Free Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass by J. L. Bourne Page B

through Doc’s body and he cursed them all to hell before paying final respects to Hammer with a sniper round through his skull. Hammer would not become one of those things down there. He hoped that Hammer would have done him the same courtesy. Doc looked out over the decimated and decaying NOLA skyline.
    Doc sat up in his rack and checked his watch out of habit. It was 1400. He was confused for a second. Is Hammer alive? Where am I? he asked himself until the total recall made a retreat back to the dark nook of his mind. Doc was back in his Hotel 23 bunk, where Hammer was dead and the undead still ruled.

11
    Kil, Saien, and Monday stepped into the secure compartmented information facility. There was nothing special, no supercomputers whirring in the corner, no real-time video satellite feeds for an army of analysts to sift through. The equipment was old and overengineered. Kil entered a room marked SSES .
    The four men that had fast-roped onto the sub with them were inside.
    “I know this place,” said Kil.
    “How so?” Monday asked.
    “Transmitted a few messages to SSES in better times,” Kil answered reluctantly.
    “Well, we’re not exploiting many foreign signals in here these days. We still have a linguist spinning and grinning in the corner over there when we need him, but no one seems to be transmitting much of anything anymore.”
    “What’s he speak?” asked Kil.
    “Chinese.”
    “I guess that’ll come in handy in a few weeks, huh?” Kil probed.
    “Yeah, maybe sooner. Sit tight—you’ll be happy to know that the navy still runs on PowerPoint in the apocalypse. We’ll need to boot up our systems and log in to the standalone JWICS computer before we start. Might take a minute.”
    Leaning over to Kil, Saien whispered, “What’s JWICS?”
    “It’s another Internet, one you’ve never seen and likely never heard of. It wasn’t a secret that the government had it before this went down. It’s just a secret what information is shared on it. Nothing too conspiratorial; back in the days before this, you couldget most of it from mainstream news or other online sources.”
    “Like who killed Kennedy and all that?”
    “No way,” Kil said, briefly reminded of his mother. She’d had a habit of asking him about those kinds of conspiracy theories, considering his vocation. “Nothing like that, just regular old sensitive information. The good stuff was on the White House Situation Room LAN or on some intranet in some unmarked Northern Virginia building. I never wanted access to that. Fewer fingernails I’d lose if I got shot down somewhere.”
    Monday stepped to the front of the room, interrupting Kil. “Good afternoon. For those that don’t know me, my name is Commander Monday. I’m going to talk to you for a bit before you go through the formal read-in process. I can count the number of times I’ve given this brief on one hand. For the four of you from our special-operations community—I want to thank you for your service.”
    One of the men nodded a response from the back of the room.
    Monday gestured to Kil and Saien. “Also, for those of you that don’t know . . . these two survived on the mainland for almost a year. Pretty remarkable, considering the odds.”
    “Bullshit,” one of the other men muttered.
    Monday continued. “Let’s get to business. It may seem a little unorthodox for a naval intelligence officer to just come out and ask, but please raise your hand if you believe in God.”
    Neither Kil nor Saien raised their hands; only one from the other group broke from the majority. Kil wanted to, he just wasn’t quite ready.
    “I see. I suppose that might make this at least a little easier in some ways. You see, what I’m about to tell you cannot be untold. I’m going to be saying that again in the next few minutes. You must understand that from childhood to adolescence to adulthood many of you were raised on certain paradigms and unshakeable principles—established