Shattered Hourgla.s.s.

J. L. Bourne.

Author's Note.

If you made it this far, you have likely spent some time in my post-apocalyptic world through the pages of the first two Day by Day Armageddon novels. Foremost, I'd like to thank you-the dedicated fans-for punching yet another ticket on the train with non-stop service through the bleak landscapes of undead armageddon.

Sit back, settle in, and make ready for what could be the final chapter in the Day by Day Armageddon saga. This one will be different, you'll see.

Although this story is best enjoyed chronologically, if you are just beginning the Day by Day Armageddon saga, allow me to bring you up to speed.

The two-minute version:.

The first volume of Day by Day Armageddon took us deep into the mind of a military officer and survivor as he made a New Year's resolution to start keeping a journal. The man kept his resolution, chronicling the fall of humanity, day by day. We see him transition from the life that you and I live, to the prospect of fighting for his very survival against the overwhelming hordes of the dead. We see him bleed, we see him make mistakes, we witness him evolve.

While surviving numerous trials and travails in the first volume of Day by Day Armageddon, the protagonist and his neighbor John escape the government-sanctioned nuclear annihilation of San Antonio, Texas. They make their way to temporary safety onboard a boat dock on the gulf sh.o.r.es of Texas, and soon after receive a weak radio transmission.

A family of survivors-a man named William, his wife Janet, and their young daughter Laura, all that remain of their former community-take shelter in their attic while untold numbers of undead creatures search for them below. After a miraculous rescue, the family joins forces with our protagonist to stay alive. As they scout the outlying areas for supplies, they encounter a woman named Tara trapped and near death in an abandoned car surrounded by the undead.

They eventually find themselves sheltering inside an abandoned strategic missile facility known by the long deceased former occupants as Hotel 23. Their union may not be enough in a dead world, an unforgiving post-apocalyptic place in which a simple infected cut, not to mention the millions of walking undead, can easily kill them, adding to the already overwhelming undead population.

The situation brought out the worst in some . . .

Without warning a band of brigands, seeing targets of opportunity, mercilessly begin an a.s.sault on Hotel 23, intending to murder the survivors for the shelter and take the vast supplies inside. Narrowly pushed back at the end of the first novel, the survivors were able to hold Hotel 23 for the time being.

In the second installment, Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile, our protagonist connects with the remnants of military ground forces in Texas. As the last military officer known to be alive on the mainland, he soon finds himself in command. He establishes communications with the acting Chief of Naval Operations...o...b..ard a working nuclear aircraft carrier on station in the Gulf of Mexico.

He also discovers a handwritten letter telling of a family-the Davises-hiding out at an outlying airport within prop aircraft range of Hotel 23. The rescue mission results in the extraction of the Davis family-a young boy named Danny and his very capable civilian pilot grandmother, Dean.

After being allotted a functioning scout helicopter from the carrier battle group, he and his men begin searching for resources in the areas north of Hotel 23. Halfway through Beyond Exile, our protagonist suffers a catastrophic helicopter crash hundreds of miles north of the facility. Severely injured, he is the lone survivor.

Running dangerously low on provisions, he manages to trek south. He soon encounters Remote Six, a shadowy group with unknown motives, h.e.l.l-bent on getting him back to Hotel 23. Later he stumbles upon an Afghani sniper named Saien. Little is known about Saien's background, and his cryptic demeanor only adds to the mystery. At the start, neither fully trust one another, but Saien and our protagonist work together and eventually return to Hotel 23 under the watchful eyes of Remote Six.

Remote Six orders our protagonist to launch the remaining nuclear warhead on the aircraft carrier. The order is ignored and a high-tech retaliation against Hotel 23 ensues. A sonic javelin weapon known as Project Hurricane is dropped by Remote Six, attracting legions of undead creatures to the region.

The sonic weapon is eventually destroyed, but it's too late.

A mile-high dust cloud, generated by the approaching undead army, signals the need for an emergency evacuation. A harrowing battle to the Gulf of Mexico ensues, where the aircraft carrier USS George Washington waits to take on any and all survivors.

Shortly after our protagonist's arrival onboard, orders from the highest level are issued-a directive to rendezvous with the fast attack submarine USS Virginia, standing by in West Panamanian waters.

Destination? China. Mission? Turn the page and find out, but first . . .

Check your doors. Better make sure they're locked.

-J.L. Bourne.

JLBourne.com.

1.

1 November.

Panama-Task Force Hourgla.s.s.

Chaos. Pure and complete. The scene below resembled an area following a Category 5 hurricane or aerial bombardment. The many ca.n.a.l structures still remained at the whim of the elements, showing creeping signs of decay and neglect. The jungle was already beginning to reclaim the ca.n.a.l regions, commencing a long bid to erase any evidence that man had split the continents a century before.

Soulless figures walked about, searching, reacting to the firings of dead synapses.

A corpse wearing only a mechanic's work shirt shuffled about the area. The mechanic had met its demise via the barrel of a Panamanian soldier's rifle, back when the national curfew was still being enforced. "He" became "it" shortly after the punctured heart stopped and the body temperature began to fall, letting loose the mystery that reanimated dead people. The anomaly (as it was known) spread quickly throughout the mechanic's nervous system, altering key areas of sensory anatomy. It anch.o.r.ed and replicated in the brain, but only in the sections where primal instinct developed and was stored via DNA and electrochemical switches from eons of evolution. Along its path of self-replication and infection, the anomaly made a quick stop inside the ear ca.n.a.l. There it microscopically altered the physical make-up of the inner ear ossicles, enhancing the hearing. The eyes were the last stop. After a few hours of reanimation, the anomaly completed replication and replacement of certain cellular structures inside the eye, resulting in rudimentary short-range thermal sensory ability, balancing its death-degraded vision.

The former mechanic stopped and c.o.c.ked its head sideways. It could hear a noise in the distance, something familiar-a nanosecond flash of audible recognition, then it was gone and forgotten. The sound grew louder, exciting the creature, causing salivation. Translucent gray fluid dribbled from its chin, hitting its bare and nearly skeletal leg. The mechanic took a small step forward in the direction of the noise; the open tendons on top of its foot flexed and pulled the small foot bones as it moved. The creature sensed that the increasing sound was not natural, was not the wind or incessant rain noises it normally ignored. The creature's pace quickened as it reached a small patch of dense jungle trees. A snake struck out as the mechanic entered the foliage, slapping dead flesh and leaving two small holes in its nearly gone calf muscle. The creature paid no attention and continued to slog forward, nearly clearing the foliage. The chorus of souls-be-d.a.m.ned boomed out from all directions as the thing broke through to the clearing.

Two hundred thousand undead on the mechanic's side of the Panama Ca.n.a.l bellowed at the sky. A gray military helicopter zoomed over at one hundred knots, trailing the ca.n.a.l southeast. The mechanic reacted instinctively to the engine noise, reaching up as if it might pluck the great bird from the sky and eat it cold. Frenzied with hunger, it followed the whirlybird, eyes locked onto the flying machine. Ten paces later, the creature stepped over the edge into the ca.n.a.l waters.

The ca.n.a.l's twisting form was no longer filled with brown muddy water and transiting ships. Bloated, floating bodies now blocked her once-busy shipping route. Some of the disgusting forms still moved, not yet dissolved by the Panama heat and humidity or mosquito larva-infested waters. The countless hordes on one side of the ca.n.a.l roared and moaned at their undead doppelgangers on the other in a Hatfield and McCoy feud spanning the great divide.

Before the anomaly, the world was fixated on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, phony government U3 unemployment numbers, spot gold prices, currency indexes, and the worldwide debt crisis. The very few that now survived prayed to go back to a Dow 1,000 and 80 percent unemployment; at least it would be something.

The conditions on the ground had degraded exponentially since the first case of the anomaly was doc.u.mented in China. Early in the crisis, the surviving executive branch of the United States government made the decision to nuke the major continental cities in a bid to "deter, deny, or degrade the undead ability to eliminate the surviving population of the United States." The cities were leveled by high-order nuclear detonation. Many of the creatures were instantly disintegrated in the process but the tradeoff was catastrophic. The dead outside of the comparatively small blast zones were zapped with so many alpha, beta, and gamma particles that the radiation eradicated any bacteria that might enable decomposition, preserving the dead for what scientists estimated at decades.

A few scattered human survivors remained though, and some military command and control was still in place. An operation was at this very moment underway to uncover the chain of events that brought humanity to the brink, maybe beyond.

Behind closed doors there was talk of possibly engineering an effective weapon of ma.s.s destruction against the creatures, as there were not enough small-arms ammunition or people to pull the triggers left on the planet. Behind thicker closed doors, there was talk of other, more nefarious things.

The helicopter pilot screamed back to the pa.s.sengers, cheek full of chewing tobacco, "Three-zero mikes until on top the USS Virginia!"

The helicopter's internal communications system failed to function as advertised months ago. It was now only good for c.o.c.kpit communications between the pilot and copilot up front.

The pilot was easily in his sixties, as told by his gray hair, deep crow's feet, and old and battered Air America ball cap. The rider in the copilot's seat was not part of the air crew-just another member of what was known on the flight docket as Task Force Hourgla.s.s.

Pilots had been in short supply over the past few months, most of them lost on reconnaissance missions. The remaining airworthy military aircraft were constructed of thousands of complex moving parts, all of which needed to be rigorously inspected and maintained, or they would soon become very expensive lawn darts. The old pilot seemed to enjoy the company of having someone in the right seat, someone to die alongside if things went too far south, which was frequent.

The rider appeared jumpy and hyperaware of his surroundings. Wearing an overly tight harness, his hand on the door latch and his eyes on the master caution panel, he nervously scanned the helicopter instruments. The rider risked a glance at the ground; they were flying low and fast. An optical illusion from the c.o.c.kpit put the helicopter nearly level with the ca.n.a.l banks on either side. The creatures screamed and thrashed loudly as they fell into the water, unable to compete with the deafening engine noise. The rider easily but involuntarily filled the gaps with his imagination, hearing the songs of the dead from below. The permanent PTSD gained from the past year's events pushed forward in his consciousness. He instinctively slapped his side, feeling for his carbine, preparing for another crash.

The pilot took notice and squawked into his headset, "Heard about what happened to you. Chopper went down in the badlands."

The rider keyed the microphone on his headset. "Something like that."

The pilot grumbled, "You just transmitted on the radio. Key down to talk to me, and up to talk to the world."

"Oh, sorry."

"Don't worry about it; I doubt anyone heard it anyway. Only those things around. Lots of fellow pilots walking about down there now. These runs keep getting more dangerous by the sortie. The birds are falling apart, no spare parts . . . What did you do before?" the old man yelled into the headset over the whine of the neglected turbine engines.

"I'm a military officer."

"What branch?"

The rider paused and said, "I'm a navy lieu-uh, a commander."

The pilot laughed as he said, "Which is it, son? Lieutenant is a ways from commander."

"Long, boring story."

"Son, I doubt that. What did you do in the navy before?"

"Aviation."

"h.e.l.l, you wanna fly the rest of the way?"

"No thanks. I'm not exactly the best helicopter stick."

The pilot chuckled at this. "When I was running small fixed wings low over Laos before you were born, I didn't know how to fly one of these, either."

The rider looked down at the undead ma.s.ses below and mumbled, "I didn't think we were flying anything over Laos."

The old man smiled and said, "We weren't. But how do ya think all them Phoenix Program snipers got close and personal with the NVA bra.s.s? By humping their bolt guns a hundred miles through the jungle? s.h.i.t . . . if you think Phoenix was only active in Vietnam, I've got some oceanfront property in Panama down there to sell ya!"

Both men laughed over the loud thumping rhythm of the spinning rotor blades above their heads. The rider reached into his pack for a piece of gum scavenged from a military MRE, offering the pilot half.

"No thanks, plays h.e.l.l on my dentures and I'm all out of Fixodent. Who you got back there with you anyway?"

The rider frowned at the old man. "They don't tell you anything, do they? The Arab-looking guy is a friend of mine. The others are SOCOM, or some of what's left of them anyway."

"SOCOM, hmm?"

"Yeah, a few frogs and such. I'm not sure I can tell you much more than that and to be honest, I don't know much more anyway."

"I understand, you wanna keep the old man in the dark."

"No, it's not that, it's . . ."

"I'm kidding, no worries. I had to keep a secret or two in my day."

A few more rotor-thumping minutes pa.s.sed before the pilot pointed his wrinkled finger forward to the horizon and said, "There's the Pacific. The coords to the Virginia are on that kneeboard card. Mind punching them into the inertials?"

"Not a problem."

After the coordinates were entered, the pilot altered course a few degrees starboard and maintained heading.

"What's your name, son?"

"My friend back there calls me Kilroy, Kil for short. What's yours?"

"I'm Sam. Pleasure to meet you, even though this may be the first and last time."

"Well, Sam, you sure know how to keep spirits high."

Sam reached up, tapped the gla.s.s on the upper gauge panel, and said, "You know the risks, Kilroy. There ain't no tellin' where you're goin' in your little black submarine. Wherever it is, you can bet it will be just as dangerous as right below us. There ain't no safe zones anywhere."

2.

A United States aircraft carrier, one of the last fading symbols of American military might. There were others, but those had been anch.o.r.ed offsh.o.r.e months ago, abandoned. One carrier was even reserved as a floating nuclear power plant, providing gigawatts of electricity to withering military island outposts and some remote coastal airstrips. Previously known as USS Enterprise, she was now officially renamed as Naval Reactor Site Three. A small contingent of power plant engineers was all that remained of her former five-thousand-sailor crew. Not all of these behemoths were accounted for. A handful of the steel giants had been trapped overseas when the alarms sounded and society collapsed. The USS Ronald Reagan sat at the bottom of the Yellow Sea with most of her crew undead, still floating through the black compartments of Davey Jones's locker. In the beginning, there was blame to cast and throw about like blacksmith anvils-that is, while men still lived to cast it. There was chatter via cla.s.sified cables that the USS Ronald Reagan had been brought down by simultaneous attacks from several North Korean diesel submarines in the days just after the anomaly. No one really knew for sure. The USS George HW Bush was last seen dead in the water near Hawaii. Visual observers from a nearby American destroyer reported that the undead creatures swarmed her decks-she was now a floating mausoleum and would remain so until a rogue wave or super typhoon sent her down to Poseidon.

Some of the surviving crews from the remaining carriers had been recovered and consolidated onboard the USS George Washington, still on active service in the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. military diaspora continued.

The hundred-thousand-ton USS George Washington cut through the Gulf waters, maintaining a patrol box ten miles off the infested Panamanian coastline. The Continuity of Government still remained, its primary orders clear and concise. Recover Patient Zero by any means necessary.

Admiral Goettleman, Task Force Hourgla.s.s commander and acting chief of naval operations, sat in his stateroom eating breakfast, watching the ship's cable TV network. A loop of The Final Countdown had been playing over and over again for the past week. He'd need to call someone about that, or maybe he'd let it go. Perhaps the crew enjoys watching an aircraft carrier travel back in time with the opportunity to change history. A loud knock on his door signaled Joe Maurer, a CIA case officer and his aide since the beginning of this mess.

"Good morning, Admiral," Joe said cheerfully, but somewhat insincerely.

"Mornin', Joe. Our boys make it to the Virginia?" Admiral Goettleman asked, chewing his final bite of powdered eggs.

"They will shortly, sir. The radio room reports that they are over the Pacific and zeroing in on Virginia's beacon now."

"I wouldn't be an admiral if I didn't worry about the weather. The helo reporting any bad chop?"

"No, sir, smooth waters, good air. Got lucky today, I suppose."

"We're going to need to save some of that luck. Hourgla.s.s has a long way to float. I'm deeply concerned at how all this is going to play out. Despite that I've asked you a hundred times, what are your thoughts? Ground truth, no bulls.h.i.t."