Crisis Event: Gray Dawn by Greg Shows, Zachary Womack Page A

Blakely had been Army Reserve, so despite their boot camp training, they were green. They’d spent the last ten months at the training base in Meadville, virtual prisoners who were barely surviving as rations went short and roving bands of desperate men and women and children repeatedly tried to attack the base and take those rations away.
    Blakely had tried his best to maintain discipline as they waited for orders that never came. And he’d attempted to train the men to be full time soldiers. It hadn’t been easy. By his estimation he had two pill junkies in the crew, three casual tweakers, and half a dozen alcoholics.
    All of them were rootless—with little or no family, and no girlfriends or spouses. What Command would have called the “bottom of the barrel” if Command still existed.
    Blakely glanced out the window. He was amazed the convoy had made it as far as it had—two miles across Meadville—before the first mishap split their force and slowed them down to a crawl. Titman had launched the convoy too late to make the rendezvous on time, refusing to listen to Blakely’s input, and thus miscalculating the travel time like he’d miscalculated nearly everything else since his arrival.
    At this point they’d already had to backtrack five times to get around traffic jams, and in a few places they’d wound up rolling over barbed wire fences and slogging through narrow trails that wound through dust-choked woods or empty pastures now dotted with the long-dead carcasses of dead horses or cows. The going had been rough, and they’d been bounced and jarred and slammed around so much they were going to have bruises from it.
    Blakely rolled his shoulders, trying to release some of the tension, but failing. He was getting mentally exhausted from the trip. Several times they’d had to stop and leave detour instructions for the third Humvee to follow, since they’d quickly lost radio contact with Nate Clark and his crew. Blakely wouldn’t be surprised to find out the men had turned the Humvee around and headed back across town to the base. After all, who was going to do anything about it? If Titman even tried, he was liable to find himself being carved up and barbecued. There was only so much Blakely could do to keep the men in line, and Titman hadn’t helped that reality with the summary execution of an inexperienced rookie.
    Out in the distance, lightning strikes danced along the tops of hills, a subtle reminder that this new world they lived in could kill or maim them at anytime. Shock and awe was probably no longer the best policy to pursue, but that wasn’t a lesson military brass learned easily. Already the convoy was three hours late to the rendezvous, and their tardiness was driving Titman mad. He kept getting on the radio and shouting “move your ass, son” and “pick up the pace and don’t be a pussy,” and “act like you give a shit about something, boy.”
    And they still had another twenty miles to go. They’d be six hours late by the time they arrived—provided nothing else went wrong.
    But Blakely knew something else would go wrong.
    Things always went wrong.
        When you were dealing with the end of the world, how could things not go wrong?
        As if to punctuate his thought, a streak of lightning ripped down in front of them. Seconds later the thunder boomed.
        It was followed up by a blinding cluster of lightning strikes that swept along the line of dead trees to the left of the road they were on.
        “I hate this lightning,” Duck said as he bashed into a Buick and rolled it over the edge of the road into the ditch. “But not as much as I hate this mission.”
        “I got something!” Kane yelped over the comm. “The transponder came through.”
        “Where?” Titman barked.
        “West. In Youngstown, or not far from it.”
        “Hot damn!” Titman said. “Come on private. Move your ass up there. We’re late.”
        “Yes sir,” Duck