by A. J. Sikes
Occasionally he would glance at the pile of concrete dust in the middle of the floor.
Jed let the others sleep until dawn began to creep in around the cracks in the doors. He woke Garza and Keoh first and had them watch the door back into the house. McKitrick roused herself and went to wake Mehta. When everyone was up, they had a quiet meal, then restocked their packs with as many MREs as they could carry.
“What’s our plan, Sergeant,” McKitrick asked.
“We check outside, see what’s up. If it’s clear, we head for Radout’s FOB. If it’s not, we fight our way out.”
With Garza in the lead, they breached the door leading inside and quickly moved down the hall to the entryway. The stink of death filled the house.
Jed took point at the front door after the pushed the couch out of the way. He stepped into the cool morning air with his rifle at the ready. Birds fluttered in the trees nearby. Some smaller ones picked at the ground around the houses. Buzzards would circle then drop down to the street. Jed forced himself to ignore them. He didn’t need to see what they were eating.
Every house had been attacked as far as Jed could see. After a few steps down to the sidewalk, he let his weapon hang against his chest. There was nothing to shoot. No threat to respond to.
Bodies littered the ground. Jed thought about scavenging the ammo from the sailors’ weapons. The streets looked empty of any threats, but he needed to confirm that before he set his people to doing anything with their heads down.
“Anybody got movement?” he asked.
“Nothing,” McKitrick said from Jed’s right. The others came back with the same from their positions behind him.
“Let’s check Mercer’s place,” Garza said. “I bet he stayed hid while his people got chewed up.”
“I hate to say it, Garza,” Jed answered, “but you’re probably right.”
The gate to the neighborhood had been left open. Their SUV was turned around on the road, and on its side.
He led the squad to Mercer’s front door. It was open a few inches. Jed knew what they would find, but he still let himself hope that Mercer was inside, alive and unharmed. It was all about numbers. As long as he wasn’t completely crazy, Mercer could help them survive.
But Mercer wasn’t alive. He was lying on the floor inside his house, right where Jed had been standing when they’d had their chat. The monsters had their way with him. Streaks and smears of blood trailed away from the body and toward the windows in the next room. They were all broken from the outside. Large rocks sat here and there on the floor.
A file folder and notebook spilled some papers across Mercer’s desk. A set of keys lay amidst the shattered glass near Mercer’s hand. Jed picked them up, then checked the papers on the desk.
“Sonofabitch,” Jed said as he read the pages. “Y’all, I think we found our bomber, or maybe one of them.”
The squad whirled to face him. Garza was next to him first. The others slowly stepped closer, keeping their eyes on the access points around them.
“I got diagrams of the daisy chain here,” Jed said. “And y’all aren’t gonna like this. He was working with Kip.”
“What?” Garza was looking over Jed’s shoulder and reached a hand for the page. Jed let him take it. He’d seen enough to settle his fears. Kipler’s name was scrawled under the diagrams beside a note about how much ANFO it would take to destroy the causeway.
“They used fucking IEDs,” Garza said. “Kip always talked about hunting bomb makers in Fallujah. Motherfucker was probably taking lessons. You think that was him last night, Sergeant? With the dogs?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t hear his voice, but I only had a few days around him before he went AWOL. Could have been his squad out there. I’m more worried about where those guys were headed last night. Sounded like they had a destination.”
“You thinking they’re going back to Galveston?” Keoh asked.
“Maybe. If Kip has it in for all of us, could be he’s bringing the horde home to roost. If that was him last night, I mean. Shit, we need to be moving, y’all. Police up some ammo on the way out—”
A heavy diesel motor rumbled outside, snapping Jed’s attention to the windows.
“Watch the windows. McKitrick, at our six. Watch the hall in case anyone tries to come behind us. Mehta, you and me on the front door.”
A convoy of three vehicles pulled up to the open gate. The first vehicle was a pickup with more primer than paint on it. It was followed by an SUV with the same coloring. The final vehicle was a desert-color five-ton truck.
The driver of the SUV got out and shook his head at the overturned vehicle beside the road. He came around the front of his SUV and Jed recognized his walk.
It was Greg Radout.
Jed rushed outside and called to him, waving as he headed for the gate.
“We’re over here!”
Radout startled and went for his sidearm, but relaxed when Jed got closer. The squad came out to join them.
“Looks like they hit you here after they were done with us,” Radout said. “They stormed our camp. I lost more people last night than the entire time I was in Iraq.”
“Shit man, I’m sorry. How’d you know to come here?”
“I didn’t. Just guessed, and figured if Mercer’s people held them off, we’d be safer with them than out on our own. How’d you get stuck here?”
Jed explained what had happened the day before, how Mercer roped them into working guard duty, and how they’d sheltered in his supply point after losing Parsons.
Jed let the silence hang between them for a bit. Radout broke it first.
“I knew Mercer. I should have told you, but I honestly figured you’d be in and out of this place and heading our way. We never spotted that hippie’s car again. That was another reason I wanted to come here. In case Mercer was sheltering the driver. Wouldn’t surprise me if he was. The dude was a whole week’s worth of bad news.”
“Had the same thought about him when I got here,” Jed said. “Was hoping I’d be proven wrong, but… I found this in his office.”
Jed held out the papers.
“That motherfucker,” Radout said. “Who’s Kipler? Anybody on Galveston have that name?”
“One of our squad leaders. Him and his people went AWOL a while back.”
“And you didn’t have any indication he might be dirty?”
“Nothing, man. I only met the dude a week before he took off, and hardly saw him more than twice.”
Radout stewed on that for a bit, spat at the ground, then looked Jed in the eye.
“We’ve got a truck full of supplies. Stuffed pretty good,” Radout said, aiming a thumb at the half-ton. “Let’s load up what we can from that garage, then we’ll hit the road.”
“Where to?”
“Baytown. They have fortifications there. More than just chain link and razor wire.”
“You know anybody there?”
“Got a few contacts. They value hard work up there, and security is always a good thing,” he said, motioning to Jed’s M4. “But you need to prove you’re worth keeping around.”
“How do we do that?”
“Bring them something they can use. The stuff in the supply here might do it. If not, then maybe Kipler’s head on a plate. I’ll get my truck in here. You can all climb on and help us load it.”
Jed called for Mehta and Keoh to mount up on the half ton. Radout’s guys wheeled the beast around the pickup and SUV, and headed down the street to the supply point.
Before Jed moved out to follow the truck, he had Garza and McKitrick check Mercer’s garage.
“See if there’s a car out there for these keys.”
He handed them to Garza and they moved out. McKitrick stuck her head out Mercer’s front door a moment later.
“SUV in there, Sergeant,” she said. “Bigger than the one we came in. It’s in good shape.”
“Bring it out by the gate, then join us at the supply point.”
&nbs
p; Jed jogged to catch up to Radout at the head of the column.
“If that garage is stocked up like you say, it should help us get into Baytown. Sorry about what I said earlier, about Kipler’s head. Baytown isn’t really bloodthirsty, not like some of the wingnut groups out there. They just want you to come in with enough material to make it worth their while to share their food and water with you.”
“So, you gotta buy a seat if you want to sit. I get it.”
“Pretty much. I just hope there’s enough gear to get us all in.”
They’d reached the supply point. Jed helped Radout’s crew load up as much as they could. They grabbed the MREs and water first, then the wet-weather gear, some tools, and a dozen bags of concrete. That left nearly a full pallet worth stacked around the garage doors.
Jed had Mehta carry the corpsman’s bag, and as a last effort, they took some shovels and dug a grave for Parsons. Radout and his team helped dig, too. Jed and Mehta brought Parsons outside and laid him in the grave with his weapon. It took a good hour for them to finish, even with Radout’s people helping.
“What about all the weapons around here?” Jed asked as they were getting back into the truck. “And the ammo?”
“They’re pretty well armed up there. But we should take it anyway, at least whatever we can carry. We don’t want the wingnuts finding all of this. We have some det cord we can use to torch anything we have to leave behind.”
Jed and his squad walked in front of the half-ton, leading it around the neighborhood. Whenever they found weapons or dead sailors, they’d stop and load up the gear. Radout walked with Jed, filling him in on the Baytown people and how they ran things.
“They’ll want to vet you guys good. Think about anything you can do to prove you’re not going to be a problem. Last thing you want is for them to think you’re a wingnut trying to infiltrate.”
“You keep saying ‘wingnuts’. Who’s that?”
“I like to think of them as the locals, but who knows where they’re all from originally. A few bands of them got together around Houston, out in the back country. They’ve mostly taken over rural suburbs, and some of them are pretty nasty about how they do things. I’ve never met them, just heard stories.”
“Like what?”
“You don’t want to know. Suffice to say they’re the people you don’t want surviving the apocalypse, except they did. You’re stuck either killing them first or staying the hell out of their way.”
“Is everyone out here a wingnut?” Jed asked, leaning down to collect a battered M16 from a dead sailor.
“No, they’re a minority really. The Lone Star Militia runs the show in Houston proper, and they’re good people. Mostly. They didn’t like it when the Army rolled in trying to establish martial law, but who can blame ’em? You have smaller groups, like at Baytown. Also good folks. They’re on their own, separate from Lone Star; they follow their own rules and have their own command structure.”
Jed had more questions, but he let it go.
It took them an hour or so to police the neighborhood for stray weapons and ammunition. They went by the crackhead’s house, and Jed expected to find the man’s body ripped up on the lawn, but he wasn’t there, and wasn’t in the house either.
“Somebody you wanted to find?” Radout asked as Jed came out.
“Just a druggie who was giving us shit last night. Saw him right when the things attacked. He was standing here smoking a cigarette in the middle of it all.”
“Guess we know what happened to him then,” Radout said.
Jed nodded, but he wasn’t so sure. Something nagged at him about the crackhead’s attitude, how he was so relaxed. Jed kept thinking about the guy and his dog while he helped Radout empty the guard towers of weapons. When they were done, they’d collected an arms-room worth of gear from around the neighborhood, sliding the weapons into any gaps they could find in the back of the five-ton.
They only had to leave behind a few M16A2s. Jed rigged up a coil of det cord to destroy the weapons. They set the package up in Mercer’s garage after McKitrick wheeled the commander’s SUV out. She drove while Garza, Keoh, and Mehta shared the rear seat. Jed rode TC and they followed Radout’s convoy through the front gate.
The sound of their demo charge echoed into the air behind them as they drove through the refinery field.
There was a radio in the vehicle, and Radout got them linked up to the blue net that Six Team used. It crackled as they got back on the highway.
“Hey, with that news about Kipler I almost forgot,” Radout said. “I found out who it was that you fished out of the water.”
“Yeah?” Jed asked.
“Guy named Palver. He’d joined us a few months ago. Used to be a Marine Raider. He was good with demo.”
Jed let that sit in his mind. He was about to lift the mic to ask Radout for more about Palver when the radio crackled again and a strained voice broke through the static.
“Anyone receiving…this is Hometown Actual. Request nine—”
Jed snatched up the mic and replied, “Hometown, this is Shorewatch 1 prepared to copy.” He dug into his cargo pocket for his notepad. It was a moment of tense silence in the truck while they waited for the LT’s reply. When it came, his voice broke with pain.
“Line one…tip of Tiki Island. No map. Line two, this channel, Hometown Actual.”
Jed scribbled the LT’s location down and waited for the report of his condition.
“Line tree, alpha…one. Line four, alpha. Line five—”
The radio went silent. Jed waited before trying to raise the LT again.
“Hometown, Shorewatch, how copy?”
No reply came.
“LT’s hurt bad,” Keoh said.
He hailed Radout and told him they’d meet up at Baytown.
“Gotta go back for our man first.”
“Okay, but make sure you have a white flag flying when you get to Baytown. They’ll shoot first otherwise.”
“Had enough of that with Mercer’s crew. Thanks for the heads up.”
“Hooah. Good luck,” Radout said.
As Keoh took them back down the road toward the causeway, Jed tried to reach the LT again.
“Hometown, this is Shorewatch 1. How copy?”
He kept trying as the scenery shifted from the refinery districts to the barren marshy wastes they’d come through the day before.
“Hometown, Shorewatch 1. We are en route. ETA ten minutes.”
— 17 —
Emily woke up in a rush of panic. The men had dropped sacks over her and Danitha’s heads and taken them in the van. They’d driven for a while, then stopped. Emily fell asleep at one point, and only woke briefly to feel someone stabbing a needle into her arm. Danitha was still with her, as far as she knew, but where was she?
She tried moving her left arm. It hurt like hell, and was still in the sling, but she couldn’t move it at all. She couldn’t move her head either. Emily felt with her other hand and found a Velcro strap. It connected to an actual sling that wrapped her wrist and held it against her chest. A plastic collar ringed her neck and held her head fixed in place.
She put her hand out and felt beneath her. She was lying on a bed or a couch of some kind. It felt like a leather cushion. The air was humid around her, thick and heavy on her face. She blinked her eyes and wiped at them with her good hand. Slowly, her surroundings came into focus. Gauzy curtains wrapped around the space and blocked her view of anything else, but she could make out figures moving in the room beyond. Their voices were hushed and soft, and would have been pleasant if Emily didn’t feel like she’d been taken prisoner.
Before she could decide whether or not to call for help, the curtain swished aside and a blond woman wearing green hospital scrubs came in.
“Well, look who’s awake,” she said.
“Where am I?”
“Aid station, honey. My name’s Jennifer. You can call me Jenny if you want.”
“Where is Dani? What happened
?”
“You’re gonna be fine. Those boys that roughed you and your friend up feel real bad about it. I don’t blame you if you’re thinking you’d like to give them a piece of your mind. But they thought you was somebody else. You rest up now. There’ll be time for reckoning later.”
“Why can’t I move my head?”
“Those boys hit you from behind pretty hard. Doctor’s worried about your neck. We don’t have X-rays here, so she put you in a brace for now. Just in case.”
Aid station? Where? Which militia had captured them? Was Danitha alive or dead?
Another woman came in. She was dark skinned and wore a white doctor’s coat.
“Hi Jenny,” she said to the nurse. Then, to Emily, “Hello there. I’m Doctor Allison DuBois. How are you feeling?”
“I’m scared,” Emily said. “Where is Danitha? What happened?”
Jennifer stepped out and Doctor DuBois came closer. She put a hand on Emily’s shoulder. “You were captured by a few of our more impulsive border agents. They thought you were someone else. You were driving a truck that had been seen before, where people were killed. Brutally. Our people were on the hunt, but I guess you took out the bad guys for us.”
“No, that was Angie. She—” Emily’s voice caught in her throat as she recalled the girl’s final moments.
“Your friend told us what happened, and about the girl who helped you. I’m sorry she died. The good news is you’re here now, and we’re going to take care of you.”
“Is this Baytown?”
“Yes, it is,” Doctor DuBois said.
“You had a bounty on Angie. She said you wanted her for killing a man who attacked her.”
“That was her story. I remember her. I also remember the man she killed. I tried to save him.”
“Did he tell you a different story?”
“No. He wasn’t able to speak, because she destroyed his larynx when she stabbed him.”
Emily thought about Angie, her temper and her attitude of always needing the upper-hand, and how underneath she had simply been a young woman stuck in a world without rules or boundaries except those she made for herself.