Apocalypse unleashed

6

United States of America

Fort Benning, Georgia

Local Time 0539 Hours

Seventeen-year-old Joey Holder couldn’t sleep. The nightmares had been going on for weeks. He’d thought they would have weakened by now, but their hold on him seemed only to grow. Every time he went to sleep at night, he saw the old Asian man’s face again.

“What you two boys doing in my store?” the old man had demanded. “You boys no good boys. You thieves.”

He’d been old and frail and afraid. Joey knew that now. At the time, Joey had been so panicked himself that he couldn’t see anything but the pistol the old man held. He and Derrick, one of the boys he’d started hanging with after he’d left his house, had stood there frozen.

Derrick had a pistol too. They’d found it in one of the empty houses they’d broken into to spend the night. With so many people gone, that hadn’t seemed like such a big deal at the time. The world had been in chaos. Half the world thought the Russians or Chinese or even Islamic terrorists had perfected some kind of death rays shot from space. The other half was convinced aliens from another world had attacked the planet.

That’s what Zero believed.

When he thought of Zero, the fear inside Joey intensified. Zero was the most dangerous guy Joey had ever met.

That night in the mall, Zero had stepped from the shadows, leveled the. 357 Magnum he carried like some Old West gunfighter, and shot the man. Seated in front of the couch in his family home, Joey shivered as the thunderous roars filled his imagination again. He wrapped his arms around his knees and wished he didn’t feel so cold and alone.

Even with his mom in the house, sleeping just down the hall, Joey felt incredibly vulnerable. He wished Goose were there. Whenever Goose was around, Joey always felt safe. Not that his mom hadn’t tried to make him feel the same way, but there was something that had always been solid and dependable about Goose.

Until Chris was born.

Thinking of his younger brother, who had disappeared with all the other young kids in the world, Joey felt sad and more than a little guilty. When Chris came along-truthfully, even before then-Joey had gotten jealous. He’d even told his mom he wished Chris hadn’t been born.

Now Chris was gone, and Joey was afraid that he’d never see him again.

After all, if his mom was right and Chris had been taken to heaven by God, Joey wouldn’t see his little brother again. Only good people went to heaven, and Joey wasn’t a good person. He’d helped get that old man killed in the mall. He’d been where he shouldn’t have been, with guys he shouldn’t have been with, and in God’s eyes he was probably just as guilty as Zero.

The gunshots rang out in his memory again.

Joey put his head down on his knees and wept silently. He wished he could tell his mom what had happened that night, but he couldn’t. He was afraid if he did, she’d have to tell the police, and he’d be locked up for murder. Then he wouldn’t see his mom either. It was bad enough that Chris was gone and Goose was over in Turkey.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Joey thought his apology to God, but he didn’t know if God was listening. The Bible was full of forgiveness and redemption; Joey remembered hearing about that. But he didn’t know for sure how to go about getting it. He’d just figured he soaked it up by going to church. So these last few weeks he’d been going to church with his mom. He’d felt a little better, but nothing like what he’d hoped.

The kid sleeping on the couch shifted, and his hand thumped against the back of Joey’s head.

Angry at himself, at the kids who had invaded his home, and at everything that had happened, Joey shoved the guy’s arm back onto the couch harder than he needed to.

The kid woke up. He was thirteen or fourteen, a skater dressed in ragged pants and wearing a wild haircut.

“Sorry, dude,” the kid mumbled. “My bad.”

“It’s okay,” Joey said, though he didn’t mean it. He resented all the kids now living in his house. Their presence had been one of the reasons he’d left weeks ago.

The fact that so many of the newly orphaned kids on base had found their way to his house wasn’t surprising. His mom was a counselor. She already knew a lot of them. Military kids seemed to have lots of problems.

“I was having a nightmare,” Joey said.

“It’s cool. But if you’re having nightmares, dude, maybe you oughta find something else to watch. Zombie flicks ain’t exactly bedtime stories.”

Joey glanced at the television. He’d been channel surfing with the sound muted. Dialogue scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

The television showed zombies closing in on a building. They were torn and ragged, in various stages of decomposition. Their arms were stretched out before them.

The scrolling subtitles proclaimed, Brains! Brains! Eat brains!

“Yeah, I guess not.” Joey found the remote and changed channels.

“Hey, dude,” the skater kid asked, “do you think your mom is gonna fix breakfast today? Or do you think she’s gonna have us eat at the cafeteria?”

“How should I know?” Joey replied. He flicked through the channels and hoped the kid would stop talking to him. None of the brats in the house seemed to get the idea that he wasn’t happy they were there.

“You’re Mrs. Gander’s kid. I thought maybe-”

“I’m seventeen,” Joey interrupted. “I’m not a kid.”

“Okay. Sorry. Anyway, since she’s your mom, I thought maybe she would have told you.”

“There’s a schedule on the refrigerator.”

“Oh.”

Joey tried his best to ignore the guy. He didn’t want to talk to any of the invaders. That wasn’t his job. That was his mom’s. She was so busy doing her job that she kept forgetting about him and his troubles.

“I like it when your mom makes breakfast,” the kid said. “It’s really cool.”

“Hey,” Joey said.

“Yeah?”

“Shut up, okay?”

“Dude, that’s really harsh.”

“I don’t care.”

“Whatever.” The kid rolled back the other way and pulled his blanket back over him.

Joey felt a little guilty, and he resented the emotion. He shouldn’t have to feel guilty in his own house. He tried to focus on the television and kept flipping through channels.

It was going to be dawn soon. When the sun was up, the nightmares seemed farther away. He couldn’t wait.

A news story on OneWorld NewsNet caught his eye. He recognized the reporter’s name: Danielle Vinchenzo. She was the one who was over in Turkey with Goose.

Fear tightened in Joey’s belly again. Goose was in some of the worst fighting taking place over there. Syria’s military hadn’t been as depleted as the American, United Nations, and Turkish forces by the mysterious occurrence. The dictator in Syria had attacked even before the vanishings had started, and he was keeping up the offensive.

Joey unmuted the TV so he could hear what the reporter was saying.

“-was the scene of a running firefight earlier,” Vinchenzo said.

Behind her, a ragged line of burning vehicles dotted the landscape. Black and gray smoke twisted up toward the purple sky. Camou-clad figures moved on foot through the burning vehicles. Joey didn’t know if they were American forces or Syrian.

“Sergeant Samuel Adams Gander, known to many of you through these reports simply as Goose,” Danielle said, “was leading a resupply convoy to one of the outposts overlooking the Turkish-Syrian border. Things have gotten desperate here, but the men of the United States Army’s 75th Rangers are persevering.”

The television cut to a close-up with a young soldier. Bruises and cuts showed on his face.

“I gotta tell you, ma’am,” the soldier said, “things here are mighty bad. Syria isn’t letting up, and they’d like to sweep on into this area and take over. There’s generations of bad blood between most of the people here, and those soldiers aren’t afraid of spilling any of it.”

The camera’s eye swept over a scene of the running gunfight. Joey stared at the images intently, trying to figure out which one was Goose. They all looked the same to Joey. His inability to see Goose frustrated him, making him angry and scared all at the same time.

Would Goose understand what had happened at the mall that night? Joey wasn’t sure. As much as he wanted Goose there, he was also terrified of telling his stepfather what he’d done.

“It was a close thing out here tonight,” the soldier went on. A caption identified him as Private First Class Mike Dunney. “But Goose- Sergeant Gander, I mean-he pulled us through it all right. He’s a good soldier. The best the army has to offer, if you ask me.”

Pride flushed through Joey.

“That’s your dad, isn’t it?” the kid on the couch asked.

“Yeah.” Joey was surprised at how choked his voice was. Goose had been more of a dad than Joey’s biological father had ever been.

“Must be scary. Him being over there, I mean.”

Joey wanted to be angry with the kid, but he couldn’t. It felt good to talk about Goose. “It is. I think Mom’s really scared.”

“Yeah. I get that.” The kid hesitated. “I don’t know where my dad is. Don’t know where my mom is either. I got up one morning; they were gone. I was all alone in the house.”

“Scary,” Joey commented.

“Yeah.”

“That was here at the post?”

“Yeah.”

“Your dad’s army?”

“My mom. First lieutenant. Dad taught high school. Physics.”

“Never cared much for physics,” Joey said.

“Me neither. But Dad would talk about it all the time.” The kid sat up on the couch and wrapped the blanket around him, though it wasn’t really cold. Not like it would be in another month. “I kind of tuned him out when he’d talk about stuff. Wish I hadn’t done that now.”

“I know what you mean.”

They were silent for a moment, watching as Danielle Vinchenzo ran another of the pieces on Goose.

“Seems like that reporter has a thing for your stepdad,” the kid said.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s always talking about him.”

“I don’t think it’s that,” Joey replied.

“Then what?”

Joey thought about it for a moment. “I think she sees Goose as kind of every soldier over there. Goose is just… a soldier, you know. Just the kind every guy over there is like.”

“She talks about him like he’s a hero.”

“I guess he is.” Joey thought it was strange that he hadn’t thought of Goose that way before. Goose had always been there for him. Always been such a… dad. A lump formed in the back of Joey’s throat. If I told you about this-about what happened at the mall-would you understand, Goose?

Thankfully, according to the news report, Goose was all right. Joey let out a tense breath as the news program shifted to a speech Nicolae Carpathia was going to deliver to the United Nations later that day.

“Is anything else on besides the news?” the kid asked.

“Like what?”

“Cartoons. Something like that.”

Giving in to the inevitable, knowing the kid wasn’t going to shut up, Joey tossed him the television remote control. “Knock yourself out.”

“Thanks.”

Joey stood.

“Leaving?” the kid asked.

“Yeah. Gotta go walk.”

“Want company?” The kid reached for his shoes.

“No.” Joey started for the door, not giving the kid the chance to catch up to him.

Local Time 0611 Hours

Joey took his old ten-speed from the garage out back. He’d helped Goose build that garage, along with the fort that Chris had played in. For a while after Chris was born, Joey had been small enough to swing in the swings with his little brother. That had changed pretty quickly.

He made himself stop thinking about Goose and Chris as he swung aboard the ten-speed. He pedaled by memory, trying hard not to give any thought to where he was going.

Fort Benning seemed deserted. According to the news, at least a third of the people around the world had vanished. Numbers were still coming in every day. Those numbers could change. Military bases had been really hard hit, as had the police forces, fire departments, and emergency medical services.

Military jeeps with armed soldiers riding shotgun patrolled the camp housing. After the disappearances, a lot of soldiers and their families living outside the fort had moved back inside the perimeter. When it got dark, though, everyone went inside. The camp was still on alert, and the nocturnal hours were carefully watched.

Joey loved the feel of the breeze in his face. For a few moments, he could pretend that he was younger, that he was just a kid again. But as soon as the military jeep sped up behind him and switched on its lights, that feeling went away.