by Nova
He drew another big circle around the Norfolk-Newport News area. “This is also locked down. The area around Quantico is another safe area for the Feds. The place we’re headed is still in play. Once you cross the Ohio River it is all a no-go zone as far as the Feds are concerned. They don’t have the manpower to bother with much except for patrolling key cities and keeping the rail and the Interstate open.
“Over here in West Virginia are our old friends led by the colonel. They are starting to expand a bit but haven’t made any serious pushes outside their zone of control yet. Supposedly they are part of the new federal plan to use surrogates. They keep the area quiet in exchange for supplies and access to data. The new administration is allowing and encouraging this to happen all over. Surrogates keep the area quiet and ‘render unto Caesar.’ In exchange, they get to be the local warlord. If they get out of hand, or don’t tithe, then a Fed team guarantees a new leader who’ll cooperate.”
“Who are we up against?”
“It should be fairly calm as far as us not running into organized groups. We’re going to have to watch out for predator groups and local crazies. Other than that it should be rather uneventful.”
In addition to gathering information, Max had made contact with a Burner cell. He had been working on trading and selling the contents of the house. I think he knew all along we would be walking out of here.
We planned to take light-weight, high-value items with us, primarily pharmaceuticals and gold. Gold had an official price and a street price. Periodic rumors that the Feds were going to ban private ownership ensured that the street price stayed high.
Pharmaceuticals were priceless if you were outside the zones. Manipulating supplies was one of the major weapons the government had left to use: Get out of line, don’t embrace the new warlord, and watch as shipments of antibiotics, insulin, and antidepressants came to a halt in your area.
The Burner philosophy was simplistic, at least in the beginning: Burn down the banks, the regional headquarters of financial institutions, and fry a few bankers if they could catch them. Occasionally someone would get confused and torch a credit union. It started as a “Crash the financial system and start over with small, green, cooperative factories and farms” philosophy. It had grown since. Now it had a large green contingent, with a spiritual base rooted in Wicca and Shamanism.
Of all the coalescing factions, it was the one we all agreed was the best. Why? Because they were less likely to demand that you pledge allegiance to whatever their agenda was and to shoot you if you didn’t. The Burners wanted weapons, ammo, and gold. We wanted light-weight, high-value items.
The Burners, while being anarchists of a sort, were generally nonviolent. That was changing quickly. They had been some of the first targets of Homeland Security, which hunted them from helicopters and shot them whenever it could manufacture a reason to. The current administration really, really hated them.
Max set up a meeting with the Burners and elected Night and me to do the deal with their representatives that evening. Night was the brains. She would run the negotiations, check the trade goods, and make sure everything was financially cool. I was security. The rule was no more than two in the room at the meet. We would leave the garage door open so they could pull their panel van inside.
Night was armed with a belt knife. She could shoot; she just did not like guns all that much. At first she had been okay with them. Lately, she was just not interested. Max was going to set up across the street with the Barrett. Ninja would sit in the basement, a loaded shotgun across his lap.
The Burners arrived exactly on time. I liked that. I met them in the garage. The negotiators were a woman and a man. They had hired muscle with them to do the loading: two good-sized guys in their early twenties. Both of them looked competent and I was sure they were armed, though they had no visible weapons.
Of the negotiating couple, the woman impressed me the most. She was stately, perhaps, even regal. No other words fit as well as those. In her late forties was my guess. Long hair, black with threads of silver. Clear, green eyes and loose-fitting clothing on a body that was still decent.
She caught me looking at her wrist. She held it up so I could see. “Yes, I did have one. It was removed.”
She was talking about the Burner tattoo. Not all that long ago, old-timers who held a position of authority in the Burners—as much as they had authority—usually had two distinguishing marks: the flame tattoo and red hair. These badges disappeared pretty quickly when the Feds began picking up anyone who had either one. The Burners that were picked up, well, they never came back.
The male was shorter, fit, and clean-shaven. He was balding and about the same age as she. He was dressed nondescriptly and was visibly armed. It looked like a 9-millimeter of some sort. None of us bothered with shaking hands.
“Thank you for coming,” I greeted them. “Any problems?”
“No. It’s quiet tonight,” the man answered.
The woman smiled. She had a great smile. I had better get it together or Night would kick my ass, especially if she caught me gawking. This woman had some serious charisma going on. The nipples standing up underneath her blouse were not helping either.
“Please, right this way.” I let them walk ahead of me to where Night was waiting in the kitchen. I followed, trying to move sideways so I could keep an eye on the two in the garage. They had not moved. One had a faint smile as he watched me go through my contortions.
The Lady and Night clicked at once. That was obvious, and it was a relief. Night explained to them how we would do the transaction.
She and the Lady would sit at the dining room table. The man and I would go to the basement. What we had to offer was sorted and piled in groups on the basement floor. He would look at each group and decide if he wanted all or part of it. He would go back upstairs, tell the Lady what he had decided, and Night and she would work out the price. Once that was done, he and his guys, no more than two of them together, would move the selected goods into the van. Night would hand me the payment and I would put it in the backpack I was wearing.
It went well. They took everything we had. With the last load the helpers disappeared back into the garage. Max had warned me that if anything were to go wrong, this would be the time. The Lady was relaxed. She and Night had chatted the entire time. The bald man, though—he was alert, more so than when he had arrived. I guess he was their version of Max. Or perhaps he knew by experience, that this was the time to be focused.
The Lady had made no motion to leave yet. Instead she said, “I would like to put one more item on the table, if I may.”
“Sure,” Night told her.
“We understand you have a Barrett. In exchange, we’re willing to offer you four one-pound bars of gold and two hundred rounds of ammo in the caliber of your choice.”
I didn’t even hesitate. “No. Not a chance.”
The man really got me focused when he asked, “Is it here?”
I began to wish that Night would leave the room. I also hoped Ninja would come up from the basement. We had told him not to, but I was starting to think he and the shotgun might be needed in the next few minutes.
The Lady must have sensed the change in the room. I know Night had; her hand was no longer visible, having dropped into her lap.
The Lady laughed. “It’s fine. We have hopes of acquiring one through other means soon.”
For the first time, the man grinned and held up a hand. “Sorry, didn’t mean for it to be taken wrong. I’ve just never seen one before.”
I had not realized that my hand was resting on my gun butt. The Lady’s glance made me realize it was—not that I moved, though.
“Well, thank you all for coming by. I hope you have a safe and pleasant trip home.”
“No, thank you.” The Lady gave Night a quick hug and extended her hand to me. I just smiled. She quickly dropped it, showing no sign that she felt it had been awkward. I stood in the doorway and watched them leave.
CHAPTER SIX
We left early the next morning. Early, according to Max’s plan, meant we were to have our boots on the trail by sunrise. We didn’t make it until forty-five minutes into the new dawn. We didn’t do a lot of miles that first day.
Max never stopped. He moved continually up and down the line, pointing out what we were doing wrong. When he wasn’t doing that, he worked on getting us to respond to hand signals. The hardest part for all of us was maintaining the necessary level of alertness. Every mile carrying a pack drained away a little more of the energy needed for that.
The second morning wasn’t so smooth either. We just didn’t have the routine down yet. Instead it was stumble around, take a leak, and figure out breakfast. Who has the food? followed by Who’s going to make it? and Who’s going to clean up? I didn’t help by insisting that we make coffee. There was a lot of sleep-stunned stumbling around just to accomplish that.
How groups of hundreds or thousands of people managed these logistics was mind-blowing. The organizational skills required just to make sure everyone would have a place to take a dump, much less have enough water to drink, were surprisingly complex, to me at least. That people had managed to progress from warrior bands to disciplined armies was amazing. It was one of mankind’s greater achievements, I thought.
We had our problems on the trail, too. Max had point and the rest of us straggled after him. Within an hour we had to stop. Night’s pack was killing her. The skin was still very tender where it had been burned. She had struggled with it the first day, but by the second day the pain was too intense to hide anymore. I took my towel and spread it over her back, tying it in the front like a little cape.
“Very nice!” I told her. “Super-Night.”
She smiled, but I could see the pain in her eyes. I think Max did, too. We sat there for a bit, about twenty feet off to the side of the trail. I transferred everything I could from her pack to mine. Ninja took what I couldn’t take. The result was that Night’s pack was now light enough that she could sling it from her good shoulder like a handbag, especially with the extra padding.
Meanwhile, Max gave us a lecture on how to stop. “Don’t dump your packs and stand there scratching yourselves and stretching, for God’s sake.” He went on a bit more. It was amusing to watch him slip into his Sarge persona. He was good: He didn’t overdo it or push us too hard.
We shouldered our packs and set out again. A full pack was a different beast altogether from a daypack. It did not take long to feel the weight of it. I was beginning to feel it in my thigh, where my woodie had been extracted. I did my best to ignore it and to not limp. I hated for anyone to see me limping like I was some kind of cripple. Cripples were weak, and being weak made you a target.
We were probably never more than half a mile, at most, from civilization. Sometimes we crossed over roads or saw the roofs of houses, yet it felt like we were in the wilderness. The trail, which was asphalt so far, had once been trimmed back about six feet on each side. I suppose it was to make it a little harder for rapists to leap out on unsuspecting female joggers who were wearing iPod buds in their ears. Now it looked as if it had not been trimmed for several years.
With climate change, Virginia had been getting a lot of rain. It showed. Occasionally we would see breaks in the grass and weeds where something had moved out of the woods and across the path. It could have been deer, but I doubted that. Most of them had been eaten. I didn’t know really, but I was a little more alert each time we passed a broken patch of brush.
We didn’t just stroll across the roads we came to. Whoever was on point would stop us. We would take cover, as much as we could find, and sit facing outward. The person on point would go across. The rest of us would wait a minute, make sure no vehicles were coming, and then one by one we’d follow and take up a covering position. It was surreal at times, sprinting across the fading white crosswalk lines. Usually there were houses in sight. The eerie thing was the silence except for the birds.
Crossing roads this way didn’t feel real to me. It was like we were playing war. Yet I knew by now that the appearance of prosperity and peace was a leftover illusion of an earlier time. The reality was that half the houses we passed were trashed inside, filled with human shit and graffiti. The nice McMansion behind the trees could hold a pack of feral boomers waiting like spiders for the unaware.
We didn’t see as many people on the trail as I expected. Back by the motel the bike trails had always been busy. People commuted back and forth from the Tree People enclaves to the shelter or to our little shopping center. The woods may have been hunted clean of their wildlife rather quickly, but firewood kept the people going back into them. That and water from the streams. There was also an element that naturally gravitated to the woods. For the most part they were not the most well-adjusted people.
Our first day out we saw only one man. He was out jogging, which I found rather funny. He wore a T-shirt with a blue globe and some sort of bird on it. It was pretty faded, which I guess is why he was jogging in it. When he passed, I read The Fighting 13th written inside the circle.
He was in good shape and had obviously spent some serious time in the sun. He was wearing a tan SWAT-style holster with a 1911 .45 in it. Actually, it looked a lot like the rig that Max wore.
Max gave us the FREEZE hand signal—his fist raised up in the air. We all froze, but only Ninja mimicked Max, remembering that we had been taught to pass the sign down the line.
The jogger saw it also and stopped. He was running in place but he wasn’t coming any closer. Max gave the DISPERSE LEFT signal, which is a no-brainer to remember. We moved off into the grass and weeds. Max didn’t move. I heard Night mutter, “I hate freaking ticks.” I was going to talk to Max later. I didn’t like her in front of me. I wanted her behind me, where I would be in a better position for stuff like this.
Max surprised me. He saluted and said loud enough for the jogger to hear clearly, “Semper Fi,” and stepped off the trail.
The jogger nodded at Max as he passed. He checked each of us as he went by, his face impassive. Once he passed us, he turned and ran backward, moving like that for about twenty-five feet. Then he snapped off a quick salute, turned, and was gone. Max didn’t say anything. He just got us back on the trail and with a brief wave of his hand he had us moving again.
The rhythm was not right on the trails, but Night and Ninja didn’t seem to notice. Night had spent very little time on the trails back at the motel. Ninja had, maybe, more time than her. I had put more time on the trails in a day than those two had in a year. The flow was off.
Later, during a break, I asked Max, “What’s up with nobody on the trail?”
“I don’t know. We’ll push for a couple hours more and then break for lunch.”
I craned my head around to look at him. I knew that tone, and seeing the look on his face only confirmed it. When I stood up I made sure my Ruger was loose inside the holster and slipped the leather thong off the trigger. Night saw me do it and gave me a questioning look. I just shook my head and smiled.
I was worried about her. I wasn’t sure if she was up to the grind. So far, everything was good. She was a trooper. Hell, if I had to, I would wear her pack up front and mine on my back. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that, though. I was already feeling what I was carrying of hers.
Lunch was simple. Today was a no-fire lunch. We had apples and bread, with water to wash it down. It was good.
I caught Night looking at me quizzically a couple times. Something wasn’t right, and now she seemed to feel it, too. I gave Max a look and got the nod in return. I was carrying my shotgun slung across my chest. I didn’t like it that way. I was going to have to find a better way of carrying it. For now, though, I was going to keep it unslung and in my hand.
Ninja was busy chattering away to Night. She was not saying much in return, just a nod and a yes every two or three minutes.
“Max.”
“Yeah.”
“I want to take
point.” I thought I would get an argument.
“Sure,” he answered. To all of us, he said, “We’re going to change things up a bit for the rest of the day. Gardener is going to be point, but I am going to move off the trail into the tree line and walk almost parallel to him. The fancy word for this is echelon. I think it’s French,” he grinned.
“Ninja, I want you behind him. Drop back to about twenty-five feet. Night, I want you about fifteen feet behind Gardener. You have the right side. Ninja, you have the left. Night, take a look over your shoulder every ten steps or so.”
She nodded her head.
Ninja grinned and said, “Cool, I am almost point.”
“Yep,” I told Night, “our boy is growing up.” We were laughing when Ninja held his hand up in the FREEZE sign.
He whispered, “Someone is coming.” The kid had good ears. I heard it about a second later.
Bicycles. They moved past us—two men and a woman, each bike towing a carrier. The carriers looked homemade, except for one that was a converted kid carrier. No kids in it that I could see.
All three of them were white. One of the males was wearing a tie-dyed shirt, which told me a lot about them: probable Burner sympathizers. The woman was not bad looking. Her brown hair was in a ponytail that bounced along behind her. All three were armed. The man in the front had a hunting rifle over his back; the woman, a holstered pistol. The guy bringing up the rear—he looked like it was killing him to keep that bike rolling—had an AR-15 look-alike over his back. He was the oldest by about ten years.
They were there and gone in a couple seconds. I noticed Ninja watching the woman’s ass as she pumped the pedals. Yep, the kid was growing up. I elbowed him and grinned. Night just looked away. A faint smile flashed across her face.