Under a Graveyard Sky

continued civilian control of the military in the event of global nuclear war or, say, laughably, a zombie plague. The NCCC’s job was to keep things in some reasonable order, or restore order, so that there could be an election again.

Right now, he was stuck sixty feet underground in Omaha, Nebraska surrounded by zombies.

Shortly after 9/11, the various departments that the NCCC succession went through had taken to quietly rotating people into secure points around the U.S. Not only the DoD had such facilities. They’d become a bit of a cachet in the inner circles of government. You weren’t seriously important unless you had a secure facility. In the cold war, in the threat of imminent nuclear obliteration, only the Department of Defense, the President and Congress had secure facilities.

By the time of the H7D3 virus even the FDA had one.

Of course, wouldn’t you know, the only ones that hadn’t been taken down by the virus were the Hole and CDC. Which left one Frank Galloway, career DoD nuclear war specialist, as the NCCC. Just ahead of the surviving senior officer of the CDC who was also on the list. And they came after all the state governors.

It didn’t help that he was only thirty-three. His Russian counterpart was nearly seventy and a former KGB nuclear security officer.

“No, sir,” Brigadier General Shelley Brice said. The former Assistant Deputy Commander of Strategic Armaments Control was one of the only female generals in the Air Force. A former B-52 driver, she had been part of the movement to recreate Strategic Airforce Command after it became clear that when the Air Force took its eyes off of their nuclear weapons, bad things had happened. Notably, in 2007 an outside inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency determined that over thirty weapons were “unaccounted for.” The head of the Air Force Department was fired and SAC was reborn.

The “rebels” hadn’t managed to, quite, retake the high ground but they’d at least gotten full control of the nukes as well as their storied acronym. And they’d gotten the Hole.

And now, well, they’d absolutely taken over the Empire. What was left of it.

She’d been the Flag Duty Officer when the orders to lock down had come in. As far as she could tell, she was now the senior surviving officer in the entire United States military. First Female Commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Big Cheese. Admittedly of nothing but some submarines.

Her Navy counterpart was a commander who was now, apparently, the CNO. Or, and this had been a low level, everybody recognized as sort of pointless, discussion, a boomer commander in the Pacific might be since he had the local guy by date of rank. Actually, six boomer commanders had him by date of rank. There was also an Army colonel who was a pretty decent sort and damned good at poker and a Marine lieutenant colonel she suspected had been shoved off to a nothing post because nobody in the Marines could understand how he made lieutenant colonel in the first place. And the fact that he used to not only be a nuclear weapons maintenance officer but security commander for a storage facility sort of scared the shit out of her. Total flake.

“There were the news reports that some groups had been producing clandestine vaccine from human remains,” the flake said. Lieutenant Colonel Howard Ellington twitched right after speaking, one of his habits that had Brice right on the edge of murder.

“CDC?” Galloway said. “Comment?”

“It was doable,” Dr. Dobson said. “And, quietly, it was recognized in the immunology community that some people were doing it. By that I mean people with degrees who were in some sort of position to get the…materials. Which, admittedly, was being an accessory to murder. Given how things ended up going… I’m not going to point fingers or condemn. It wasn’t even particularly hard to do and much much faster than the alternatives. Frankly, if we’d just…processed those who became full neurological from the beginning we probably could have stopped this in its tracks. But nobody, then, was willing to even consider it. In retrospect…”

“That’s a hindsight I’m not sure I want to explore,” Galloway said.

“We may have to, sir, with respect,” General Brice said.

“Explain,” Galloway said.

“If we’re going to get vaccine to the uninfected crews… There aren’t a lot of other choices,” Brice said. “I don’t see anyone being able to produce the… Dr. Dobson…?”

“What the general is saying is that the attenuated vaccine is relatively easy to make,” Dobson said. “Not easy and there are dangers. But it’s doable. Whereas the crystal formation serum… We’ve got some here. Now. But it is exceedingly unlikely they have either the ability or the equipment to build it. And from the sounds of it, killing infected does not really bother some of them. Frankly, Mr. Galloway, the attenuated virus from infected homo sapiens is the only valid choice in terms of vaccine for the crews.”

“There’s one problem I’d like to bring up,” Commander Louis Freeman said. “Using an untested vaccine produced by people whose credentials we don’t even know on our last remaining operational military arm raises some issues.”

“You think?” Galloway said, chuckling.

The one of the things going for the NCCC, in Brice’s opinion, is that he had a great black sense of humor.

“Then there’s the whole chopping off people’s heads to make it, commander. I’m cognizant of the issues, Commander and we’ll cover them if and when we get to that point. But since the agenda for the rest of the day is watching the world not miraculously spring back to its feet, I’m declaring a blue sky discussion. Dr. Dobson, you know, more or less, what is required for…attenuated vaccine?”

“Yes, sir,” Dobson said. “General lab equipment. A controlled source of radiation such as an x-ray machine. Infected spinal cords. And a blender.”

“I think I know where the nukes can get some radiation,” Brice said.

“Controlled,” Dobson said. “I’m not sure exactly how much you can release from a nuke’s engine or how you’d do it. But the most important part is that it be controllable and precise. If you get too much, you do too much damage to the virus and it’s useless. Too little and you infect those you’re trying to vaccinate. That was one of the major mistakes that drug dealers, who were selling virus that was, in fact, attenuated, made. Some of them infected their customers, others gave them ‘vaccine’ that wasn’t much more than tap water with some random organic material in it. On the other hand, some of the materials collected off the street might as well have been made here. It was that good. Controlled.”

“There’s a way to do a release,” Commander Freeman said. “How controlled?”

“The radiation dosage for creating the primer is forty-three millicuries per second per milliliter in a standard microtube,” Dobson said. “For the booster, thirty-seven millicuries. If you’re off by as much as a millicurie or a tenth of a second, you get either useless or infection. That’s the danger of attenuated virus.”

“Damn,” Galloway said. “What would you suggest using if we, and I’m starting to think we can’t, use this method?”

“A cesium x-ray machine,” Dobson said. “And a lot of prayer. I’d suggest testing specific lots of the vaccine on specific crewmen. Absent them having picked up a microbiologist along the way or having someone familiar with successful attenuated vaccine production…”

CHAPTER 22

“Fish or cut bait?” Steve asked. “You want it or no?”

The 67' Bertram Convertible had taken a beating from the three zombies that had survived. It looked as if there had originally been six. But according to Stacey none of the damage was critical and it was basically a good boat.

“You missed your calling in life,” Blair said, shaking his head at the feces all over the saloon. “You should have been a yacht broker. It’s going to be a hell of a lot of clean-up.”

“If you don’t want it, I’ll find somebody who does,” Steve said. “That’s not being a prick. But if you don’t take it, somebody will. Sophia would take it like a shot.”