“Hi Bill. Yeah, we’ll be hitting that Walgreens we found a while back. What’s the rush? Running out of coffee?” Bill’s coffee dependency was legendary. It was rumored (and Joseph didn’t doubt it) that Bill had stocked up more coffee than food.
Bill smiled. “Not in this century. No, I wanted to ask a favor. If we have time, after we unload the Walgreens, I’d like to run past the Scott Engineering Center, to see what condition it’s in. The scouting group hasn’t been able to follow up on that, and I’m getting antsy.”
Joseph thought about it for a second. “Sure. But it’ll have to be either a quick look, or we’ll have to drop you off and pick you up later.”
“Five minutes max,” Bill replied. “I’m not looking for anything specific. Just want to see if it’s still holding up.”
Joseph gestured towards the group gathered around Matt’s pickup truck, and they headed that way. The truck now sported a trailer as standard equipment.
***
Finding the Walgreens was no problem. With the pole cam active and the GPS system as a guide, they simply drove the pickup until they were at the coordinates recorded by the scavenging party. They spent a little time waving the pole-cam around until they found the back door. They moved ten feet, turned the pole-cam back on, and they were able to see a view of the inside of the store. The Pleistocene sunlight shining through the pole-cam in the gap around the camera provided more than enough light for a clear picture.
In less than ten minutes, they had selected a spot that was clear in the Walgreens, and close enough to ground level on the Outland side. They set up the truck gate, and stepped through.
This had been a large Walgreens. The building interior was a single large space with columns at regular intervals to hold up the roof. The roof hadn’t completely collapsed under the weight of the ash; instead, the supporting girders had buckled between columns. This resulted in a series of parallel tent-shaped spaces, centered on the rows of columns. A lot of shelves and goods had been flattened, but far more was still safe in the tented areas.
Joseph walked up and down the aisles. “What are we looking at, you think?” he asked. “Eight trips?”
Bill nodded. Even filling every inch of the pickup and trailer, this was going to be a huge haul. It wasn’t just the food, since a lot of that would have gone bad by now. It wasn’t even the aisle containing nothing but different brands of coffee and tea. The big score was the first-aid supplies and toiletries. It would be a few years before anyone could go to a dentist again, so toothbrushes and toothpaste were worth their weight in gold.
“Okay, then,” Joseph said. “Let’s get started.”
***
The crew was almost done emptying out the store. Bill and Joseph were more in the way than anything else, so they stepped outside to survey the immediate area. They’d left through the service entrance, which opened easily from the inside. Joseph made sure to peg it open so they could get back in.
“What are we looking for?” Joseph asked as they walked.
“Nothing really,” Bill answered. “I just wanted to take a few minutes to walk through the old neighborhood.”
Bill moved over to a nearby building that looked intact and tried the door. Joseph leaned up against a wall, waiting for Bill to finish with whatever personal journey he seemed to be having.
Abruptly, they heard a shout. “Hold it right there. Drop your weapon and put your hands up!”
Bill backed away from the door and turned towards the shout, reflexively reaching for his shotgun strap. There was a gunshot, and a bullet threw up a spray of damp ash near his feet. “Put it down!”
Bill looked at Joseph, who seemed to be out of the immediate line of sight. He motioned with his head for Joseph to get moving. Joseph turned and sprinted away. There were shouts of “Stop, or we’ll fire!”— immediately followed by bullets spranging off the ground and nearby buildings.
Maybe you meant and we fire, Joseph thought irrelevantly as he turned another corner. He heard the sound of pounding feet behind him. Oh great! He tried to put on a little more speed.
As he approached the Walgreens service entrance, he yelled, “Get through the gate! We’re under attack!”
The people inside must have heard him because, by the time he got in the door, he could see their backsides going through the gate. One of the guys, Charlie, stood on the other side, holding the tablet and looking alarmed.
As he jumped through, Joseph yelled at him, “Turn it off! Close it!”
Charlie reacted immediately.
***
Corporal Chavez gasped, trying to catch her breath without being too loud about it. She often made it loudly clear that she was as good as any man, but dammit that Stevenson could sprint like a mofo!
They moved cautiously into the door that the fugitive had run through and looked around. It was a Walgreens. It was also empty. Pretty much everything accessible had been taken from the shelves. Chavez guarded the door while Stevenson looked down every aisle and checked everywhere for hidey-holes.
Finally he came back and shook his head. “No idea how he got out, or where everything went.”
They left the store, being sure to push the door closed until the latch clicked.
As they walked up the lane, a camera peered down at them from a small circle of much bluer sky.
***
“Unbelievable! What part of ‘lift’ is unclear to you?” Joseph was upset, and he was taking it out on everyone around him.
Per his instructions, Charlie had swapped the gate for the pole-cam and proceeded to find and watch the people who had pursued Joseph. Now Joseph and some of the other scavenging crew were hurriedly loading the portal hardware onto the pickup.
“Dickinson, you’ll need to stay here and guard the salvage. Some of it has got to smell like food. Peters, you stay too. Watson, get in the truck. Tell Matt which way.”
Matt looked up from his seat in the pickup. Reaching over, he hit the switch to lower the rear left passenger window to allow him to hear Charlie more easily.
Charlie handed the pole to Joseph and operated the tablet. He called out instructions to Matt when necessary.
Finally, he asked Matt to stop. Joseph looked at the tablet video feed while continuing to hold the pole-cam. On the screen, Bill was being shepherded into the back of an army truck while a half-dozen or so soldiers milled around the truck and a Hummer parked nearby. Charlie cranked up the volume to maximum, and they tried to make out the discussion on the other side.
After a minute or so, the soldiers got into their vehicles and drove off at a much higher speed than Matt could maintain over rough prairie.
“Well, hell,” Joseph said, “those are National Guard. And apparently, we are looters.”
“Well, we kind of are,” Charlie commented.
“Yes, but we’re the good kind,” Matt said. Everyone was too worried about Bill to laugh.
“Matt, take us back to Rivendell,” Joseph ordered. “I’ll update Peters and Dickinson on the radio, then update Rivendell. Maybe they’ll have something worked out by the time we get back. Then we’ll still have to arrange to get the Walgreens salvage back to the camp. Geez, we need more vehicles!”
Matt rolled his eyes. Everything was a priority, these days. Which meant things got done one after another based on who screamed the loudest, and some things had to wait.
***
“Into the truck. Up.” Bill felt himself being poked by the rifle barrel. He’d figured out quickly enough that these were National Guard, which at least meant they weren’t going to kill him and eat him, or worse. Rape, then pillage, THEN burn, went through his mind. He chuckled.
“Something funny, asshole?” one of the soldiers asked him. “You think this is funny? You think you’re in a funny position?”
“It would take too long to explain,” Bill answered.
“Yeah, and maybe you don’t have that long,” the soldier retorted, waving his— her— rifle in Bill’s face.
Bill took a few moments to look at the soldier. “Save it, corporal,” he said. “S.O.P. is for you to return me for interrogation. If you were undisciplined enough to ignore orders, you wouldn’t still be here on duty.” He looked her straight in the eyes.
“You’ve got a lot of attitude for a damned looter!” she responded angrily.
“Really? Really? Looter?” Bill’s sarcastic tone rocked her back for a moment. “Yeah, look at the big evil looter, with blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth, eating dead burnt bodies, I mean kill, kill!” he gritted at her.
One of the other soldiers said, “And being a litterbug.”
Bill, caught by surprise, laughed out loud.
“Oh, shit,” said the corporal. “Another one.”
Bill continued in a calmer voice, “Look, you are practically the first people we’ve seen since about twenty-four hours after the eruption. We’re doing what we can to survive; we’re not stealing TV’s to support a drug habit.”
“That’s fine, but you’re still going back to base.” The corporal answered.
“And that’s fine, because I’ll be very interested in talking to your C.O.”
“Well then,” the corporal said, “this should be a pleasant Sunday drive, since we all want the same thing.” She sat back, but kept her gun pointed in his direction.
***
“Fuck fuck son of a fucking bitch motherfucker!” Richard was in full-on conniption. That he hadn’t started breaking things was due in equal parts to his few remaining shreds of self-control and the fact that there was nothing close enough worth breaking.
Joseph felt seriously uncomfortable. He knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, but right now Richard wasn’t thinking in those terms. It didn’t help either that Monica, who Joseph was a bit afraid of, also looked like she was ready to chew up the furniture and spit it out.
Eventually, Richard calmed down. He stood for a few seconds, looking down, rubbing his forehead. “Right. Does anyone know where the National Guard base is?”
One of the committee members raised a hand and said, “Yeah, it’s actually a bit west of campus. Couple of miles? Near the airport, anyway.”
Richard straightened up and looked around at the group. “Okay, we need to get over there and do some reconnaissance.”
“We also need all that stuff from the Walgreens,” Krista cut in. As Richard turned angrily on her, she quickly added, “Look, if it starts to rain we could lose it all. And we, including Bill, put a lot of effort into getting it out in the first place.”
Richard bit off what he had been about to say and pinched the bridge of his nose for a second. They heard him mutter something that sounded very Scottish involving gangs or something.
“Joseph, could the bobcat make it there and back?”
“Oh, hell yes. There are no creeks or big gullies or anything between here and the Walgreens. Just follow the path we’ve already worn with the pickup. It’ll be a lot more trips, using the bucket to haul the loot, but you can save the delicate stuff first, and maybe wrap the other stuff in tarps if necessary. For that matter, we might be able to rig up a way for the bobcat to pull the trailer…”
“Okay, Krista, can you get someone started on that when we’re done here?”
At her nod, he continued, “We certainly don’t want to start a war with the National Guard. First, because they’re the good guys. Second, and not to put too fine a point on it, they probably outgun us by a wide margin.” Richard slumped his shoulders and thought for a few seconds.
“On the other hand, we’re not leaving Bill with them,” he continued, straightening up. “That’s not an option. So we’re going to have to find out what the reality is, then take steps to rescue him.
“Joseph, that’s your job.”
***
The soldier directed Bill out of the back of the truck. He found himself in a large warehouse space. A hangar? The ones at the Lincoln Airport had sloped roofs, so that seemed like a good possibility.
The corporal had a clipped conversation with the driver, during which he managed to catch her last name. Chavez.
As he waited, he realized that he was looking at an indoor tent city. He turned and scanned the crowd. A quick count indicated there were around fifty people, including a number of children. They looked dirty, tired, and desperate. While we live the high life.
The corporal poked him with her rifle barrel. “These are the people that you stole food from their mouths, asshole.”
Bill turned to her. “These are the people from whose mouths you stole food.”
The corporal’s face turned red, and she looked like she was ready to shoot him, and screw the regs.
“We’ve got six times this many refugees, corporal. You want to compare dicks? We’re doing a better job that you are.” Bill regretted that as soon as he’d said it. Poor strategy, Bill. Are you trying to get shot?
She gave him a hard shove with her rifle and Bill turned in the indicated direction. They went through a door and he found himself in a small, very bare office, with an officer standing there. The name-plate said Lt Collins.
“Have a seat,” Lieutenant Collins pointed to a chair, then sat on the edge of his desk. He took a sip from a cup of coffee and made a face. He stared at Bill in silence for a while.
This is the softening-up part, Bill thought. I get real nervous, and then try to fill the empty air with an explanation. Bill stared back with an innocent expression on his face.
After a while the lieutenant sighed. “You’ve been caught looting during a disaster, which means I can have you shot right here and now. So you’re going to give me some answers, and they’re going to be truthful. And I’ll know if you’re lying.”
Bill waited two beats before responding. “Well, no you won’t because that particular type of micro-expression training isn’t standard issue for National Guard officers. Anyway, I wasn’t caught looting, I was caught walking around in the general area of where your soldiers assumed some looting had been done.
“And please save the standard interrogation routine for your less educated prisoners. What you really want is to find out who I am, where I’m from, who else might be with me, and what other resources I might have. And I’m prepared to tell you all of that, in as much detail as you want.”
Lieutenant Collins stared at him for a second, then slowly smiled. “You’ve got some experience with this, I take it?”
“Not personal experience, no,” Bill answered. “This was my first supervolcano eruption. Up until about a month ago, I was an engineering student at UNL.”
“So then why don’t you start by telling us how many people are in your group or whatever it is?”
“Just under three hundred.”
Lieutenant Collins’ eyebrows rose at this statement. “Three hundred people, and we’ve not seen hide nor hair of you. Nothing but a lot of tracks, despite almost a month of patrolling. How does that work, pray tell?”
Bill leaned back in his chair and did his best to look casual. “Well, that’s kind of a long story.”
Lieutenant Collins spread his arms, palms up, looked around, then said to Chavez, “Corporal Chavez, please cancel all my appointments, including my date with the President.”
Chavez grinned and made typing motions into the air. After a few moments she said, “Done.” They both turned to look at Bill.
Bill grinned back, thoroughly enjoying this, and said, “I think I’m going to like it here.”
This was not the reaction they’d been expecting and it showed on their faces.
You may have the guns, lieutenant, but I’m the king of this stuff. Surrender, Dorothy.
Lieutenant Collins looked at Chavez and raised one eyebrow. Chavez said to him, “We might have to get Stevenson to translate.”
Collins raised the other eyebrow and said, “Star Trek quotes?”
Bill interrupted. “Guthrie. Alice’s Restaurant. Star Trek is for amateurs.”
Lieutenant Collins
laughed out loud. Chavez muttered something about brain-damage.
Gotcha
Pete and Phil pulled over once they were out of sight of the camp. They had borrowed the bikes on the pretext of doing some scouting, and Pete admitted to himself that they would do some actual scouting at some point. But for now, he and Phil needed something to relax, and a chance to tend the garden.
He looked at Phil and patted his pocket. It wasn’t that they thought they’d get in trouble for smoking a little pot; after all, there were literally no cops anywhere on this planet. Well, there were the two retired guys, but they didn’t give a damn.
But Pete had a limited supply and didn’t feel like sharing with the entire student body. He motioned to a spot over by the trees, and they rode their bikes over to it.
As they came to a stop, there was a pop, and Phil staggered and fell off his bike. As Pete’s eyes widened in shock, there was another pop, and the world came to an end.
***
Charles and Bluto hit the kill switches on the dirt bikes. They quickly pulled the bodies into the trees, then rolled the bikes into hiding.
It took only moments to remove the weapons and anything else of value from the bodies. Charles said, “We’ll have to bury them. We can’t spend all day parked next to a couple of corpses, and if animals come along and start dragging pieces of student around the landscape, it’s going to set off alarms.”
“So? Why don’t we just shoot anyone who comes looking?” Bluto asked.
Charles shook his head. It looked like Bluto was back to his normal level of ideas. “Bluto, there’s only two of us. If we give them time to run for their guns, we’ll be outgunned a hundred to two. We have to be able to catch them by surprise.”
“After dark?” Bluto asked. “I’m not thrilled about walking around after dark.”
Charles shrugged an agreement. “Me either. No, I was thinking around dinner time. They all gathered in that fenced area in front of the sheds yesterday. We can approach from behind the sheds. I didn’t see anyone watching on that side.”
***
Outland (World-Lines Book 1) Page 24