Dead and Rising: Terminal

Torrent

Daniel Thatch sat next to the radio desperately punching buttons and trying to get a pinpoint on where the bird had crashed, but without the coordinates it was pretty much useless. He jabbed at some buttons absent-mindedly, knowing full well that there was no way either of the men who'd been out had made it. Not under these conditions.

Outside, the wind blew and snow drifted down almost as if it were rain, making it nearly impossible to see out of the porthole-sized window to his left.

A computer whirred next to him, occasionally emitting a small blip as the radar circled a two-mile radius, although the snowstorm was sending false frequencies now and then; little scatters of white dots sometimes clustered on-screen for a moment before blipping out.

For about three days nothing had shown up on the radar besides this interference, and Daniel was doubtful that anything would turn up during the blizzard.

He sat back in his chair and sighed in frustration. A search party looking for the fallen pilots was sent out about an hour ago and he hadn’t heard from the group yet.  He wasn’t worried so much about finding Keaton and Denske as much as he was worried about salvaging the helicopters’ parts. Now they were reduced to one malfunctioning helicopter, two jeeps, a hummer and a quickly dwindling cache of ammo that wouldn't last long at all.

He laced his fingers together and leaned back in the chair, staring gloomily out the window. The small, hastily thrown together tech room was cramped and cluttered with a mix of broken machinery and high-tech hardware, courtesy of the U.S government. Daniel stretched his arm out to grab his cup of black coffee, the last of the last can of Folgers, actually, when the door opened behind him, startling him.

He jumped at the abrupt noise and the coffee spilled and dribbled over the side of his desk, pooling under it and almost dousing a clump of tangled computer wires. Wires which, if ruined, would surely mean the end of all of their lives.

“Hey, watch it, asshole.”

Daniel leaned down, throwing a napkin on the puddle and with his foot mopped up the spill as best he could. When he looked up, he saw a ripe red face glaring at him over a thick black mustache.

“Oh, sorry about that, I didn’t mean—”

The stout man known as Henry J. Blake waved him off and weaved through the piles of junk to get a better look of the layout.

“Don’t give me that, Thatch. That’s an order. You don’t want to piss me off right now.”

Daniel turned to face the monitors and rolled his eyes. Looks like you’re already pissed to me.

Blake planted his feet firmly behind him and gazed at the monitors with a look of rage and incomprehension. “What the hell is wrong with this? What is all of that?” He pointed to a large clump of fuzz on the radar, just north of where they were.

“Oh, well, that’s just interference. It’s nothing.”

Blake snorted and grabbed at the radio, which Daniel had turned all the way down.

“Why is this off? You should be listening for the search party.”

Blake thumbed the dial and then a burst of static filled the small room. The high-pitched screech reverberated off of the walls, amplifying the noise to an almost deafening level. Daniel quickly turned it back down and glared at Blake.

“That’s exactly why it’s off. There’s been nothing but static for the last half hour. I think maybe our search party needs a search party themselves.”

Blake eyed Daniel. “Nonsense! The crash had to be within range, so it should only take a couple hours to scout there and back, and since we know the course, I’m sure they wouldn’t have gotten lost!”

Daniel shrugged his shoulders. Blake thought he ran things, but in reality, without Daniel the whole operation would be useless.

By operation, he meant the stabilizing of civilization and the re-colonizing of the United States, which now had been reduced to a bunch of useless land infested with undead and … something else.

  To do that, though, they needed forces. An army.  And with only a few hundred of the military left, that was a pretty tough task. So, they needed survivors.

So far, they’d rescued only about forty people. It was a funny thing, listening to all of their stories. Somehow, every time a survivor was rescued, the same question would pop up; where was the government in all of this?  And each time, Daniel made the same answer clear; honey, there is no government. We are the government. And it was true.

So, yeah, Blake could go ahead and pretend to run things, but Daniel knew it was all a cover. No one knew what to do next. Living was just a day to day thing and the things out there, out in the snow, were the obstacles.

Suddenly, the radio picked up something, and a voice came through. Blake’s eyes popped as he turned the volume up and shouted, “Hello? Anyone there?”

A few seconds of fuzz. “Roger.”

Blake’s red face was now a light pink as he straightened himself out.

“Are you at the crash site? Can you tell me the damage?” 

The man’s voice at the other end was broken up by crackling, indecipherable amidst the static. 

“What was that? Couldn’t read you, over.”

“I said…. yes, we’re at the site… no sign of the bodies, but salvageable material has been gathered… freezing out here…. storm… about one mile north of base…”

Daniel looked up at Blake, who had a somewhat dumb look on his face.

“Bring as much material as you can and get back here before you freeze your asses off.”

“But what about Keaton and Denske?”

“There is no hope for them now.”

 The fuzz followed, and then it died down to silence. Blake switched it off and plopped down on a chair next to Daniel. He loosened up a bit and sighed.

“Four months, Thatch. Four months of looking all over. Four months and forty people. I’m getting too old for this. We can’t just keep moving from place to place, you know. Give this shithole another week and those things will be crawling all over the place.”

Daniel knew exactly what Blake was talking about, he had heard the same speech back in Virginia and Ohio, back when there was hope of a future.

But now he wasn’t focusing at all on his complaining superior, on the futility of their struggle: his eyes were locked on to the radar, where six dots were coming into range.

“Sir… I think the search party was closer than we thought.”

Blake stopped talking and stared at the screen.  The dots were close together, slowly moving in the direction of base. Out of the side, from the east, a huge blip showed up on the radar, a big fuzzy dot that streaked momentarily across the screen before disappearing-- and then reappearing again.

“What is that?”

Daniel studied the fuzz closely. “Well, I mean, we’ve been getting a lot of interference lately from the snow storm, but this is just weird.”

Then the fuzz overtook the six tiny dots for a moment.

“Turn that radio up.”

Daniel switched the radio back on, and what came out was pure chaos.

“— God help us, what the fuck is that? Can you hear me, damn it Blake! There’s something out there!”

The fuzz was about three times as big as the small scattered dots. It descended on them quickly.

“—fuck— get the— leave it! We’re—the base!” The radio died amidst a cacophony of deafening screams.

Blake’s face turned pallid and his forehead broke out in beads of sweat.

“I think it’s time we move now. I think we've been found.”

Daniel nodded and started to shut down the monitors.