Seasons of Man | Book 2 | Reap What You Sow

by Anderson, S. M.

Jason watched Pro and Pavel as they crossed the street, and the corner lawn of a frat house that appeared to have been converted into permanent housing for some of the citizens of Charlottesville. Neither of them bothered to hide their weapons; they were wearing street clothes like the rest of the citizen militia they seemed to be following down the road, west, deeper into the campus. Everyone they saw was armed.

  Skirjanek had attacked the roadblock about an hour ago. The 120mm main gun on the Abrams had a distinct sound. There had been half a dozen of the shots, and the light from a couple of secondary explosions had reflected off the low-hanging clouds and been easily seen from the edge of the city that they crept through. By the time they reached the eastern edge of the campus, their small group spotted the groups of citizens, all walking in towards the center of campus. Pavel and Pro had scrambled out of their flak jackets as fast as they could to join Charlottesville’s call-up.

  Jason had pulled Pro in close. “Remember, we’re trusting you with the mission. There’s no room for the personal here. You follow Pavel’s orders, whatever he says.”

  “I will.” Pro had seemed genuine. But watching the two of them disappear into the darkness was hard.

  “I got a dollar that says he gets some before we do.”

  He turned and looked behind him at Trey Nathans.

  “Trey, you’re messed up. You know that, right?” Farmer beat him to the punch, which was probably a good thing.

  Nathans looked at both of them in surprise. “Relax . . . I meant the Russian; dude’s stone-cold nuts.”

  Jason couldn’t imagine Pro in safer hands. Now the three of them had to get to the other side of the medical complex so they could get Nathans to a perch on one of the rooftops. With their heavy packs and Nathans’s sniper rifle, they weren’t going to blend in as easily as Pro and Pavel. They’d seen two roving security teams in campus security golf carts in the last five minutes. They seemed to be acting like sheepdogs, directing everyone to the middle of campus. He desperately wanted to get eyes and ears onto whatever was happening there.

  “You probably don’t want to talk too much,” Pro whispered to Pavel, “like at all.” They had a group of half a dozen men and women a block ahead of them, and another, smaller group behind them. At the last crossroad, they’d been able to see yet another group walking in the same direction, backlit by a couple of vehicles.

  “You will speak for me,” Pavel whispered.

  “OK . . .” Pro regarded the Russian for a moment. The man looked keyed up, not in a nervous way, but like he was ready to break the neck of anybody who got close to them. “Remember, there’s people from everywhere here. We’ll just blend in.”

  “I am blending.”

  “You know, you look like that guy from that old Terminator movie, the one who was made of liquid metal.”

  Pavel looked down at him for a moment and shook his head in confusion as they walked underneath a trellis of some sort at the end of the road. They were entering what appeared to be a garden, with a statue that looked like a lump of rock in the middle of it. “Not Arnold . . .?”

  “No, the other guy, the bad terminator.”

  “Ahh, yes. Was good movie.” Pavel turned to check behind him and then gripped Pro by the back of the neck and guided him firmly off the stone path and into the bushes. “We will wait here for everyone to pass, and then follow.”

  “But . . .”

  Pavel’s finger mashed against his lips. There wasn’t enough light that he could see the Russian, but he could almost imagine red, glowing eyes. Voices reached them a moment later as the group that had been following them entered the garden.

  “What the hell do they expect us to do?” A woman’s voice was heavy with worry.

  “I suppose they’ll tell us, won’t they?”

  “You believe them, from the flyers they dropped?”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know? If they’re for real, I’m going . . .” The group passed out of earshot.

  “We should follow them,” Pro whispered.

  “Yes, from a distance,” Pavel answered. “We do not want to be in the middle of a crowd. We will wait.”

  Pro wanted to argue on principle, wanted to be doing something, but realized it made sense. They waited a couple of minutes before another, larger group of over twenty people streamed past. The group broke in half to go both ways around the statue within the garden alcove. There were so many voices, they drowned each other out, but it was easy to tell that no one seemed excited about this muster.

  Two more smaller groups passed; the last group was walking slow enough that Pro thought they were looking for them. He could feel Pavel tense up next to him. A whirring sound startled the four laggards as they were lit up a by a handheld spotlight.

  “We going to have a problem here?” one of the men yelled from the open-sided electric cart that swung into the garden alcove from the neighborhood side.

  “No, we’re good,” one of the men from the group shouted back, holding his arm up to block the spotlight shining in his face.

  “Hurry the fuck up, then! Or we’ll collect names.”

  The group picked up their pace and disappeared down the trellised walkway. The cart stayed where it was, its spotlight centered on the laggards until the pathway bent out of sight.

  “Should be the last of them,” the passenger said as he clicked off his spotlight and put his legs up on the dash of the security cart. “Let’s wait here for a few minutes, and then we’ll make another loop to see if we have any stragglers.”

  “Sounds good.” The driver hopped out and walked over to the edge of the path. He fumbled with his belt for a moment before turning back to the cart. “You think Marks is going to have them roll out or just reinforce all the gates?”

  “Dude, I heard Marks ain’t going to be deciding shit. Mendoza told me Cooper had him arrested.”

  “Yeah, right! He get that off one of those bullshit flyers?”

  “I’m serious. He’s pretty tight with some of those militia dudes; he’d know.”

  “Who the hell are we supposed to be taking orders from, then?”

  “Keynes for now, I suppose.”

  The driver finished taking his leak. “This is messed up; we got no business fighting the fucking Army.”

  “They ain’t the Army, Benny. Just a bunch of—”

  The radio on the cart stopped whatever the man in the passenger’s seat was going to say. “Security three, when you finish your rounds, can you swing up to the north campus? We got a bunch folks with a lot of questions.”

  The passenger fumbled with his radio for a moment. “You’re not there to answer shit; just get them moving to the lawn. We got stragglers at the frat houses. We’ll come up when we can.” The passenger threw his radio back onto the seat.

  “That was Gorelic?” The driver paused with one hand on the roof, looking in at his seated partner.

  “Yeah, I don’t see why we have to do our job and his.”

  “I hear that.”

  Pro was startled by Pavel’s movement. The man was there next to him one moment; the next, he was walking out of the bushes towards the cart.

  “Who the hell are . . . ?”

  Pro saw Pavel raise his handgun with a suppressor. Two muted shots split the night air just as he was starting to stand up.

  The driver had collapsed in a heap outside the cart, and the passenger slumped down and slid out the far side. Pavel had already reached down and grabbed the driver. Pro reached him a second later and knelt to help him. Pavel stopped him, picked up the driver’s baseball cap, and seated it gently on Pro’s head.

  “Now we will go. You will drive.”

  Two quick minutes later, the two bodies were in the bushes, and they were both wearing the borrowed navy windbreakers over their gear and matching UVA baseball hats. Pro was sweating up a storm underneath the extra layer of clothing, but he wasn’t about to complain.

  “What now?”

  Pavel gave him a quick grin.
“You can drive this . . .?”

  “Golf cart.” Pro jumped behind the wheel. “Yes.”

  Pavel cracked two infrared glow sticks and taped them to the roof of the cart, then fell in next to him, fumbling with his radio. “All units, Raven One and Two are mobile. We are in possession of security vehicle . . . it is golf cart, marked with infrared.”

  Pro wanted to laugh as he followed Pavel’s pointed finger and began turning the cart around.

  “Affirmative, Raven One.” Jason’s voice came back. “Any chance you can deliver Mr. Nathans for us?”

  *

  Drew listened to his own radio and set it down. Jason and Pavel were on campus. John and his strike team of Bradleys had rolled across the railroad bridge over the Rivanna and were pulled off the tracks a mile from campus. They’d accomplished everything he’d wanted to this evening. It had taken half a dozen shots from Salguero’s Abrams, directed against the wall of stacked cars stretching across the freeway, before the people manning the roadblock had started waving T-shirts at them and filing out of their makeshift positions.

  They’d stopped the approach at the maximum range of the M1’s cannon and fired directly into the wall of stacked cars. It had been for psychological effect only, and Salguero had taken pains to shoot the wall of metal. It had worked; Poy had reported ten minutes ago that the former defenders were still moving back up Route 250 towards the ruined bridge, running into town.

  “All units, Skirjanek—we are moving forward to occupy freeway roadblock at Route 250. We will hold there and let them stew for the night.” He waited for the confirmations to come back and then pointed down the dark stretch of freeway; patches of small fires amid the still-burning cars were all he could see with his naked eye. He was heads-up in the commander’s seat of his Bradley and could see Salguero ten feet away, similarly perched out the top of the Abrams’s turret.

  “Lead the way, Tommy. Button up, and take out the two Bradleys down there as soon as you are close enough to be certain of hitting them.” He hoped whoever was manning them had retreated as well.

  “All vehicles will follow in two lines.” He looked behind him at the three other Bradleys besides his and the half dozen JLTVs as he transmitted. “Maintain one- hundred-yard separation, just like the approach.”

  “They are coming.” Roberto Giron wasn’t a happy camper. He looked over at Mohamed as he crawled through the Bradley’s rear hatch and pulled the heavy door shut behind him. If he had a friend inside this metal coffin, it was Mohamed. He’d seen the enemy formation up the freeway with one of the night vision scopes that had been dropped and left behind by the fleeing guard force. Supposedly there to defend the roadblock, they’d turned and run, waving white T-shirts over their heads as they went. The fact that so many of them seemed to have had white T-shirts ready and at hand said more to him than the fact that they’d used them. He’d been careful to keep the pillowcase he had crammed into his thigh pocket out of sight, but it was past time to use it as far as he was concerned.

  “No shit, they’re coming,” Jack spit back at him. “You think they’d have lit us up if they were just going to sit out there?”

  Roberto spun towards Jack; he was sitting in the commander’s chair where he could control and fire the Bradley’s main gun. “We’re the only ones left here for them to shoot at! This thing isn’t going to scratch the paint on that tank.”

  The three of them were buttoned up inside the Bradley that acted as the rolling gate for the roadblock. He and Mohamed weren’t even supposed to be here. They’d been pulled off the wall to “help” Jack inside the Bradley when his other crew hadn’t shown up, earlier in the evening. There was a lot of that going on; everyone had read or heard about the message on the enemy’s flyers. Their bad luck; otherwise, he and Mohamed would be headed back to town as fast as their feet would carry them, along with the rest of their unit.

  “They’ve got other vehicles we can hurt.” Jack sounded scared, which he could more than understand.

  “They have those rockets,” Mohamed blurted out. “They will fire before we can.”

  Jack’s hand dropped to his sidearm as he turned towards them in his seat. “We’re staying.”

  “Everyone else is gone,” he tried again. “Why?”

  “You think these assholes are going to show us any mercy, after what we’ve done?”

  “Who gives a shit? I’m not waiting around to find out; I’m headed west. So are a lot of other people,” Roberto said as he looked over at Mohamed, who had slid one seat closer to the front while Jack took another look through his scope.

  “What about our other tank? Why aren’t they answering?” Jack almost sounded confused, like his brain wasn’t working.

  “They’re gone, too, and this isn’t a tank! We’re dead men sitting in here.”

  Jack drew his revolver from his belt and pointed it at him. “We stay and fight.”

  Roberto’s hands went up over his head in reflex. “Easy there. I’m not saying we run, just that this thing is no match for that tank they have. We need to get out of this coffin.” Once outside the armored vehicle, Jack could stay and fight if he wanted to; he had no intention of doing anything of the sort.

  “We stay.” Jack sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

  “Why?” Roberto could sense the enemy tank rolling closer. He didn’t want to burn to death in a steel box. God had spared him from the virus; he was certain it hadn’t been for this. He was already moving as Jack started turning towards him in his seat, the gun coming up slowly. He slammed into the Bradley’s commander, the tight spaces doing as much to protect him as having Jack’s gun arm pinned against him.

  He felt Mohamed next to him, reaching past for Jack’s legs. The gun clattered to the deck as the two of them tore Jack out of his station and dumped him on the floor. Mohamed’s heavy boot slammed into Jack’s face to stop whatever he was going to say. Roberto scooped up the revolver and waved it at the back door, hitting the ramp release control. “Let’s go!”

  The back ramp came down slow on its hydraulic hinge. Too slow . . . Their Bradley, acting as the barricade’s gate, was oriented at a right angle to the freeway. It was presented in an almost perfect profile to the tank bearing down on them. The same tank that had already fired.

  The depleted uranium penetrator rod struck the Bradley slightly forward of the midpoint of the upper half of the armored box. There was no explosion of a warhead. The uranium rod and the armor it bore through were converted into a superheated plasma by the kinetic force of the impact. The plasma jet sprayed through the interior, killing them before they knew they’d been hit. Roberto Giron’s last thought had been a good one; he’d cheated death again.

  *

  “They lied to me . . .” Lisa barely heard her own voice. Her office was a madhouse of activity with her people running in and out, shouting orders and requests at their colleagues. Orders that no one was answering. This team she had handpicked and trained to help her administer what she had built was staying by her side. She was enough of a realist to know they weren’t the team that could protect her. She’d arrested the man who could have. Marks was being held in the basement of this very building and wouldn’t be inclined to help her. Not now.

  “Ma’am.” Jerry Moser came to a stop in front of her desk. “The scouts we sent to the freeway say that the enemy has complete control of the roadblock. They seem to have stopped. They spotted over forty individuals and say there were probably more within the vehicles they have, which includes a tank.”

  “Over forty?” She looked up at her newest commander of their supposed defense force, the third one of what had turned out to be a very long day and night. “Did any of them look sick?”

  There was an instant of confusion that flickered across Moser’s broad, pale face. She realized her mistake right away. Up until a few seconds ago, Jerry had believed her explanation; that the enemy’s accusation that she had purposely infected them was bullshit; that the claim printed
on the flyers was meant to sow confusion.

  “They didn’t say.” Jerry checked behind him at the others in the room before turning back to her. “Should I have asked?”

  “I should have told you; I’m sorry. We had some earlier intelligence that the virus had caught up to them.” She held a palm out in front of her face. “Not that we had anything to do with it. If their story about being in Antarctica is true, they wouldn’t be immune, would they? They’re just blaming us for something that we couldn’t possibly control.”

  “I see,” Moser deadpanned. It was clear he didn’t believe her. She was past tired of this worthless moral posturing. The world didn’t have room for that shit, not anymore. Why couldn’t the rest of them see that?

  “I’ll send more scouts,” he said after a moment. “Get you an answer.”

  “If there are only forty people, why don’t we just attack them?”

  Jerry shook his head. “Ms. Cooper, it would be suicide. They have a tank, four of those Bradleys like ours, and a half dozen other lighter military vehicles. They’ve got those missiles that we know they can use. The units General Marks had on the barricade? They’ve all retreated, and have gone to ground somewhere within the city; most didn’t return to the campus. The teams we had guarding Route 29 in the north and the western approaches aren’t reporting in. There are reports of groups fleeing the campus to the west.”

  She already knew all that, and waved her hand at him to make him stop. “Any word on Josh Keynes?”

  “Nothing. He hasn’t been seen in hours.”

  Josh had gone out to check on the barricade. He might have been caught in that fighting, or, more likely was off hiding somewhere after having lied to her.

  “Who do we have left? That will actually fight to defend this place?”

  “Most of the militia, ma’am, but right now, they are on campus, trying to corral our people and stop them from running, and it’s getting ugly . . .”

  “Go on. You seem to be the first person to be honest with me all day.”

  “Ma’am, I used to be the head of marketing at a vineyard in the valley. I don’t know anything about this . . . sort of thing. It just seems that if we put up a credible defense, they’ll want to negotiate, or at least give us a chance to explain. Your militia is what we have left to do that with. It might save some lives.”