line on this summer morning. My simple address was over and I could already see a visible boost in their morale. The compound was buzzing with purpose.

The Gunny said, “One more thing, sir. Ramirez wanted me to give you this.”

He handed me a fixed-blade knife with a heavy-duty leather sheath. The sheath had a small pocket containing a sharpening stone. I pulled the knife from the sheath and noticed that it was a very high-quality combat knife with a black micarta handle. The knife appeared to be stainless steel and had the words “Randall Made Orlando FL” stamped into the blade near the handle on one side. I laughed as I thought to myself, “They don’t make ’em like this anymore.” Hell they don’t make anything anymore.

After all was said and done, three LAVs and a covered supply truck stayed here along with twenty-two men, including the Gunny. We were topside when the staff sergeant and his convoy left for base camp with the news that they had found an officer to
help with the cause. Two military radios, loaded with crypto key-mat code from KYK-13s (small cryptographic storage units), were taken down into the compound and set up in the command center. The Marines quickly set up their berthing below.

Most of the afternoon was spent returning Hotel 23 to an operational military combined operations center.

18 Jul

1605

We have established communications with the USS
George Washington.
The acting Chief of Naval Operations is currently away from the carrier on one of the small boys planning with one of his commodores. I am certain there will be more to come in the following days. I’m told they are sending someone out to reprogram my common access card (CAC) chip on my military identification card in the next anticipated supply run, but I’m not sure what good that will do or why it matters to me here.

22 Jul

1720

I have opened a Pandora’s box. I now have more responsibility than I know what to do with. The twenty-two new Marines have been busy militarizing the perimeter and standing security watches. I now have a full-time radio operator with direct links to the carrier strike group. Message traffic has been heavy with updates to the status of the Gulf and eastern coastlines. Even daily threat assessments are being received indicating large undead swarm movements in some areas. I was curious about how the carrier was getting food for the three thousand plus skeleton crew they were running. One of the young Marines told me that they had units of Navy strike teams stationed onboard supply vessels and they used these teams to infiltrate and exfiltrate, via zodiac boats, the government coastal supply centers to identify
good targets so that the larger cargo choppers can get in and airlift the food.

I listened to the battle group radios for a few hours today, monitoring Navy and Air Force aviation communications, in particular voice traffic from a U-2 reconnaissance aircraft flying over the eastern seaboard. I was curious to know how they were able to keep the DRAGON LADY airborne with the hefty maintenance and long airfield requirements.

Apparently the U.S. Army didn’t fare very well, and according to a report received day before last, they have suffered a loss of over 70 percent of ground troops in CONUS. There just wasn’t enough room for them on the ships. The sailors and Marines took priority and the U.S. Army units were left to defend themselves inland. They were given advance warning of the nuclear strike, but many of them were overcome by the radiated undead that were pouring out of the radiation zones after the strike.

Some of the voice communications I was monitoring indicated that there were still search teams out surveying the ground for military survivors. One particular communiqué received was from a surveillance aircraft flying over the Virginias, in search of a lost tank convoy. Apparently the convoy met its demise after one of the lead tanks crushed an overpass under its massive weight. The structure of the ill-repaired overpass gave way and took four tanks with it. The convoy was being pursued by thousands of “hot” undead, and it only took a couple of hours before the swarm caught up with them. Three tanks were disabled in the fall from the overpass and their occupants were left to die in metal tombs with countless bodies pounding on the heavy armor and squirming over the turrets and tracks like maggots over roadkill.

The remaining tanks scattered to the winds and got the hell out. Location unknown.

The crew in the back of the aircraft commented on the radio that the occupants of the disabled tanks might already be exposed to high levels of radiation due to the sheer number of dead below. The aircraft sensors indicated that the horde was emitting deadly amounts at ground level. After surveying the situation, the aircraft headed back to base, reporting that they were on
bingo
(emergency) fuel.

One thing is for sure, the number of new inhabitants here will force us out soon to find a water tanker to fill Hotel 23’s tanks back up to maximum capacity. Hitting the tank with my rifle today revealed that the level is down to the bottom eighth. We are already rationing water and have set up numerous rain catches around the compound to help fill the critical need.

A technician showed up at the command center after flying in today to reprogram my identification card. There is a chip embedded in the card. The technician inserted my card into a reader/writer connected to a laptop and instructed me to enter a pin number at least six digits long. I thought of a number that I knew I’d never forget and entered it into the terminal. The technician informed me that I would have full control over all sensitive systems at the compound by using my card and pin at the computer terminals in the command center. He warned that I am the only person that would have this access until I was relieved. I asked him why this mattered and he stated that he didn’t know but that his instructions from headquarters were to give the ranking officer at the compound this access. The only way to designate another person would be for my card to be used in the command center to give permission for the transfer of authority to another officer designated by higher authority. If my card or pin number were to be lost or destroyed it would take ninety days to reprogram another, as the system has a time-lock fail-safe to avoid the unauthorized transfer of power.