by Wade Ebeling
The reasons why he had broken the group up into smaller raiding parties were considered to be pure genius by Daniel. Several of the raiding parties were, almost surely, destined to be completely wiped out. But none of the other parties would know this, continuing to fight on, trying to accomplish their given tasks. This gave the plan the best chance of success in his eyes, and Daniel reiterated to the groups how important each of their tasks was going to be. If he could keep them fighting and inflicting damage for as long as possible, it would thin down Bob Donner’s ranks. Each of the individual raiding parties would fight until the end, thinking that, if they failed, they were failing the group as a whole.
To Daniel, these people were viewed as fodder for the flame, flotsam crashing against the shore in a portrait of the ocean seen only in books. Daniel did not care if these people actually reclaimed the Warehouse. If he could just get them to drastically reduce Bob’s numbers, he would get his chance for vengeance. All Daniel cared about was getting that chance. If he got it, Daniel would trade his life willingly away to seize it.
……..
Mack Jones twisted the rope as tightly as his massive arms would allow, and a small gap opened in the fencing. Jabbing his huge hand through, he quickly pressed the buzzer, kicking the gate open with a free foot. He pulled a wad of gum from his mouth and stuck it in the lock on his way through. Swiftly across the open ground, Mack made it to the guard barracks. Acting as if he belonged there, he pulled open the door and walked in. The duty guard hardly looked up, dropping his eyes to look back at a magazine; he had seen Mack here hundreds of times before.
“Toilet broke again?” the guard asked almost politely.
“Heh, yeah. You know it,” Mack said calmly, closing the distance.
“Need to get the tools out, I suppose?” The guard neatly folded the magazine he was reading and put it down. Standing up, he turned to unlock the door behind him.
Mack stuck the shiv into the back of the man’s skull, and his ribs, and his neck, and his kidneys. Stopping only after the sharpened spike had slipped from his blood-splashed hand.
Taking the nail from his pocket, Mack stuck it into the service port on the electronic lock that the guard was going to punch the code into. It sparked briefly and the display went dark, effectively locking the rest of the guards inside.
Turning back to the small desk, Mack unlock the bottom drawer with keys taken from the dead guard. Inside was a small ring of large keys, which would unlock all of the sealed doors to the workers’ housing units. Once the workers were freed, Mack would sit back and let the rest take care of itself. They could all escape to the north after the fun was over.
……..
Daniel made one last tour of the battlements, making suggestions to the teams about how to improve their positions or tactics. The party was obviously not happening tonight. Everyone who was not already assigned to stand watch got recalled to the R.V. camp to rest their body and nerves. The remainder of the food from the cache would be distributed in the morning.
There was no turning back now, no way to stretch the plan out further. If the festivities did not happen tomorrow, Daniel would lose his chance, and the group. He could not show the group his remaining food stores now. It would almost surely cause such a backlash towards him that it was not an option anymore. It was better to just keep the concrete plant building and the food as a secret, in the event that the raid went horribly wrong. This would ensure the remaining stash was safe, a means to make it through the next winter if need be.
It was hard for Daniel to resist the urge that kept telling him to take a surreptitious trip to check on the concrete plant. He had to keep reminding himself that Jason had lived there for all of those years, remaining undiscovered, despite being in the Warehouse’s backyard. The thing that he regretted most about having to approach the group earlier than planned was leaving the backpack and combat vest behind. He had only paused long enough to stuff two extra thirty round magazine in his back pocket when he left with the food pails.
He had never meant for this to happen, but he only had a few frantic minutes before the main body of the group left for good. He figured that he could sneak off later to place the wanted items near the cache somewhere, but he had underestimated the complete lack of privacy that joining the group resulted in. He never got the chance to accomplish this task before having to go on record with Tony that the contents of the cache were, in fact, all he had. This put him in a far more vulnerable position than what he had first intended. The growing feeling of slow starvation made it very hard for him to stay away from the extra supplies, but he could not chance someone seeing where he went.
Daniel smiled, and bracingly slapped the backs of the group members around him, before making his way to the makeshift tent, which had served as his home since joining them. Crawling into the moldy smelling bedding, made from cushions pulled out of toppled campers, seemed a futile gesture; he did not expect to get any sleep during the night.
Wafts of a nauseating petrochemical stench blew in as he lay there. The ground water in this area was so saturated by the leaking vehicles that it had to be distilled to drink or cook with. This was accomplished by inverting the lids on pots and pans. A small can or metal cup was suspended from the handle of the lid. As steam rose up from the tainted water inside, hitting the lid and dripping back down purified, it was caught by the smaller cup. This was very labor intensive, and several of the lesser mobile members of the group had to work non-stop to have enough water for everyone.
Daniel’s thoughts decided that they were not going to cooperate with him, and he could not focus on Bob, or how best to kill him. Instead, the faces of the group’s children came before him. Smiling, laughing, and, worst still, reminding him of Rebecca. They moved as she did. They looked upon things with the same innocence that she would have. They did not have the same feelings of dread that the adults had; naivety being a child’s best attribute at times. Times like these.
Daniel was passing the hours in that hazy point between conscious thought and dreams. Trapped in the limbo of revisiting past trials and tribulations without any measure of control. He swam through a quagmire made up of murky memories of death, and the fear that came from years of being alone. Struggling to force away the sheer panic that he used to feel in his childhood had not easy, by any means. Those years were punctuated by such terror and loathing, scrubbing his mind entirely clean of them had proven to be impossible. Every sound, or flash of movement caught with the periphery of his childish vision, drove Daniel into hiding. But there was never anyone there to go check to see if all was safe for him, and the hours he had spent trying to convince his own body to move were incalculable.
Once again, Daniel found himself focusing on the part of his life that he most wanted to be rid of. Trying to wipe it away again brought him back to the group’s children. With the exception of a few misguided parental decisions, Daniel felt that the kids were being treated very well. None of them were being subjected to the same rejection that he had endured. Daniel could not quite place the emotion that his addled mind was trying to convey into his semi-lucid state. He did not think that he cared whether or not some, or all, of the kids became orphaned tomorrow, but some part of his brain was trying to correlate what he had faced as a child to what might lay ahead for those smiling faces. Then the moment passed, and he was looking into Jason’s yellowed eyes; he had finally fallen asleep.
……..
Monday
Mack wearily laid back down on his cot. The sounds of the riot echoed through corridors and reverberated down the exposed duct work. Screams of hatred and moans of pain were a fitting lullaby for the mountain of a man. The stench of hair burning still hung in the air as Mack slowed his breathing and shut his eyes. It was late, and he was tired of the twisted games that the workers were playing. Another howl of agony assured him that at least one of the guards still lived.
As he drifted off to sleep, Mack pushed away the thoughts of tonight�
�s tortures, as pleasurable as they had been, instead filling his mind with the wanton killing that could be done tomorrow, when the workers marched out of the city and up to the little town just like they had talked about. After that, if he could find a way through the quarantine barrier, into a life of true freedom, Mack would play out his most sadistic thoughts with much relish.
Mack Jones needed to remind the world that there were more cruelties to be had than just death. He would show them what a few of these things were soon enough. Mack had a twisted smile spread across his face just before falling asleep.
……..
Daniel awoke when the sun had warmed his little space under the blue tarp enough to chase him outside. The beautiful morning mocked the coming events. Sparse, low conversations were being held by small groups around the camp. Upon further inspection, each of these groupings were clustered into their prearranged battle groups. Daniel found this to be a good sign; the more separate these groups felt, the more important they believed their part in the plan to be, and the greater the chance for success. Or, at least, the longer they would fight. Just before Daniel allowed his mood to rise, a small girl ran past, crying about some unknown injustice.
Suddenly, Daniel felt his desires and shoulders collapse. How it happened, he was not sure. His anger had dissipated. The abject desire for revenge was no longer present. Even his vision of the world and of the group seemed different. The looks on the faces all around him did not look distant or unworthy; they felt close and concerning. Someway, somehow, each member of the group had crept into his heart, which was thought closed forever.
Daniel shifted his gaze from face to face, each person looking more determined and familiar than the last. He started placing names with those faces, despite thinking that none had been retained, short of Tony and a few others that he had dealt with several times. The people started to give notice of Daniel, who was standing just outside their ranks. Mumbled greetings, smiles, and nods accompanied their observation of him. Despite wanting to yell out some kind of warning, Daniel just smiled as warmly as he could, and nodded back.
Torn between two thoughts, one that said he should just walk away and hide from these faces, the other begging him to call off the raid on the Warehouse, give the rest of the provisions out, ask for forgiveness, and hope that they would take him along when they tried to get somewhere better than this. The second thought was pure fantasy. The world had been stripped clean of more than just safety; there was no chance for this group to just start a new life. The only hope they had was inside of the Warehouse. The first thought, however, stretched across his mind like it was the last possibility that a condemned man had for reprieve.
That is truly how Daniel felt at the moment; condemned to a fate that he had fought long and hard to bring about, and now found himself powerless to change. He did not want to see his plan, his anger, his lack of compassion cause the deaths of anyone in the group; his group. These faces were more than just a means to an end now, they were his only chance at a life not spent alone and bitter. They had become his hope.
“Morning…Sorry, didn’t mean to startle ya. Are you alright? You’ve been just standing there for like ten minutes,” Tony said, breaking into Daniel’s thoughts. The concern on the man’s face made Daniel feel even worse.
“Yeah…I’m just…I’m not sure if…” Daniel managed to reply before the words stuck in his throat.
“Worried, huh? Hey, we all are,” Tony said with a smile that did not match up with the dark patches under his eyes. “We have a good plan…A solid plan. You know this can work. Everyone is worried. Rightfully so, I might add. This can work,” lowering his voice slightly, Tony added, “It has to work.”
“Tony…I just don’t know if it will,” Daniel spoke in the same hushed tone that Tony had just implemented. “I don’t want anyone…well…I’ll feel like it’s all going to be my fault…if things go wrong.” Daniel found himself speaking the truth for the first time in a long while.
“We’ve done everything possible to make the plan work…It’s now or never. No one will blame you, Daniel. You are the one that gave us this opportunity, we owe you, if anything,” Tony said, patting Daniel’s shoulder.
This, of course, did not cheer Daniel up at all. It only instilled in him the fact that any deaths that occurred tonight were to be placed on his shoulders; the same shoulders that Tony was now rubbing in an effort to console him. The day seemed to be spinning out of Daniel’s control. A teasing sense of inevitability hovered over him, like a dark cloud that only he could see and feel. The sun peeked over the treetops, lighting the heads and faces around him with shiny glows. The light showed to Daniel what each of the group members truly looked like, and he found in most disconcerting that none of the faces looked as scared as he felt they should, or even as scared as he was himself.
“I am going to go over each group’s responsibilities with them. Maybe we missed something, Tony. Maybe we can…find something…that will help,” Daniel said, more to himself than to Tony. He walked the short distance to the first huddled, whispering group in front of him. Once he went over the plan with them again, all Daniel had to add for them was that they should wear the darkest clothes they could find, and that they should cover their faces with soot or grease.
It seemed a trivial amount of help in light of what they would soon face, but he still shared this same little nugget of information with the rest of the groups that he visited; at least it was something.
……..
Mack Jones had made his point. Despite the workers being well accustomed to brutality, especially after last night’s riot, the flayed out skin of the wheezing guard, who had been left chained to a fire hydrant, punctuated this point succinctly. The poor man’s flesh dangled from his featureless face, swaying to and fro in the morning breeze. When Mack held up his hands, giving an animalistic growl, everyone standing around knew what the meaning of this horrible, gruesome act was. There were far worse things in life than dying, and questioning Mack’s authority would lead to you finding out what they were. He was the undisputed champion of inflicting pain, and no one present would ever question that.
Mack was handed a rifle by one of his new gang members, and he pointed to the north with it. Without hesitation, hundreds of bodies turned and started walking out of the camp. They marched for hours, following the worn trail of the gravel trains. They eventually turned onto a wide road, the signs all saying it was Klondike Avenue, and the group spread out a bit. With Mack in the rear, herding the workers along, they were going to get out of the Detroit, the cost be damned.
The amount of deaths that were surely about to happen did not matter to Mack, or to those shoving and pushing ahead of him, it was their only hope for survival.
Allowing the workers to stop and eat some of the liberated MRE’s and to rest, and to celebrate their newfound fortune for a while, kept everyone from scattering into the vastness of their new world. Once the jubilation wore off, Mack led the way forward. Under the cover of darkness, the emboldened convoy of scabbed and pustule laden flesh, carrying clubs, rifles, and rusty knives, headed north in search of the town.
Chapter 26
Shortly after the sun had dropped down low, bobbing just above the western horizon, casting the faces of the group into reddish-hued masks, Daniel started moving the battle groups into position. Each team, as usual, was instructed to take a longer and, more importantly, new route to their pre-assault positions. One of Daniel’s deepest concerns was the trampled pathways that these groups had inadvertently created while either doing reconnaissance on the Warehouse or carrying materials to fortify the two positions on the south side of the Warehouse. By having them take new routes, Daniel hoped to avoid anyone who had spotted the obvious trails and were watching them.
Even Daniel had led Tony and three of the older boys, who were to be used as runners, along a meandering route across the abandoned Tech Center, reaching their position inside an old fabrication shed that afforded a
view of the south and west sides of the Warehouse. Taking this longer way meant having to walk right by the former generator house; a place that Daniel had given strict orders to avoid.
He believed that Bob Donner would try to secure this small building, if not in the hope that new fuel might arrive but, surely, for the amount of spare parts that could be salvaged from within. As the odd group of tall, short, short, short, tall passed by the thick-walled generator house, nothing looked disturbed, the only exception being a freshly dug grave. This made Daniel wonder about his rival’s mental state. It appeared that Bob had made no long term plans, and was just living in the moment. Having these thoughts helped Daniel relax slightly. Maybe, Bob was so confident in the Warehouse’s impenetrability that there were no other hidden defenses, another of Daniel’s worries.
Light left the world. Awash in nothing but shades and variances of black, Daniel made it to his dusty command post. They looked across the night through a large window made up of dozens of other small panes of glass, half of which were broken out. The waiting game began. Each of the boys held onto a small clock with a strange determination, like they expected the time pieces to spring to life and attempt suicidal jumps from their hands. These wind-up clocks, though mismatched, held the same purpose. Once Daniel and Tony decided when to start the attack, which depended upon when the party started, each of the boys would then make their way to a different attack group, so their assaults would coincide.