The NorthCom Commander, Admiral Winnefeld, James A, sat at a field desk in a randomly chosen campground in west of Virginia. He was man with a sturdy build, close cropped regulation black hair that had started to show grey and white a few years ago. He was wearing borrowed army issue fatigues with admiral rank on his chest. He held his hard blue eyes fixed on the report he was preparing for the newly appointed SecDef in a few hours. His face was a map of the stress he had been under his entire life, even if he viewed the burden of leadership as a challenge to overcome. Admiral Winnefeld took a sip of the lifeblood of all commanders, a cup of bitter coffee so acidic and thick he could feel it dissolving his teeth, and thanked the Lord for paranoid nutjobs who though the world was out to get them. The written continuity of government and NorthCom defensive plans had called for him to relocate to a bunker complex somewhere in flyover country, but so many contingency plans had been potentially compromised that they were improvising as the situation developed. Even if the plans weren'tcompromised they would still be improvising. Not only because the situation was so far outside anything they had planned for, but also because nobody actually reads any of those plans. This was playing out well because zombie discs, for lack of a better term, had been found lurking in two backup command and control facilities. This new enemy, the zombies and alien machines controlling them, had fallen into the same trap many other enemy commanders had in the past. They had actually studied the US military and government manuals. Despite the best efforts of their writers, the majority of the US military does not even read its own manuals, so an enemy gains almost nothing from studying them. All put together it meant something significant, but immediately it meant that he was in a randomly chosen location, hand writing reports, instead of his climate-controlled office typing on a computer.

More reports and information had started stream in over the last few hours as all the subordinate units meshed into the current chain of command. Status updates came into his office, usually delivered by a runner, and orders flowed out. Analog hardline and secure line of sight communication networks were being setup, but progress was slow. Most of the equipment they were using had been on its way to getting phased out or obsoleted, but it was brick simple enough that the communication techs believed it could be secured. Every military asset in North America was on the move somewhere, or soon would be, and he had overall command.

He sighed, bringing his mind back to the subject of his report.

Murphy and the team who recovered him.

He had just come from a meeting with his staff officers, and the situation was chaotic, but stabilizing. All the public knew was that there were zombies, a fair amount people knew that the zombies were created by machines. What even fewer people knew was in the report he was writing by hand.

One lone former cav scout named Murphy had infiltrated an alien craft, killed the occupant(s), and then been recovered by a group of extremely well armed military veterans. Apparently, most of them were on government watch lists for various reasons. The amount of weapons they had stockpiled, their skill sets, and/or their mental health records. This made them easier to identify, but more difficult to track down due to their distrust of authority. The team’s leader, Joshua Hoss, had delivered a concise report of what happened to the first national guard unit on the scene. He also presented a letter of essential need, stating they were all currently working as security contractors and excluded from reactivation, making them immune to military authority. This last parts was of course not true, but by the time the bureaucrats figured it out and the report was passed up and back down the chain of command it was too late. Before anyone could get ahold of them they had vanished off the face of the earth.

The badly injured Murphy had vanished from his hospital room, despite having both legs amputated. Four hours later the hospital had exploded along with the listed addresses of everyone who rescued him. This confirmed that the still functioning communication networks were compromised, not surprising considering the technologically advanced nature of their current enemy. But it also meant that the enemy had other means of attack than the obvious and were willing to give away their capabilities to eliminate those men and women. Officially, they were all listed as dead, because whoever… whatever they were fighting viewed them as a threat. Unofficially, SOCom had mobilized an entire task force to recover them, off the books. Without involving any electronic devices or even putting anything in writing. They were not even allowed to draw on their black budget unless the funds were already withdrawn. There was no code name for the operation or call sign for the targets. Just get them, secure them so they could be used. How well they cooperated determined how they would be used. If the enemy was after those specific people, they could be used as bait at the least. His PsyOps team wanted to use them as some kind of mascot and his operations teams wanted to use them as a training aid. Personally, he wanted to use them as a security detail, but that would be a misuse in the extreme.

An exhausted looking Lieutenant Adams, one of his aids, burst through the door flap of his tent holding a battered folder and enthusiastically proclaimed “Sir! We have them!” and slapped the contained papers on his desk, almost spilling his coffee. The jumble of papers, some stained and ripped, others dog eared and highlighted, the one on the top of the stack was a hand receipt that had two blocks circled, highlighted, and underlined. “Scar Company” and “Joshua Hoss”

“What is this?”

“Sir, Joshua Hoss, signed for thousands of gallons of aviation fuel and multiple crates of ammunitions in Fort Irwin.” It was the latest breadcrumb of a trail left by Hoss, they had been sighted at multiple locations moving west, after somehow acquiring two cutting edge helicopters. The next pages in the report were a roster of the units that were responding to orders to move on LA, this included two helicopters by the callsign Serria Charlie 1 and Serria Charlie 2.

Admerial Winnefeld rocked back in his chair as he considered this for a moment. The operation in LA was turning out to be a blood path, with civilian casualty projections already in the millions. The situation was a nightmare, panicked civilians had failed to evacuate. By the time they realized there was a problem it was already too late to get out of the city. The navy was running patrols off the shore to rescue survivors, but few people had made the choice to run to the water and so far, no civilians had been flown out of the airports. Hoss was either crazy, senile, or ballsy beyond belief to volunteer for that operation. “I guess they didn’t make a run for it like we thought. Pass this information to the taskforce and start your section on rest cycles.”

“Yes, sir” Adams said before hurrying back out of the tent.

Admiral Winnefeld leaned forward over his desk and thought, at least there is progress on one objective. He heard his personal Blackhawk start spinning up its engines to carry the message to the SOCom. He completed his report with the updated information and put it in the stack of other reports that he would hand deliver later today. Mentally he crossed one minor task off his list and moved on to the next, the evacuation of New York.