SOTOFO

04-02-2024

EARTH’S SURVIVOR’S AMERICA the DEAD: BOOK ONE

Based on the series by W. G. Sweet

Episode 1

PUBLISHED BY

Writerz.net Publishing

AMERICA the DEAD: BOOK ONE

Writers: W.W. Watson, Geo Dell, W.G. Sweet, G.D. Smitty A. L. Norton

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incidents depicted are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to
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EARTH’S SURVIVOR’S – AMERICA the DEAD: EPISODE ONE

Route 81 rest-stop

Watertown New York

April 20^th

1:00 am

A black truck pulled into the rest stop and two men climbed out; walking
toward the rest rooms that sat in from the road. Concrete bunker looking
buildings that had been built back in the early seventies. They had been closed
for several years now. In fact the Open soon sign was bolted to the
front of the building; rust streaked the sign surface. It seemed like some sort
of joke to Mike Bliss who used the rest stop as a place to do light duty drug
deals. Nothing big, but still that depended on your idea of big. Certainly
nothing over a few thousand dollars. That was his break off point. Any higher
than that, he often joked, you would have to talk to someone in Columbia… Or
maybe Mexico, he told himself now as he sat waiting in his Lexus, but it seemed
that since Rich Dean had got himself dead the deals just seemed to be getting
larger and larger. And who knew how much longer that might last. He watched the
two men make a bee line for the old rest rooms.

“Idiots,” he muttered to himself. He pushed the button, waited for the
window to come down, leaned out the window and yelled. “What are you, stupid?
They’re closed.” He motioned with one hand. “You can’t read the fuckin’ sign or
what?”

Both men stopped and looked from him to the sign.

“Yeah, closed. You can read right? Closed. That’s what it says. Been closed
for years. Go on into Watertown; buy a fuckin’ burger or something. Only way
you’re getting a bathroom at this time of the morning.” He had lowered his
voice for the last as he pulled his head back into the car, and turned the heater
up a notch. The electric motor whined as the window climbed in its track. He
looked down at his wrist for the time, 1:02 A.M., where the fuck was this dude.
He was late, granted a few minutes, but late was late.

A sharp rap on the glass startled him. He had been about to dig out his own
supply, a little pick-me-up. He looked up to see the guys from the truck
standing outside his window. “Oh… Fucking lovely,” he muttered. He pushed the
button and the window lowered into the door, the motor whining loudly, the cold
air blew in.

“And what can I do for you two gentlemen,” He asked in his best smart ass
voice.

The one in back stepped forward into the light. Military type, Mike told
himself. Older, maybe a noncom. A little gray at the edges of his buzz cut. With
the military base so close there were soldiers everywhere, after all Watertown
was a military town. It was why he was in the business he was in. It was also
why he succeeded at it.

“Did you call me stupid,” The man asked in a polite tone.

“Who, me? No. I didn’t call you stupid, I asked, what are you, stupid?
Different thing. The fuckin’ place is closed… Just doing my good deed for the
day… Helping you, really, so you don’t waste no time,” Mike told him.

“Really?” The man asked.

Mike chuckled. “Yeah really, tough guy. Really. Now, I did my good deed,
why don’t you get the fuck out of here ’cause you wore out your welcome.” He
opened his coat slightly so they could see the chrome 9 mm that sat in its
holster.

“Really,” the first guy repeated.

“Okay, who are you guys, frick and frack? A couple of fucking wannabees?
Well I am the real deal, don’t make me stick this gun in your fuckin’ face,”
Mike told them. He didn’t like being a dick, but sometimes you had to be.

“You know what my mother always said about guns?” The second guy asked.

“Well, since I don’t know your mama it’s hard to say,” Mike told him. He
didn’t like the way these two were acting. They weren’t cops, he knew all the
locals. If it had been someone he had to worry about he would have handled this
completely differently. These guys were nobodies. At least nobodies to him, and
that made them nobodies to Watertown. If he had to put a bullet in… His
thoughts broke off abruptly as the barrel of what looked like a .45 was jammed
into his nose. It came from nowhere. He sucked in a deep breath. He could taste
blood in his mouth where the gun had smashed his upper lip against his teeth.

“She said don’t threaten to pull a gun, never. Just pull it.”

“Mama had a point,” Mike allowed. His voice was nasally due to the gun that
was jammed hallway up to his brain. “Smart lady.”

“Very,” the man allowed. “Kind of a hard ass to grow up with, but she
taught me well.” He looked down at Mike. “So listen, this is what we’re gonna
do. You’re gonna drive out of here right the fuck now. And that’s going to stop
me from pulling this trigger. Lucky day for you, I think. Like getting a Get
Out Of Jail Free card, right.”

“This is my business spot… You don’t understand,” Mike told them. “I…
I’m waiting for someone.”

“Not tonight, Michael.”

“Yeah, but you don’t.” He stopped. “How do you know my name?” he asked.
There was more than a nasal quality to his voice, now there was real fear.
Maybe they were Feds. Maybe.

“Yeah, we know you. And we know you use this spot as a place to do your
business. And I’m saying we couldn’t care less, but right now you gotta go, and
I’m not going to tell you the deal again. You can leave or stay, but you ain’t
gonna like staying,” The guy told him.

“Listen… This is my town… If you guys are Feds you can’t do shit
like this… This is my town. You guys are just…”

The guy pulled the trigger and Mike jumped. He fell to the right, across
the front seat. Both men stepped away from the car, eyes scanning the lonely
rest stop from end to end, but there was no one anywhere. The silence returned
with a ringing in their ears from the blast as it had echoed back out of the
closed car interior. The shooter worked his jaw for a moment, swallowing until
his ears popped. He lifted his wrist to his mouth. “Guess you saw that,” he
said quietly.

“Got a cleaner crew on the way up. You’ll pass them in the elevators. The
boss is waiting on you guys.“ The voice came through the implant in his inner
ear. No one heard what was said except him.

He nodded for the cameras that were picking him up. “In case you didn’t
hear it, someone is supposed to meet him here so your cleaner crew could have
company.”

“Got that too… We’ll handle it.” He nodded once more, and then walked off
toward the rest rooms as the other man followed.

Once in back of the unit they used a key in the old rusted handset. It only
looked old and rusty, it was actually an interface for a state of the art
digital system that would read his body chemistry, heat, and more. The key had
dozens of micro pulse sensor implants that made sure the user was human,
transmitted heartbeat, body chemistry, it could even tell male from female and
match chemical profiles to known examples in its database. Above and to the
sides of them several scanners mapped their bodies to those same known
profiles. Bone composition, old fractures, density and more. All unique in
every man or women. The shooter removed the key and slipped it into his pocket.
A few seconds later a deep whining of machinery reached their ears, the door
shuddered in its frame, and then slipped down into a pocket below the doorway.

A second later they stepped into the gutted restroom. Stainless steel doors
took up most of the room; the elevator to the base below. They waited for the
cleaner crew to come up, then took the elevator back down into the depths.

The Bluechip facility stretched for more than five miles underground. Most
of that was not finished space, most of that was connector tunnels, and storage
space bored from the rock. The facility itself was about three thousand feet
under the city of Watertown in a section of old caves that had been enlarged,
concrete lined and reinforced. The rest area was one of several entrances that
led into the complex. An old farm on the other side of Watertown, an abandoned
factory in the industrial park west of the city and a few other places,
including direct connections from secure buildings on the nearby base.

John Pauls and Sammy Black had Alpha clearance. Both were ex-military, but
most likely military clearance was no longer a real matter of concern this late
in the game, Sammy thought as they made their way down the wide hallway. The
word coming down from those in the know was that in the next twenty-four hours
the human race would come very close to ceasing to exist at all. No
confirmation from anyone official, but regular programming was off air, the
news stations were tracking a meteor that may or may not hit the Earth. The
best opinions said it didn’t matter if it hit or not, it would be a close enough
pass that there would be massive damage. Maybe the human race would be
facing extinction. The government was strangely silent on the subject. And that
had made him worry even more. The pass was estimated to be right over the tip
of south America. So maybe formalities like Alpha clearance weren’t all that
important any longer. If only Mike Bliss had given that some thought before he
had pissed him off.

The halls were silent, nearly empty. Gloss white panels eight feet high
framed it. It had always reminded Black of a maze with its twists and turns.
Here and there doors hung open. Empty now. Always closed any other time he had
been down here. So it had come this far too, Black thought. He stopped at a
door that looked like any other door and a split second later the door rose
into the ceiling and Major Weston waved them in.

Alice, he had never learned her last name, sat at her desk, her eyes on
them as they walked past her. One hand rested on the butt of a matte black .45
caliber pistol in a webbed shoulder holster that was far from Army issue, and
Sammy had no doubt she would shoot them both before they could even react.
Alice was etched into one of those name pins that the Army seemed to like so
well, but oddly, just Alice, no last name, rank or anything else. She wore no
uniform, just a black coverall. The kind with the elastic ankle and wrist
cuffs. No insignia there either. He had noticed that months before. Her eyes
remained flat and expressionless as they passed her desk.

“Alice,” Sammy said politely. She said nothing at all, but she never did.

“Sit down, boys,” Major Weston told them. He spoke around the cigar in his
mouth: Dead, but they always were, and there was never the smell of tobacco in
the office. They took the two chairs that fronted the desk.

The Major was looking over a large monitor on the opposite wall that showed
the north American continent. This map showed small areas of red, including the
northern section where they were. The rest of the map was covered with green.
“Where we are, and where we need to be,“ he said as he pushed a button on his
desk. The monitor went blank. He turned to face the two.

“So here is where we are. You know, as does most of the world, that we are
expecting a near miss from DX2379R later on tonight.” He held their eyes.

John shrugged. “I’ve been doing a little job, must have missed that. It’s
not gonna take us out is it?”

“Saw that on the news a few days back. Guess we dodged a bad one,” Sammy
said.

“Right… Right,” Weston said quietly. “But that cover was nothing but
bullshit.”

“It’s going to hit us?” John asked.

“Maybe… The fact is that we don’t know. One group says this, another
group says that, but it doesn’t matter because it will probably kill us off
anyway. Direct hit, near miss, it is going to tip over an already bad situation
with the Yellowstone Caldera.” He raised his eyes, “Familiar with that?”

“Yellowstone park?” Sammy said.

John nodded in agreement.

Weston laughed. “Put simply, yes. Yellowstone has always been an anomaly to
us. Back in 1930 the Army did an exploratory survey of that area. What we came
up with was that there was a section of the Rocky Mountains missing. Looked at
from the top of Mount Washburn it was easy for the team to see that the largest
crater of an extinct volcano known to exist lay before them.”

“I guess that’s about what I thought,” Sammy agreed.

“Yeah. We all think that. Except it is not true at all because the
Yellowstone caldera is not extinct, it is active. Active and about to pop.
There have been several warnings, but we took the recording stations off line
quite some time ago, so there has been no mention of it in the news. Budget
cuts,” he shrugged. “So everyone is focused on this meteor that may or may not
hit us and instead this volcanic event is going to blow up and when that
happens the rest won’t matter at all.” He clicked the button on his desk and
the monitor came to life. “All the red areas are spots where the surface
pressure has increased. There was, at one time, many active volcanoes on the
north American continent.” He clicked a button and the map changed to a view of
the European continent with many of the same red shaded areas.

“All over the Earth… Higher pressures. Up until a few days ago the
brainiacs were still arguing over whether this could even happen.” He laughed.
“It is happening and they are arguing over whether it can happen. Well, we had
our little debates and then we realized that history shows clearly that this
has happened before. Several times. Call it the Earth’s way of cleansing
itself.”

“But it’s not an absolute, right?”Sammy asked.

“Don’t start sounding like the scientists.” He reached below his desk and
came up with six small silver cartridges. Each had a red button mounted on the
top with a protective cap over the button itself. He clicked a button on his
desk, and a picture of destruction appeared on the screens. It was obviously an
aerial shot, looking down at a chain of islands. Smoke hung over the chain,
reaching as high as the plane itself. As the plane dropped lower, rivers of red
appeared. “That picture is an hour old. That is… Was, the Hawaiian
chain.”

Sammy twisted further to the side, staring at the monitor. “How can that
be… I mean everyone would know about it.” He turned back to Weston.

Weston nodded. “And that would be true except the satellites are out
because of the asteroid. Shut down to avoid damage. That is the official word.”
He clicked the button on his desk and the monitor went dead once more. “I
started this out saying that none of it matters and that is true. The Yellowstone
caldera is going to erupt sometime in the next few days. Not a maybe, not an
educated guess: If the satellites were up you would know that the park is
closed. It has already started. We have had a few small quakes, but the big
stuff is on the way. He rolled the cartridges across the desktop; Sammy and
John caught them.

“Super volcanoes… Earthquakes that modern civilization has never seen…
The last super eruption was responsible for killing off the human population
some seventy-four thousand years ago. Reduced it to a few thousand. And that is
not the biggest one we have evidence of.” He lifted his palms and spread them
open, sighing as he did. “So it is a double whammy. If we survive the meteor
the volcanoes get us, or the earthquakes because of them, or we’ll die from
injuries. And I think those of us who die outright will be lucky. The rest of
us will have a hard time of it… Staying alive with nothing… We will
probably all starve to death.” He paused in the silence.

“Those cartridges are a compound developed right here in this complex for
the armed forces. Project Super Soldier. SS for short. That kept people from
looking too deep, they assumed it was something to do with the Nazi youth
movement here and abroad. We let that misconception hold.” He waited a second
for his words to sink in. “SS is designed to prolong life past the normal point
of termination. It allows a soldier to survive longer without food and more
importantly without water. Does something to the cells of the host, I don’t pretend
to know what. What I do know is that the people above me made the decision to
release this…” He picked up a mug of coffee from the desk and sipped deeply.
His eyes were red road maps, Sammy noticed now. Like he hadn’t slept in a few
days.

“So this is it for us. I guess you realize that you probably won’t get paid
for this. No money is going to show up in your account. I will run it through
before I pull the plug, but I truly believe the machinery will be dead by the
time payday rolls around. So this is something I’m asking you to do.” He
pointed to the cartridges that both men were looking over. Sammy held his as
though it might bite him.

“Those babies are really all we have to hope with. Most people will die
outright. They will never make it past the quakes, eruptions, and the resulting
ash clouds and gases. Up here we should be okay as far as gases go, eruptions,
but there are fault lines that crisscross this area. This whole facility is
bored from limestone caverns. Probably won’t make it through the quakes,
although it is a good eighty miles from the closest line,” he shrugged. “Maybe,
maybe not. My point is there should be a good chance for survivors here.”

“So we do what with these? Can they harm us?” John asked.

“Harm you, kill you? No, but you will be infected the minute you push that
button. It will protect you the same as anyone else. There is enough in a
single cartridge to infect about five hundred million people,” Weston said
quietly.

“Whoa,” Sammy whistled. “Why infect… Why not inoculate? And why six
cartridges… Three Billion people?”

“Minimum, three billion. That is before those infected pass it along
themselves: After a while it won’t matter. As to the question of infected, this
is a designer virus. You catch it just like the flu. We infected whole platoons
by releasing it in the air over them. Eighty-Nine point seven percent infection
rate, but that doesn’t really matter because it infects people close to you and
those people will infect you… Sneezing, waste, sex, water, food, it gets into
and on everything. And once it is in you, either orally or via bloodstream you
will be infected. The human body has nothing to fight it, no reason to be
alarmed or believe it’s anything more than a virus. And that same response will
help to carry it to every area of the body as your own defenses manufacture
white blood cells to fight it. So you may as well say a one hundred percent
infection rate.” He paused and rubbed at his temples.

“Be glad they decided on this. They have some others that will kill
everybody in the world in a matter of days.” Weston nodded at the raised
eyebrows that greeted his remarks. “I don’t doubt that the merits of which way
to go were hotly debated,” he finished gravely.

“The virus is designed to live within the host, but it can live outside of
the host. It can stay alive in a dead body for days, even if the body is
frozen. In fact that just freezes the virus too, once the body is thawed it
will infect any living person that comes along. So those,” he pointed to the
silver cartridges, “are overkill. Same stuff is being released across the
globe. Great Briton… Germany… Australia… West coast just a few hours ago.
Manhattan has already been done, all the East Coast in fact. I want the two of
you to head out from here. One vial here, then one of you head west, the other
south. Go for the bigger cities… Water supplies… Reservoirs… Release it
in the air or water, it doesn’t matter. There are men heading out from the
south, the west coast. The Air Force will be dispersing the same stuff via
cargo planes tomorrow or the next day… As long as they can fly, if we can
even make it that long, and that isn’t looking really good right now…” He
rose from the desk. “I’ll see you out.” He turned to Alice. “Alice… Pack us
up.” Alice nodded as Sammy and John got to their feet, but her hand remained on
the butt of the pistol. Rubber grips, Sammy noticed as he passed her.

“Alice,” he said.

“Um hmm,” Alice murmured.

Sammy nearly stopped in his tracks, but managed to hide his surprise as he
passed by into the hallway. The Major fished two sets of keys from his pocket.
“Parked in the back lot. A couple of plain Jane Dodge four-bys. Drive ’em like
you stole ’em. Leave ’em where you finish up. Hell, keep ’em if you want ’em.
Nobody is going to care.”

The three stood in the hallway for a few seconds longer. Sammy’s eyes
locked with the Major’s own, and he nodded. The major walked back into his
office, and the door rose from its pocket behind him. Quiet, except the slight
buzzing from the fluorescent lights.

John shrugged as his eyes met Sammy’s, waiting.

Sammy sighed. “You heard the man… West or south?”

“Flip for it?” John asked. His mouth seemed overly dry and he licked his
lips nervously.

Sammy pulled a quarter from his pocket and flipped it into the air. “Call
it, Johnny.”

“Tails,” John said just before the quarter hit the carpet.

Sammy bent forward. “Tails it is. You got it, Johnny.”

John looked down at the carpet. “West, I guess.” John said.

Sammy nodded, looked down once more at the quarter and then both men turned
and walked away toward the elevator that would take them back to the surface.

Watertown Center New York

Shop and Save Convenience store:

Haley Mae

1:30 AM

“Last one,” Neil said.

Neil was a detective for the sheriffs’ department. It
was closing in on 2:00 AM and he and his partner Don had just come back from
six hours of sleep to get a jump on the day. Yesterday one of the checkout
girls had disappeared between the Shop And Save, a small mini mart on the
western outskirts of the city, and home. Earlier this morning she had turned up
dead in a ditch just a quarter mile from the front door. The techs were still
processing the scene, but it was looking personal. Stabbed to death, multiple
wounds, no defense wounds, at least none that he or Don had been able to see,
and fully clothed. Her purse had been found nearby, wallet and cash inside. No
ID, but her store ID had still been clipped to her shirt. They would know more
in a few days once the coroner did her magic. It all pointed to someone she
knew, and they had no known boyfriend. The trailer park where she lived had
turned up nothing, they had questioned some people at the convenience store,
but some had been off shift, so here they were back at the store questioning
the other employees.

They had commandeered the night manager’s office which
was barely larger than a broom closet, but at least it was a place to sit with
enough space left over to call in the workers and ask their questions. Free
coffee via the same night manager, who had still not gone home, was taking a
little of the six hours of sleep sting off, but to Neil free coffee in a
convenience store was like a whore offering a free shot of penicillin to the
first twenty five customers.

“Who’s next?” Don asked.

The last half hour they had been interviewing the
people who worked the same shifts as Amber Kneeland.

“Haley Mae,” Neil said.

Don looked up and stopped writing in his little
notebook. “How do you,” spell her name, he had meant to ask
Neil, but she was right in front of him.

“EM. A. E,” she said with a smile.

“Vietnamese?” Don asked. She was obviously mixed race,
African American and Asian, he questioned himself.

“Japanese,” she told him.

“Nice name,” Neil said, “Haley.”

Beautiful girl, Don thought. “Did you know Amber
Kneeland? Sometimes works this shift?”
he asked.

“Not really,” she answered. “I mean, I met her, but
only in passing… I just started here myself.”

She really is beautiful, Don thought. “You wouldn’t
know if she had a boyfriend… Other friends?” he asked.

Haley shook her head. “Sorry,” she said… “What has
she done?”

“Nothing,” Neil supplied.

“She went missing last night,” Don said. “Turned up
dead this morning.”

Haley shook her head. “Oh my God. That’s horrible. She
was such a nice girl… Quiet.”

Neil nodded his head. “So maybe you did know her a
little better than you thought?”

“I just started here a few weeks back, and like I
said, I don’t really know her… But it might be a girlfriend not a boyfriend.”

Don looked at her. “You wouldn’t know who?”

“No. It’s just a rumor. Someone said it to me… I
don’t even remember who… But I’ve never seen her with a guy, and I have seen
her with other girls… Maybe also the way she looked at me a few times…”

“Go out with her?” Don asked.

“No… Never… I…”

“Don’t swing that way?” Don added.

Haley frowned slightly before she answered. “I work. I
don’t swing any way. But if I did she
wasn’t my type. She never asked me out, I never asked her out.”

“Didn’t mean to offend you,” Don said. He shrugged.
“She’s dead.”

“She would probably do the same for you,” Neil said.

Haley nodded. “That really is all I know. I hope you
find who did it though. She seemed like a nice girl,” Haley said.

“You don’t seem the type for this… Bagging groceries
at 2:00 am,” Don said, changing the subject. “You aren’t local or I’d know
you… This city really is small despite the base.”

Haley smiled. “Came here a year back with a boyfriend,
Army. He left, forgot all about me, I guess. I had this idea of modeling…
Tough to get a foot in a door though.”

“Wow, if he left you behind he must be a fucking
idiot… Any good?” Neil asked.

Haley laughed.

“Excuse mister smooth there,” Don told her. Neil
feigned a hurt look and Haley laughed again. “He meant, have you done
anything? I know somebody… Might be interested.”

Haley arched her eyebrows. “I can model. I did a You
Jeans ad back in Georgia a few years ago. I just need to prove it to the
right person.”

“Escorting? Maybe dancing. It’s strictly escorting or
dancing, no funny stuff. Dance clubs… Clothing modeling,” Neil said.

“Probably start out escorting… Dance a little…
Then if he likes you he’ll put you into the modeling end of things. He owns a
lot of shit… Several car dealerships across the state… Some of the biggest
dance clubs, clothing outlets, those bargain places, but still, modeling is
modeling, right? Not the big name stuff, but it is a foot in the door,” Don
added.

“I can do that,” she said slowly.

Neil passed her a white business card with his own
name scrawled across the back. “Tell him I sent you… That’s my name on the
back.”

“Jimmy Vincioni,” Haley asked.

“Just V… Jimmy
V, good guy,” Neil said.

Haley nodded and tucked the card into her front jean
pocket. “I’ll call him… Thanks. Look…” Her voice dropped to a near whisper.
“I’m pretty sure she had a girlfriend here… I just don’t know who,” Haley
added quietly.

Don finished writing in his notebook, nodded once he
met her eyes and then shook the hand she offered. She walked away.

“Beautiful,” Neil said.

“Absolutely,” Don agreed. “You ain’t getting none of
that though.”

“Yeah? But if Jimmy V hires her? It’ll be the next
best thing.”

Don shook his head, but smiled. His eyes rose and
watched as Haley walked away. “Guess I’ll have to have a few drinks at the club
if that happens.”

Neil chuckled low. “You and me both,” he agreed.

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