Turning Point (Book 3): A Time To Live by Wandrey Mark

Author:Wandrey, Mark [Wandrey, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Zombies
Publisher: Blood Moon Press
Published: 2020-04-20T22:00:00+00:00

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Chapter 7

Morning, Saturday, May 4

Classified Task Force

100 Miles West of Eureka, California

A storm had blown in overnight and slowed the task force’s progress to the south. Chamuel could have told Michael about it, had she desired to. Frankly, he was an asshole. He was the only one in the heptagon who was from a military background, and it showed. The bastard seemed to think he was a new Caesar or something.

She snorted as she sat in her mobility chair and let her eyes scan the monitors. Her working space was nearly covered in them. She missed their land-side installation in Portland where she’d had 20 monitors of various sizes and a pair of simply gorgeous 75” curved displays for live video feeds.

With the collapse of society and mass media, the need for the big displays was gone. So, when they’d abandoned the base and moved onto ships, she’d left them behind with a certain amount of sadness. She rode in their main ship. It had started life as a NOAA research vessel. The global weather monitoring room served her purposes quite well, and she’d asked Michael to have it modified for her use. He’d done it, if only to get her to shut up.

On the stern of the ship were three, large satellite uplink dishes. Chamuel had appropriated two of them. Despite Gabriel’s releasing her virus to shut down the world’s comms, Chamuel still had considerable assets for gathering intel. Dozens of military intelligence satellites, weather satellites, even commercial imaging satellites were accessible to her, thanks to the old legacy gateway via WWMCCS. Chamuel had to hand it to her, Gabriel had game.

As the sun was lighting the eastern horizon, Chamuel sipped her beloved Darjeeling tea and let her sharp eyes run over the hundreds of data screens set in her monitor wall. The door opened, and she glanced over to see who was coming, hoping it wasn’t Michael. It was Azrael, their archeologist.

The tall, albino man had a steaming coffee mug in one hand and looked like, once again, he hadn’t gotten much sleep. Chamuel went back to her studying, adding some new data from Europe to her notes. Eastern Europe had plenty of signs of life. Zombie life. The infected didn’t seem overly bothered by radiation, which was good for them, since a good part of Eastern Europe would be radioactive for a millennium.

“Anything new?”

Chamuel was a little surprised her visitor had spoken. It wasn’t uncommon for Azrael to come in, look at the screens while he drank his coffee, then return to his work without commenting.

“No,” she said. “The fallout in Eastern Europe has followed Cold War era patterns. The windstorm, yesterday, over Turkmenistan carried the Mashhad fallout into Tajikistan. It’s a shame; they were a pretty successful holdout to the virus until now.” She brought up a satellite image on the largest of her monitors. The big city of Dushanbe in Tajikistan glowed in the evening light, its boundaries sharp. They’d built defenses and kept the infection from spreading.

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