2020: Emergency Exit Read online

  Back at the base, Eddie was reluctant to admit to the other officers he’d sent scout troops out, and he definitely didn’t want them to know some of his men had already died. He kept the news to himself and his troops on a different radio frequency. He figured the perpetrators had to be close by, and he knew he could find them with the drones, if he could get another officer to sign off on their launch. They had been ordered not to fly them at night, but Captain Eddie, knowing his friend Markus was dead, needed to find these people before they escaped.

  He sought out one of the officers he’d had a good conversation with earlier and convinced him it would be wise to know what they might be facing in the morning. The other officer agreed and signed off, just once, for that specific intent. Eddie said he’d get back to him with what he found and went to the tower to watch the drone search. Focusing only east of the base, the drones found several dozen civilians either hiding out or attempting to accumulate supplies across the city. His soldiers sought them out, killed them, and brought their bodies back to the base along with their own three fallen men. As Eddie checked each of the bodies, he couldn’t help but notice two of his men, including Markus, had been taken out from the back, center mass, in the same spot on the spine. They never had a chance.

  He said a silent prayer for his friend as he scanned the civilian bodies. Only a few had even been armed, and clearly none of them were professionals. Whoever had taken out his good friend, and his other men, had done so with a precision beyond the capability of these dead Americans. It was likely they were still out there. And now they had his attention.

  He stood up to walk away from the jeep and stopped when he saw the other jeep his men had brought back. Eddie swung open the door. The radio and THIRST tracker were gone, but with the system ID he could trace its location. He ran back to the other jeep, looked up the ID, and used the touchscreen to plug in the number for the missing THIRST system. Its location began flashing on his screen: two miles northwest of the base. The signal wasn’t moving. He scrambled his men together, and they took off. He had them.

  --------------------

  Danny led us down Twenty-Third Avenue, weaving through the cluttered mess of crashed cars, to Highway 18. We then jumped north a few miles to 33rd Avenue before cutting west again toward the town of Devil’s Lake. In case the radio and THIRST system contained a tracking chip, Cameron had disassembled the equipment and ditched it along the dirt roads, a few miles northwest of the Air Force base. It took slightly more than two hours to get to Devil’s Lake, and it was starting to get light. We found a makeshift rest stop in a game preserve fifteen miles south of town. Already deep into autumn, most leaves had fallen from the trees, and little natural coverage remained to conceal the vehicles. Danny and Cameron managed to find enough thick brush to mix with the camouflage hunting tarps to temporarily do the trick. They caked the hoods of the trucks with cool mud to further dim the engine heat. We were several miles from the main road and hoped that would be enough to keep us safe until nightfall allowed us to move again.

  A great deal of that depended on what the man, watching us from the other side of the lake, decided to do.

  ELEVEN: “Go Wes”

  Wes had lived in Bismarck, North Dakota most of his life. He and his two sons were avid duck hunters, and their favorite place to hunt was at their custom-built lodge just outside the Devil’s Lake Nature Preserve. Okay, so Wes and Sam were the avid hunters. Isaac more enjoyed the distance from Bismarck’s big city noise and traffic. Isaac didn’t like to get his hands dirty. Sam was willing to jump into pretty much anything, and he’d helped Wes build the hunting lodge from scratch. They’d been at the lodge the entire week, completely unaware of the attacks. They had seen a few strange military-like planes pass over Devil’s Lake, but nothing had come south of town.

  Yesterday morning Sam had brought a cup of coffee out to his dad and remarked that he hadn’t seen anyone passing by in days. The longer Wes thought about it, the more that fact began to bother him too. It had been a while. Almost five days. They hadn’t seen a single flying duck either, even though they were camped just outside the preserve. On the other hand, plenty of dead fish and birds had washed up on their private shoreline. These were bizarre and bad signs, leaving no doubt that there was at least something wrong with the water. Wes had to find out what was going on.

  He had driven into town leery and yet not the least bit prepared for what he discovered. He found the wreckage from dozens of car accidents and dead bodies everywhere, but he didn’t encounter another living soul. He was glad he’d left the boys back at the cabin; they wouldn’t have handled this well. Whatever this was, he didn’t know how he and his boys could have possibly survived it. It had clearly spared nothing else. Their cove on the lake must have sheltered them somehow, but that had to have been pure luck. The frozen expressions and darkened dried skin on the victims suggested some powerful form of biological agent was responsible. It seemed to have taken their oxygen away rapidly, if not instantly. They’d had little or no time to react.

  Wes tried to call home on his phone but there was no reply. He found another phone next to a body and tried it as well. No luck. He drove down the street to the local pharmacy and threw a brick through the door and each of the front windows, creating as much airflow as possible—in case any of the chemicals had been trapped inside.

  He waited twenty long minutes before entering, then quickly loaded up garbage bags with medicine, facemasks, and wound/injury treatment supplies. Finally, he hopped behind the counter for morphine, oxycodone, and other more powerful drugs—anything he thought they might possibly need at some point. He had no idea what exactly they were up against or how much of the area was affected by it, but he knew it was severe. In all his years of war experience, including time he spent in quarantine zones, he’d never seen anything like this.

  Wes made one more stop, this time at the grocery store, loading up his truck with dry supplies and bottled water, before returning to the lodge. He told his boys a condensed version of the horror he’d witnessed. Their thoughts went immediately to home as well. They too tried repeatedly to call friends and family but received no reply. Wes convinced his boys there was nothing more they could do from the lodge and everyone was likely dead. Left to assume the worst, and unable to find any radio signals on the shortwave radio, they moved their supplies into the bunker beneath the lodge and locked themselves in. This custom fortress was the only security they had.

  At sixty-two, with over a decade of service in the Army Corps of Engineers and another seven years as a Navy SEAL, Wes had a rather unique skillset. He wouldn’t exactly have considered himself a doomsday prepper, but he was ready for a fight, and the custom-made bunker under his lodge was built to withstand a direct missile hit and make them invisible from all radar. It was possible to blow open the roof by digging it up and using explosives, but no one outside his family even knew the bunker was there. The entrance was concealed by a lift-gate in the floor of the cabin’s fireplace and could be locked into place from below.

  It had taken him and Sam a year just to design the main bunker room and its adjacent tunnel. It then took another seven years to safely excavate and stabilize the living space and quarter-mile passage into Sully’s Hill, behind the lodge. The tunnel ran from the room below his lodge to a large pile of boulders—above them in the woods—one of which could be moved outwards and aside as an exit. A second emergency exit was masterfully built through a revolving wall capsule that led directly into the cove below their cabin, completely hidden from outside view. Inside the bunker, it looked like nothing more than a giant fish tank. The tunnel to the cove had been more difficult to build and was much steeper than the tunnel up Sully’s Hill. With double doors built to a submarine’s codes, the hatch room could be safely filled with water, allowing people in and out without leaking so much as a drop into the bunker. It was Army Corps of Engineers technology used in the most advanced way, a small-scale underground Hoover Dam. Wes ne
ver intended the cove exit to be used, but he had a dozen sets of scuba gear on hand for each of his family members. Just in case. The ventilation system he had installed was able to heat and cool the bunker with minimal sound, and it also redistributed trapped heat directly through the water of the lake. It was another example of his engineering genius and something he’d always been quite proud of. No matter the level of technology, no one would ever know there was a chamber under this cabin. In theory.

  His two boys were in their mid-twenties with families of their own, and this bunker and tunnel had served as quite the entertaining fort for his six grandkids. It had been fun to build, and he’d invested a moderate fortune from his savings into decking it out. Although Wes liked to be prepared, he never figured he’d have to use it for self-preservation in his lifetime and didn’t think he’d have to worry about any form of terrorism in North Dakota. The North Dakota oil supply, one of the world’s largest only a decade ago had been wastefully drilled and drained by the U.S. government. There was little of value up here anymore, other than a few nice ranches and golf courses. Wes couldn’t help but wonder what the devastation outside was about, and who exactly was behind it. What could they possibly want? And how far reaching was the destruction?

  Unable to reach anyone on their contact list—in any state—or find anything on the radio, Wes and his boys sat for hours and discussed their limited options. Before they could come up with any sort of plan they noticed movement on one of their many monitors. People!

  Through the bunker’s high-tech surveillance system, they watched a group of people pull in across the lake and begin hiding their three trucks. They appeared to be hiding, but from what? He watched his screens for signs of pursuit, but saw nothing. Four men did the work covering the trucks, but there were clearly more people in the vehicles. The sun was up now, and they were scrambling to complete the camouflage effort, and doing a dang good job of it.

  His initial instinct was to contact them. They had to know something. But the possibility loomed that they could be among the ones responsible for the devastation. They could be fleeing from U.S. troops. Going over there or bringing them here would give away the one advantage he had. Right now, he knew he had to sit, watch, and wait.

  He and his sons remained in the bunker, watching the world beyond the walls of their lodge through their remote cameras. The people across the lake remained mostly invisible throughout the day. Several of his exterior cameras had sound capabilities, and they picked up planes flying overhead a couple times throughout the day. He caught a glimpse of one of them and froze the frame to get a closer look. It turned out it wasn’t a plane at all, but some kind of drone. He could make out the word “FOTROS” on the tail. The Internet was down, so he couldn’t look up where the drone was from, but he knew one thing for certain: it wasn’t American. So did that mean the people across the lake were?

  TWELVE: (Ryan) “Off the Mark”

  Mark was a jumpy guy. Beefy, hairy, bald, and pretty arrogant, he wasn’t afraid to promote his own toughness and self-importance. After thanking us for saving his life, while insisting he could have handled everything himself, he went on to tell us all he knew about the attacks. Or didn’t know. We listened but became less and less comfortable with his presence as the day went on. The guy was a total a-hole.

  His friends called him “Wooly” because of his excessive girth and thick body hair, and he referred to himself in third person as such. He was vulgar, sexist, and racist. His stupid wild generalizations demonstrated his true intellect—or lack of it—making statements like “people from Afpakistan are as bad as all the other Africans.” Seriously? Infants have more geographical sense. His ignorant nature was making us nervous. I was certain we couldn’t trust him to look out for anyone other than himself.

  He and the three guys he’d been with at Cabela’s had been working on a landscaping project north of Grand Forks, a little south of the Canadian border, during the attacks. A police officer from the border town of Emerson had told them what had happened and strongly suggested they stay out of the cities, but a few days later they desperately needed supplies and sufferance—as Mark put it, clearly meaning “sustenance.” They ignorantly disregarded the officer’s advice and went to see for themselves what was going on. “Wooly ain’t just gonna sit around, you know?” he told us. “Wooly gotta take care of me, doncha know?” They’d worked their way down to Grand Forks through the clutter of crashed cars, first to Walmart and then over to Cabela’s, to stock up. Wooly’s plan all along was to go get the guys who had done this, not run away from them, and his overblown confidence was frightening. “Wooly could’ve taken them on his own, you know? Don’t care how many of those damn A-rabs there were.” The policeman had told him about Hawaii being the only safe zone left for Americans. Wooly was certain that’s where we were headed and seemed intent on going with us. I could tell Danny was never going to let that happen. The jackass was bound to get someone killed, if not all of us.

  We stayed hidden throughout the day, and although several planes flew directly overhead multiple times, they didn’t spot Mark flipping them off, and our location wasn’t discovered. Around five o’clock Mark excused himself to go to the bathroom and Danny told him to come right back, while we secretly wished he never did. We couldn’t trust him, but we couldn’t exactly treat him like a prisoner either. When Wooly hadn’t returned in ten minutes, Danny decided to look for him, but he was nowhere to be found. Danny came back for Cameron, and they tracked Mark through the woods towards the nearby town of Fort Totten. They eventually found him walking down the middle of the road talking on a cell phone. So the communication grid wasn’t shut down. But who was he talking to?

  As Danny was about to yell for him, lights appeared in the distance. He pulled Cameron down into the ditch as multiple sets of headlights rapidly approached Mark. Cameron recognized the vehicle outlines and headlight height as being about right for military vehicles, and Mark seemed to be thinking the same thing. He started waving like mad and whooping, assuming they were American. By the time he realized they weren’t, it was too late.

  He turned back towards the boys and started running. Cameron and Danny were already well ahead of him, cutting through the woods to the lake. They ran into the frigid water and submerged themselves, watching as Mark thundered through the trees behind them, pursued by a dozen armed men. He was shot once and then again, and he collapsed on the shore. One of the soldiers, a huge, muscular, ebony-toned man, walked up to Mark and flipped him over with his boot. The guy had to be six foot seven at least. Mark seemed to still be alive, but unable to talk. Seemingly dismayed over that fact, the giant man stared into the fog and darkness settling across the water. He then glanced down, pointed his pistol at Mark’s head, and finished him off. He looked across the lake once more and then turned back to his men. Danny and Cameron breathed a collective sigh of relief. Had Mark been able to talk, he would have given them up. A guy like that would have done anything to save his own life, no matter how many it cost in the process.

  The large military man addressed the group of men around him in clear, strongly African-accented English. “This man could not have been alone. Others must be close by. Get the dogs. Tonight we hunt.” Danny and Cameron listened as he ordered four of the men to return to Devil’s Lake to get more men and the dogs and ordered the others to hide near the bridge until they returned. He then told the last few men to set up his tracking equipment. One of them handed him a black object, which turned out to be a cell phone. Mark’s. The giant man tapped the screen and held it up to his ear, making a call. A woman’s voice answered on speakerphone, and the big man promptly hung up. Danny and Cameron shared a look saying both “uh oh” and “we don’t have a lot of time.” They were lucky they hadn’t been seen, although it seemed Mark had not been tracked by body heat but by his cell phone. Apparently the big army man they called Captain Eddie assumed the woman on the other end of the phone was close by. Danny figured it would take f
ifteen to twenty minutes to set up the tracking system and a few more to begin searching the area. They needed to move fast. He and Cameron swam diagonally across a corner of the lake, ran across a narrow spit of land and then dove back into the chilly water. They passed under a bridge and joined the others back at the vehicles a minute later.

  Danny and Cameron stepped quickly across the rocks up to the vehicles. I saw them coming and stepped out to meet them. “Is everyone still in the trucks?” Danny asked urgently.

  I nodded. “Why?”

  We’ve got to get out of here. Now!” Danny said.

  “Wait. Where’s Wooly?” I asked.

  “Dead,” Cameron replied. Before I could ask how, Cameron answered. “They’re here. And they went to get the search dogs and tracking equipment set up. We don’t have much time.”

  Danny added, “I’ll explain everything else later.” It was nearly dark now, and the moon had not yet come up. Danny and Cameron were starting to uncover the vehicles when we saw lights on the bridge. Crap! It was too late. We were stuck. We counted eleven vehicles crossing from Devil’s Lake to Fort Totten, and figured others had to be coming down Sully’s Hill Road. Knowing the southern end of that road was already blocked, we realized we were stuck here. We had to cover the vehicles back up, even more if possible, and hope our masking did the trick. Meanwhile, Danny and Cameron were going to have to put on their full-body wetsuits and defend as necessary from the water. I stuck my head into one of the trucks to tell them what was going on when I heard the distinct click of a gun being cocked. I glanced at Danny and Cameron as they spun, but it was already too late to defend themselves.

  THIRTEEN: “On The Same Side”

  Inside the bunker, Isaac watched the monitors on their surveillance system while his dad and brother napped, adjusting the light and magnification scopes to keep an eye on the people across the water. They’d stayed hidden in the vehicles all day. If they’d gotten out at all it had been on the other side because Isaac hadn’t seen a single one of them on this side. That streak was broken late in the afternoon by a fat hairy man exiting one of the vehicles. Isaac watched as he crept further and further away and eventually took off running, if you could call the jerky wobble that. Isaac woke his dad to tell him what was going on, and Wes decided to venture outside and follow the hairy man. Isaac and Sam stayed behind.