AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Assuming I can find diesel for this guzzler I’ll go over the Rockies, bypass Denver and keep going across the plains.” Rick shook his head and looked back at the sky. The weather didn’t look friendly and with as cold as it was getting he started wondering if snow was in his future. The Humvee was capable of handling just about any terrain but he wouldn’t want to be stuck driving it over the Rocky Mountains in a snowstorm.
An hour later, as Rick was nearing the turn-off from Interstate 15 to Interstate 70, his fears came true. The flakes were light and soft at first, making him think that they were just flurries. When they started sticking to the ground instead of melting, forcing him to slow down to avoid slipping on the slick roads, he realized that the snow was accumulating in a frighteningly rapid manner. In the time it took for him to get a few miles through Fishlake National Forest on Interstate 70 a full six inches of snow had fallen on the ground, covering the Interstate and disguising the obstacles in his path with a dangerous—albeit beautiful—coating.
The Humvee had a surprisingly powerful air conditioning system with enough coolant in it to keep the interior of the vehicle in the eighties even in the heat of a Middle Eastern desert. This had surprised Rick to no small degree when he had turned it on after leaving Nellis as he had assumed that military vehicles lacked such amenities. While the air conditioning on the vehicle worked well the heater was, sadly, not up to the same standards. Rick could barely get a trickle of warm air out of the vents and he found himself wrapping his legs and torso with the tablecloths from the restaurant to try and keep warm.
Rick tried valiantly to press forward in the snowstorm, but the lack of visibility became too much for him to handle after he lost track of the number of times he had a low-speed collision with the remnants of a burned-out car in the middle of the road. “Dammit!” Rick squinted as he looked through the windows looking for a place where he could seek shelter. There were no buildings nearby, no underpasses to stay beneath and the only place he could see that would help protect him from the driving wind was parking next to an eighteen-wheeler along the side of the road.
Rick pulled up next to the massive truck and shut off the Humvee, concluding that it was probably better to save some fuel given how little heat was getting into the passenger compartment. He moved the food and supplies in the back seats to the floors and crawled into the back, curling up against a backpack pressed up on the door and covering himself with layer after layer of the tablecloths. He wasn’t tired in the least but with nowhere to go and nothing else to do he figured that rest was his best option.
Rick’s mind wandered as he stayed still in the back of the Humvee, the swirling snow and biting wind cutting through the imperfections of the Humvee and bringing the chill outside to the interior. With no distractions to occupy himself he started thinking about home again.
The level of destruction, both of things and of basic humanity itself, terrified him. Not because he feared for his own safety or the safety of those he had met, though he worried about those people and himself as well. It was his wife and children who he felt the most concern over. If the smallest of towns in the middle of Nowhere, Utah could be burned half to the ground and look like a horde of zombies came through, what did that mean for Ellisville?
What did it mean for the few neighbors near his house? Would they have turned hostile as well? What about the people from town? Would they have sought refuge—forcibly, perhaps—farther out in the country? How long would it take, he wondered, for friends to become enemies? Rick closed his eyes and pictured his wife and children seated in the kitchen the morning he left on his business trip. He refused to believe that they had been killed or injured, for their survival was the only thing keeping him going. He said a quiet prayer for them, hoping against all hope that they were alive and well and continuing their fight against the encroaching darkness.
Chapter 14
One day after the Event
Deep in the Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia
Deep beneath an isolated mountain, far beyond the reach of conventional and non-conventional weapons, sits a massive bunker that covers over five hundred square miles of real estate. Built as part of a decades-long project involving tens of thousands of workers, the bunker beneath Mount Yamantau—known as Mezhgorye—is the lynchpin in the Russian continuity of government plans.
While Russian intelligence services detected the Damocles infiltration of networks external to their own, they—like most other countries—did not realize the threat it posed to their own internal networks until it was too late. Most government systems were affected by the virus and were quickly shut down and destroyed along with many civil systems as well.
Inside Mezhgorye, however, life for the twenty thousand government employees and support staff goes on as normal. The only portion of the Mezhgorye network that is infected by Damocles is an isolated and air-gapped system used to communicate with the outside world. The rest of the site’s systems are left untouched, including the three dozen ICBMs, the massive generators that power the complex, the bunker’s computer systems and the pair of satellites used by the bunker for specific spy operations.
After being evacuated to Mezhgorye, the senior Russian leadership set to work analyzing Damocles and attempting to discover both its origins and how to disable it. Each attempt to study the virus ends with yet another infected system, however, and by the second day after the Event they are forced to admit that there may not be a way to analyze and disable the virus through traditional means.
This revelation paves the way for discussions about non-traditional means of disabling the virus. Based on a flawed analysis of the way Damocles operates, the technical ex
perts performing an analysis of the virus believe that it is being controlled by a central system somewhere within the United States. The fact that the USA is being ravaged by the virus as much or more than the rest of the countries across the world is the only thing keeping Russia from launching missiles in an attempt to destroy what they believe to be the nexus of the virus’s control systems.
With communications channels down across the globe, though, there is no way for the Russian government to contact their American counterparts to discuss the situation and find out more information about what is going on. Arguments in favor of the nuclear solution are strong and persuasive and as the days go by and the situation in the country worsens it begins to look more and more like the solution that they will be forced to attempt.
Chapter 15
The Waters’ Homestead
Outside Ellisville, VA
The grass was still damp from the melted snow and Dianne headed quickly down the slope towards the barns. She kept low, crouching to try and avoid being seen, though she needn’t have bothered. By the time she got halfway between the house and barns she could see the shadowy figure in front of the closest building kicking at the barn door and talking.
“Dammit open it up already!” The voice belonged to a man, and she recognized it as the man who had approached their house previously. Not taking any chances she stayed quiet as she snuck up behind him, stopping when she was a little over thirty feet away.
Dianne stood up and flicked on the flashlight attachment on her rifle, sending twenty-five hundred lumens of blinding, flashing brightness at the man. He turned and raised his arms in surprise, shielding his eyes from the unexpected blast of light. With the light at the end of her rifle set to rapidly pulse the light on and off, the man was disoriented by the beam. He backed up, keeping his right hand over his eyes while his left felt along the face of the barn for support.
“What the fuck?” The man shouted. “Turn that off!”
“Stop right there!” Dianne fired a shot past the man into the dirt. The rifle’s crack echoed across the stillness of the night and the man stopped in place, expressions of anger and fear washing over him.
“What’re you doing, lady? I only wanted some food!”
“You’re the one who showed up the other day, right? And tried to break in the other night?”
The man lowered his arm briefly but immediately raised it again to shield his eyes. “Yes! Damn you, yes! Turn that shit off!”
“Why did you try and break in? I told you to get off our property. Why would you come back?”
