Michelle relayed the message she’d gotten from the guards. Tom, the veterinarian, had left to go and collect the gear that his group had stashed before approaching the mall.
“Why the hell would he do that at night?” Even over the radio, it was clear Michelle was fired up.
“Because he’ll be working all day tomorrow?” Rachel was on edge too. Pro thought she looked exhausted.
“Ask Pro if he knows where they camped before they moved in.”
He did remember; he’d watched them use the megachurch on Route 7 as a base for a couple of days. He was nodding yes at Rachel as he overheard Michelle’s question.
He was there now. Michelle had said Tom was on foot. He’d ridden his mountain bike, and was set up on the top floor of the giant church’s parking garage twenty minutes before he spotted the veterinarian’s skinny frame trudging up the edge of the Route 7 from the toll road. He’d convinced Rachel to stay behind and get some sleep. She’d argued, sort of, but had relented when he’d explained he’d watched them at the church for days and knew where to go so he wouldn’t be seen. In the end, it wasn’t anything he hadn’t done alone, countless times. Michelle had made him promise he wouldn’t do anything other than keep an eye on Tom.
He might not have trusted anyone outside his close group, but Tom seemed harmless to him. The gangly veterinarian struck him as absentminded; maybe that was why he was an animal doctor and not a real doctor. He picked up the movement through his rifle scope and made out Tom’s profile approaching along the edge of Leesburg Pike. He didn’t have a round in the chamber, but this still beat the hell out of playing video games or reading one of the books from the pile that Daniel had assigned him. He was slowly working his way through the reading list, not because he enjoyed it, but because Jason had told him that if he wanted to live with him, he was going to continue his education.
He’d tried to argue; what the hell was the point in learning crap that he’d never need to know? He could remember the argument and had looked to Rachel for some help. She’d betrayed him in an instant and sided with Jason. Of course she had; she’d already finished school. Daniel’s tailored home study program was better than sitting in class with some of the younger kids at the hotel or doing the math homework that used to give him such fits, but sneaking around watching somebody through a rifle scope was going to win hands down all day, every day. Besides, if Michelle wanted something done, she only had to ask, and he was going to do it.
It was a warm, humid night, and the bugs were out in force. None of them, least of all him, had realized how effective the spraying the county had done in previous years had been. Almost a year after the virus, the mosquitos seemed to be the big winner. Along with coyotes, turkey buzzards, rats, stray dogs, and birds of prey, the planet belonged to them. He’d layered up, just as they’d all learned to do since earlier in the spring. It was uncomfortable as hell in the heat, but it was better than being eaten alive. There was enough moisture in the air that the view through his scope was a little bit foggy. Tom was still coming on.
He watched as his target crossed the road and then disappeared behind a bank of foliage from the line of trees that fronted the church’s property. He got on his radio and reported in. He wasn’t sure if Rachel would be listening in or not, but he could picture Michelle pacing back and forth on the roof of the hotel, worried about him. She was always worrying.
“Copy that,” Michelle answered. It was hard to tell over the radio, but she sounded disappointed that Tom had ended up where he had said he was going. “Stay put. Remember, you’re just there to watch. Let me know when he leaves.”
“I know.” It was his turn to be disappointed. He wasn’t going to see shit from the top level of the garage beyond watching Tom approach and leave. He was standing up now, no more visible to Tom through the foliage than Tom was to him. He was listening for the sound of the doors being pulled open. A minute or so later, he was rewarded. The beam from a bright flashlight was easily visible, shining through the colored glass of the small round windows that lined the parlor area in the front of the auditorium-sized chapel. Tom was inside, doing what he’d said he was going to do.
He scanned behind him across the expanse of his nearly empty parking level, and the flat expanse of the church’s roof across the narrow gap before him. Nothing. He leaned against the waist-high wall of the parking deck and slid down behind it, wondering if one could read a book in the dark with night vision goggles. He should have brought one with him and given it a try. He knew he’d hear the door open when Tom left; then he could head back home.
It was nearly ten minutes later when he heard the door. It wasn’t the jerking open that he’d heard before, it was the softer click of it shutting. He came to his feet and laid the rifle across the top of the wall. It would be a few minutes before Tom would appear from behind the trees. He found himself wondering if Michelle was going to be relieved or even more suspicious that he hadn’t caught Tom doing anything.
A door crashed open on the roof of the auditorium across from him. Tom was there, having just emerged from what looked like a small shed planted in the middle of the roof. The man was only about sixty feet away from him and waving his flashlight around. Lessons from Jason kicked in, and he ducked down slowly out of sight and crawled fifteen feet to his right before peeking back up.
It was pitch-black, and there was no way Tom was going to see him unless the beam of the man’s flashlight outlined him. That didn’t seem to be a worry. He could see via his NVG monocle that the veterinarian was focused on the big microwave dishes on the roof and digging around in the bag he was now carrying. A bag he hadn’t had when he’d approached the church.
The church! What had he just heard at the main door? He glanced down and could see another weak beam of light playing within the church through the colored windows. There was someone else inside, on the ground floor. He swiveled his rifle and slowly jacked in a round. He loved the .270 that Jason had fitted out for him. It didn’t have close to the power or effective range of Rachel’s .338 Lapua, but he had gotten to the point where he could almost drive nails with the gun out to 150 yards and kill a pie plate out to three hundred. Tom had moved away from him towards the satellite dishes, but he was still easily within fifty yards.
He adjusted the focus of his scope and watched as Tom pulled a spool of wire from his bag and started stringing it between the two microwave dishes. He couldn’t make out the wire through his monocle, but he could see the spool. The process looked like something Tom had done many times. Even in the dark, the veterinarian worked fast. Within a minute, he saw Tom pull a radio out from his bag and then a big battery. He’d watched this group for days, but he’d never seen them use this kind of radio. Then again, he’d been set up behind a house across Leesburg Pike—he hadn’t had a line of sight to the microwave dishes on the roof.
Pro knew exactly what he had to do; he didn’t hesitate. He focused on the radio, and put a round right through the middle of it. He was rewarded with a flash of sparks. By the time he ejected the round, he saw Tom sprawling on his ass, trying to scurry further from the radio. He chambered another round and tracked his target as Tom managed to find his feet and make it into an ungainly bear crawl towards the roof’s access door.
A second later, the man’s mad scramble became a full-out run. Pro wasn’t nearly as certain what to do with Tom as he had been with the radio. He thought Jason would want to know who Tom had been trying to contact. He caught himself; Jason wasn’t here. Michelle and Daniel would want to know just as badly. He held off firing and watched Tom struggle with the door in the dark and then finally disappear behind it.
Jason’s mantra rang in his head; shoot, move, communicate. He dropped back down behind the wall and frog-walked to the corner of the parking deck closest to the front of the church. It wasn’t far from where he’d originally set up.
“Michelle, you there?”
“Did you just shoot? What’s going on?”
*<
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Ray had been kicking himself for his paranoid stupidity ever since he’d started following Tom. Earlier in the afternoon, he’d overheard Tom ask the guards if he could go out and collect the rest of their gear that evening. Carla had been standing off to the side, all casual-like and far too interested in the answer. He’d traveled with these people; if they had any shit worth going back for, he hadn’t seen it. It had been easy to sneak out. He’d just watched Tom leave, waited ten minutes, and then approached the same guard Tom had on his way out of the mall.
The guard hadn’t even blinked, just pointed after Tom and told him he’d probably be able to catch his buddy. Buddy? Tom was a squirrely milquetoast son of a bitch if he’d ever met one. The vet student had a handshake that felt like a dead fish, but it was the guy’s slavish devotion to Carla that just struck him as wrong. He knew he’d probably get in trouble; his plan was just to say he’d heard they had permission to collect their gear.
These people might even kick him out. He’d be fine with that. He really did just want to get back to Georgia. The idea of living in a place like these people had set up struck him as crazy. Why try to rebuild what was dead and gone? It just made you a target for assholes like the ones he’d escaped from in Lexington. It wasn’t for him. Civilization hadn’t really been his thing even before the suck. He’d walked out of his parents’ home at eighteen with four thousand dollars. It had paid for a semester of trade school, where he’d learned welding.
Three years later, he was a novice undersea welder and living on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the next ten years, he had worked in places all over the world, but they’d all had the cocoon of his diving helmet in common, and he had loved it. It was the perfect job for a loner. He’d had the bad luck to be in Ohio attending a mandatory training class when the suck had shut down the airports and people had started dropping dead. The months that had followed had been nightmarish and left him with a healthy mistrust of anyone not named Raymond Hoover. He should have left Carla and her so-called “new family” a long time ago. If it hadn’t been for Sammy, he would have.
He was putting a lot at risk by following Tom. He’d been half-surprised the veterinarian had been able to find his way back to the church. The guy was as clueless as he was book smart and rarely had an idea that didn’t start in Carla’s head. Standing at the back of the immense auditorium-style church, that thought brought him full circle. What the hell was so important to Carla that she’d send Tom to do it, alone?
He listened in the dark for a moment before clicking on the flashlight and letting its beam play across the backs of empty seats and far wall. When they’d stayed here before, they hadn’t come in here much; they’d used the lobby area. There’d been couches, and easy access to several exits. He’d passed by the pile of “supplies” that Tom had said he’d come to collect. The cold-weather coats, sleeping bags, and a few half-used steel bottles of camping fuel were still sitting there where they’d left them. None of it was worth coming back for.
Where is the creepy horse doctor? He shut off his flashlight and just tried to listen. The cocoon of darkness reminded him of being deep underwater without lights. The diving bell he and two other insane idiots had lived in on the bottom of the Norwegian Sea for a week had lost its power once. There’d been a temporary problem on the surface with their minder boat. The darkness in the auditorium was nearly as complete, and there was a silence to the world that he would have craved a year ago. Now, it was just a reminder of how truly alone he was. The auditorium felt empty.
The boom of a rifle shot was still echoing through the walls by the time he realized he’d thrown himself to the floor. He stayed where he was, on his stomach in the aisle behind the back row of seats. He was no expert, but he’d been shot at enough in the last year to know the rifle had been very close. He could hear muted pounding on the roof coming through the ceiling and getting farther away. There was a crash of a door slamming, and then a string of pounding footsteps somewhere within the church. It was somebody running down a set of metal stairs.
He pulled out the Glock that had seen him away from Lexington and sat up enough to look into the darkness towards the auditorium’s stage, between the backs of the seats he could feel in front of him. Another door crashed open somewhere behind the stage, and he could see a bloom of light from a flashlight. The flashlight appeared on stage and flashed in hurried jerks all over the chapel. He couldn’t make out the face of who was behind the light, but he was pretty certain it was Tom’s skinny ass holding it. The figure jumped to the floor and started running up the center aisle towards the back.
“Tom!” he yelled. “That you?”
Whoever it was gave a yelp of surprise and started firing by way of an answer.
Ray ducked back down; he was a section of seats away from the aisle Tom was in, and none of the shots came anywhere close.
“Ray!” Tom shouted in that nasally whining voice. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with!”
He was about to reply that it hadn’t been him, when Tom fired three more shots. These had been aimed in the direction of his voice and came a lot closer. One round impacted the back of a seat, ten yards from him.
He crawled on his stomach along the back of the auditorium, towards the top of the aisle Tom had been running up. Once he made it, he peeked around the corner and could see Tom hunched over on one knee, a flashlight burning on the floor as he struggled to put a new magazine in his gun.
Ray popped to his feet and ran forward with his own gun held out.
“Tom, it’s Ray. I didn’t shoot at you!”
Tom froze and just looked down at the gun and magazine in his hands. He shook his head slowly back and forth. “It doesn’t matter if it was them or you. You can’t stand against what’s coming. None of you can.”
“Who’s them?”
“Our guests, the idiots who let us in.”
Ray watched as Tom woodenly inserted the fresh magazine. He raised both his own gun and the flashlight in response until Tom was framed in the beam. The slide of Tom’s handgun was still locked back.
“I don’t want to shoot you, Tom. But I will. Put the gun down.”
Tom gave a short laugh. “New beginnings have a price to be paid in blood.”
“What!?” Tom was losing it, that was the only thing that made sense to him.
“You stupid redneck.” Tom was smiling now, trying to squint past the light shining at him. “You don’t get it. You can’t understand something bigger than yourself.”
“Explain it to me then, mister horse doctor.”
Tom paused a moment before looking down at his gun. “You’ll see . . . you’ll all see the new beginning, the ‘New Republic.’”
Tom moved more quickly than he would have credited. The slide release slammed forward as Tom’s arm moved. Ray fired three times, point-blank into the chest of the man who had saved his life two months earlier.
Stunned, he stood there a moment, realizing what he had just done. There would be no going back to the mall, not now. Georgia was waiting, again. He took a step, then another, on legs that didn’t want to work. By the time he reached the lobby doors, he was almost running. He ignored the leftover supplies, cut through the breadth of the lobby, and punched his way out through an emergency exit door on the side. The first thing his brain registered when his feet hit the pavement of the parking lot was a figure with a rifle, spinning around in surprise.
He’d fired twice before he really even saw the man. He hit him at least once and surged past, still running. He made it as far as the corner of the parking garage complex before turning around to check his results. There’d been a rifle, and he’d sure as shit be needing one. The figure wasn’t moving, and he went back with his gun held level, ready to fire again if he had to.
It was the kid from the mall looking up at him, blinking in surprise and trying to bring the rifle that lay next to him closer. The same kid who spent a lot of time with Daniel and Reed. Pro . . . What th
e hell was he supposed to do now?
“Jesus! I’m sorry, kid.” He took the rifle away from him and set it aside. He sat his own gun down and moved Pro’s other hand away from where he held it over his shoulder.
“Why . . .?” Pro struggled to speak.
“I didn’t mean to . . . What the hell are you doing out here?”
He felt around under the kid’s collar and realized his 9mm had punched right through the kid’s collarbone, just inside the shoulder, and exited out the back. Great! And he’d just killed the closest thing to a doctor these people had.
Christ, the kid was really bleeding, but it appeared to be coming from all the torn tissue, not an artery. “You got a first-aid kit? Or something?”
“My . . . bike.” The kid lifted his good hand and pointed at the garage.
Pro had passed out by the time he got back. He slapped him until he came back around. “You gotta stay awake! You hear me?”
“Help . . . coming,” Pro slurred.
Maybe for you, he thought. Ray tried to work as fast as he could; he’d had a battery of first-aid training over the course of his career. Almost all of it had dealt with the prolific dangers of his profession; hypoxia, crushing wounds, electrocution, the bends, burns, and hypothermia. All the shit he and his colleagues worried about on a daily basis. Gunshot wounds had never been part of the conversation. He’d had a crash course over the last year.
He plugged the entry wound with a tampon from the bag and packed the back side tight with all the sterile wrapping the kid had with him. He’d just finished wrapping it all tight under Pro’s armpit with an elastic ankle wrap when two Humvees roared up the road to the church. They bounced and plowed their way across the median and disappeared, hidden by the church. He could hear their tires squealing to a stop. For the briefest of moments, he considered making a break for the bushes that lined the parking lot. These were good people, he told himself. He grabbed the flashlight off of Pro’s belt and shined it at the corner of the building.
Seasons of Man | Book 2 | Reap What You Sow Page 6