Carl peered around the corner into the alleyway. Steam rose up from the old underground storm drain system, but nothing moved. After a few seconds, he stepped into the alley with Mary Ann and continued walking. They intertwined their arms and walked side by side, pretending to be just another amorous Kodiak couple. Carl kept the pace brisk enough to say, “hey, we’re going somewhere specific,” but slow enough that it didn’t look like they were in a rush. Carl’s training told him that was the best way to avoid being noticed—blend into the background, behave like everyone else, and you’re practically invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking right at you.
Before they reached the end of the alleyway, however, the situation changed. Two people stepped into the alley’s exit, moving slowly. They seemed to be trying to look like two people chatting quietly with one another while on their way to somewhere. But their legs and arms were too stiff, their body language tense and ready for action. Carl turned his face toward Mary Ann as he glanced quickly toward the rear and saw two more people step into the alley behind them. This was obviously no coincidence.
Beside him, Mary Ann laughed out loud as though responding to something he had just said and took her arm out from his in order to punch him playfully on the shoulder. “Oh, you’re no gentleman at all, are you,” she said. She spoke in a normal tone of voice, sounding completely at ease, but in the silence of the night and in the alley’s confines, her voice surely traveled to their soon-to-be attackers.
Carl grinned back and chuckled aloud. Mary Ann was obviously smart and cunning. By doing that, she had freed up his right arm without being obvious about it, and she hadn’t missed a step as the other players showed up. She had played it perfectly.
When they got within a dozen feet of the first two, Carl heard the people behind them walking and guessed they were still about forty feet away. That gave him at most four seconds to deal with the first two before the second pair would be able to realize what was going on, react, and then be upon them—he’d have to do this fast. Strike first, strike hard.
In one motion, he drew his pistol and fired with his elbow at his side. The round struck the man on the right directly in his face, and he toppled backward. The second man’s leg lashed out in a blur, striking Carl painfully at his wrist and sending his pistol flying. It nearly struck Mary Ann, then clattered to the ground.
Even as the pistol skittered across the pavement into the wall next to Mary Ann, Carl was already drawing his Tanto-pointed knife, thrusting it at his attacker, but he jumped back to the left and Carl’s knife only brushed his leather jacket, ineffective. A knife appeared in the man’s hand. He held it like an icepick, point down, and drew his arm up to attack.
Carl felt the thrill of victory rush through him—the other man was dead already, he just didn’t know it. It was exactly the wrong grip, wrong attack. As his arm went up, Carl stepped toward him, thrusting his knife toward the attacker’s chest.
The man’s other arm swept across his body to block the blade, but it didn’t. It only pushed the path of the blade from the left to the right. As Carl’s blade punched through leather, skin, and bone with ease, he raised his other arm, blocking the man’s clumsy downward stroke. Carl shoved the man backward, momentum then ripping the blade from his chest. He hit the ground making a wheezing, bubbling noise. That was definitely a punctured lung—he’d be dead shortly.
Carl spun to face the other two and saw they had knives drawn as well, rushing toward him. Two on one with knives was a losing proposition, no matter how skilled you were, especially when they were ready for you and knew you had a knife, too. At least Mary Ann could get away, and her other guards couldn’t be more than a few seconds away. Carl only had to delay these two motherfuckers for a moment.
The distance closed from twenty feet to six in only a moment—and Carl braced himself. He had already decided, right or wrong, that he was going to kill the one on the left, knowing the other would waste two precious seconds killing him. Then it would be only the last attacker and Mary Ann, with her having a great head start.
A deafening boom startled Carl, and one of the two—the one Carl figured would kill him—fell forward onto his face, skidding almost to Carl’s feet.
Carl had no time to decipher what happened and swung his knife diagonally at the remaining one. He dodged to Carl’s right, and the strike missed.
The man didn’t stop turning, though, and finished spinning in a blur, his knife streaking toward Carl’s face with a backhand strike.
Carl raised his right arm. It blocked the strike, but the other man’s blade was no Tanto-point; the slightly curved blade cut through Carl’s jacket like butter and bit deep into his upper arm.
Carl managed to keep his grip on his knife but felt immediate wetness in his jacket sleeve. It was a serious wound, he knew, but it didn’t slow him down yet. Knife arm already up, Carl then thrust his knife point down and forward toward the other man’s neck. His enemy’s momentum from the last attack carried him forward, ruining his chance of defending himself, and Carl’s knife sunk to its hilt into the man’s back just below his neck.
The last foe groaned and fell forward slowly, toppling slowly at first like a tree. The fight was over, but there were sure to be more. He had to find Mary Ann and get her to safety.
Carl turned, ready to run after her, but saw her standing there, wide-eyed, holding the pistol he had dropped at the beginning of the fight.
“You should have run,” he said. His voice was a deep growl from the adrenaline pumping through him and he felt like he couldn’t catch his breath.
“Good for you I didn’t,” she smirked. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Those shots will bring people.”
Side by side, Mary Ann still holding the pistol, they ran from the alley, sprinting across the next street and up a block. They slid through one house’s side gate into its backyard, then across the yard to the tall wooden fence. Neither of them slowed for it, leaping up and throwing an elbow over the top instead and using their momentum to carry their feet over the top before rolling off. They landed in a crouch on the other side.
Carl felt fire shoot through his arm, taking his breath away. The adrenaline was wearing off and he might go into shock soon if the wound was bad enough. There was no way to see it through his jacket, though, and no time yet to slow down. They kept running, though Carl quickly found himself a couple paces behind her. She didn’t slow, however, so Carl put his chin down and redoubled his efforts. He didn’t catch up, but at least he fell no further behind.
They crossed the yard and reached the house on the other side. Carl drew up short and kicked the back door open. It flew inward, one hinge flying away in a rain of wood splinters. He and Mary Ann stepped inside, and stopped. Carl propped the door up as best he could and then tried to catch his breath.
“I guess I owe you a thanks,” Carl said, panting. “Stay low.”
Mary Ann leaned against the dead refrigerator, crouching enough to put her hands on her knees. Between whistling gasps, she said, “No problem… Guess we’re even… badass.”
Carl grinned. Mary Ann was turning out to be quite a remarkable person. He decided right then and there, she would make a fantastic Speaker for Liz Town. So far, she embodied everything Liz Town had stood for under his old Alpha. “…just glad you didn’t miss that shot,” he panted, “…woulda sucked for me…”
Carl counted his heartbeats. Forty beats later, his breathing had returned mostly to normal and his pulse was slowing noticeably. “We need to get out of here. Ideas?”
Mary Ann handed his pistol back to him and stood straight, stretching her back. “Well—”
The rear door, already halfway off its hinges, flew inward, narrowly missing Carl. A man wearing a leather jacket and Diamondback colors stepped through the doorway, gun drawn. He swung his pistol toward Mary Ann, to his left, ignoring Carl.
Carl leaped at him in a flying football tackle, but even as his feet left the ground, he knew he’d miss. He must
have lost more blood than he thought, because suddenly his arms and legs felt heavy.
The other man stepped back, ruining his shot, as Carl landed on the kitchen floor and skidded into the lower cabinets. The other man growled and swung his pistol toward Carl.
Nothing he could do. Carl closed his eyes and waited for the bang. A half-second later he heard the resounding boom of a gun fired inside. It took another half-second to realize he didn’t feel anything. Wasn’t dead. He cracked one eye open. Standing at the front door was the lone guard, from whom they’d separated to avoid drawing attention as a group.
The guard grinned. “Lucky timing,” he said. “Mary Ann, are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “No, but Carl got cut on the right arm.”
More footsteps, but it was the other two guards. One said, “If we found you, they can too. Let’s go.”
Carl got to his feet. “I’m bleeding pretty bad. Must’a followed my blood trail.”
Mary Ann nodded. “Take your jacket off. Do it now.”
Carl shrugged out of the jacket and let it fall to the ground, and pulled his hoodie up over his head. He let it fall to the floor as well and looked at his arm. It was gashed to the bone and still bleeding heavily, but it wasn’t an arterial cut. Take the good where you find it.
Mary Ann bent down, picked his hoodie off the floor, and pulled hard on one end of the hood’s drawstring. It came out easily. She quickly looped the cord in half, slid the loose ends through the loop, and slid it up Carl’s arm past the wound. When it got nearly up to his armpit, she pulled hard. The loop cinched down painfully, and after Carl’s involuntary grunt he felt his arm begin to tingle immediately. No oxygen, but no bleeding out before someone could sew it up. Take the good where you find it.
Mary Ann tied the loose ends back around his arm, adding to the constriction and preventing it from coming loose. “No blood trail, now,” she said, and used his hoodie to wipe as much blood off his arm as she could. It had taken less than a minute to apply the tourniquet. “Let’s get out of here.”
The group left together and headed toward the safehouse, taking a circuitous route while checking for tails or rooftop watchers. They had to avoid leading anyone right to it. When they drew close, two guards broke off and slipped into shadows, waiting for followers cursed with a death wish.
Carl, Mary Ann, and the other lone guard got to their hideout safely. Once inside, she pulled a first aid kit and a sewing kit out of a kitchen drawer. “Sorry, no Lidocain. This is gonna hurt.”
“Carl nodded. “Yeah, well, can’t hurt worse than losing my arm.”
“You wish,” Mary Ann said.
Carl felt the cold air against his fresh, hot wound and let out another involuntary grunt. He sucked in a deep inhalation and held it. “Let’s do this,” he said, gritting his teeth.
“Alright, here goes,” Mary Ann said as she sank the needle into his arm.
She was right. It hurt like hell.
- 17 -
0645 HOURS - ZERO DAY +249
CASSY SLID HER hand lightly over the rough surface of the biplane lower wing, feeling the hardened canvas with the tenderness of a lover. “Amazing. Two hundred years of technological advance, and this plane is back to being one of the most advanced machines in the world.”
Dean Jepson nodded and wiped his handkerchief over his sweaty face before stuffing it back into his pocket, sewn into the chest of his overalls. He spit, then grinned. “So glad you took a liking to her, Cassy. I call her Betsy.”
She didn’t care what it was named. “Fantastic, Dean. You did well getting her up and running.”
Dean was not a smiling man, far from it, but now his face lit in the biggest grin she had ever seen on him. “Ah, this old workhorse of a plane is the prettiest girl at the ball, I’d say.”
Cassy, Dean, and his wife may have once gone to court against one another before the EMPs, but they were all just Clanners together now. He was cranky and old, and the kids messed with him like they would any old codger sitting on a porch yelling at them to stay off his lawn, but she suspected he enjoyed that role. It was just the way he played with them, something he proved by working with Brianna and Kaitlyn when the two girls wanted to make “Medals of Generator” for Jaz and Choony.
“The only thing left is for y’all to figure out how to arm her and them other planes. We got ten, but the others are newfangled, and they ain’t half so pretty. This one, though… She can fly almost as slow as a man might walk, and she can circle on a dime. She’ll do better than all the rest when the fussin’ and fightin’ starts, you mark my words.”
“And the fuel problem?” Cassy asked. “How are we handling that?”
“Ha. Missy, right now she runs on regular ol’ gas, same as always. Them scouts got up cases of gas perserves, so she’ll run right for another year if we’re lucky. But by then we’ll have more of them gas fryers, and I reckon I can rig her up to run on that stuff somehow.”
Cassy stifled a chuckle at the way he said “preservers” and “gasifiers,” but that didn’t make him any less right, or less vital to the Clan.
So for now, the planes could run without major modifications. That was very good news, considering how scarce the high demand had made the small, efficient gasifiers that Dean built.
In fact, Dean’s design was far better than the gasifiers out of Falconry or Brickerville, but Cassy reserved them for the Clan’s battlecars. When there was a surplus, she’d think about trading them with more distant groups like Falconry and the Clan’s client settlements like Taj Mahal.
She had set up the less efficient gasifiers that they had gotten by trade so far to generate power, turning the wind and solar power generators into backups. It had allowed the Clan to light most of the dwellings in the Complex, the HQ, and the Bunker—though the latter already had a generator that was now purely backup—and even the Clanholme water pumps. Now the reservoir at the top of the south hill could be filled without rain and without labor, saving hundreds of labor man-hours and giving the outdoor kitchen and the HQ running water at all times, and great pressure to boot.
Cassy nodded and said, “That’s great, Dean. I’ll let you get back to work. Tell your wife I said hello.”
Dean grumbled, “You want to say hello to the missus, you tell her y’self. Bah. I don’t know how you expect me to get work done if all y’all keep interrupting me anyway.” He walked away, still muttering under his breath.
Cassy bit back a smile, shaking her head. There’s the Dean I know, she thought as she left the hangar. Outside, Michael waited for her.
“How did it go?” he asked with a wry grin.
“Well, he smiled today.”
“No kidding. But where are we with the planes?”
“All ten of the planes are running now, including the biplane, which he named Betsy,” Cassy said with another drip of sarcasm at the end.
Michael chuckled a bit, shaking his head.
“Though, something interesting Dean had said to me just now—the biplane will fly almost as slow as a man walks, and will circle on a dime. I’m sure that’s an exaggeration, but maybe we can use that to our advantage somehow.”
Michael walked with her as she returned to their horses for the half-hour journey back to Clanholme. The planes were kept far enough away that only the scouts knew about them, even among the Clanners. Other than the Council, of course. They absolutely did not want word of the Clan’s working airplanes to leak out to anyone outside.
“He’s not exaggerating by much, actually,” Michael said. “He might be absolutely right. His ‘Betsy’ might be our best plane. We studied different eras of warfare in the Corps. In World War One, they used biplanes by preference. They could stay in the air at surprisingly slow speeds and, with those two sets of wings, they generate enough lift to turn tightly for a long time before losing much altitude. That more than made up for their lack of speed.”
The two Clanners mounted their horses and turned toward home. “If th
ey are so great, why did we move to single-wing planes and jets?” Cassy asked, genuinely curious.
“Easy. Technology marches on. We got air-to-air missiles with ranges far beyond the pilot’s vision, and radar to see the enemy very far out. With jets, speed is life. Biplanes just can’t go that fast, and their quick maneuvering didn’t mean as much when you could see by radar what was coming long before it got there, so we found designs that could go extremely fast.”
Cassy nodded. “I see. We don’t have air-to-air missiles and radar to worry about anymore, at least not outside the Mountain. If I’m getting this right, speed just means short attacks and long times between attacks now.”
“That’s the gist of it, yes. The biplane might outperform the others in every way that matters in this upcoming war. Not that the others won’t do well—they’re all crop dusters, after all. They were made for maneuverability.”
“So we’re reinventing air tactics from World War One and have to figure out how to arm these planes.”
“Wait a minute.” Michael paused in thought, then replied, “I think I have an idea. Earlier in the Great War they dropped bombs, but not like how you imagine them now. Their bombs were basically grenades that went off on impact, and the pilot or a passenger would literally throw them over the side to rain down on enemy positions. Sometimes they’d chuck a bomb right from the plane into a spotter tower and watch it go up in smoke as they flew away.”
“Interesting,” Cassy said.
“Yeah. We could rig up something with all that dynamite we got and maybe with shotgun shells—you know, like the boobytraps we have around Clanholme.”
“I think the Brickerville people put something like that together to lob down from their drones during that fight against the invaders over at the quarry.”
“Easy enough to set up. Impact drives a pin into the shell, which goes off and detonates the dynamite. We could attach fins to make them fall truer, as well.”
Dark New World (Book 5): EMP Resurrection Page 21