by LeRoy Clary
Sue jabbed me with her elbow at me and pointed to the man with the rocket launcher. “Why isn’t he firing again?”
I turned to Major Dundee and asked, “What’s happening?”
“He only had two rockets.”
Another man leaped to his feet and raced to the end of the pier, lugging what looked like a six-foot-long green tube. Another followed behind a green canvas sack over his shoulder. The first shouldered the bazooka, a weapon I recognized from the war games on my game console in the basement.
The second man inserted a shell and the first fired at the cluster of three ships behind the smoke and flames of the first two. The shell fell far short. He tried again, this time after his partner pounded his shoulder to tell him to fire at will, the bazooka was tilted much higher. The second shell fell short by a hundred yards or more.
They turned and ran, in our direction. A few bullets struck uncomfortably close, which caused them to zig and zag. They made it safely.
I asked, “Do you have more shells?”
“About a dozen,” the second man said.
“Good try, but no sense in wasting them. Maybe we can get you closer.”
They both nodded eagerly.
The second ship, the one that had taken a rocket where the water rushed in, listed so far to one side, it looked ready to roll over. The number of men leaping from the first ship increased. The water was dotted with them. Firing from the beach at the edge of the pier was almost continuous.
I turned to look. The gunboat crews were pinned down at the beach. All the shooting had brought more people from Everett to find out what was happening. Many had chosen to join in. We now had hundreds perched on the hillside, all waiting for any of them to expose themselves.
The white-haired SEAL carried a green kayak balanced on his head as he jogged our way. Behind him, others tried to keep up. I estimated darkness would fall in a few hours. The kayaks would head out then.
The SEAL put his kayak down and motioned for the others to do the same in a semi-circle around him. He started a lecture, probably teaching them how to attach the magnets with the C4 to the hulls, the best places to do it, and how to approach the ships. He didn’t need my input.
More gunboats from the other seventeen ships appeared and raced for the shore to support those pinned down there. I motioned to the man with the bazooka. He jogged to me. “Listen, those gunboats are going to land and they will give us hell. Can you and your buddy go blow up the gunboats that are already here?”
He cracked a crooked smile. “If they blow up, those others will think twice about landing there, right?”
“Can you do it?” It became a rhetorical question and the pair of them quickly covered the few hundred yards to where the fighting was, and where five gunboats and their crews were attempting to gain a foothold on the beach.
Our men ducked behind a cinderblock shed and loaded the bazooka. With the tube raised, the first stepped out, took quick aim, and fired. He leaped back under cover. The shell struck the gunboat in the midst of the other four. The explosion threw flames twenty feet into the air. A secondary explosion that I took to be a second shot fired by the bazooka, but was not, came within seconds. Then another. It was not a video game.
Two of the gunboats no longer existed. Another was burning. Soldiers were scattered, some looked dead. Others cried for help in a language I didn’t understand. I puked and splashed vomit on my feet and still bare ankles. Those people nearest me moved a step or two away.
The bazooka holder stepped into the open again and fired another shell at the two boats least damaged. More explosions and fires. He and the man carrying more shells turned and raced back to where I stood wiping my chin with the back of my sleeve.
A man I hadn’t seen before approached and saluted stiffly. I could get used to the respect they showed. I returned it, hitting my forehead too hard with my fingers and flinching.
He said, “The Commodore of that enemy fleet is on the radio. He wants to speak with you.”
“Where’s the radio?”
“Follow me, sir.”
I followed. There were five men, all with radios in front of them under a brown tent set up well back from the action. The firing of rifles was still almost constant. I accepted the preferred microphone and squeezed the transmit button. I paused.
“Captain Bill,” Sue prompted. “Tell them who you are.”
“Captain Bill here,” I said in a pompous voice. “To whom am I speaking?”
An echoey voice replied in perfectly enunciated English. “Surrender now and you may live.”
When I didn’t respond, Sue reached out, squeezed the button on the mic again and said in a husky voice that she pretended to be mine, “Surrender, and your ship may still be floating in an hour, ass hole.” The exact words he’d used, all but the two at the end.
“I have ten thousand trained soldiers in this harbor. You have no chance.”
Sue still held my hand with the mic. She transmitted again, “Maybe you had that many a while ago, but a lot of them are swimming right now, so you can’t count them.”
“I order you to surrender or we will storm your shores and take no prisoners.”
Sue puffed out her chest and said gruffly, “Have you looked up in the sky lately? If not, Captain Bill says you should. He’s called in an airstrike on your ships. Their ETA is about ten minutes.”
She let go of my hand. All eyes were on her. I said it first, “What good will that do? We don’t have any way to call in an airstrike.”
She grinned and shrugged in the way fourteen-year-olds do when dismissing others. She said, “We know that. He doesn’t. I hope he has a real bad ten minutes wait. I’d love to see a plane, any plane, flying this way.”
The laughter around me caught me by surprise. The men in the radio area were repeating the conversation to anyone listening. A boom sounded, another explosion, but it was different.
We ran outside and found a cloud of smoke near the edge of the pier. A cannon mounted on wheels sat there. Exposed, it looked like it was leftover from the Civil War over a hundred and fifty years earlier. The thing may have been sitting beside the steps of the city hall or VFW building earlier today. It had been covered with tarps and hidden from the ships, but it was at the edge of the concrete pier and pointed at the gunboats. The cloud of smoke slowly dissipated as the cannon was rolled back nearer us and three men leaped to reload.
The word came to us that it had fired ball bearings and steel nuts, like a giant shotgun. It was being reloaded and pointed to where the soldiers on the gunboats would come to take the pier from us. When I looked, the second ship was in the last stages of sinking, the stern high in the air, while the first was completely engulfed in flames. Only seventeen more to deal with.
Gunboats from those seventeen started massing together. Probably forty of them, each with twenty or more men, all heavily armed. They were determined to get a foothold so they could land more and more troops, enough to overwhelm our pathetically small force by sheer numbers and superior weapons.
I turned to look up at Everett sitting on the hill above and saw hundreds of people arriving. From where didn’t matter. They must have been hiding in the city or living with gangs, but wherever they’d been, they were now settling down in on the hillside with their rifles. More were working their way to the bottom, to join with us. At a guess, there were five hundred of our people protecting the hillside from the invaders.
While that seemed an impossible and formidable force to overcome, there were ten thousand trained and better-armed troops on the ships waiting in the harbor. Major Dundee must have had the same reaction and realization. He’d come into the tent a few moments earlier and waited for my attention.
“Major?” I asked.
“Sir, what are our plans?”
Without pause, I said, “We have perhaps five hundred people to hold off ten thousand. We’ve been lucky so far. Do you have any ideas?”
“I do,” Sue said before
he could respond in the negative. She continued, “Five hundred against ten thousand isn’t fair. We need more. Dispatch the sailboats, send motorcycles and send radio messages to everyone in the northwest. Tell them whoever is in on those ships sent the blight that killed our friends and families. If they want a piece of them, get their asses here with whatever weapons they have and fight alongside us.”
Major Dundee looked from her to me. “Sort of like sending a hundred Paul Reveres to alert the citizens the British are coming. I like it.”
She smiled sweetly, but her eyes were hard. She said, “We’ll have another thousand here by dawn, and more by the end of tomorrow. In two or three days, we’ll outnumber them.”
The major turned to me. “Do I have your permission to do as she says?”
“Yes. Tell everyone to spread the word. Those who came on motorcycles should head out, stop and tell everyone they encounter. We need help. Lots of it.”
“And you think they will come?”
“I do,” I told him, as certain of that statement as any I’d ever made.
He rushed away. Ten minutes later, over the intermittent gunshots, the roar of thirty motorcycles was music to my ears.
More gunboats joined the others still on the water circling fast and sweeping in close and firing, before retreating. They broke into three smaller groups, about ten boats in each. I suspected what would happen next but couldn’t prevent it. Part of them went north of us, others south, and the last group came directly at us on the pier. While we could hold the pier, at least for a while, there were not enough of us to control the entire waterfront. They would land hundreds of troops to our left, a few hundred more to our right, and hundreds of others would attack directly at us.
I considered withdrawing.
The white-haired SEAL was striding my way. He placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t do it. If they take this pier, it’s over.”
“We don’t have enough to stop them. I can’t order all these people to stay and be killed.”
He looked out at the ships—and beyond. At the sun that was almost touching the tops of the Olympic mountains. “Can you spread the word for them to stay until midnight?”
That gave them six hours to escape before dawn. “I can do that.”
In appreciation, he pounded my shoulder with his balled fist so hard my knees almost buckled. He turned and hurried to where his group was gathered, still talking and planning and issuing orders I didn’t understand. He didn’t seem worried and the men with the kayaks were in good spirits.
Sue took me a few steps away from everyone else. We stood beside a rusted Buick as she said, “Remain calm. You have to set an example. You’re doing great.”
“I have no right to be giving orders. If these people ever find out I’m just a geek who lived in a basement, they won’t do anything I say. I don’t know what I’m doing or how this happened to put me in charge. You and Steve are doing ten times what I am.”
“Stand tall. You are the figurehead, Captain. You have us to support you. Steve, Major Dundee, the SEAL, and me. And others. Just take a few deep breaths and watch what’s going to happen.”
I turned to the setting sun but could only see seventeen ships filled with ten thousand troops between the sun and me. And of course, the gunboats they kept sending our way. “At midnight, I’m sending everyone away.”
She gave me a faint smile but didn’t argue.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The sun went down as more clouds moved in. The gunfire decreased as the targets became invisible or at least, harder to see. Hopefully, that would help the SEAL and the kayakers, too. The major found me and said that he’d heard many more people had arrived or were in transit. The motorcycles had splint up onto small groups were spreading the word.
They were riding into every part of the city and even the small towns nearby. I wondered if they had recruited the same guys on motorcycles in Marysville who had chased us. And the Indians guarding their reservation. Even those in Darrington would come if the word reached them—and if they were sober enough.
He said, “When the survivors heard about what’s happening here, they got so pissed some are running on foot to reach us before the main attack.”
“There are still ten-thousands of the those on the ships,” I said. “They are better armed and trained, so don’t get your hopes up that we’re going to win. Issue the order that unless told otherwise, we all leave here at midnight.”
He snorted, then straightened. “Sir, not to attempt to correct you, but I think you’re wrong. From what I hear, nobody has refused to help. They insist on it. And despite what you say, nobody is leaving.”
Steve, who hadn’t said anything for quite a while, leaned closer. “How are you going to feed all of them?”
Major Dundee said, “I forgot to mention it in all the excitement. When we broke into the armory, there were pallets of MREs. We loaded case after and case into that second duce-and-a-half truck, a hundred-and-forty-four dehydrated meals in foil packs in each. Should we distribute them?”
I knew the letters stood for dehydrated meals in foil packs. Meals, Ready to Eat, MREs. Those video games were coming in handy. “One per fighter. Honor system. We don’t have the resources to control who takes more. Pass the word.”
“The people up on the hill, too?” he asked.
Without hesitation, I said, “They’re here to fight with us and just as hungry.”
He turned and gave orders to pass out the meals, one to a person, to everyone who had come to help us. He sent men with cases balanced on their shoulders up the roads and to the hill where folks were located. It was up to them to find water to mix with the meals, but that shouldn’t be too hard. Many carried water bottles or canteens.
People kept coming to me for orders. Oddly, they already knew most of the answers and just wanted confirmation. Sue and Steve responded to many of them for me, as they shielded me from making hard choices. They kept me from making stupid ones, too. I walked to the radio tent and entered. To my dismay, all five operators leaped to their feet. It startled me to look around for what had caused their reaction.
The answer came in a hot flash of understanding. It was me. I ordered them to sit and continue, as I asked questions. Yes, they’d all reached others, and those who were within thirty miles or so, should arrive by daylight to provide help. None could provide an accurate guess as to how many that might be. All were bringing whatever weapons could muster.
What was more important, one radio operator with a bad leg and a bandage with blood seeping through told me, the Paul Reveres were still out there passing the word to others and beyond that, others had taken up the call. We now firmly suspected the flu, or blight as it was beginning to commonly be called, had been inflicted on us by another nation, not nature. The reaction was instant hate. People demanded revenge and wanted to be part of it.
A radio operator said he had spoken with another one in Seattle and the word was spreading there. They had already formed a convoy of pickups, SUVs, and motorcycles, amounting to more than three hundred vehicles, each loaded with men and weapons heading up the interstate. They were only a little more than an hour away. There was no gang along the way that would attempt to stop them, but some might hear the story join up with them.
Sue whispered in my ear. “That is probably over a thousand people, right there.”
I hadn’t realized she had slipped up behind me. Another radio operator said there were at least, two other convoys forming, and all would arrive by morning. Sue gave me a jab in my ribs. When I didn’t say anything in response, she raised her voice and said loud enough for anyone nearby to hear, “Captain Bill should have told you how much he appreciates what you’ve done.”
“I-I do,” I stuttered.
The radios we used were CBs and the like. All with a limited range, often measured in single-digit miles. However, there were others out there with radios that reached another five or ten miles, and a few short-wave radios that
reached thousands of miles were reporting in. The word was spreading rapidly. Instead of fighting to survive a faceless disease, we began to understand that the blight that had rotted the bodies of our families and friends had been introduced. That knowledge created deep anger in us in a way I’d never seen before nor even begin to comprehend.
My working premise of the events made sense. The flu had been released and had spread the blight nationwide within a few short days. It was preprogramed to last a week before it died off. The blight had a built-in factor that limited the life of the infection or the biological agent that spread it. No new cases. That should have been the clue all along.
Once the blight had killed off eighty or ninety percent of us, and the country descended into chaos, our unknown enemy would simply arrive on our shores and take over our lands, buildings, roads, water, natural resources, and industries. Done correctly, they would probably have powerplants up and running in days. In a year, they would control the entire country and everything in it. The survivors would become slaves for the invaders.
After the ships brought troops, they would bring the immigrants, the new owners of the land, buildings, and roads. Farms were ready for them to harvest, orchards ready to pick, and cattle ready for slaughter.
The outrageous audacity contrasted sharply with the ease of the plan. Right now, we were the only ones holding things up, unless there were more landings up and down the coast. I chastised myself. Of course, there were. Troopships were probably landing at dozens of west coast ports.
I turned to the radio operators and said, “Are any of you in contact with short-wave operators?”
“I am,” one said.
As I explained my thoughts, his face tinged red with anger and he ground his teeth. He said, “I will get the word out. In hours, I’ll have pickups loaded with red-necks and their guns heading for everywhere on the west coast. The radio operators in the ports where the enemy has landed will direct our people where to go.”