The birds were singing in the forest and the sky above was a bright blue filled with sunlight. The world went on as normal, oblivious to the hell mankind was going through. Geoff found that funny.
He reached the bottom of the tree and vanished into the woods without a trace.
Jeremy paused on his way up the trail. He shrugged off his backpack and opened it, hunting for the map he’d picked up from the remains of a local tourist trap. He knew the base wouldn’t be on the map, even if it did exist, but he wanted to check the other landmarks to make sure he was still headed in what he believed to be the right direction.
He didn’t hear his stalker step onto the path behind him until an arm snaked about his neck.
Jeremy choked and fought against his attacker’s grip until he heard the gun cock beside his ear.
“Stop it, kid, if you want to live to see the sun set.”
Jeremy stopped squirming. “Look, mister—”
“Shut up, kid.” The man released his hold and shoved him forward. Jeremy whirled around and almost broke into a smile when he saw the man’s green camouflage uniform.
“I’d tell you to go home,” the man continued, “but I guess none of us really have one anymore…”
The man, Geoff, was in his later fifties, and gray hair covered his head. His eyes were bloodshot and it looked as if he hadn’t shaved in days.
With cat-like grace, he scooped up Jeremy’s backpack and slipped it onto his own shoulder. Muscles rippled and bulged beneath his uniform. “So I suppose I’ll have to take you back with me.”
“To the base?”
“To what’s left of it, kid.”
As they made their way together through the woods, Geoff told Jeremy what he knew about the wave and about what had happened at the base, which he referred to as Def-Con IV.
Apparently, the energy had been some kind of shockwave from somewhere far beyond the space known to mankind, perhaps from some interstellar war, or from an alien species’ failed experiments with dark matter. It didn’t really matter where it came from.
The light was merely a side effect of the energy reacting with Earth’s atmosphere. A portion of the wave’s main body had been trapped in greenhouse gasses, and like a super and perpetual EMP on a global scale, the wave and its lingering remnants caused technological failures throughout the world, dampened or disrupted to the point of uselessness. Only basic things worked now; things like electricity and nuclear energy were out of the question until the field dispersed, which it was continuing to do a bit more every day.
The alien energy field also produced a type of ambient radiation, which scientists believed would still be there in a thousand years unless they found a way to deal with it. This radiation was what caused the rampant “plague” of madness across the globe. It broke down the neural pathways of the human mind to their most basic core, leaving human shells full of only instinct and violence, unless you were immune, and very few people in the world were.
At first, Def-Con IV retained contact with a handful of similar bases here in the United States and in the United Kingdom—for the first day they had even been in touch with the president and the White House—but they’d slowly lost contact with those bases one by one as the radiation plague and other problems took their toll. For all Geoff knew, Def-Con IV could very well be the last holdout of humanity in the world.
During the first few hours of the chaos when the wave had reached the earth, the base had opened its doors to the locals who had come seeking shelter. Very quickly, the staff of the base learned firsthand of the secondary biological effects of the wave as those same locals succumbed to the radiation.
A mini-war broke out inside the compound. It was a hard fight, but in the end Def-Con IV’s staff prevailed. Only Geoff and a handful of staff survived. Two were badly injured: one in a coma, the other in a wheelchair but healing. Geoff informed Jeremy that if he had come looking for salvation and hope, he’d came to the wrong place.
They went through the high barbed wire fence that surrounded the Def-Con complex, and Jeremy got his first good look at the site. Before the wave, it had disguised itself as an agriculture research facility. Inside the fence, there were only three buildings, two of them the size of toolsheds, but the third was fairly large and very much civilian in nature. Blooming gardens stretched beyond the buildings with flowers planted around their edges, and the rear fence was far beyond eyeshot.
“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Geoff asked.
“What?” Jeremy asked, as if snapping out of a dream.
“That the gardens survived,” Geoff explained. “Like I said, when the wave first hit, people were flooding up here in droves based on rumors and desperate hopes. Of course, all they really cared about was finding the base and getting inside. I don’t think many of them headed out into the fields. Most of them poured straight into the garage.” Geoff pointed at the larger building. “I guess they thought it had to be the base since it’s the only real building up here. It’s in pretty bad shape now. Most of the vehicles were stolen or damaged by the mob when we stopped letting people into the real base below.”
“How do you get inside?”
Geoff laughed and led him towards the more battered of the two sheds. Its door was new and a sharp contrast to the aged and beaten wood around it. “I had a hell of a time fixing this back,” Geoff said as he opened the door, barely concealing his pride. “Carpentry’s a lot harder than killing people, kid.”
The shed itself was completely empty except for a large metal plate in the middle of its unfinished floor. Geoff squatted and ran his fingertips across the hatch until his fingers felt a crease, the edge of a small lid that popped open to reveal a numerical keypad. He typed in an eight-digit code as Jeremy watched. Somewhere below the floor, a motor came to life and the plate rose up like a tilted manhole cover. Geoff motioned to the hole. “After you.”
Jeremy slid down into a metal tunnel just wide enough and tall enough for two people (no more than six feet in height) to walk comfortably side by side. When they reached the large vault-like doorway at the end, Geoff typed a code into another keypad on the wall, and the door dilated from its center. Beyond lay another series of corridors.
“Welcome to your new home, kid. You can call me Geoff. I don’t think I caught your name.”
“It’s Jeremy, Jeremy Davis.”
Geoff grinned. “You live around here, Jeremy Davis?”
“Not really… Well, I guess I kind of did.”
Geoff shrugged. “Didn’t we all. Well, I guess it’s time you met your new family.”
The soldier led Jeremy deeper into the base.
12
Nathanial Richards punched a button on the control panel in front of him and watched as the test ran again. On the gigantic screen across the room, an image of a translucent wave struck the earth once more.
Troy, sitting nearby, reclined and propped his feet up on a dark, malfunctioned console. He had no idea what Nathanial’s simulation meant, but from the way Dr. Sheena Leigh frowned in her wheelchair, and judging by the grim look on Nathanial’s face, Troy could tell it was nothing good.
The wave shattered as it struck the earth, slowing from the speed of light to a dead crawl in space as its fragments dispersed, each taking a different trajectory. Then the screen went black.
“Run it again,” Sheena ordered, leaning forward in her wheelchair.
Nathanial shook his head. “We’ve run it over three dozen times today alone, Sheena. There’s just no way to know where the pieces are headed. Maybe if we waited until the wave’s aftereffects dissipated in the atmosphere a bit more, we could link up to one of the satellites. Surely at least one of them had to survive. We could—”