"Well, hon, it looks like you're fast departing your first trimester and everything is looking great," Jan said, presenting her most positive tone as she examined the ultrasound image. Onscreen, the baby was deceptively large. Its actual size was a little larger than a grape.

"I'm going to tell him."

"You sure about that? He probably has a lot going on right now. He's not expected back until February. Tell you what, why don't you sleep on it tonight and then, if you think you need to tell him, ask John to send the message tomorrow. Whatcha think?"

"I think that sleeping on it is always a good idea. I'm just so excited. It's that, well, this is the most positive thing to happen to me since before. Since before . . . you know."

"I know, honey. You don't have to say it, I know. I'm excited for you, too. Can I ask you something personal?"

"Sure, I mean of course," Tara said, almost annoyed that Jan would even need to ask.

"Why didn't you tell him before he left? You knew already. Maybe it wasn't official, but you knew. Why not then?"

"I don't know; it just didn't feel right. With so much loss, so many gone-I felt that if I told him, we'd lose the baby. Don't ask me why. I know it's a terrible thing to say, but the only thing we have left to hold on to is life, what little is still out there. I didn't want to jinx it, I guess." Tara frowned and then started to cry.

"It's okay. Let it out. You're pregnant, this is allowed. You'll be in your second trimester when he gets back. Here are some prenatal vitamins and this book to read up on in the time being. Get excited, you're going to be a mom. Believe it or not, you're the only one onboard that's pregnant. At least the only one I know of."

"Jan, I can't thank you enough."

"Don't, I'm here. We've been through a lot. I'll be here for you when you need me. I mean it."

"Thanks, anyway."

"I want to see you every week to monitor your progress and make sure you're okay, got it?"

"Yeah, I got it," Tara replied with a Mona Lisa smile.

39.

Southeast Texas The road was a desolate, unforgiving place. Doc and Disco rode the long curled highway as if on the back of a giant black eel. The continuous potholes, debris, and hulks of abandoned cars and trucks caused near-accidents at every turn. They were not far from their rally point now-a bridge named by the Galveston Island team as the halfway point. Keeping an eye on his odometer, Doc realized that Galveston might have gotten the better end of the deal. The bike trip meter read fifty-five miles when the two men crested the hill that overlooked the bridge spanning the Brazos River.

Doc squeezed the front disc brake, stepping on the rear brake simultaneously, jerking the dual sport bike to an abrupt stop. Both men looked down the hill to the bridge, where they could clearly see muzzle flash erupting from unsuppressed weapons. The flash was like lightning, revealing a hundred creatures clearly engaging the gunmen on the bridge. Doc hoped that the men down there were not the men they were supposed to meet, but he knew that their luck had run out back at the fuel truck.

"Let's ride up and shoot at two hundred meters," Doc said over his shoulder to Disco.

"Yeah, two hundred meters, and lean the bike against something to keep it running."

Doc rode the bike down the hill, turned it around, and leaned it in neutral against the sandbag barrier of an old pill box from a time when the living outnumbered the undead and men were still fighting, not hiding.

"Okay, Disco, fire at will. Check your six every five rounds and I'll do the same, staggering on your count."

"Roger, boss, engaging."

Both men began to surgically target the heads of the creatures below, using the other group's muzzle flash to avoid fratricide. It was a game of timing and speed. If both teams hurried, they could neutralize the ma.s.s of dead before more replaced them, responding to the unsuppressed report of the weapons on the bridge.

Suppressors dramatically reduced undead response radius, meaning less reaction on Doc's position. Unsuppressed weapons extended the response radius exponentially, reducing the ability to escape before undead reinforcements arrived to replace the fallen. It paid to be fast, and they were.

It took seven minutes of constant shooting by both the hill crest and bridge valley teams to clear the hundred or so undead. After the last creature dropped, Doc and Disco sprinted down the hill to a scene of carnage. Only one man remained standing out of the three-man bridge team. The others were dead or dying from mortal wounds.

They had also arrived on motorcycles.

"Let's get this over with. Those were my friends," the survivor said to Doc right before moving over to his mortally wounded comrade, administering his last rites.

He whispered a good-bye and took a b.l.o.o.d.y piece of paper from the dying man before shooting him in the head at point-blank range. He didn't face them for a moment, but eventually turned in their direction, face flooded with tears.

"You guys are from the silo?" the survivor asked.

The sounds told of more dead approaching.

"Yeah, listen, we're sorry about . . ." Disco offered.

"Save it, I don't want to hear it. Those bikes were theirs," the man said, gesturing over to the dirtbikes leaning against the guardrail of the bridge. "Take 'em. They're full of gas."

Doc looked at the dead operators in disbelief. When their teammate, Hammer had been killed in New Orleans, it was devastating to the team. Doc still thought of Hammer often and wished he could have done something, anything that day. Hammer's life ended in much the same way as the man bleeding and lifeless on the ground; a bullet from the barrel of a friend.

Doc saw the man's AK-47 underfolder slung across his chest on a single-point sling, a paratrooper model. "Here bud, take this; you'll need it," Doc offered, handing over his suppressed M-4 carbine.

The man looked down at the rifle and said, "Thanks. I'll take you up on it. I hope that your side of the river will treat you better than mine. One of my men flipped his bike off an overpa.s.s on the way here, broke his neck avoiding those f.u.c.king things. We lost our only silent rifle with him. Take my AK-I don't want to leave you in the same boat I was in."

"Thanks, brother," said Doc. "Here's my ammo and three mags, got any seven-point-six-two?"

"Yeah, six mags. Here. Also, this is what I was ordered to bring you."

The man handed over a military radio with a frequency written on the outside of the case in silver Sharpie. Attached was a small notepad of waterproof paper.

"The radio is tuned to talk to our A-10 drivers at Galveston Island. We've converted the road to an airstrip there and cleared the dead. Some seem to get in anyway though. The notepad is our weekly flight schedule and brevity codes. We've been ordered by the COG to support your missions. You transmit your scouting plan to the boat and they'll notify us of our strip alert times. If you run into trouble that you can't shake, our Hog pilots will be on scene inside of twenty mikes for the troops in contact. They'll literally be sitting in the ready room geared up at the times your teams are out. I'm ordered to tell you that the Hogs are carrying air-to-air IR missiles in their loadouts, too, whatever that's supposed to mean to you."

Doc quickly thought of the Reaper mentioned in the previous Hotel 23 commander's report, but decided not to mention it.

"One last thing, I'm sure you know that transmitting is a bad idea in your keypad and especially killbox. I wouldn't use that radio unless the devil himself started coming out of the ground with h.e.l.l behind him."

The dead drew nearer and Disco took shots, thinning them out with the smaller noise radius of his carbine-the only suppressed rifle between the two, now that Doc had donated his.

"Do you have anything for me?" the survivor asked Doc.

"Yeah, here are our reports and copies of some equipment we recovered a week ago, and some other intel." Doc handed over the package.

"Thanks." The man took possession and slid it into the leather messenger bag slung across his chest.

"You got a name?" Doc asked the man.

"Galt. Yours?" he replied as he mounted his bike.

"I'm Doc, and that's Disco. Good luck."

"Thanks. You too, thanks for the gun."

"Least I could do. I'm really sorry about your friends. Thanks for the Warthogs."

Galt didn't say a word. He slung his leg over his motorcycle and his M-4 over his back and was out of sight before Doc and Disco departed.

"Doc, it's time to go," Disco reminded him apprehensively.

"Yeah, I know. Take that bike and scout up ahead where we left ours."

Disco mounted one of the dirtbikes that belonged to the fallen Galveston Island team; it started without trouble. Doc jogged behind, trying to keep up with Disco as he rode up to the other bike, which was still running. Disco's gunshots told Doc that the undead had been attracted to the running engine while the two were down at the bridge. By the time Doc made it up the hill, Disco had already dispatched the creatures, littering the ground with more corpses.

"We gotta roll, man. That AK caused a major ruckus. I wouldn't doubt it if every creature for five miles is headed for our pos." Disco revved his engine, heading back in the direction they came, with Doc trailing.

They made good time back to the tanker, refilling without incident. The undead density was higher on the way back, remainders from the dead attracted by their motorcycle on their way to the bridge, causing more swerves and weaving. The vampires of Hotel 23 once again beat the winter sun.

Remote Six-Eve of Project Hurricane G.o.d stood on the watch floor, deep inside a covered facility, staring at the Global Hawk UAV picture of a particularly high-interest area in Texas. He remembered the day, more than ten months ago, when he shut the doors, securing himself below ground-the day the president was declared dead.

At that time, the vice president was still alive somewhere in the mountains west of Washington, D.C., issuing logic tree orders to Remote Six via secure cable. Logic trees were made of complex responses, as they required more than a simple yes or no finding. They were basically a prediction market, something that the intelligence community had experimented with prior to the fall of man. The logic tree response demanded a chain of yes or no answers and probability annotations for each option. This was no trouble for the quantum's mind mapping and reasoning algorithms. To complement the quantums, Remote Six boasted a small team of nuclear experts on site for the human reasoning input on the decision to deploy tactical nuclear warheads on U.S. soil. Strange, Charm, and Top were their codenames-Remote Six did not use real names, only those that represented the expertise of its personnel. Over nine and a half months ago, the quantums, as well as nuclear weapons experts Strange and Charm, all agreed that the full destruction of a majority of cities was necessary to regain control of the United States. The lone dissenter was Top. Top believed that more research needed to be conducted on the second- and third-order effects of radiation and on the true origin of the anomaly.

G.o.d looked down on the facility that the pathetic squatters called Hotel 23. His database had another name for the place, but that really didn't matter anymore. Under most circ.u.mstances he'd leave them for the undead-sooner or later they'd leave the safety of the compound looking for food, water, antibiotics, whatever. The creatures would pick them off slowly but ever so surely.

Now, G.o.d was forced to devote time and attention to the miserable pimple and its squatters below, because Hotel 23 still contained a viable nuclear warhead. The quantums ran the numbers, informing his think tank that there was now only one way to destroy the USS George Washington, the COG's military right hand. Remote Six had a squadron of Reaper UCAVs armed with five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs and even a small number of Global Hawk UAVs with a prototype weapon. None of those weapons could so much as dent the hull of the carrier. The LGBs would fall straight down and possibly damage the flight deck but would have no chance at sinking the ship.

There was only one working nuclear weapon inside the United States that G.o.d had a shot at controlling. That warhead was secure inside the closed silo beneath his Global Hawk-an unmanned aerial vehicle that orbited at sixty thousand feet over Hotel 23. It monitored the area equipped with an advanced optics suite and one other prototype payload-Project Hurricane.

G.o.d grew tired of helping him along. The man, according to Remote Six SIGINT intercepts, held control of the warhead launch via an encrypted Common Access Card. He nearly had a heart attack the day he learned that the man had been in a helicopter crash, fearing that his chance of neutralizing the USS George Washington had evaporated. Remote Six designated the man as a.s.set One, or just the a.s.set. The a.s.set had been doing a fair job of evading the creatures, but G.o.d took no chances.

He ordered full Reaper and air-drop support the instant that Remote Six intercepted and geolocated the distress beacon from the a.s.set's survival radio. G.o.d would have dispatched a small extraction force, but he was very short on air-breathing aircraft pilots and couldn't risk losing an extraction team in a mishap onboard one of the prototype C-130 UAVs. Technology was not a problem for Remote Six, but personnel was becoming a big limiting factor.

The fully functioning twelve-thousand-foot runway co-located above Remote Six was increasingly difficult to secure, despite its location-a secret basin far away from what many would consider a densely populated area. A ten-foot-high, double-layered, K-9 patrolled chainlink fence buffered the runway from the straggling dead near the facility.

But some got through.

There had been casualties since January, since going underground. The most valuable resource in Remote Six was people-those still loyal to the charter of the facility anyway.

The strength of the facility was her drones, DARPA prototype weapons. Though formidable, there were things darker, blacker. Things known only by a whisper between the highest elected and appointed officials before the fall. Things reverse engineered from technology secured in a Lockheed Martin laboratory vault since a time when the government hit its own technological impa.s.se in the 1950s and thereby signed the hardware over to the military-industrial complex.

G.o.d grew impatient. He'd thought that the a.s.set would have been more appreciative; after all, he'd saved him from certain death more than once. The a.s.set had made it back to Hotel 23 a few days ago, and had been unresponsive to G.o.d's iridium phone transmissions.

The quantums, as well as his top think tank advisors, agreed that destroying the carrier would serve two purposes; it would eliminate Task Force Hourgla.s.s before its submarine deployment to China, and would get rid of the only ent.i.ty that could order nuclear response on Remote Six. With the a.s.set's apparent refusal to launch hanging over him, G.o.d had a whole new problem set for the mainframes. The answer came out in real time; some Remote Six scientists theorized that the reply might even be given before the user actually asked-perhaps by a few nanoseconds. It twisted one's mind thinking about the physics behind that-answers before questions, or output nanoseconds before input.

The quantum output did not surprise G.o.d. Project Hurricane would likely be deployed against Hotel 23 tomorrow or the next day. This would force the evacuation of the facility or likely eliminate the squatters. Either outcome awarded some time for G.o.d to evaluate his next move. He was all but certain that none of the surviving military apparatus knew of his location, but . . . doubt kills, he thought.

G.o.d flipped a switch and turned a few dials, adjusting the Global Hawk UAV video feed to another location miles away from Hotel 23. Mega Swarm T-5.1 would soon be within range of the Hurricane device, and Hotel 23 would be neutralized. Until then he would continue to feed the quantums, predicting the next big thing.

40.

Kunia Facility-Oahu Interior It took a few hours for Rex and Huck to figure out the cave facility generator system. Fortunately it wasn't anything high-speed like geothermal or tide power, just a simple diesel system. The fuel tanks were still three-quarters full and it seemed like the back-up system had never been activated. The mainland grid must have stayed on until it was knocked out by nuclear detonation. By isolating the power grid internal to the cave, they could get maybe two months of power out of the generator banks.

Commie was straining over the keyboard, attempting to bring up the critical computers needed to provide overwatch for the Virginia.

"I don't get it," he said. "None of my log-ins work and I know they're still valid."

"Could the birds have burned in already?" Rex said, referring to the overhead satellites.

"No, they haven't re-entered. I'm seeing their maintenance signal active, see?" Commie pointed to a screen cascading code that might as well have come straight out of The Matrix.

"I don't know what the h.e.l.l any of that is," Huck said.

"You probably don't even know your own social, shut up," Rico chided.

"At least I have a social, ese."

Rex jumped in, not feeling the comedy routine right now. "If you all think you need to joke around, think about Griff. Think he's joking right now?"

"Naw, he's probably back on the boat in a warm rack," Huck said.

"I hope," Rex responded, staring down Huck.

"Commie, what's the situation? We need to make a decision."

"Sir, I'm telling you, the birds are up there. They're functioning, too, because I can see they're transmitting a green maintenance code."

"You didn't answer my question."

Commie explained, "Okay, I don't know quite how to say this without sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I saw this once before. The NRO took control of the birds a few years back to run some diagnostics and didn't tell anyone they were doing it. Some of us little guys didn't get the memo. This looks like outside control has been locked out, and the birds are being controlled once again in the same way. I don't think we'll be able to get them."

"Well, f.u.c.k," Rex murmured.

"There is good news though," Commie offered. "I can try to run a trace on the ent.i.ty that's currently in control of the birds. We likely won't be able to pinpoint, but we might get close."

"Okay, Commie, do it. I'm not going back to the Virginia empty-handed. If Griff made it, that's good, but if he didn't I won't throw his life away without forcing this mission to give us something in return. Don't forget that Commander Monday wanted the archives of all the intel collected three months before January and up until the nuke was dropped on Honolulu. Check?"

Commie clicked another works.p.a.ce on the GUI of the Unix system. "Yeah, I'm on it. Running it now."

"Can he access the comms interface from here? The boat is no doubt worried about us and maybe we can find out about Griff," Rico asked, visibly worried about his team member.