Day by Day Armageddon: Shattered Hourglass Read Free Page B

We all have it. The only humans left not carriers of the anomaly are the poor bastards on the ISS. We haven’t received burst comms from the station in weeks.”
    The admiral’s eyes moved away from Joe to a lit corner of his cabin, where a very old painting of General George Washington prominently hung on the bulkhead. “What would General Washington do?”
    “Probably defend Mount Vernon by cutting, shooting, blasting, and cursing. Fisticuffs, if it came to that.”
    “Exactly, my boy. Exactly.”

3
Task Force Phoenix
    A four-man special operations team sat in the back of the C-130, flying angels twenty-two over southeast Texas. The men stared at the light near the cargo door, tugging at their chute straps, willing the light to turn steady. They sucked on pure oxygen through the aircraft’s O2 system, attempting to remove nitrogen from their blood and maybe avoid potentially deadly hypoxia. They were five minutes out.
    The men were not strangers to jumping out of airplanes, but there was something to be said about doing it in the cold dark of night, twenty-two thousand feet over an infested area, with no ground or close air support. You just never convinced yourself that it was a good or worthwhile endeavor. Every man’s extremities shook so hard they could barely connect to the static line. It wasn’t the jump; it was what happened after their feet, knees, ass, back, and then shoulders absorbed the impact of their twenty-foot-per-second descent after hitting the ground. Many of their comrades had completed similar essential jumps to retrieve items or information deemed crucial to the survival of the remaining U.S. civilian population and infrastructure. Some jumpers extracted items like insulin formulas, manuals, and machinery; some were sent into big-box hardware stores looking for lithium battery–powered hand tools. Some went into abandoned fields. Some landed on the roofs of buildings in high-density infested areas. Many jumped into the waiting arms of the dead or incurred a simple broken leg on impact—forcing them to take homemade suicide capsules, pills that didn’t always work as intended.
    According to airborne infrared cameras, many were still alivewhen the creatures found them, although stunned and slowed by the poison. Ironic . . . every jumper packed their own chute and every jumper cooked their own capsules. Better not to think about that sometimes.
    His fellow operators called him Doc. A year ago he was eating sand and 7.62mm in the mountains of Afghanistan, hunting high-value targets. That was before the worldwide troop recall. Only 35 percent of the military forces spread across the globe made it back to the mainland before things went stupid. Doc and Billy Boy, his longtime friend and fellow SEAL, were the last men out of the southern Afghan provinces. They fought hellishly south across Pakistan to the Arabian Sea, where they caught a ride back stateside onboard the supply ship USNS Pecos waiting offshore. It was a long swim that day.
    Doc sat swinging on a cargo net near Billy Boy and the C-130 shitter curtain. Wearing a puke-green David Clark headset, he listened to the pilot chatter up front.
    The pilot keyed the mic and said to the copilot, “These guys have some balls jumping out into the shit below in the dark.”
    “Ain’t no fucking way I would volunteer for that shit. Hell, flying this deathtrap is dangerous enough. How many we lost in the past three months? Four? Five?”
    “Seven.”
    “Shit, seven? We never recovered even one downed aircrew. I wonder if any of those poor bastards are down there somewhere, alive and on the run.”
    “I hope so.”
    “Me too, man.”
    Doc interrupted the chatter: “Can I get an inertial position check?”
    The internal communications system from the flight station crackled, “You got two minutes to go time, Doc.”
    “Roger that, flight. You guys have a safe RTB, we’ll catch you on the flip side.”
    With the lack of available