Invasion USA 3 - The Battle for Survival (15 page)

“What about the underground system?” somebody asked.

“A good question,” answered the general. “We have entered three stations so far, I’m not sure where, but the death and frozen corpses are far more concentrated underground. The cold got there as well, unfortunately. Only three people have been found alive out of thousands.”

“What are your time frames for completing this grisly task?” asked someone.

“Our main aim is to beat the problem of disease. We have at least two months of possible freezing conditions left and we hope to have the larger cities clear. Unfortunately we will not even get to some cities for another month. I think in April we will have to close down the areas we have not touched and keep everybody out. This is our major problem for the rest of this year: to keep the population alive and stop any disease that could spread like a plague in the United States. We are praying that an immense team of soldiers and civilian personnel can actually clean a complete city or other high density area and then move as a unit into another city. That hasn’t happened yet and unfortunately, it is impossible for us to know numbers and the size of the task ahead to be able to give you any more information on this horrible program. I believe it will impossible to clean up the entire United States by the end of this year, so I’m trying to find ideas on how to combat the onset of disease in the hot summer. As many as 53 million corpses have been burned in the country to date.”

There was absolute silence. “Now back to our idea of burning pits. It is a mammoth task. We have begun to dig 48 of these pits, and we have given out general recommendations to the personnel on how to dig them. They are in a dozen states and are being monitored by military personnel. We have 350,000 civilians countrywide under military supervision working to recover identity information off dead bodies. Chicago and several other cities are placing hundreds of thousands of bodies at a time into large pits which were dug by dozens of civilian and military digging machines. Our recommendation is to dig them fifty feet deep, fill them, and then pour fuel into them from defunct gas stations or airports. Once the burning is complete, usually after 48 hours, the ground cools and another team fills the holes with dirt. In Philadelphia alone, and with the ground frozen, we have a hundred large bulldozers at work 24/7 making a new hole every 18 hours. Our first one in New York started burning yesterday with 115,000 full corpses and the second one with 150,000 major parts of corpses. The fuel was obtained from JFK Airport. I’m sure many of you noticed the plume of smoke to the north?” Many of the pilots nodded that they had. ”That plume is in Brooklyn, New York. The flames are several hundred feet high. It is expected to take two days before we can cover the pit over. The engineers are making sure that a minimum of twelve feet of dirt covers the blackened remains for safety purposes.”

Many people were beginning to feel sick and this was just the beginning. The scope of the atrocity was becoming clear to many. Even Preston was totally shocked and felt sick as a deep anger began to burn in his stomach; he was already thinking of the billions of people worldwide—millions of people already dead and millions more who had little hope of survival.

“The largest pit so far was 150,000 whole corpses in Chicago and the smallest 10,000 just outside El Paso, Texas. The southern states have fewer corpses and most of those are from crime and shootings. Unfortunately, the number of people being shot is rising quickly.

“If we continue at the same rate we are going, and if the corpses keep coming, we will able to cremate two to three million per day by the end of April.” The gasp from the audience was far louder than before.

“General Patterson, do you have recent calculations on how many people are dead, and how many people are going to die before spring?” asked Preston.

“Our current scenario estimates a minimum of 150 million dead, Preston. We have recorded and cremated over a third of that number already. As far as future deaths this winter, all I can say is that in total the country has basic food rations for 12 million people including our armed forces. We have assumed that at least another 30 to 50 million people, hopefully many more, live in areas with abundant food stocks, and another 25 million with minimal or low food stocks. Sorry to say this but nearly everything that is not human is a food stock and that means birds, insects and four-legged animals. I will not go further. So, to answer your second question, as we gauge food availability and have no crime, we could have 100 million people alive as the first crops of this coming spring come out of the ground; that is less than one third of the 2010 Census. What I’m worried about is the premature butchering of cattle, pigs, and other meat animals that could reproduce in the spring. It’s like cutting off the hand that feeds you.

“And that leads me to my next topic, security. We are aware of very few active police forces. We believe that there are fewer than a hundred out of the 20,000 nationwide we had only three months ago.”

Preston was reminded of Will Smart. He hadn’t seen him yet, so he looked down the line of chairs to his left. He then turned to his right and saw the Smart family occupying several chairs in the same row. Maggie smiled at him and so did the kids. There was a spare chair, but Will was not there.

“I would like to bring on Detective Will Smart to give us a report on what he has seen and heard in California since he returned there a couple of weeks ago,” continued the general and Will appeared from the back of the hangar. He looked a little wheezy to Preston.

‘Looks like they had to drug him again,” whispered Martie in his ear. General Patterson sat down next to the President and drank from a glass of water.

“Ladies and gentlemen, sorry to be a little weird but I’m not good at flying as many of you know. We, the Lancaster Police Department, just north of Los Angeles, have an active police force of seven men out of forty. We do not know what happened to many of our colleagues, but new dead bodies appear every day. We have the City of Lancaster in curfew from sundown to sunup and shoot anybody we find in the streets during night hours, no questions asked. To date we have been shot at over 40 times and we have shot over a dozen armed men and one woman. Lancaster is pretty clean of crime compared to what I have heard from other areas.

“Parts of Los Angeles are, as General Patterson explained, being used as burning pits. We have seen smoke from what we assumed were several of these in the last two weeks. Soldiers coming through town, and at Edwards Air Force Base, tell us of hundreds, even thousands of shootings per day, every day in LA. Thirteen aircraft went down in and around heavily populated areas in the City of Los Angeles on the last day of last year. I was pretty close to another one in Lancaster and from the latest reports, it has taken ten days just to clear these burnt-out areas. What we have found are mostly blackened remains of unidentified bodies and the worse news is that of the nearly two million bodies already cremated, less than 10,000 had any ID. We believe that the missing IDs were either burned or stolen.

“San Diego also has a shooting problem. Soldiers coming through suggest that over one million are dead from shooting-related violence in the area of San Diego alone. I have not heard from further north in California, but the shooting deaths are mounting quickly in the southern areas and even little cities and towns around Lancaster have horrific numbers.”

“What is the reason for these shootings?” asked Sally Powers, white faced and shocked.

“The soldiers returning to these areas have been listening to the civilians passing through with their families, carrying any belongings they have left. These folks say that at first the violence stemmed from armed robbery and then for food. Now it’s the other way around. Glittery gadgets don’t work anymore and now food is the main reason, then gasoline and now just plain criminal intent.”

“Thank you, Detective Smart,” stated the general, returning to the podium. “For all of you who have just arrived from outlying areas, I want any feedback from you after this meeting and we will condense it into a written report for your reading in a day or two. What the detective has described is happening in many areas. Very vague numbers and information show that California, southern Arizona and Texas are the worst areas. We are about to send in as many troops as we can to these areas and this is the one problem I mentioned earlier: fly in the food or fly in the men? Both are equally important. We have heard of areas of safety in the country, especially rural areas and the smaller towns where the police force didn’t disappear and other areas where civilians set up road blocks and started their own protection groups to protect their families. From our latest knowledge, you don’t want to visit over 50 percent of the country, and I believe it is growing. The violence and murders are mostly in the south, and once the northern areas warm up we need to be ready for a growth in crime in those areas. Now, let’s get Captain Mike Mallory up here to give us his latest report on food supplies and numbers.”

The captain walked up to the podium, dressed as a civilian. He, like many people in attendance, looked tired and overworked.

“Good morning, everybody. Yesterday we gave 387,000 meal packs to 201,000 people. These are not exact figures, but figures we calculated from our daily supply system. Exact reports take a week or more to reach headquarters at McGuire Air Force Base in the Northeast, Seymour Johnson in North Carolina, McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas, Denver International Airport and Hill Air Force Base in the center of the country, and Edwards in California. As of yesterday, we are supplying food from 175 military bases using 150 aircraft of all types and sizes and 640 trucks big enough to carry three tons of food or more. It has been a tiring couple of weeks and the size of the job at hand is just unbelievable, but we are growing and getting better at getting food to the starving out there.

From what I have just heard in this hangar this morning, all we are doing is going to save lives. I want to thank the President, the Pentagon, the military and whoever were responsible for having so many military rations in storage. Without these millions and millions of ration packs, millions more people would have died between when we started a month ago and the approaching spring in about two months’ time. There are a few places in the United States which don’t need these rations and I’m pleased to tell you that this number is growing.

“I was in communication three days ago with farmers I met on my travels from New York to North Carolina a couple of days after the deadly happenings on New Year’s Eve. They have driven tractors across a large swath of farmland in the central United States and their reports are unbelievable. In extremely rural areas, there are people who have traveled south from cities such as St. Paul, Chicago, New York and even several Canadian families. Reports are that tens of thousands of people are heading south trying to reach warmer places. All are on foot and tell of atrocities in their home towns which made them leave. The ground is not very good for any motor traffic as snow is over twenty feet in drifts in some places. These people just keep heading south, being given scraps or supplies from the farmers who have extra. We have set up several food points on the main migration routes in the last week and so far have given supplies to 100,000 people or families who have been told of our outposts by the farming community.”

“How far have you set up these outposts across the country?” asked the President.

“During the first week of January I met the first farmers who began to spread the information as we travelled down I-95,” described Mike Mallory. “They are in a broad farm belt just north of Baltimore. We, the farmers and the military set up the first outpost on I-81 west of Baltimore immediately after the attacks in New York ended. We actually set up our first outpost on I-95, but, funny, this highway had no traffic in the first 48 hours we monitored it. The thinking was that it was safer to travel across country. The people were traveling on foot and country paths became used more and more. So we moved our first post to I-81, cleared a mile of road for runways, closed the area down, set up several military tents and defensive positions on bridges on each side, flew in soldiers for protection and began airlifting supplies—food and medical—into our new runway and outpost headquarters. We had three people walking down the highway on day one, 100 on day two, 500 on day three and now we get well over a thousand a day at Outpost One. The information is being relayed by farmhouses in a fifty-mile zone north of the outpost. Each arriving family is given a military tent, two weeks of rations, a propane gas heater, a road map and any warm clothing like gloves, army boots and headgear we can supply. They are given medical attention by a military doctor and two nurses. The medical tent always has a line.

“From the beginning of February, they have been told about our second outpost which is currently set up in Bristol, a small town further south-southwest of Outpost One, again on I-81. This one is on the Virginia-Tennessee border. Outpost Two is approximately 450 miles further south. Seventy-five percent of daily visitors who walk directly from the north into Outpost Two are new and did not get rations at Outpost One. There we have received people from Cleveland, Columbus, New York State and Pennsylvania. The other twenty-five percent who arrive walking down I-81 spent about two weeks traveling on the road from Outpost One to Outpost Two. Visitors from Outpost One are given another case of rations per two family members and anything else we can give them: water, candy, dog food, anything that can keep them alive.”

“Dog food?” asked somebody in the audience.

“Yes, I’m sorry to say but nothing is being left out. We found a dog food plant on our travels and we airlifted 190,000 cans of the stuff into Outpost Two. I tried it with several of the extremely hungry families and to them it tasted quite good. I didn’t like the taste much and preferred it cold to heated up.”

“Are you giving out weapons for protection?” asked somebody else.

“No, we have nothing to give them. They are either carrying their own, or travel in groups of twenty to thirty people with a couple of weapons in the crowd.