Standing the Final Watch Page 10

  If they were ever activated. Walling kicked back in his chair, scowling. He’d finished his dinner but hung around the mess hall hoping someone would come in. The days never varied. Neither did the food. Every meal involved Long Shelf Life Meals Ready to Eat, nasty mixes of alleged foods sold to the Army under the guise of being safe. Nobody had ever guaranteed they’d be particularly digestible.

  Nobody came in. Grumpy, he rose and shoved back his chair. He’d be talking to himself again. And loneliness made for a long year.

  Chapter 12

  Dreams of Glory Are Lost in the Ages,

  Bare Feet Fail On A Broken Trail—

  Let My Name Fade From the Printed Pages,

  Dreams And Visions Are Growing Pale.

  Robert E. Howard, from “Lines Written In The Realization That I Must Die”

  June 18th, 0122 hours

  He saw the clear night as one final gift from God, a panoramic view of the universe spread overhead in a spray of stars and a full moon. Dennis Tompkins studied the constellations as he had so many times before, hoping they might cheer him up. They reminded him God still ruled in Heaven and the travails of men crumbled to dust in His overall plan, and the reward for faith came not in this life, but the next.

  Yet try as he might, the wonder of the spectacle depressed him. In the countless wars through the ages, how many times had those stars watched over sleepless soldiers on the eve of battle, warriors who stared at them while contemplating their own imminent fate and praying to their gods? Thousands of times, or tens of thousands, so that one more such requiem might pass unnoticed. Men condemned to death had been mesmerized by the grandeur of creation since humans first walked the Earth.

  With the sun gone the night turned cold and the chill deepened his gloom. Tompkins tried to think of some way out of the trap. The ridge rose sheer from the platform and climbing up would be slow, laborious, requiring rappelling gear and strong legs and upper bodies. The drop to the desert floor would require scaling hundreds of feet down jagged granite. No, even if they had still been young it would have been impossible.

  He’d forbidden a fire but his men watched him from the shadows. He’d told them they had survived fifty years wandering the wasteland of the dead United States, using only their wits and their brains and maybe a little luck, to go on living after they should have died. He’d told them that, of the entire American military machine, they were the last survivors. They’d continued fighting to protect the weak. They could count their lives well lived. All of those things he’d told them, but he did not tell them they were going to survive the next day.

  Tompkins stared into the darkness. He didn’t hear Sergeant Thibodeaux walk softly across the plateau and sit beside him.

  “Whatcha thinking ’bout, Skipper?” he said.

  “Just remembering. What it was like, you know, before. Really, I was trying to remember. There’s a lot of things I know we had, but I’ll be damned if I can see them any more, or remember what they smelled like, or how they tasted. Football, television, cold beer, cheeseburgers, ice cream… they’re just words now. I know I liked them, but now they don’t even bring a picture to mind. They’re just… just words.”

  “I know whatcha mean. I was growing up eating boudin and crawfish, a hot gumbo with shrimp—” His voice cracked.

  “There’s one thing I do remember,” Tompkins said. “One time when I was a kid, my dad took me to this place way down south, right on the beach. There was this big, long wooden building; I think it was a bar but it could’ve been a restaurant. It might have been painted green, I’m not sure. Half was in Alabama, half Florida. I remember it was really hot and crowded and my dad made me hold his hand, even though I didn’t want to. After a while, somebody handed him a pail with some dead fish in it. Not big fish, little ones…”

  “You mean like a cigar minnow?”

  “Yeah, that’s right, cigar minnows. Mullet, I think. They handed my dad this bucket and he hands me a fish. Then we stood there, I guess we were over the line in Florida, and threw the fish as far as we could over into Alabama. I don’t know why we did it, but everybody else did so we did, too. I smelled like fish for days, but of course I went fishing all the time so I was used to it. I don’t know why I remember that so well, but I do.”

  He smiled at the bittersweet memory and fell silent again. In his soul Tompkins felt every one of his years.

  “For me,” Thibodeaux said. “I wish I could’ve tasted pecan pie one more time… and a Coke. My daddy used to take a cooler of Cokes, all filled up with ice and running with cold, every time we fished in the back bayou. I loved them Cokes, me. Daddy drank Jax.”

  “What did you fish for?”

  “Sac a lait, mostly. My daddy had a recipe for sac a lait croquet so good it made you wanna slap yer mama. He cooked them with hush puppies and greens. That was good eating. And when them crawfish was in season, everybody wanted to be Cajun then…. We’re gonna die out here, ain’t we, Skip?”

  “We’re going to die somewhere, that’s for sure. Never give up, John. We’ve been in some bad spots before and we’re still here.”

  “C’mon, Skip, don’t feed me no shit. Them boys down there ain’t hanging around because they like sleeping in no desert. They’re hanging around because they ain’t leaving ’til they get the women back. And you, me, and the boys ain’t gonna let them just walk up here and take them, now, are we? Only this time, I don’t see a way out. Six of us, couple hundred of them — that don’t add up to us getting out of here alive.”

  Tompkins could think of nothing to say.

  “Guess you answered my question,” Thibodeaux said. “Damned shame I should die so young, before my prime and all.”

  Tompkins could not help but chuckle, even with a tight throat. “Yeah, you’re not seventy-five yet. You’re just a kid.”

  “Cajuns don’t reach their sexual peak ’til at least a hundred. So like I said, not even in my prime.” Thibodeaux squatted in the darkness. “Hey, Skip, whatever happened to them codes you used to read into the radio? You ain’t done that for a long time.”

  “Codes? Oh, right, the activation codes. John, I must have read those damned things every night for ten years, but I got sick of getting nothing in return. Do you know what I mean? It was a reminder that there was nobody out there, that the country I loved and bled for was gone and wasn’t coming back, and that millions and millions of people were dead. Every night that I read those codes all I could think of was everything we had lost. I knew what was gone and I didn’t need to be reminded of it.”

  “So, you still got them?” Thibodeaux said. “Them codes, I mean.”

  “Yeah, they’re in the big trunk somewhere. Why?”

  Thibodeaux shrugged. “Cain’t see where there’s much to lose trying it one more time.”

  Tompkins shook his head. “The cavalry isn’t riding to the rescue. Besides, I’m not even sure those projects were real. There was a lot of bullshit back in those days. ”

  “Gotta be straight with you, Skip. Right now me and the boys need any kinda hope we can get. False hope ain’t so bad if it’s all you got.”

  Tompkins knew it was futile. But if Thibodeaux wanted him to read the codes one more time, why not? Half a century wandering desolate North America together had earned him at least that much.

  “All right. Why the hell not? Go find the radio and start cranking; the battery is probably shot. Then go find the codes. They should be in that brown leather case inside the trunk. I’m going to need the flashlight, so charge that, too. Then I’ll read them and we’ll see what happens. It’s not like we’ve got anything to lose.”

  Chapter 13

  Yesterday upon the stair

  I met a man who wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there again today;

  I wish, I wish he’d go away.

  From “Antigonish,” William Hughes Mearns

  June 18th, 0117 hours

  Less than three hours remained in the interminable
shift. Nobody had shown up to distract him. Soon enough his replacement would wake up, then a week to train him and Dupree could sleep… yeah. Sleep.

  In college he’d had a job as a night desk manager in the Tulane dorm, where his main job responsibilities had involved staying awake and not letting anybody feed the aquarium full of piranhas. At least then he could watch the fish swimming.

  He could watch a movie, listen to music. Without enthusiasm he perused the selections from Beethoven and Mozart. Nothing appealed to him. Finally Dupree settled on Beethoven’s Eighth symphony and turned up the volume. He was about to click the PLAY icon when the speaker did something it had not done for more than five decades.

  It came to life.

  “To any United States military forces within sound of this transmission, this is an Overtime activation warning. I repeat, this is an activation warning for Operation Overtime. Prepare to receive codes; activation sequence to begin in ten seconds. Nine, eight, seven…” The voice crackled as if traveling a long distance or riding a weak signal, shaky but loud, with the volume turned up for Beethoven.

  Dupree froze in his seat, staring at the speaker as if a live snake coiled on his desk and hissed. Adrenaline flooded his body. He quit breathing without knowing he did so.

  “…two, one… Begin Overtime activation sequence…”

  The voice rattled off a long series of numbers and letters, sixty-seven in all, then said, “Repeating activation sequence,” and did so. Once finished, it said, “Activation sequence ended.”

  Then the unknown voice dropped lower, almost to a whisper. “If anybody is out there, if anybody can hear me, for God’s sake hurry. We don’t have much time.” The transmission terminated with a loud click as someone keyed the microphone off.

  Stunned, Dupree followed his training and waited. The computer had to first verify the activation code. Only then would he have duties to perform. On the computer screen, the list of Beethoven’s symphonies had given way to numbers and symbols flashing by so fast he could not follow them. Some program had been triggered, but he hadn’t seen anything like before.

  For more than a minute silence filled the cavernous space. Dupree began to wonder if he had dozed off and dreamed the whole thing. Then a new voice came through the speakers, a pleasant female voice he had not heard before. “Activation code accepted and verified. Operation Overtime is now active. All personnel should follow Activation and Deployment Protocol A.”

  The mountain shuddered. Far below the surface, massive machines came to life, including the twin nuclear reactors. Electric energy flowed through tens of thousands of miles of cables, and in the seven hundred miles of tunnels burrowed through the rock, lights flickered on and dark corners became visible, shadows receded and ominous shapes were revealed as more machinery. At the heart of the mountain enormous pumps dipped into the wide, swift river that ran deep underground, sucking up hundreds of gallons of water per second and sending it under high pressure throughout the huge base to bathrooms, kitchens, purification tanks, hydroponic farms, storage silos, and drinking fountains.

  Outside, on the high meadows near the mountain, a herd of pronghorn antelope stopped grazing and sniffed the air. Sensing the seismic event beneath their hooves, their instincts warned them not to wait and they ran. Birds scattered, lizards sought the cover of rocks, and mice scurried back and forth. A prairie hawk shadowing its favorite prey did not swoop down for an easy meal, because under the desert something rumbled to life, something powerful and dangerous, and the animals knew better than to stick around.

  The bank of computer stations to Dupree’s left booted up, sending electronic commands throughout the base via thousands of miles of fiber optic cables. Lights flashed on and he saw the true vastness of the chamber he’d worked in for the past year. Dull noises came from below and the ground shook again. In vast caverns, a precise mixture of chemicals started pumping into thousands of individual chambers where the base’s crew lay in Long Sleep, injecting it into the pods to bring them back to consciousness.

  Shaking himself free, Dupree managed to key the comm. switch connected directly with the quarters of the Officer of the Watch, who had just been promoted to Officer Commanding.

  0125 hours

  Captain Walling pulled the pillow over his head and wondered what the hell that noise was. It took a full minute before his sleeping brain registered that it was the base alarm. He sat upright and only then noticed the alert button on the phone beside his bed flashing red, which had never happened before. His mind sharpened in an instant. The readout on the phone stated the call came from the command center.

  Picking up the handset, he said, “Walling here. What’s going on, Hudson? Do we have a fire?” That fear haunted him most, a fire in one of the ammunition chambers, or maybe a hangar or, God forbid, in a sleep chamber.

  “Not Hudson, sir, this is Dupree. No fire, but… Captain, we’ve been activated.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The code, sir, the activation code. It came in about four minutes ago, and whoever sent it seems to be in big trouble.”

  Adrenaline or not, Walling’s mind was slow in processing the information. “The code? Who sent it? How do we know it’s authentic?”

  “They didn’t identify themselves, Captain, but they repeated the code and the computer accepted it and everything is happening automatically according to Deployment Plan A. I haven’t touched anything, not one thing, but if this is real then I need your permission to begin the checklist.”

  “I’m headed your way. Don’t do anything until I get there.”

  0158 hours

  Nothing existed. Time did not flow because time did not exist. Thoughts did not register because thoughts did not exist. No dreams, no reality. No darkness, either, because darkness implied the absence of light and light did not exist.

  Nothing existed, until something did.

  Exactly when sentience returned he could never say, but the first sensation did not involve sight or touch, or even sound, but smell. No conscious thought registered that he smelled something familiar, or connected the appropriate memories with the smell, since as yet he had no conscious thought. But the scent did trigger the firing paths among synapses that had lain dormant for a long, long time. Eventually his sluggish brain interpreted it as the smell of warm bread filling a favorite café in Vienna, although the chemicals flooding his chamber smelled nothing like bread. Images began to reinforce the memory, colors, sounds, people… none of which made sense. Self-awareness had not yet returned, but part of him knew enough to mistrust the memory.

  At length sounds registered, loud sounds… voices? Yes, a voice! It seemed to be yelling. A pathway in his brain cleared enough to know the voice spoke words, and the words began to make sense.

  A crust over his eyes made them hard to open. When he did, he turned away, unused to the light. After half a century of disuse, even the dim lighting in the chamber assaulted his optic nerves.

  A young man hovered over him, speaking. “I’m Captain Walling. General Angriff, can you hear me, sir?”

  He formed two dry words. “How many?”

  The man leaning over his pod came into focus. He wore a uniform, an Army uniform, with the insignia of a captain.

  As his body warmed, Angriff’s skin broke out with chill bumps. “Clothes,” he whispered, and then sat up, stiff. “Uniform.”

  He blinked and rubbed the crust from his eyes. The captain handed him a plastic glass with a straw. He sucked on it and felt the indescribable pleasure of water moistening his throat for the first time in fifty years.

  “How many?” Although cracked and harsh, this time his voice carried.

  “How many what, sir?”

  “The battalion. How many in the battalion?”

  Walling drew back, his eyes uncertain. “Which battalion do you mean, sir?”

  Angriff paused. Frozen muscles had warmed close to their normal temperature, but tightness made his skin feel three sizes t
oo small. Concentrating, he marshaled his thoughts and they came easier. “What do you mean, which battalion? How many do we have?”

  “Eight combat, twelve total, counting logistics and communications, and not counting smaller attached units. But sir, there’s an unknown American military unit in trouble. As temporary officer commanding I’ve proceeded with Deployment Plan A and the Comanches have the standard anti-personnel package, but we need to get rolling on follow-ups.”

  Angriff’s eyebrows creased into a V. “What the hell is Deployment Plan A? Or a Comanche?”

  Walling rocked back and forth as if impatient. “A Comanche is an attack helicopter, the AH-72. It replaced the Apache.”

  “And we have those?”

  “Yes sir, two on standby, armed and ready, and ten more in storage.”

  “Captain,” Angriff said. His voice had grown stronger. “If Americans need help, sortie those gunships.”

  Walling took Angriff’s uniform from its storage drawer in the pod. He looped the General’s left arm around his neck and helped him out, then helped him dress. Once clothed, he supported Angriff as they made for the hallway. Throughout the immense space the CHILSS, Cryogenic Human Life Support Structures, opened as their inhabitants came back to consciousness.

  As overhead lights brightened to their full illumination, Walling noticed scratches on the lock panel for General Angriff’s CHILSS. Had someone tried to tamper with the machine? Video cameras recorded every person who entered the massive bay, and he made a mental note to look into it when time permitted.

  0301 hours

  Lita Ford begged Joe Randall to kiss her deadly and Randall would have obliged if he could. Tank Girl or no — and he didn’t mean the helicopter — he had seen pictures of Ford with her first band, the Runaways, a punkish jailbait blonde in tight pants and a fuck-me smirk. Even as she’d aged, she’d remained a gorgeous woman. But as he bobbed his head in time with the music, Tank Girl’s image replaced Ford’s and that made him glad, because that way he forgot Ford had been dead for half a century.