Free Day by Day Armageddon: Beyond Exile by J.L. Bourne Page A

often they had communicated with the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO).
    “We got regular but sunspotty HF comms with his carrier and they’re still flyin’ very maintenance-limited sorties off the boat doing airborne reconnaissance on the mainland in an attempt to give accurate intelligence to what’s left of the men on the ground. Hell, they’veeven dropped some iron a time or two for us when things got real bad.”
    I asked him, “So, I suppose much of the Navy has survived the plague?”
    He replied, “A lotta ships turned into floatin’ caskets in the beginnin’. Of the ten carriers in active service at the start a’ all this, only four were not infested and overrun by the dead. You might also wanna know that there is a ballistic missile submarine that has been under for seven months. They’re livin’ off powdered eggs ’n’ dried fruits ’n’ meat. That boat is the last normal piece of the lifecycle. . . . People can still die in peace there and not come back.”
    I asked the gunnery sergeant what he meant by that.
    He said, “The boomer sub was under before all of this happened, so somehow they’re unaffected by whatever is causin’ the dead to rise. They radioed in on the very low frequency band that they had suffered one natural death in the month of February but the corpse didn’t rise. After a twenty-four-hour observation, their doc put the corpse in the freezer and had it restrained with riggin’ web. The thing has been there since, motionless. Of course, they will have to surface sooner or later or they’ll run outta food, but for now they are the last unaffected humans known to exist. All the other boomers and fast attack subs didn’t hit the right time gate to avoid exposure. I guess we all have some form of this plague dormant inside us . . . waitin’ on the day our heart stops beatin’. The whole thing’s fucked up as a football bat.”
    Then came a chilling silence, interrupted only by the random report of 5.56 rounds being fired at the creatures.
    “Sir, we don’t wanna blow a big hole in your clubhouse and then take it from ya. Isn’t there some sort of peaceful agreement we can come to? There are civilians at our compound that are happy to be there.”
    I replied, “We won’t be happy there, Gunny, we aren’t cattle. We have been surviving on the run since the beginning and much of it was before we found this place.”
    “That is impressive, but it doesn’t change the fact that this complex falls under military jurisdiction.”
    “Gunny, you still haven’t given me proof that you all aren’tsome rogue group of military survivors with no government leadership backing your actions.”
    “Sir, government guidance and hesitation are what brought us into the shithouse and to the point of extinction.”
    “Yes, Gunny, you may have a point. However, we found this place and we don’t want to live under any iron fists, even if they belong to the U.S. military.”
    He just replied with a “very well” and then came more radio silence. This was the night of the sixteenth. Two hours after the last radio call they detonated their first charge in the silo. It had no effect save for a barely visible crack in the eight-inch-thick window glass of the blast door. Then another detonation, and another. The already damaged camera in the silo was disabled at this point, not even returning any variance of visible signal. The explosions were having no effect.
    Thinking of this, I wondered if the civilian marauders had even had a chance at getting in with their cutting tools before I killed them. The alloy and fiberglass embedded concrete that made up Hotel 23 was very strong. I suppose it would need to be to withstand a nuclear blast. I felt an ever-so-slight sting of guilt at the possibly needless killing of the civilian raiders. Perhaps they would have given up when their torches turned out to be ineffective. Maybe I didn’t have to see them as walking, burnt men. Rationalization tells