Carla just glared at Ray for a moment and then turned to him. “So what? You going to torture an old woman now?”
Rachel reached for a bottle of water, stood up, and handed it to the woman. “Just hear us out, please.”
Surprise and confusion battled on the woman’s face for a moment, but after she drained half the bottle, her expression returned to steady suspicion.
“We don’t want to fight with anyone,” he said. “But, we will if we have to. We like the sound of some of what Ray told us. It doesn’t seem like a bad idea to be part of something like you’ve built in Charlottesville . . . if it’s true.”
Carla looked back at him and took in the faces around the table as if really seeing them for the first time. “I don’t know what he’s told you.”
“That you’ve got a large group, thousands strong. You’ve got crops in . . .”
Rachel jumped in on the conversation. “That you let everyone carry guns, especially the women?”
“That’s all true,” Carla said after a moment of staring at Rachel.
“Did the virus somehow miss Charlottesville?” Reed asked from where he stood behind Carla. “How is it that you have so many people?”
“They found us,” Carla answered quickly. “The university pretty much sits next to I-64. Early on, people passed by, and we invited in everyone who wanted to stay. We don’t have a Ritz hotel like you people, but the university and the hospital complex had been a FEMA and CDC site for a while. We had a bit of a head start.”
“We’ve got I-95 less than half a mile from here,” Michelle fired back. “We haven’t seen that kind of traffic. In fact, anybody with half a brain knows to avoid the freeways.”
“This was early on, I said.” Carla seemed to nod in agreement. “Not now.”
Michelle just stared back at the woman. “And now? How do you get your people?”
“We send out scouts.” Carla sat up a little higher in her chair. “Like me, to make contact with people. Most folks are desperate for some sense of security.”
“So, you can protect what you have? The place is secure?” Jason changed tactics.
“Very.” Carla just smiled back at him. “But I’m not going to talk about that. I’m sure you understand why.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “I wouldn’t either if our roles were reversed.” He looked at the others around the room. Some were listening; a few weren’t very good actors and were openly staring at the spy with disdain of their own. For her part, Michelle was a better actor than he would have given the woman credit for. Michelle had argued a day ago to march Carla outside and put a bullet in her head. He hadn’t disagreed, and knew it might still fall to him to do just that.
“If we agree, we would just join up? How exactly does this work?”
Carla just shrugged. “I don’t have the authority to answer that. I’m just a scout.”
“Who does have the authority there?” he asked.
“Yeah, who’s running the place, and what kind of place does he run?” Gabe stepped away from the wall next to Ray. “I’ve lived under a whack job; I’m not doing that again.”
Carla almost smiled at Gabe. “Before you people locked me up, I heard the stories of what happened here. Trust me, we don’t have anything like that going on. Our leader is a former professor at UVA, and she’s a she. She doesn’t have any patience for tough guys on power trips.” Carla looked directly at him as she said the last.
Is that what you think I am? Jason just looked back at the spy, and then jerked a thumb at Michelle. “Don’t look at me. She’s in charge here.”
“So, this lady professor?” Michelle leaned forward and put her elbows on the table. “She a one-man show? Her word law? Or does she rule by committee?”
“I’m not going to talk about any of that stuff either.” Carla shook her head. “If you want me to take a message or escort a few of you down there, I can do that. But I’m not going to sit here and play twenty questions with you.”
“You’re a spy,” Michelle fired back. “You’re lucky we are asking anything.”
“Like I said, I’m just a scout.” Carla managed an awkward smile. “Call me a recruiter.”
Jason turned to Gabe and motioned to the paper bag on the floor next to him. He accepted the bag, stood, and dumped the contents out into Carla’s lap. It was one-half of the destroyed shortwave radio they’d found on the top of the roof.
“That’s not what Tom said.” He smiled as he sat back down.
“You’re a scout alright, so was he. You were reporting on us.”
“What are you talking about? Tom’s . . .”
“Dead,” he finished for the woman. “Told us all about the New Republic before he died too. How you’re the advance team of what’s coming for us. I’ve been to Charlottesville, you know. Took a nice stroll around campus. I saw the golf course planted with crops; I saw the field behind the admin building filled with military equipment. Tanks, Carla? What do you need tanks for? I saw the football stadium, too, the prisoners inside, living in tents. Listening to a recording spouting gibberish like some communist reeducation camp. I talked to survivors you missed when you rolled through Harrisonburg and Woodstock. I’ve heard firsthand how you collected your people.”
He leaned back and crossed his arms across his chest as he swiveled his chair to face her fully. “Save us the I’m-just-a-recruiter bullshit. We know how you people operate.”
Carla was staring at the piece of radio in her lap. “You killed Tom?”
“What would your people have done if they caught me sneaking around campus?”
She was quiet for a long time. When she looked up, she did a good job of putting on a brave face. “You do what you want with me. The only thing I’m going to regret is not being here when my people come through. Anybody who resists is going to join me. The rest of you will be taken and, in the end, you’ll see it wasn’t worth fighting in the first place. You’ll be better off, safe and secure.”
“Our survivors would just have to soldier for you at that point? Right? Forcing other survivors to join?” Michelle was shaking her head. “You should have stuck with scout; you’re a shitty recruiter. I think we’ll pass.”
Carla smiled at the room. “Roanoke . . . Lynchburg . . . Blacksburg, Lexington, Harrisonburg . . .”
“Get her out of here,” Michelle shouted at Reed.
“They all passed too! Every one of them. Staunton! Winchester! All of them.” Carla kept yelling as Reed and Gabe cuffed her and dragged her out of the room. They were all silent a moment as they listened to her continue to scream down the hall. “You’re all dead! You just don’t know it yet.”
Michelle was looking at him when he turned away from the door. “That was a dirty trick.”
“Wasn’t sure she’d say anything, but I’m glad she did. You have to realize what you are facing.”
“I don’t have all the answers,” Michelle said, shaking her head, and then leveled a finger in his direction. “Neither do you. I think we have to fight, but you’re right—there’s no need to make it easier for them. I’ll support dispersing, getting away from the hotel and the mall, as long as we make every effort to keep our people together and take as much as we can with us. Will you help us with that?”
He glanced at Rachel; her eyes were pleading with him. They hadn’t spent much time sleeping the night before. They’d even spent some time talking about the future and different scenarios. In every one of them, his main concern had been to get Rachel, Pro, and Elsa away from Tysons. If Michelle could agree to move the people out, he’d help them.
“I will,” he said. “Let the hotel and the mall be their target. We can defend it a lot more effectively if we aren’t actually living here and don’t plan on ever coming back.”
“You lost me,” Daniel said.
“You mean to turn this place into a booby trap?” Michelle was frowning.
“I was thinking more along the lines of a death trap,” he admitted. “B
ut yeah, you’ve got the general concept. All of it hinges on them thinking we are here. It also means our perimeter is going to have to be extended; scouts out as far as Leesburg to the west, and south watching 15 and 29.”
“We can do that easy enough,” Reed responded.
“And our rules of engagement need to change. We’re operating under the assumption they’ve lost contact with their eyes and ears here. We have to assume they’ll look to send more before moving on us. We need to be prepared to vet or engage anybody coming towards us.”
“Definitely,” Ray added. “Carla flat out told me they’d sent teams to different cities. She mentioned Richmond, Norfolk, and here. She even said they’d sent a team into Pennsylvania and another to Knoxville. It sounded like they’re pretty ambitious.”
“Well, Richmond isn’t very far from Charlottesville,” Daniel countered. “Maybe they’ll head in that direction first.”
“Maybe,” Jason agreed. Everything they could plan for was based on a series of maybes. “We can’t count on anything. We need to start now, and you are the last people in the world I need to tell how much stuff there is to move—you built the mountain.”
“Where to?” Rachel asked.
He nodded and flashed a smile in Michelle’s direction. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that . . .”
“You’re going to make me beg, aren’t you?” Jason had to try, but he could see the determination on Ray’s face. The guy was anxious to be gone.
Ray straddled a BMW touring bike, wearing a shit-eating grin and holding a pair of night vision goggles. He waved the goggles at him and ignored the question. “Thanks for these, by the way.”
“If I were you, I’d travel only by night. Stay off the interstates,” Jason said. “All the former FEMA sites have been within a mile or so of an interstate, and good or bad, they all seem to have collected people.”
“The one thing I don’t want.” Ray grinned. “Will do.”
Reed handed him a radio. “I imagine you’ll be out of range shortly, but we’re always listening on this frequency.”
Jason watched as Ray pocketed the radio. “I’ll radio in if I see anything for you to worry about. I’ve spent a lot of time with the map book.” Ray patted his chest.
“You want to give us your route in case you need us to come get you?”
“Would you?” Ray was smiling.
“If I thought you’d come back with us.” Jason smiled in return. “You bet your ass I would.”
“I’ll take 15 south all the way to Durham, then work my way west through North Carolina. I’ll go south at some point; my folks had a farm in northwest Georgia. A little community called Trion. It’s on the map.”
Reed laughed. “Not sure I’d tell Jason where you’re headed.”
“No worries.” Ray waved away the concern. “It’s Georgia hill country; somebody doesn’t want to be found, they won’t be.”
Jason held out his hand. “Good luck to you, Ray. You’re wasting moonlight.”
Ray shook hands with both of them. “You as well.”
They watched the motorcycle disappear behind a building and listened to it grow more distant.
“Wish that was you?” Reed asked him as they turned to walk back to the hotel.
Jason kicked at a loose nugget of asphalt and watched it until it rolled to a stop. He could see Rachel and Elsa standing at the doors of the beast; he thought he could see Pro already seated in the back. Michelle was right; they were going to have to fight.
“Not anymore.”
*
Chapter 15
“Frog? You hear that?”
Former or possibly current Marine; he wasn’t exactly sure what he was at the moment. Ogoro Uwasi stared at Elliot, wondering what had ever possessed him to divulge the fact that his given name meant “frog” in his native tongue. It wasn’t like he could pull rank on the fool; all the Marines were now corporals except for Sergeant Farmer and Lieutenant Bruce. According to Bruce, the colonel had plans to make them all sergeants at some point.
Beating some sense into his fellow Marine wasn’t an option. They’d tried that when they’d been stuck in The Hole, and it hadn’t worked. Besides, the colonel didn’t seem to be in the mood for horseplay at the moment. Skirjanek had been all business when he’d ordered the two of them three miles north of their new base. If anything went down at their makeshift roadblock, he’d need Elliot.
“I don’t hear anything,” Uwasi answered.
They both stared at each other for a moment from where they leaned up against the side of the Humvee that anchored the serpentine track of abandoned cars along the straightaway of Highway 15.
“Me neither.” Elliot shrugged. “It’s gone.”
“What was . . .?” Uwasi stopped. He’d heard it. Now, they both did. It was a motorcycle, its high-pitched whine growing louder. The back end of their roadblock sat two-thirds of the way up a rise in the road, and they had a good view of Highway 15 stretching north into Virginia farm country, or at least they’d had one before the sun went down.
He ignored whatever Elliot was about to say, climbed up into the back of the Humvee, and stood up in the cupola, sporting a .30 caliber M-60 machine gun. He flipped an NVD monocle down over his left eye.
“I see him. He must have night vision too!”
Uwasi knew they weren’t outlined on the ridge. They were below that, but something had caused the motorcycle to start slowing. They hadn’t built a barrier with the abandoned cars; it was more a serpentine course designed to force anybody not driving a tank to slow down.
“I got him,” Elliot whispered from the ground. He bent over, sighting down the length of his rifle over the hood of a car.
“Captain Volkov said we need intel,” he answered as he brought the machine gun around to the target.
“We really going to take orders from a Russian?”
“I certainly am.” Uwasi had been with Pavel before he’d become Captain Volkov in Newport News. They’d been on patrol and walked into an ambush set up by some scavengers. The three men and a woman had been dead, courtesy of Pavel, before he’d picked himself off the ground after catching a round with his vest. “Besides, the colonel made him captain. Gunny . . . I mean Lieutenant Bruce agreed.”
“But he’s Russian, Uwasi.”
“So what? We have a dozen Russians with us. I’m Nigerian, Cruz is Puerto Rican, Poy Boy is Samoan or some shit, and all those folks from the sub—they’re Navy.”
“You got a point there,” Elliot admitted.
And you, Elliot, you’re an idiot. “What’s he doing?”
“Just looking around . . . no! Here he comes, moving slow.” Elliot was breathing hard, starting to get wound up.
“Relax, Elliot, it’s one guy on a motorcycle. We got this.” His Humvee was halfway hidden behind a small building holding a massive irrigation pump of some sort that would never run again. Elliot’s cover was in the middle of the road; the bike would have to go around his colleague. “I got an idea,” he said when the bike was within a hundred yards of their position.
He let go of the M-60 and maneuvered his M4 up through the cupola. “I’m going to shoot out his front tire when he’s in front of your car. You knock his ass off the bike when he tries to get by you.”
“What!”
“Just do it, Elliot.”
“Wait! He’s stopping again.”
Ray rolled to a stop again. He’d been dodging abandoned cars for the last two hours. He’d even had to leave the road once when the traffic snarl had involved two tractor trailers, but this was different. These cars looked like . . .
He spotted the rear half of a Humvee ahead, sticking out from behind a concrete pump house. He sat frozen with fear, his eyes crept upward, taking in the outlines of the top of the vehicle. A bright flash bloomed in the middle of his vision, and he felt the impact of the bullet through his hands on the motorcycle’s handles. The whole bike dropped a couple of inches at the front end. He half jumpe
d, half flew off the bike in reflex. He’d had it in gear; when his hand let off the clutch, the motorcycle lurched forward with a sputter and died, tipping over in front of him just as he reoriented himself on the asphalt.
Scrambling forward on his hands and knees, he passed the BMW that he’d thought would see him home, and reached the back end of an abandoned Toyota SUV. He ripped off the NVDs to try to see what was around him. The sky was overcast, but there was a full moon somewhere behind the clouds, and it wasn’t nearly dark enough to sneak back the way he’d come. Besides, whoever these assholes were, they’d been able to shoot out his front tire, so it was a good indicator that they probably had night vision too.
“You’re surrounded! Toss the rifle!” The deep bass of the voice had a strange accent.
The world had it in for him. It had killed everyone he knew. He’d been trying to get to Georgia when he’d been shanghaied by the assholes in Kentucky. He’d fought his way out of that shit show only to fall in with Carla and her group before finding Tysons. Giving him a rare glimmer of hope, they’d set him up and sent him on his way. And now this . . . all of a sudden, the world still seemed to have too many people in it for his taste.
“Not going to happen!” he shouted back. “Looks like I’ll be needing it shortly.”
“You assholes picked the wrong people to fuck with. The Marines are here now!” It was a different voice shouting, sounding like it was coming from the middle of the road. Maybe he was surrounded . . .
“Drop the weapon, and approach with your hands on your head.”
The Marines? How stupid did these people think he was? He glanced at his motorcycle; he’d ridden right into their roadblock—maybe it wasn’t the right question to be asking himself. Then again, they could have shot him just as easily . . .
“Look, I’m not looking for any trouble. I’m just trying to get south to Georgia.”
“Why?” the second voice shouted. “Nothing going to be there. Where you coming from?”
Seasons of Man | Book 2 | Reap What You Sow Page 14