The closer they moved to the coastline, the denser the hordes. The anomaly was so new that the creatures had not yet spread out from the coasts; most of the world's population lived in the littorals, and now the dead ruled these regions.

Fueled by rumors that the fleet might be anch.o.r.ed off the coast of Pakistan in the Arabian Sea, Doc and Billy pressed south. It was not until the day before they reached the coast that radio chatter began to break in on their handsets. They eventually made contact with the USNS Pecos-their ticket home.

Doc adjusted course based on the ship's transmitted position and they continued to pay their toll in lead to the undead for the last miles to the sea. The sun was setting and their scorched rifles were out of ammunition by the time their boots filled with seawater. They sidestroked away from the ma.s.sing thousands of creatures that churned the surf with undead footsteps.

The Pecos was the last ship remaining at anchor to take on American evacuees. Billy and Doc soon found that the Pecos's master was pleased to have the added security of two special operators aboard. After arriving, eating, and taking a shower, Doc and Billy received a current situation briefing.

Doc learned of deadly piracy taking place on the high seas. The pirates were capitalizing on the lack of maritime security, and ruthlessly attacked all vessels on sight. Chinese, American, British, all were falling prey to Somali warlords and other vile sea vermin. The pirates were cold-blooded in their attacks, using stolen military hardware to sink vessels that didn't explicitly comply with their demands.

On their way stateside, steaming south, deeper into the Arabian Sea, they verified the worst of the reports. The GPS navigation network was failing. This, combined with a lack of sea charts, forced the Pecos's master to adjust course west and visually hug the African coastline. Pirates had been a problem in the Horn of Africa region long before the undead, and now they were a force that rivaled them.

Pecos was under attack long before they saw Africa.

The faster pirate vessel approached quickly through the choppy blue waters. As the vessel maneuvered into range, it began firing at Pecos with crew-served machine guns, aiming for the stern just above the waterline. Fortunately for Pecos and her crew, the pirates were not trained marksmen.

Doc, Billy, and the ship's master-at-arms took down the pirate vessel in a flurry of accurate sniper shots. Anytime a head popped up above a catwalk to man a machine gun or peek through a porthole, Billy put its lights out. The ship soon surrendered to Pecos and her superior firepower and was boarded.

Doc remembered when he and Billy had boarded the ship all those months ago. It was one of those things that would be difficult, if not impossible, to forget.

"Doc, look at that," Billy said, pointing to the pile of shoes six feet high, near the pirate ship's bow.

"Let's take a look down that hold," Doc said, hoping his first instinct was wrong.

"Chief, you open that hatch, me and Billy will be ready to spray whatever's down there."

"Aye, sir."

The chief master-at-arms jerked the hatch open, exposing a putrid and h.e.l.lish pit to the East African sun. The stink was so intense that the chief dropped the hatch cursing and gagging. He poured canteen water on his face and covered his mouth with a bandana before making a second attempt.

Doc stepped up to the edge.

The hold was filled with barefoot, half-naked creatures. They reached up to the light seemingly asking for help, just a hand. Doc felt the heat from the open hatch radiate from the baking and bloated corpses. The men examined the pulley boom and tackle mounted over the hatch; it stank, covered in sun-scorched human remains. Its purpose was clear.

The pirates lowered victims into the pit after robbing them of everything from gold fillings to the very shoes on their feet. The brigands likely used the pit as intimidation to force their victims to tell them where valuables were hidden. Doc, Billy, and the chief tried and executed the remaining pirates. A burial at sea was held before they opened key valves belowdecks, eventually sending the pirate vessel to the bottom.

Months had pa.s.sed since, but time would never fade the horror of that dark hold.

There was no moon when Doc and Billy rolled out into the Texas badlands. Disco and Hawse stayed back to provide security and monitor the radio while the others were outside the wire. During their mission brief before they boarded the C-130, Task Force Phoenix had been provided copies of maps indicating the positions of air-dropped equipment originally intended for Hotel 23's former commander.

Based on what had been recovered from the other drops, Doc thought this equipment would prove useful to his team and possibly shed some light on what the intelligence reports did not reveal-the ident.i.ty of the organization responsible for the airdrops, and for wreaking utter mayhem on the former occupants of Hotel 23.

According to the briefing, the previous equipment recovered consisted of some rather advanced hardware. This hardware was described in reporting as "surpa.s.sing current technology by ten years" and "things you might find in an agency directorate of operations back room inventory."

The Task Force Phoenix operation orders were clear: Primary mission objectives: Secure Hotel 23, verify her systems are in the green, verify remaining nuclear warhead viability in support of Task Force Hourgla.s.s.

Avoid detection.

Secondary mission objectives: Recover abandoned hardware for exploitation, a.s.sess the origin of Remote Six, recover supplies for ongoing support of Hotel 23 launch activity.

There was not much left for ambiguity. His primary tasking had been met. Hotel 23 had been secured, secure communications had been established, all networks checked green, and the nuclear payload had pa.s.sed all function bit checks.

Although unclear as to what exactly the mission objectives of Task Force Hourgla.s.s might be, he knew it was something big and something far above his snake-eater pay grade. No matter what the mission of Hourgla.s.s, he still had his team's remaining objectives to meet. Doc never fell short of tasking.

Their target for the evening, an airdrop eight and a half miles east of Hotel 23, was the closest drop identified on the maps. Working east they moved wall-line abreast of one another. No point man, no straggler. They knew they didn't have enough people to run this excursion safely, so they evolved tactics to mitigate the extreme threat.

Their sleep cycles and circadian rhythms had already adjusted to night operations. Normalizing their bodies to their new living conditions was necessary before heading out. They needed maximum awareness and attention for night reconnaissance like this. Their night observation devices were functioning literally in the green, with fresh lithium batteries as well as back-ups tucked in their packs. Neither Doc nor Billy observed anything out of the ordinary in the night sky. They scanned overhead from time to time, always aware that there might be air a.s.sets collecting on them from above.

They hadn't brought enough water, as they hadn't wanted to hump it sixteen miles round-trip. The iodine tablets they carried would kill any bugs in the stream water they collected along the way.

They were only five hundred yards outbound from Hotel 23 when they had their first encounter.

Billy whispered to Doc, tapping his shoulder. "Three tangos caught in the fence about a hundred yards."

The field was shaped in such a way that the men had no choice but to pa.s.s close to the creatures to stay on course. The other option was to avoid them by taking the adjacent path through the woods. Not a choice, since both men knew that option would be much more dangerous than just engaging these immobile undead. Leaving them flailing about in the fence would draw too much attention-quick kills were the only option.

Approaching cautiously from the west, they switched on their lasers and each took to their targets. Billy Boy took the two on the left and Doc took the right. There was no real need to count down and execute a time-on-target kill, but they did so anyway out of habit.

Doc whispered back, "Three, two . . ."

Thunk, thunk.

The first two shots occurred simultaneously; Billy had an extra shot for the remaining third creature. Clockwork. All three lay caught up in the barbed-wire fence and would stay that way until they decomposed to dust. Strange, but wild animals wouldn't generally eat the dead.

Doc held down the bottom wire with his boot and pulled the second wire up with his fabricator-gloved hand-no point in risking teta.n.u.s or even a simple infection. Billy quickly ducked between the sharp wires and held them wide for Doc. They both continued to move.

"What's your pace count, Billy?"

"About six hundred, you?"

"Yeah, about that."

Moving east they noted possible shelters and egress routes in the event they were swarmed or stalked by any foe, dead or otherwise. Thinking back to the briefing, Doc remembered, Stay off the roads. It's okay to use them as a guide but remain offset at least twenty-five meters. The roads just aren't safe. The dead congregate there.

The intel report from the former Hotel 23 commander was useful as h.e.l.l. Some of it was common sense but Doc was fine with that. There was valuable intel in the reports that he was glad to have for his team, like the detailed written account of the base commander's helicopter crash and subsequent journey back to the compound. In reading the reports, Doc could not help but notice interesting patterns of thought in the man's mind-set and methods of survival.

It was nearly midnight. They stuck to the preplanned route. Doc didn't want to risk detection by whatever it was that had attacked Hotel 23; this meant that radios were out, no omnidirectional RF communications. The burst unit set up back at Hotel 23 would evade detection if proper comm discipline was observed, but their Motorola brick units could easily be intercepted and were subject to direction finding (DF) by the most rudimentary SIGINT collection capabilities.

This was Doc's reasoning for religiously sticking to the planned route. If Doc and Billy didn't return by daybreak, Disco and Hawse would lock up and search for them at next nightfall, following the trail.

Doc wasn't thrilled about being clueless about the contents of this airdrop or the other drops marked on the map, but mission was mission.

"Shhhh!" Billy said.

Using hand signals he told Doc to take cover behind a huge pile of storm debris. Doc did so without hesitation and Billy followed, walking backward in a crouch. The instant they were hidden, the howling and moans commenced. Like a night chorus of demons on Halloween night, they bellowed.

Billy whispered to Doc, "At least a hundred."

"No way, Billy, I'd say about a hundred and four."

Without thinking, Billy punched Doc hard in the arm, causing Doc to bite his tongue to keep from yelping out.

"Thanks, a.s.shole."

"No problem, p.r.i.c.k."

"We're about a mile from the drop," Doc said.

Smiling, Billy replied, "Naw, more like a mile and a quarter."

They remained behind some cover until the mini-swarm of creatures pa.s.sed by. When they were far enough out, Doc broke cover and crossed the road where the creatures had just been. The wind blew fading sounds of the creature's hunger about.

USS Virginia The only man onboard who is aware I keep a journal is Saien. Even so, I feel apprehensive in doc.u.menting some things, in the event my journal is lost or stolen. Not long ago, Saien and I were told of certain historical facts as well as current events that if true, at least for me, forever change everything. I'm told that the United States has in its possession a large portion of a s.p.a.ce vehicle recovered in the forties as well as the cadavers of four extraterrestrial beings. First thought, total and complete bulls.h.i.t. Second thought, pretty clever to stage the weather balloon debris at the Roswell crash site to divert attention away from the true crash site in Utah.

The vessel was allegedly held and studied by government scientists until they reached a technological barrier in the 1950s. They were unable to exploit the tech beyond basic circuitry, lasers, and low-observability characteristics. Knowing that they had only unlocked a small fraction of what the hardware's true capabilities might be, they turned to the military-industrial complex.

According to what I've learned today, Lockheed Martin has possessed the vehicle wreckage for over sixty years and made quantum advancements in the technology, resulting in the development of a particularly secret U.S. aircraft known as Aurora. I remember hearing about flying triangles in the newspapers and all over the online video-sharing websites before all of this. It wasn't often, but every now and again someone would catch a triangle flying silently through the night sky on their night-vision cameras and upload it to the Internet.

Although no one could prove this was Aurora, the aircraft's existence was almost an open secret in the halls of the Pentagon. Despite Aurora being disclosed to me today, no one was to ever know or would ever even believe that this Skunkworks project was a result of Lockheed Martin's reverse engineering of advanced alien technology.

Intelligence obtained from Aurora is what led to the formation of Task Force Hourgla.s.s (the operation that Saien and I are now in the middle of). Since before the anomaly in January, Aurora had overflown China forty-seven times conducting sensitive reconnaissance operations. She had taken thousands of extremely high-resolution photos of a crash site discovered by the Chinese military only weeks before the anomaly took its first communist Chinese victim.

In the very early days of crash-site reconnaissance executed by the U.S. intelligence community, Aurora's hypersonic propulsion and extreme alt.i.tude saved her from being shot down by the still-operational Chinese SA-20 Gargoyle surface-to-air missile battalions.

The HUMINT reports coming out of the PRC combined with Aurora imagery and SIGINT capability gave the U.S. intelligence apparatus a pretty good picture of the situation on the ground around the Mingyong glacier crash site.

The Chinese had discovered their own "Roswell" crash site and were well into the process of excavation by December of last year. The information is incomplete (or withheld) as to the relationship between the anomaly (that's what everyone keeps calling it) and the Mingyong crash site. Commander Monday purports that we're headed to China to study the source of the anomaly to see what might be done about stopping it. I'd be a liar if I said I trusted him and I still don't believe half of what was briefed to me today.

The government and its elected representatives have had their fair share of diplomatic flaps as a direct result of being caught in bold-faced lies. The Gulf of Tonkin, Operation Northwoods, Watergate, WMD in Iraq, and other blatant Const.i.tution burning brought on by the Patriot Act are a few examples from memory. Hey, I don't have the benefit of a Google search to dig up the hundreds, maybe thousands more. Guess what, the lies were the same after all this s.h.i.t went down.

"Stay in your homes, the situation is under control."

Same story, different lie.

If this ancient Chinese secret turns out to be true (a long shot), I can safely add it to the long list of conspiracy facts.

-A cynical naval officer

16.

U.S. Outpost Four-Somewhere in the Arctic "I read you Lima Charlie. George Washington, where are you?"

After a minute of static the ship responded, "Sorry, OP4, we can't disclose our exact operating location on this net. I'm authorized to tell you that we are operating somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, over."

Both Mark's and Crusow's hearts sank. The ship might as well be light-years away. They were using atmospheric bounce to communicate, a phenomenon that was intermittent at best. Mark continued his dialogue with the first living Americans he had spoken to since Crusow's wife last winter. He didn't know how long the atmospheric HF bounce might last.

"GW this is OP4, understood. We are an Arctic scientific research station. Our situation is dire; we have less than sixty days of fuel and food. We have five souls...o...b..ard, some are not in good health, over."

"OP4 this is GW, roger that, I'll be pa.s.sing your situation report up the chain to the highest levels immediately, over."

"GW this is OP4, you do that, please. What is the situation on the mainland, over?"

"OP4 this is GW, situation really bad. The mainland United States has been deemed uninhabitable. Nuclear detonations have destroyed many overrun cities to no measurable advantage. The undead continue to dominate in the lower forty-eight. No word on Alaska."

"GW this is OP4, roger that. Winter has set in here pretty hard and heavy. The worst of it is in front of us. You might like to know that the creatures don't fare too well up here. The cold freezes them up pretty good. They can't move if exposed longer than a few minutes, over."

"OP4 this is GW, acknowledged. There will be folks interested to hear that. Before we lose connectivity, recommend we set up a radio contact schedule with times as well as primary, secondary, and tertiary frequencies, over."

"GW this is OP4, sounds like a d.a.m.n good plan."

Mark continued his back and forth with the ship, exchanging common High Frequency Global Communications System frequencies as well as contact schedule times based on Greenwich Mean Time. Mark had finished establishing his comm schedule and started exchanging news when the transmission faded to garble.

"d.a.m.n it," Mark said angrily.

"Buck up, little camper, this is the best news we've had in months. If that boat is up and running then maybe more might be. Maybe something that can help," Crusow replied.

"Don't even try to be optimistic. We're well over a hundred miles from thin ice and even so, the weather is so f.u.c.kin' bad, no ship captain in his right mind short of an icebreaker skipper would risk it. Even if they did, how the h.e.l.l are we going to hike a hundred miles over chasm-filled and unforgiving terrain in negative-fifty conditions, Crusow?"

"We have the Cat, right?"

"Yeah, I guess we have that."

"It's something. I am not giving up. If anything this makes me at least a little more hopeful. I'm not dying at the top of the world. I'm staying at ninety-eight-point-six degrees and you are, too. Neither one of us is headed to the bottom of the gulch and I'll be d.a.m.ned if I'm not off this ice cube before I die. We will see the sun again. There's a lot of work to do. Write out three copies of that schedule you just made with the ship. You keep one, give one to me, and post one at the desk, under the gla.s.s top. We need to call a meeting to let the others know."

"All right. Okay. I'll start now," Mark said as he sat up straighter in his chair, with just a little more focus, a little more hope.

17.

It wasn't long before Tara and Laura found their way down to the sick bay, and to Jan. Laura missed her mother and wanted to know why she was down with the sick people all the time. The moment Jan saw Laura, she peeled off the blood-stained lab coat and gloves, removed her face shield, and picked Laura up, squeezing her tight.