“That way, he’s not at full-strength when he marches a damn army to our gate.” Kent stroked his chin, feeling the course stubble beneath his fingertips, still not used to being unable to shave. Razor bumps were annoying before The End had come, but now, shaving wasn’t really safe. Infections weren’t something to take lightly anymore, so he’d been reduced to trimming his whiskers with a little beard-trimming gizmo. Those still worked, at least, since they didn’t have circuits—
An idea flashed through his mind. Some things still did work, and maybe…Perhaps some of those things could be used in new ways. “Babe, you know that farm west of us? The one with the old two-wing planes you love so much.”
“Biplanes. Crop dusters. Yeah, what about them?”
“So, you figure those things can still fly? It seems to me that maybe gravity still works like it did before the CMEs.”
“Yes,” she replied cautiously. “They could, anyway. What did you have in mind?”
Kent grinned, but only for her benefit. Inside, his stomach turned as he imagined what was about to happen. “If it works, I think we can fry two chickens with one barbeque.”
“Two birds with one stone.”
“That, too. Here’s what we’ll need right away,” he said, “starting with about a hundred boxes of Tide laundry soap, and cases of lightbulbs.” He went through a short list of things, and she furiously scribbled notes with the mechanical pencil she never seemed to be without.
36
Dumping his mountain bike into the dirt, sucking air, Nick put his hands on his knees and took a moment to just breathe. That last hill had almost made him walk up it, as the one before had, but time was of the essence. Granted, Clarks Crossing was only fifty miles from Fenton, but it would have taken days to walk and they couldn’t spare the vehicles to drive. Nor would he have wanted to stay on the roads, which a vehicle would have required. Those were far too dangerous right now, especially with what was going on between the new bandit king and Burnsville, which had been directly along the path. Bikes had most of the advantages of walking, without the impossibly slow rate. The sun would be down in an hour—and Clarks Crossing lay below, just over a small river.
Corey grinned and slapped his dad on the shoulder. “How you doing, old man?”
Nick grunted and then replied, “Let me…catch my breath and then I’ll…show you how old I am.”
Corey chuckled. “Sorry. You’re not old. Nope. Not at all. I’ll feed your dinosaur mount, while you catch your breath.”
Once he’d caught his breath, Nick started a Dakota fire hole, perfect for heating up the meager rations they’d brought along without sending plumes of smoke up to give away their position. They were about to go into the lion’s den, and it would be a lot easier to sneak in if they weren’t dead or caught by the lions. A tension headache threatened to bloom at the base of Nick’s skull, the idea of sneaking into town, once it was dark, refusing to leave him alone.
As they ate, Nick let out a deep breath. Time to tell Corey the plan. “So, I’ve been thinking about how we should do this. I don’t think we should both go in together.”
Corey frowned, pausing with his titanium camping spork hovering above the Mylar pouch holding his meal. “What? I don’t think splitting up is the best plan. What’s that they say about splitting your forces in the face of a superior enemy?”
“Never do it. Where’d you hear that?” Nick smiled.
“History Channel. Something about George Washington.”
“Oh, right. Don’t you remember, we watched that show together? I guess you forgot the part where Washington ignored that advice and did split his forces in the face of a superior enemy. Harassing the enemy until they go home is better than getting wiped out, I guess. But that’s on the battlefield, and I’m hoping we can avoid shooting anyone. Or being shot. You’ll help me do that.”
Corey lowered his spork. “How am I going to do that if I’m not with you?”
Nick smiled at last. “You’re going to be the angel on my shoulder. We’ll situate you in a prime sniper position with that camo netting I made you carry, and the scoped rifle. If I get in trouble, you’ll need to cause a distraction. If there’s time, you can warn me on the little handheld radios we brought, but I’ll have the volume turned way down.”
“You want me to…shoot someone?”
“If needs must, as Abram would say. Yes. To save my life and make sure we get what we came for, if it’s the last option, then taking out a bandit is not the worst outcome possible. Just the last one we want to use. But like I said, if there’s time, just warn me. I’ll do whatever needs doing, so you don’t have to. I just want you ready for it, if it comes to that.”
Corey looked down, and set his mylar pouch down. His lips flatlined.
It was clear the boy didn’t like the idea—no, the young man, Nick corrected himself for the umpteenth time—but if it came down to Nick’s life or some bandit stranger’s…Nick added, “Son, I don’t want that to be the outcome. No one decent wants to kill another human being. But if it comes to that, these people are no different than the ones who raided the compound and killed Kat. From what Abram said, they slaughtered some defenseless town, or that’s the suspicion. They aren’t innocent. And they’ll be on our doorstep, with Gary leading them, if we don’t do everything we can to stop them. Getting this woman out of here is going to be a huge part of making sure that doesn’t happen, son.”
Corey didn’t reply right away, and Nick just watched as the conflicting emotions played out over his son’s face. But at last, Corey’s face stopped twitching, and he looked up to meet his father’s gaze before nodding once, curtly. “Okay, Dad. I won’t let anything happen to you, no matter what the cost. I trust you not to make that necessary without a good reason, too.”
“Okay, now we’re cooking,” Nick replied, though he couldn’t bring himself to smile. Corey was no coward, but if he could avoid making his son take a life—in cold blood, from a distance—then he would. “We’ll pick a spot after you finish eating every bite of that food. I’ll go down into town after sunset.”
It took a while to finish eating, even given the meager meal. Neither of them seemed to have much of an appetite, anymore.
Part of Corey’s mind tugged at his thoughts, refusing to let go, debating whether he could pull the trigger. But ultimately, he would do it if he must, to save his dad. Rae Ann needed her dad now more than ever, and Corey was close to her, but Nick was her rock. The adult. The parent. If he had to, Corey realized with a bit of a start, he’d have shot Abram if it ever came down between the compound and his dad. But why, oh why, did the first time Dad gave him a gun and the responsibility of using it have to be here, in someone else’s town, shooting the people who lived there? Did this make him and his dad the bandits of this scenario?
He snarled and shoved that thought aside. There was no guarantee anyone would have to die, and Nick wasn’t the sort to recklessly put himself into a situation where Corey would have to pull that trigger. He watched through the 8x scope as his father moved from cover to cover, approaching the little town’s outskirts. At the little river, his dad took his clothes off and put them into the huge Ziploc plastic bag the camo netting had come in, then swam across. Most of it, Nick only had to wade through. On the far bank, Nick took a small towel out of the bag to dry off a bit, then struggled into his clothes before stuffing the towel into the bag and hiding it under a bush.
Corey’s heart raced for a moment, when Nick went out of view behind a building, but moments later, his dad emerged from an alley and moved purposefully north-west into the little town’s heartland. Nick had an address, courtesy of some captured bandit in Burnsville, but Corey knew full well his dad didn’t have much faith in the word of a captured bandit. He did have faith in the value of family, though, and he’d done much in recent times to instill the same value in Corey. This woman wasn’t just politically useful—she was Abram’s sister. And to save Abram’s sister, Corey would pull tha
t trigger just as assuredly as he would to save his father’s life, if it came to that.
Corey reached his trigger-hand back long enough to wipe the stress-sweat from his palm, but the scope never left his father. He’d just brought his hand back, sliding his index finger above the trigger mechanism, when two men stepped out of the shadows in front of Nick, stopping him, with no time for Corey to warn him.
Dammit.
Cursing, Corey sighted in on one of them, the larger of the two, and hoped he wouldn’t have to add a giant hole to the jagged scar disfiguring the man’s left cheek.
Abram resisted the urge to wring his hands together. He couldn’t get thoughts of Nick out of his head. Was he sending Nick to his death? He was certainly shoving him into quicksand, asking him to go rescue his sister. Deep inside, Abram couldn’t shake the bone-deep feeling that he should be the one sneaking into Clarks Crossing, rescuing Miranda, or as she thought her name, Misty. Family took care of their own—
No. That thinking was what had gotten Miranda lost to him in the first place. But…Maybe he should have had Nick come to Burnsville to help plan their defenses, while Abram left to go get Misty. Or maybe, he should focus on the task at hand…He shouted, “One, two, heave!”
The row of people armed with crudely pointed metal fence posts, tips dug in between train tracks and the wooden railroad ties, put their might into levering the poles, two people per pole. The stretch of rail stubbornly refused to move, at first, but then one spike came loose. Like the start of an avalanche, the rest came loose in rapid succession after that. “Okay,” he called out, “gather the spikes. Make sure that rail lines up, people—it has to look solid.”
He looked north, along the railway. Though they’d loosened twenty rail segments, ten parallel segments, it didn’t look disturbed. That should be enough to derail whatever came their way, though. The switch, where the side spur rejoined the railroad, was perhaps a hundred yards north of where the trap began, so if they ever got a train of their own in Burnsville, they’d be able to use it. Not that most locomotives worked, anymore. Modern trains relied on electronics, even if the underlying technology that had moved so many tons of goods before the CMEs came had been, and remained, simplistic. Where Black had found a train that didn’t rely on computers was a mystery, but apparently, he had several at his disposal. The bad guys always seemed to have all the luck, in the real world, while the good guys struggled just to eat.
“Bah.” Abram turned to the local who had been placed under him for that special project, and said, “I think you got this, now. Clean up and make sure there are no signs to give away that anything’s weird about this railway. When you’re done, report back for new assignments. We got a lot to do, and no time to do it in.”
The woman smiled. “Yes, sir. Speaking of time, aren’t you about due for the, um…special project?”
Abram frowned at her. No one outside the project was supposed to know of it. Not yet, not until the spectacular reveal in half an hour. “Where’d you hear that? There’s no ‘special’ project you aren’t supposed to know about, and absolutely shouldn’t talk about.”
She smiled at him, a winsome grin that reminded him of his wife’s, when she’d been younger. “Oh, of course not. My husband isn’t on the project, because there is no project. He didn’t tell me the basics, so I wouldn’t worry, and he didn’t tell me to stay in cover at dusk.”
Abram couldn’t wait to get back to that wife, and her smile. “Good. Glad to hear it,” he said with a lopsided grin. Not wanting one’s spouse to worry was a motive he could understand, even if it broke security protocols. He’d keep the lapse to himself, he decided as he stepped into his loaner horse’s stirrup and vaulted up to the saddle. “But I am due for a meeting. Just a meeting.”
They exchanged waves, and then he was off, galloping toward town, angling west to approach well away from where the bandits were encamped while they awaited Burnsville’s decision. Those bastards didn’t even know the town’s guards had caught one of them sneaking in to spy. All Abram had heard was that they were looking for a someone, not a something, but he didn’t know whom or why, nor whether there had been other spies. Probably looking for Danny, their traitor. Hopefully, they didn’t know he was there. If they now knew, the poor guy could probably never go home, even if Burnsville did take care of their dictator problem for them.
Either way, though, Abram was not looking forward to the next step in the plan. It was the one he most needed to participate in, though. First, he had to pick up his companions. When he arrived at their new dwelling—a vacant house, rather than their secured, glorified jail cell—Owen and Frank were ready and waiting outside. Owen waved as he approached. Frank merely tossed his chin up in greeting.
As Abram dismounted before them, Owen adjusted his pack hanging by a strap over one shoulder and said, “You sure we need to be a part of this? I’m not really comfortable with it. I know it’s necessary, but this is their problem.”
Frank tapped Owen’s arm with his elbow. “Because someone has to make sure these people do it right, or we’ll all be worse off than we was before.”
Abram pursed his lips and nodded, then said, “It’s both to ensure it goes down right, and to earn some ‘cred’ with Burnsville. If we do this, not only will it make a trade deal impossible to refuse, it’ll cement our biggest nearby neighbor as a no-vote on Clarks Crossing’s burgeoning little empire. If Burnsville falls, Gary’s going to come and take our home next. You know it, and I know it. Think long-term survival, Owen.”
Owen’s lips flatlined and he looked down, but nodded. “Right. Let’s get this over with.”
That pretty much summed up Abram’s feelings on the issue, too. He sighed, then said, “All right. Double-check your weapons, and let’s get going. We’ve got a war to start.”
God, let this work.
Abram wasn’t as certain as he’d let on to the others.
37
Near the end of her shift, Emma made a cup of “tea” from a packet of dried plants she would once have called weeds. Now, she knew better, after her time on the compound farm—weeds were just the natural result of bare dirt, and they built up the soil, enabling other plants to move in and choke them out. Eventually. These weeds made a nice, tingly tea that seemed to help her stay awake, though she had no way to find out if they had caffeine, like soda or coffee.
Her daydreams of drinking an ice-cold soda were interrupted by the radio crackling to life. What followed was a man’s voice, sounding bored, saying a string of gibberish that sounded like English, but she had no idea what any of it meant.
Then, the voice said, “Is there anyone out there? This is the National Guard, attempting to contact survivors in the central region of Vermont and Northwest New York.”
The message repeated. Emma almost dropped the radio handset in her haste to snatch it up. “Hello? National Guard? We’re survivors,” she said, more loudly than she’d intended.
“Outstanding.” The voice repeated the gibberish she’d heard at the beginning, then said, “Please identify yourself.”
“Um. My name’s Emma. Can you hang on? I want to get someone who can speak for all of us.”
“Affirmative. Go ahead. Please be hasty, Emma.”
She bolted from her chair, not even irritated at the tone the man had used, like he’d somehow known he was talking to a kid. Not that sixteen was a kid anymore. Maybe her reply had given it away. Didn’t matter. She rushed up the stairs and burst into the living room, where Maggie sat with the kids, doing math on little chalkboards. “Maggie,” she said, trying to keep her voice even and calm, “can you please come down here? There’s someone on the radio, and I think you should talk to them.”
Maggie looked up from her lessons, irritation on her face, but after she saw Emma’s face, the expression vanished. “Sure. Kids, keep working on the problems on my chalkboard. You know how to do these, Rae Ann on the left, Henry on the right. I’ll be back.”
Emma led her do
wn the stairs, and once the door was shut behind her, Maggie said, “What’s going on?”
“We’re on the radio with the National Guard,” Emma whispered. “They’re trying to find survivor groups like us. We’re saved!”
Maggie said, “Don’t be hasty. Let’s find out more, first.”
Emma sat nearby while Maggie got into the operator’s seat, then had a moment of panic realizing she hadn’t logged the operator handover in the logbook. She glanced at the wall clock; she’d note the time down later. Abram’s rules didn’t care what was going on; it had to be in the log or he’d yell at her. When he got back. If he found out. She smiled, realizing she’d probably get away with it, this time.
Once Maggie had identified herself, the soldier guy asked where she was, and she told him they were just outside the Fenton-Burnsville area on a small farm. He asked a bunch of questions, from how many people were there to whether the compound needed antibiotics, then asked what their most pressing needs were.
Immediately Maggie answered, “Troops to come fight off the bandits taking over all around us. It’s hell down here. Clarks Crossing has been taken over completely, and Burnsville is next. If they fall, we will, too. Can you send soldiers to help them, and us?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the conversation. Then, the radio voice said, “Roger that, bandit activity near Bravo-Seventeen. Affirmative, we will relieve them.”
Emma’s heart pounded with excitement.
“But we won’t be able to organize supplies and personnel for that for forty-eight hours.”
Her stomach lurched. That wasn’t soon enough. The fighting was now, not in two days.
EMP Crisis Series (Book 3): Instant Mayhem Page 27