Floating Hunger Read online

  Rolling Hunger

  Book Two of the Yard Gnome Action Team

  By RW Krpoun

  You can find my blog at: https://imadeitup.wordpress.com/blog/

  Dedicated to my wife Ann, and to the UND wargaming club, 1978-80.

  Copyright 2015 by Randall Krpoun

  All Right Reserved

  ISBN: 9781651595350

  Preface

  While every author hopes that his words will be emblazoned upon their reader’s mind, by the third book of a series a preface is in order. (Or you can just jump ahead to Chapter One)

  A group of radical factions from every point on the political spectrum (and a few whose creeds would not be reliably categorized) were unified into a loose confederation by Rakir Nawaz, a retired Indian general. This coalition, FASA, produced a weaponized virus (the 618 virus) whose intended purpose was the bring down the established society of the world, allowing a rebirth of Mankind, as envisioned by the various creeds within FASA.

  Intelligence services took note, and Nawaz was assassinated (possibly by Mossad), and FASA’s production facilities in Malaysia were taken out by nuclear devices launched by the USA.

  FASA managed to get seventeen dispersal units loaded with the virus dispatched before the strikes hit. While counter-terror forces stopped the dispersal units aimed at Miami, London, and Jerusalem, the releases in Pakistan (two), India (two), Tokyo, Shanghai, Saint Petersburg, Warsaw, Paris, Dover, Mexico City, Toronto, New York, and Seattle were sufficient to initiate a world-wide plague.

  The Miami device was captured largely intact, and three samples of the undeployed virus were secured by US forces. These three samples were dispatched to a secure facility by three different paths; one had to be destroyed when the transport unit was over-run. One unit, Fastbox Two, sent by air, crash-landed in central Florida after a mutiny by the aircrew.

  Fastbox Two’s sample, called the payload, remained in the hands of Staff Sergeant Marvin ‘Marv the Maniac’ Burleson, an Airborne Ranger, and over the next five days he (and a small group of volunteers he picked up along the way) struggled all the way to central Texas and the delivery of the payload. The group was actively hunted by FASA, as FASA desperately wanted to secure the undeployed virus for future biowar attacks.

  The group named itself the ‘Yard Gnome Action Team’ because their first fight as a group was clearing out infected subjects in order to access a small store. The spare key to the store was found taped to the base of a yard gnome; the gnome, named ‘Moogie’, became the team’s mascot.

  The 618 virus kills the young and the infirm, and turns the rest into semi-human psychopaths, commonly referred to as ‘zombies’ or ‘zeds’.

  After delivering the payload Marv resigned from the Army (cashing in on the gratitude for the accomplishment of his mission), and formed the YGAT Security Corporation with the rest of his group.

  Functioning as private paramilitary contractors, the Yard Gnomes recruited more personnel and took part in the testing phase of Rolling Hunger, a program of mounting paramilitary groups on trains for faster, more efficient deployment. Rolling Hunger, and the diligent efforts of the Gnomes in tracking down a wanted subject, inadvertently placed the YGAT team in the middle of various FASA and splinter schemes. It came to be known that before the outbreak a rogue group within FASA (the ERF) had infiltrated the bioweapon program and inserted a second virus, the 619 strain, which produced subjects who retained more cognitive abilities; these subjects are commonly referred to as ‘ghouls’.

  The ERF also infected zombies to transmit the 619 virus instead of the 618; these subjects are known as ‘vectors’. Lastly, it was discovered that the ERF is trying to complete the 620 virus, which will result in a subject (‘revenant’) which will have even greater intelligence and sustainability, and which is intended to displace Mankind as the top of the food chain on Earth.

  Both zombies and ghouls are less physically active than a normal Human being; they are highly resistant to shock or blood loss, so critical damage to the brain or spine is needed to end them. Zombies naturally defer to ghouls, and are much more cunning when in groups which include ghouls.

  Both viruses are transmitted by saliva (bite), not blood, and are very weak, not surviving long outside a host’s body. Once infected, a subject is quickly incapacitated by a high fever, and will fully ‘turn’ within 50-70 minutes. An experimental counteragent is in field use, and if applied to a bite within minutes has a chance to kill the virus.

  Organization of the YGAT Corporation

  Command Group: Director Marvin Burleson, Senior Chief Operators Ivan ‘Brick’ Lischensky, (Chief Mechanic) and Chip Wilson (Medic), one Operator*, and Gnome-4 (HUMVEE)

  Team One: Executive Officer Jefferson ‘JD’ Davis (Team leader), Senior Chief Operator Addison Smith (Second in Command), three Operators*, Operator Sylvia Santiago (Human Contact) and Gnome-1 (M35 2.5 ton truck).

  Team Two: Master Chief Operator Dyson Winters (Team leader), Chief Operator George Sanchez (Second in Command), three Operators*, Associate Anna Winters (Human Contact) and Gnome-2 (M35 2.5 ton truck).

  Team Three: Master Chief Operator Leslie “Bear” Mapplethorpe (Team leader), Chief Operator Frederick ‘Sauron’ Olsen (Second in Command), three Operators*, Operator Brenda Jean ‘Bambi’ Anderson (Human Contact) and Gnome-3 (M35 2.5 ton truck).

  Reserve Group: Angela Hunt (Cook) and Kat Fisher (General help), and Gnome-5 (light utility vehicle). Neither Angela or Kat have corporate rank.

  * = Associate or Operator rank.

  When the corporation operates without outside supervision, Kat functions as an extra operator. It is planned to recruit personnel so that operators can be left behind to rest in rotation, but to date there have not been enough suitable recruits and too many demands on the Corporation.

  Staff work: Angela takes care of food and household supplies, Brick fuel and all things vehicular, Chip medical supplies, Dyson arms and ammunition, and Addison intelligence and electronics.

  Common Terms

  Backstop: The area beyond a target which may be affected by a bullet that misses or over-penetrates the target.

  Counter-Asset Target List (CATL): (cattle) Non-citizens are placed on CATL status by order of the President; citizens are tried (in absentia) before a panel of Federal judges, and their recommendations are reviewed by a panel of five Congressmen before being forwarded to the President for inclusion on the list. Essentially the CATL is a bounty list, offering tax-free cash for key terrorist leaders.

  The CATL list data is posted on-line and as decks of playing cards, complete with photos and fingerprints.

  DEM: Department of Emergency Management, the agency that oversees the establishment and maintenance of Patriot Homesteads, Relocation Centers, and similar safe housing systems.

  DSR: Department of Strategic Response, the agency tasked with overseeing the fight against terrorism and the infected within the United States.

  ERF: Environmental Restoration Front, a radical eco-terrorist organization.

  FASA: The group responsible for the deployment of the 618 virus, and for mounting hundreds of terrorist attacks against numerous governments since the viral outbreak. The group’s name is in Lingala, and loosely translates into ‘Front for world alignment’.

  National Guard: All the military reserves have been called into Federal service, so the only difference between Regular Army and National Guard or Reserve units is a slight difference in equipment levels and the average age. However, the term is still commonly used by NG units.

  Militia: With the Federalization of all Reserve and National Guard units, state administrations are left with no military units for emergency use. In addition, in the wake of the Outbreak a variety of irregular combat groups spra
ng up, many achieving considerable success. With assistance from the Army the individual states are forming irregulars and volunteers into traditional militia battalions (500-800 troops each), which are equipped with whatever arms are to hand. The states often give these battalions a morale-boosting title, such as Missouri militia battalions being called ‘Rifle Battalions’. The militia battalions are made up of part-time and full-time members and assigned to the security of vital infrastructure. While they lack much in the way of formal military training, militia units tend to be highly motivated and built around cadres of experienced combatants. Army training teams work to bring militia units to a military standard of training.

  Chapter One

  The Scottish Princess, one of four Vista class cruise liners built in Italy for the Edinburg-based Royal Scots line, nimbly picked her way through the Belize Barrier Reef. Nine hundred sixty-four feet long, one hundred six feet at her widest, drawing twenty-five feet, with nine decks standing above her waterline the ship looked rectangular, ungainly, and a bit surreal as she traveled the clearly marked channels, but she was actually a handy ship for her size, capable of achieving twenty-four knots if needed. She dwarfed the lean, low warship escorting her, the USS John Finn, a Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class destroyer.

  Although handy, the ship required careful captaining as she slipped along the clearly marked channels between the hidden banks of coral that were the great reefs.

  “Hard aport!” Senior Chief Operator Ivan ‘Brick’ Lischensky bellowed, standing high above the blue water. Brick was a good-natured Polish immigrant in his thirties who had served in the Polish Army and as a security contractor in Afghanistan before the Outbreak. He looked a bit like the actor Daniel Craig, if Craig was shorter, tougher, and had the upper body strength of a stevedore. Brick was the Gnome’s chief mechanic, a skilled man with tools or a welding torch. “Flank speed one-third! Luff the starboard!”

  Senior Chief Operator Addison Smith obligingly spun the iron wheel with fast, sure turns as the ship neatly changed course. Slender, tough, olive-skinned, and hard-featured, with his dark hair now worn in a buzz-cut, Addison could pass (and had, in the past) as Italian, Greek, Hispanic, or Native American.

  “Listen, you Polish bastard, how many times do I have to tell you to quit making noise outside. the bridge?” A burly crewman stomped up, his annoyance deepening his Scottish accent. “You’ve got the rest of the entire bloody ship to yell on, so piss off from here. And you.” He jabbed a thick finger at Addison. “Stop playing silly buggers with that winch. It’s not a bloody toy.”

  “Chill out, dude.” Until very recently he would have never dared say anything to the mate, who was clearly a tough customer, but times had changed for Senior Chief Operator Chip Wilson. At six one Chip was the second-tallest Gnome, just topped by JD, and easily the largest, being big-boned and markedly overweight. Years working on a moving truck had meant that he was strong and overweight, and in fact he now weighed less than he had at the onset of the Outbreak, but in his mind he was still the pudgy geek he had been in high school.

  His face was too round to be handsome, although he had to admit his new buzz cut made him look less amiable than he actually was. Easy-going had been his life before the outbreak, moving households by day and performing heroics at night in Skyrim, WOW, and similar haunts. Now he moved salvage and faced danger for real, and wanted nothing so much as to go back to the old days. Except that the old days would never have included Sylvia, who somehow saw something desirable in an overweight over-tall gamer. He would resent her for getting him killed, but she was simply too hot for him to harbor ill-will.

  “You can stuff it, too,” the mate advised the medic, who was leaning against the railing. “You bastards can find somewhere else to take up space.”

  “We go,” Brick announced. “It stink like lamb guts here.”

  The mate scowled at the Pole, but didn’t reply as the three YGAT officers trooped down the stairs.

  Marvin ‘Marv the Maniac’ Burleson, Director of the YGAT Corporation and only a few months from being a Staff Sergeant in the US Army’s 75th Infantry Regiment (Airborne Ranger), leaned against the railing and watched the coast approach. Marv tended to look bigger than his six feet because the harsh planes of his face and his burr haircut (one clipper guide above shaved) gave him a look of sullen brutality that was neither wholly accurate nor inaccurate.

  Marv had not gotten his nickname in the Rangers for being the sort of wild man that the regiment often attracts, nor for being an exceptional drinker, bar fighter, or womanizer, three endeavors the Rangers also hold in high esteem. He had gotten his moniker in Afghanistan for his single-minded intensity, and it had stayed with him; having lost his young wife to a rock-climbing accident he had devoted himself to the Ranger mission to the exclusion of anything else.

  At least until the Outbreak; his actions in those early days had won him a commission, and ultimately a discharge. Marv was not out of the war against FASA and the infected, but he was done with being just a small cog in a big machine.

  “What are Dyson and Anna doing out there?” JD asked as he came up to lean on the rail next to Marv.

  The former Ranger glanced down towards the bow. “Doing the Titanic pose again.”

  “Newlyweds.” Executive Officer Jefferson ‘JD’ Davis snorted, shaking his head. The handsome ‘face man’ of the Corporation was fifteen years removed from his Navy days and there was gray in his meticulously groomed hair (he was one of the few Gnomes not to have a Marv-encouraged buzz cut), but his six foot two inch frame was still as toned as it had been when he had wrestled for Florida State. A successful career working the wrestling circuit as a promoter and agent had developed his people and administration skills, and Marv was only too happy to dump PR responsibilities onto JD’s capable shoulders.

  “What can you expect?” Marv shrugged. “They’re young, in love, and on a cruise ship.”

  “Yeah, I remember those days.”

  “Me, too.” Marv glanced at his second-in-command. “You ready for this?”

  JD sighed. The Outbreak had caught him away from home, and before he could return his wife had departed with her lover and his kids to Belize, her planned divorce having moved up in schedule due to the appearance of the virus. “Nervous as a sheep in a frat house. Not about her, she’s dead to me. But my kids…”

  “You’ve been talking with them,” Marv reminded him. “And the ‘cool factor’ of you coming here as a badass operator certainly won’t do you any harm.”

  “Yeah, the first hour will be the easy part. But sooner or later they’re going to ask questions I really don’t have answers for.”

  Marv pondered that. “I dunno. Stick with the truth, I guess.”

  “I’m not sure what the truth is.”

  “Can’t argue with that. Just do your best.”

  “I suppose.”

  Marv checked his watch. “Well, let’s have an officer’s call in ten minutes on the main deck by the entry point. It’s going to be game time before we know it.”

  The YGAT officers gathered on the main deck, leaning against the rails or sprawling in handy chaise lounges as their individual natures dictated. Chip and Brick stayed to the side, set apart by rank but no direct command responsibly, although both regularly commanded details. Addison leaned against the rail next to JD, his team leader.

  Master Chief Operator Dyson Winters stood next to Addison, a clean-cut young man in his late twenties whose sun-bleached blond hair looked white in its fresh buzz-cut, Dyson was regarded as one of the physically strongest Gnomes (only Brick eased him out of the top title) and undoubtedly the most dangerous with his bare hands. Before the outbreak Dyson had had a dojo in Atlanta teaching mixed martial arts and caged fighting techniques, and fought in his own right. An expert bow hunter, he was commonly tasked with scouting missions and recon duty, and was a frequent volunteer for dangerous missions. The Gnomes had arranged for his reunion with Anna, his fiancé, and they had married
three weeks ago; this was his first post-honeymoon mission.

  With Dyson was Chief Operator George Sanchez, the ‘old man’ in the Gnomes hired after the corporation was formed and the first non-founding member to be promoted to a leadership position, a former Marine in his mid-thirties, a quiet man of average height who looked shorter because he was barrel-chested and thick through the shoulders. He was dark-skinned and balding, with a dense mustache that gave him an air of educated aloofness that reminded Marv of the actor John Benedict Hillerman. His air of dignity and quiet competence made him stand out amongst the rowdy young Associates, and whose respect amongst that group was demonstrated by the absence of a nickname, a unique circumstance in the lower ranks of the company.

  Master Chief Operator Leslie ‘Bear’ Mapplethorpe lounged in a chaise, a big man with dark, brooding eyes and a strong jaw. Before the Outbreak he had been an unaffiliated biker and dealer in electronic goods of questionable legality; he had met Marv and JD in Florida before any sort of group had been formed, and with those two, two members who had not survived to reach Texas, and Addison was considered a ‘founding’ Gnome. Dyson, Chip, and Brick had joined over the next two days.

  With Bear was his second in command, Chief Operator Fredrick ‘Sauron’, a tow-headed former delivery driver and State Champion quarterback now three years out of high school, an Odessa native whose nickname came from the from the modified yellow and black skull-faced welding mask he wore when in action or riding in the back of a truck. The Gnomes wore tactical goggles or ballistic glasses to protect their vision from road dust and their eyes from blood splatter, but Sauron had decided to take it one step further. How the mask had translated into the nickname wasn’t clear, but it had stuck.

  The officers’ meeting made a suitably war-like appearance, as all Gnomes wore desert battle dress uniforms, or DCUs, the discontinued ’coffee-stain’ series, the fruits of a lucky find in their first corporate salvage operation. Marv had been determined to get the corporation into uniform and the discovery of countless bales of the discontinued uniforms was a Godsend. They had not found headgear to match so the former Ranger had decreed that Gnomes would provide their own headgear in black. The same warehouse had had a cache of the collar brass used by Army ROTC program, which had promptly been adapted to Gnome service. It was Marv’s belief that the first step to creating professionals was to make them look like professionals.