First Wave (The Travis Combs Post-Apocalypse Thrillers) Read online

  First Wave

  Volume 1

  by

  JT Sawyer

  Copyright

  Copyright 2014 by JT Sawyer

  No part of this book may be transmitted in any form whether electronic, recording, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction and the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, incidents, or events is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Note from the Author

  This book came about as the result of many colorful experiences working as a fulltime survival instructor. Much of this has involved teaching field-courses for the military special operations community and many of their expressions and attitudes wove their way into this story. In addition, I’ve led many multi-week survival trips, where we were so immersed in living off the land that the only reality became the group, at hand, trying to find food, water, and shelter under harsh living conditions. The idea for people coming off of an extended river trip, and finding their world forever changed, came from a friend who guides Colorado River trips through the Grand Canyon and had gone on an extended trip with clients during the tragedy of 9/11.

  I’ve blended some of these elements into an action-packed story that combines bushcraft, fighting tactics, evasion, and self-reliance in a post-apocalyptic setting. I hope you enjoy this first book as much as I enjoyed writing it. Stay tuned for more volumes in the series. You can also get updates by signing up for my email notices at [email protected] or visiting http://www.jtsawyer.com

  Prologue

  August 26, Ten Days before the Pandemic

  Doctor Robert James Pearson lowered the silver-rimmed glasses on his nose, as he gazed at the clear vial before him. His technicians in the research lab next to his office had gone home for the day. The only noise came from the hallway outside his office where he could hear the comforting footfalls of security personnel doing their evening sweeps in the high-security facility on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico. He stroked his thin, grey goatee while marveling at the precious substance in the vial.

  After thirty-eight months of toil in his lab, his research for the Department of BioDefense was complete. The viral load he, and the other scientists had perfected in the modified avian flu strain, had passed the initial series of animal testing and the antidote was ready to use, if necessary. They had painstakingly taken the original 1918 virus and magnified its replication capabilities. This super virus dramatically increases the onset of necrotizing bronchiolitis while instigating diffuse alveolar damage. The subject will typically perish from internal hemorrhaging within twenty four hours of exposure, he proudly stated in a recent briefing to his funders.

  The Biodefense officials had assured him that his research in neurophysiology and virology was critical to arriving at an antidote before terrorists could complete their own strain of the new virus. Now, over three years later, he could wrap up this voluminous project and resume his work at Stanford. Pearson was part of a six man group of researchers who conferred through daily videoconferences, comparing research data. They were the brilliant minds behind the resulting antidote that could potentially save millions of lives.

  As he pondered the accolades he would receive from his contemporaries in the scientific community, the landline phone on his desk rang, jolting him back to the present. Very few calls ever came in on this phone and he picked up the receiver, squinting his eyes and tensing his lower lip.

  The trembling voice on the other end was his colleague Doctor Emory from Chicago. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. It’s a little too quiet in here, to be honest,” Pearson said. “Only the security guards and maintenance staff at this hour.”

  “There isn’t much time. You need to leave now,” the other man bellowed. “Take your notes, laptop, and the vaccine with you. Somehow, the virus has been unleashed in Europe. Soon, it will be on our doorstep.”

  Pearson interrupted his friend’s hurried exclamations, “What are you talking about? How do you know?” said Pearson, clutching the phone and thrusting his shoulders forward over the edge of the wooden desk.

  “That new agency we met with last week…and that woman…they came to my office looking for me a few hours ago. They killed my assistants and took everything,” he paused, his breath racing over the phone. “I escaped but the others…they’re coming for us all. Get out of there now. You have to disappear. Go to your fall back location.”

  “Wait, what…what do you mean….why would they….” Pearson paused and his eyebrows scrunched together, as he heard the sound of muffled gunfire coming from the hallway. His eyes darted to the brown door leading into his small office. He tried to dismiss the noise as a janitor’s cart tipping over, or another sound-- anything other than what he had heard. Then, the rhythmic pattern of gunfire shuttered through the hallway again as he heard people shriek and collapse to the floor.

  Pearson’s face looked frostbitten as his world constricted. He placed the phone down and grabbed the vials of vaccine from the desk, along with his laptop, and thrust them into a compact, metallic briefcase. He could hear the password keypad being activated for the exterior lab wall across from his office and the sound of a woman’s voice issuing commands. The familiar, swishing sound of the first set of air- locked, lab doors opening, followed next. With a white-knuckled grip on the briefcase, he pried open his office door to see three armed men and a woman with a black vest enter the lab. The first series of doors closed behind them.

  Pearson swung open the office door and bolted in the opposite direction, heading for the stairs. His tan blazer fluttered like a cape as he ran down the stairs to the emergency exit. He entered the security code and the pressure-sealed door opened to a dimly lit parking lot. After the door slammed, he stopped and turned around, then activated the biohazard alarm for the building. He didn’t wait to see if his actions were successful in sealing the intruders inside as he sprinted for his black Volvo. As Pearson sped towards the security gate, he could see the door ajar on the checkpoint booth. The security guard, a portly man he had greeted each morning for years, was lying face down amidst a blood sprayed console.

  As he raced away, he kept waiting for the roar of police sirens heading to the facility but there was only the expanse of the lonesome, desert road enveloping his car. On the seat beside him was the silver briefcase containing the vials of vaccine.

  His constant, furtive glances in the rearview mirror matched his racing thoughts. If the virus could be contained in Europe then there might still be hope of preventing it from turning into a catastrophic pandemic. But how long had it been? If quarantine was unsuccessful, then widespread fatalities would commence within two weeks. He reflected on the recent meeting that Emory mentioned. That icy-eyed woman, with the neck scar, said her employer would be overseeing vaccine distribution in the event of a bio attack. How was she involved? What was she doing at the lab?

  Twelve miles later, the two-lane remote highway ended at a T-section as the last glimmer of sunlight streaked across Pearson’s pale cheeks. The faint lights of vehicles driving on the interstate could be seen in the distance. A hundred yards down the road, a green sign indicated Albuquerque to the east and Flagstaff to the west. Reluctantly, he edged towards the west entrance ramp. This would be the safest direction for now and perhaps offer a chance to salvage humanity’s future.

  Chapter 1

  Travis Combs was brushing flecks of sand from the side of his face as he sat up on his thin bedroll by the shoreline of
the Colorado River. He turned and looked over to his left where the rest of the passengers were still sprawled out asleep. To his right, the rafts were tethered to a row of cottonwood trees alongside the camp kitchen and coolers. Even with the sun having risen an hour ago, the inner walls of the Grand Canyon were painted in an orange and red hue, silhouetted against an indigo sky.

  The morning silence was penetrated by the voice of a canyon wren, whose melodic song floated down the cliffs. The last few days had been quiet with very few rafters on the river. The warm night had hardly required entry into his sleeping bag, and Travis had slept in faded khaki shorts and a cotton t-shirt that was nearly threadbare in the shoulders. His faint black beard was well groomed- one luxury he afforded himself on this trip.

  As he stood, he caught the movement of three bighorn sheep making their way up an incline a few hundred yards away across the river. The clamoring of their small hooves on the rocks echoed off the canyon walls. All my years of rappelling cliffs and traversing mountains around the globe and I could never walk with that kind of grace, he thought.

  Travis rolled his shoulders around in an effort to loosen them up. At thirty-four, too many airborne jumps and arduous missions in third-world settings, had taken its toll on his otherwise fit body. He had achieved the rank of Staff Sergeant in the 5th Special Forces before serving the last three years as a SERE instructor, teaching others the skills of survival and evasion. Now, with his discharge a few months behind him, it was time to unwind and live without a schedule, and no one to command.

  A few feet away, Katy, a fair-skinned, strawberry blonde from Ohio was sitting up and let out a miniscule yawn, as she crawled out of her blue sleeping bag.

  Travis stood up, raising his fists skyward in a stretch and then walked behind some boulders to relieve himself. He headed back down to the beach by the rafts to fire up the camp stove and brew a pot of silty, cowboy coffee. He inhaled the crisp, desert air and sweet scent of cottonwoods, and realized it was the first time in months that he had slept through the entire night.

  Pete, the official trip leader, came over to get the griddle warmed up. His tan skin and shaggy blond hair was typical of the professional guides who spent four months, each season, living in the sun. Pete dug his hand inside the cooler and pulled out a few of the last bags of dwindling food. They had been eating gourmet meals each day and the last breakfast on this twenty-two day river trip was going to be no different, even if the omelets were mostly cheese with a few of the remaining powdered eggs mixed in to the fray.

  Pete glanced over at Travis who was inhaling the aroma rising off the coffee pot. “So now that you’re done with service, are you going to keep that stubble head or let it grow into a long mop again like you had after high-school?”

  “Who knows amigo? Other than taking my son on his first big-game hunt, I haven’t thought about what I’m gonna do after this. I know a decent cigar is on the list as my supply ran out, day before last.”

  “You should really smoke a pipe, like me. It will add some sophistication to your looks,” said Pete.

  It had been twelve years since they guided a river trip together through the Grand Canyon. Pete was a lead guide for the family-run, River to Rim Rafting Company, based out of Flagstaff. Like most professional river guides, he had worked his way up through the ranks the only way possible- through logging month after month, season after season in all manner of weather, rafting the Colorado River. This was one of the more tame trips at season’s end and, with only a handful of clients, Travis had jumped at the opportunity to spend time afloat with an old friend.

  Travis had worked as a guide for a few seasons during college, before joining the Army. Other than a few firearms training courses he had attended in Prescott, he hadn’t been in the southwestern wilderness in many years. The tension that was strung like a taut web across Travis’s face at the start of the trip, on September 5, had begun to melt away as he relaxed into the flow of life on the river during the past few weeks. Having Pete in command while he sat back and did kitchen duty was a luxury he relished.

  Despite being surrounded by mostly urban types on this trip, and immersed in the tranquility of the Canyon, Travis still felt the need to look over his shoulder. He reflexively selected his nightly bed with a boulder backstop and knowing all the exits to high ground. He felt naked without a pistol on his side, even though he had a hefty, fixed-blade strapped to his hip. He had enjoyed sleeping under open skies again without the jarring sound of mortar shells or gunfire, but it was only the last few days that allowed him to get out of the habit of studying the cliffs and mesas from a tactical perspective.

  Katy walked barefoot on the wet sand over to the breakfast buffet. “Don’t know how you boys ever get used to having this much grit in your cup of Joe,” she said.

  “You talkin’ about the sand or the coffee grounds?” replied Travis.

  Katy smiled and grabbed a cup of the thick, black elixir, dowsing it with a generous helping of brown sugar. “Is it a slow time of year for you guys usually?” she said looking at Pete. “We’ve only run into one other river party in the past four days. I expected we’d be fighting for campsites each night with other rafting groups.”

  “You never can tell from year to year, especially given the economy or that flu in the news that was shutting down travel in some parts. Who knows? Some years we’re nuts with back-to-back trips and other years some of us guides are looking for work in town,” Pete said with little conviction in his voice.

  Travis, who was wiping down the folding table, thought back to one of the river groups they encountered a week earlier. The leader said they were preparing to have one of their members evacuated via helicopter, as he was suffering from seizures and internal bleeding. Though Travis couldn’t ever recall seeing anyone with such blue marbled skin, in the brief look he got of the patient as they floated past their camp.

  With breakfast nearly complete, the five other participants slowly extricated themselves from their bedrolls and came over to feast. Afterward, they began breaking camp and stowing the items on board, while Pete and Travis lashed everything in place one last time. The takeout was only four hours down river and the shuttle driver at Diamond Creek beach would be waiting with a batch of fresh donuts and cold beer, a river rafting tradition.

  An hour later, they were floating through the serpentine gorge. As they paddled, Jim, a thinly built man from California, asked Pete about the geologic layer that ran through this part of the canyon and why they hadn’t seen anything like it before. Jim was the one person in the group who required constant hand-holding and always complained about the food, the weather, or the insects. He said on the first day that he was a college professor on sabbatical. He seemed more comfortable lost in his own thoughts than in socializing with the others.

  Pete leaned forward while continuing to row. “Well, the formation changes significantly in this cross-section. We are much deeper in the overall canyon and lower in elevation from where we started. The layer just above this is where the ancient Anasazi had their cliff-dwellings. That rock layer is also famous for its miles of underground caverns,” he said, slowing his paddling rhythm. “Not far from here there’s a tourist trap, where you can take an elevator down ten stories into the caverns for a guided trek. A hokey, roadside attraction but the tunnels sure are cool.”

  The rafts made their way through the sculpted inner passage of the canyon, winding past thickets of tamarisk trees lining the shoreline. “It sure has been peaceful this past week. I haven’t heard a single plane fly over the whole time,” said Katy, who was in Travis’s raft.

  “That’s true now that you mention it,” replied Travis, looking upward, pausing on a mid-oar stroke.

  The party of three women and three men, along with Travis and Pete, arrived at their final takeout point at Diamond Creek beach around 1130 am. After anchoring the rafts, everyone began moving gear thirty feet up under the shade of a rustic picnic area along the beach.

  Fran
and Mark, the only married couple on the trip, began pulling out coolers and cooking items. They were from Georgia and had both recently retired. Evelyn, who was a high-school principal from Washington in her early fifties, grabbed the life vests and oars; LB, a short fellow from New York, of Puerto Rican descent, lugged the bedrolls and camp gear. Jim merely grabbed his own pack and sat in the shade, watching everyone else work despite their glares.

  Over the next hour, Pete, Katy, and Travis began letting the air out of the rafts and stowing the rest of the items.

  “The shuttle drivers should be due in from Flagstaff any time,” said Pete. “But the river ranger who stays down at the beach to check permits, is nowhere in sight. Maybe he’s taking a snooze in his truck.”

  After everything was neatly stacked, the group took a shade break under a grove of nearby cottonwood trees where Diamond Creek merged with the Colorado River. Travis walked up the road to look around and then returned twenty minutes later. “There are no fresh tracks on the road or in the immediate area and it hasn’t rained here in over a week. Not sure why we’re not seeing any tire tracks or any sign of the river ranger?” said Travis wiping his brow.

  Pete’s face winced slightly while he brushed his blonde locks out of his eyes. “Not sure to be honest. The vans are usually here hours before us. Could be the road is closed temporarily from recent flash flood damage and they’re only letting in the shuttles. Either way, I’ll get on the SAT phone and give the main office a ring.”

  After a few minutes of silence on the phone, Pete stowed the device in his pack and shook his head in Travis’ direction. “Those devices are temperamental anyway,” said Travis. “I couldn’t stand using them in field operations. Hell, my smartphone is more reliable than one of those. Just give it a try in half an hour.”