by Nova
“Dang, I hate yappy dogs,” Shayla said as they rolled away.
“Sorry, guys, I’m a little busy. But, yeah, folks are bailing because they think the Feds aren’t going to be able to feed them. A whole lot of people out there are going to find family at their doors that they haven’t seen in years.” She turned back to take the next toll.
The driver yelled out the window. “Hey, fellas. You got anyplace to get gas around here?”
Max answered him. “We haven’t had a delivery in a week.”
The driver thanked him with a curse and drove off. I laughed.
“Come on, G. Walk with me while I think.”
We walked down Main Street. The snow was starting to stick. Four more cars passed us. “Max, this is the busiest I have ever seen Main Street except when I was back here healing up.”
Max stopped. He looked at the tollbooth we had just left and at the tollbooth ahead of us. Then he looked up and down Main Street. “Tell me what you think of this scenario, G. We get a couple hundred cars at the tollbooth, maybe more, all filled with hungry, scared people. How would you handle them?”
I surveyed the road, thought for a bit, and said, “Let them flow through. No toll. We would need to block every side street. Run them through a chute. Make sure no one turns back. We’d probably have to organize street patrols for a while. Perimeter patrols also. We are going to need to add some people at the farm.” I looked at him. “Yeah, that might work.”
“Why the ‘might work,’ G?”
“You know as well as I do, Max, what can go wrong, will.”
The snow trailed off and the sun came out around noon. I watched it because I managed to evade the big “How can the town avoid being overrun by hungry tourists and riffraff” meeting. Someone had to muster the militia and set up security; I volunteered—something I generally avoided doing at all costs. The problem, as always, was a lack of qualified people that I could trust not to do something stupid. Then again, I found that my idea of stupid was vastly different from how others defined it.
I assigned the militia the job of pushing cars into the side streets. They would know far better than I would who was local and who wasn’t. I told them to set up some fire barrels to keep warm around, and I would try to get them relief and something hot to eat.
I also spent a lot of time—for me at least—delivering words of inspiration and hope. The average conversation went something like this:
“Hey, Gardener, what the hell is going on?”
“There is no electrical power in America. The grid has gone down, and it may stay down, maybe for weeks.”
“So that means no one has power?”
“Yep.”
Then the self-appointed expert in the group would tell them all what that meant. They were not stupid; it was just too big for them to wrap their brains around. Hell, it was too big for me, even though I thought I had. I was still going into rooms and flipping light switches on and then going, “Oh yeah.”
The conversation continued with my telling them, “People are going to be looking for food and a place to stay. Our job is to move them on.” It spoke well for the folks in town that the idea of “moving people on” bothered them. But then I explained the potential numbers involved—numbers I had made up, of course, but hey, who really knew what was coming? I told them that too, just not in those words.
“It’s like this. We will probably run out of food or be on reduced rations by March or April. That’s our best-case scenario. We may have fifty . . . seventy thousand people or more come through here in the next month. If we feed them all just one meal and send them on their way, what happens to us?”
They would start seeing the light about then. Some had already gotten it. They just didn’t want to say anything. But I would see their heads start nodding.
“Yeah, exactly.”
For the really dense I had to make it clear. “We will all starve to death or we will end up on the road right behind the others. Nobody is going to make you do anything you don’t want to do, but the odds are pretty good that it is going to get ugly. Really ugly.” I left them with that and went to the next group.
Ninja found me, and I told him to split the two squads. I asked him for a pen—he was always prepared—and used a wall that had been painted white for paper. I drew a rough diagram of the town and divided it in half.
“Draw the same map for your people,” I told him. “I want everyone clear on what and where they are supposed to be. I want the first squad here. I don’t care how you do it, but I want a three-man patrol working this area. I want reports on who they find and what they see. They can eat at the diner before or after they go out. I want them using those damn night-vision goggles after dark. Everyone gets turned away.”
“G, what if they don’t want to turn away? What do we do then?”
I remembered how during the farm raid Ninja had let one deputy get past him because he didn’t want to shoot the guy in the back. “Ninj, we don’t have food for them. Tell them if they don’t move along, you will cuff them and drop them outside of town limits without their shoes. Damn, tell them whatever you think will work.”
“But what if they have little kids?” He would have to ask that.
“Same thing. Tell them somebody will take care of them further down the line.” We both knew that was a lie, but if it made him feel better, so be it. “Figure out the duty roster with Diesel. I’m pulling Hawk and sending him to the farm.” Those berms were going to pay off now. “Damn, I almost forgot. I need a three-person team at each tollbooth starting now.”
“You forgot something else, G.”
“What’s that?”
“When are we going to sleep?”
I grinned. “Whenever you get a minute. Drive or push a car down to each tollbooth. Let one person sleep in the backseat while the others watch.” I sent him on his way.
My radio had been amazingly quiet so far. Someone didn’t want to pay for a meal at the diner. The patrol officers had handled that. I was going to use them as street patrol and a mobile reserve.
We were going to need some kind of logistics support and medic teams if this got too weird. And I’d have to get some ammo to each of the militia points and tollbooths for reserves.
Logistics made my head hurt. What I didn’t like was how thin we were at the farm. I understood why we couldn’t pull people from the town to guard our home. I didn’t like it, though.
I also wondered where the hell Freya was. Probably mooching apple pie from Shelli.
I went back to the station the long way. I walked Main Street by zigzagging from side street to side street. Twothirds of them were already blocked, and the rest were in the process of being blocked.
One of the militia suffered a minor heart attack, which slowed things down. I often forgot that most of these guys were old and not in the best of shape. He’d been taken home to rest and I made a note of his name. Max or I would need to find time to check on him.
The rest were in pretty good spirits. Some of the wives had shown up and were transforming the empty houses and storefronts into homey break rooms for their men. In the background I could hear a steady increase in the traffic.
While I talked to a group of militia, Max got me on the radio. “You got that road sealed up yet?”
“No.” I looked over at Lenny, the de facto militia leader. “Probably in about an hour, Max.” Lenny nodded to let me know that would work.
“Okay. As soon as you do, close both tollbooths. We are already getting a traffic jam here. Out.”
“Got it. Out.” I looked at Lenny. “We can do this?”
“Yeah.” We both looked at the passing cars. He spit some Copenhagen in the street. “A freaking shame is what it is.” I nodded in agreement, and I hoped I would never have to do CPR on Lenny.
A little later, I went back to the station. Shelli had sent some sandwiches over, and Night had saved two for me. I told her about getting food to the people, and I updated Max on what
I’d done so far. After eating and talking a bit I went outside, carrying boxes of ammo and extra magazines for the M-16s.
When I dropped them at the tollbooth, I grabbed a militia member to help. We found some grocery carts to use for running ammo to the checkpoints. We passed Shelli and a couple of kids bringing food to the checkpoints. The next time we saw her, she had a cart, too. Carts got tougher to find after that, especially ones with wheels that all moved in the same direction.
Max had left word that he wanted to see me, so I returned to the station. He was still out with the patrols that were going to cover open areas. In theory, those patrols could monitor vehicles, but they’d more likely encounter people who had abandoned overheated or out-of-gas cars. Ninja and Diesel were working opposite sides of the streets. They stopped and talked to the group at each checkpoint.
Night had gone to sleep in a corner; she still wasn’t 100 percent back. Freya was sitting in a corner sorting BDUs. I could hear the occasional horn honking, and decided to go outside to watch.
“Hey, kid. Want to take a walk?”
“Sure.”
We headed out. “So what have you been up to?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah. Okay, this here is good.” There was a pickup parked where it gave us a good sight line. I climbed into the bed and gave Freya a hand up. Then we got onto the roof of the cab.
The headlights of cars came and went. It wasn’t a steady stream but it was unusually heavy for the town. A week ago you could have slept in the same street.
“What do you think, kid?” I was genuinely curious.
She looked at me, her face calm. “It is going to be uglier than you ever imagined.”
“Yeah, kid? Well, I have seen ugly. I have lived ugly. Ugly isn’t nothing to me but just another day.”
“I know.”
“Let’s head back. It’s getting cold.” My radio, which I had turned down, still carried Max’s voice to my ear. It wasn’t music either.
“G, come on back. Over.”
I squelched twice to let him know I was on my way.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Everyone who mattered to me was inside the station. There were no townspeople. I said, “Hi, sleepyhead,” to Night and greeted the rest of the crew.
“You might as well pull up a chair,” Max said. “This might take a bit.”
I had been set up. It had to be a meeting.
Max addressed all of us: “Night is going to give us her estimate of what we can expect soon. I am not going to ask you for any decisions tonight. I have a good idea what she’s going to say, and I want you all to think it over.” He paused. “Okay, it’s all yours.”
Night stood up and faced us. The table behind her was covered with maps. We were arranged in a semicircle in front of her, draped in chairs in various positions of fatigue. Freya sat in the back, her hands folded in her lap.
“Think of it like this,” she began. “Imagine a rock thrown into a pond, the ripples spreading out. Now picture those ripples being followed by more ripples. Do you all see that?”
We all nodded our heads or replied with some variation of yes.
“The Baltimore–Washington, D.C., megalopolis had around eight million people in 2009. Subtract Zone movement and all the other crap we have lived through, and my guess is we have six million people within a tank of gas of here. Go north to the Philadelphia area, and there are at least another three million people. Keep going north and we hit metropolitan New York. That area still has at least ten million people now.
“My guess is there are well over twenty-five million people in our region. We are close to Interstates 81, 66, and 95. These are going to be prime migration routes. That is, until they aren’t, which should be any day now. We are on the edge of the largest tribal migration in human history. Only post–World War II Europe comes close.” She paused.
“It’s going to come in waves. This is all based on the assumption that the grid stays down for at least two weeks. What I see happening now is the early wave. People ‘in the know’ have started to bail. We are seeing that currently. If they are in a position to know, then they probably have a place to go and the resources to get there. The next wave will be bigger. The people will be desperate, hungry, but still semicivilized. The third wave, and anything thereafter, will be ugly. Very ugly.
“Our first waves of migrants will be from the Baltimore–Washington megalopolis. Their route will be either south or in our direction. Our direction takes them into the Midwest. They will try the interstates, but the sheer volume of traffic, roadblocks from the state, plus car wrecks, and what have you will cause people to take to the side roads. Any questions or comments so far?”
“Other than we are fucked?” This was from Diesel.
“Oh, you have no clue,” replied Night. “Because right behind that will be the waves from the Philadelphia and New York City areas. Maybe even Boston. You see, it’s winter and these people will all try to go south. Sure, some will head toward the Midwest. They’ll run into the Chicago migration. About the time they hit Richmond, I think they will run into determined resistance. Like a wave, they will bounce off and flow backward. Oh, this is going to be fun.”
I didn’t like how her voice was becoming shrill. “Night, what happens if the power comes on in a couple weeks?”
“G, think about it. By then the situation will have spun out of control. How would the Feds be able to start up the distribution system? Would you want to drive a truck filled with food anywhere without an armored escort?”
“Actually, it might be fun.” I looked around. No one seemed to agree with my assessment. That included Night.
“The power won’t go off everywhere,” she continued. “What was that old sci-fi book? Hammer’s Fall? Some places will stay up. Some nukes will be waiting and ready to flow power. I don’t know enough. My guess is it won’t be so bad in some places. I just don’t know. I do know that we may see a million people or more head this way. Do you have enough bullets for all of them, G?”
She was angry. Why at me I had no idea. Nor did I have a reply that would make her less angry.
I shrugged. “I’ll do what I always do, Night. Fight until I kill them all or they kill me.”
From the back of the room came the sound of Freya’s laughter.
I spent the night at the station. I woke after a couple hours’ sleep on a pile of BDUs, feeling less than refreshed. I headed for the bathroom, but seeing Frank slip in before me changed my mind. He may have been an okay person, but he could peel the paint off a wall. The man must have had a steady diet of toxic waste. I went outside instead. Max was walking toward the station, coming from the direction of Shelli’s, and I decided to catch him before he went in. He did not look happy. For the first time I could see faint lines on his face—barely discernible, but there.
He saw me, so I stopped and waited for him and smelled the moisture in the air. I also felt how the flow had changed.
I have a talent for being able to feel the currents of emotion in an area. For me, it’s the ability to recognize changes in what people are feeling versus what they are displaying, usually before they know it themselves. I don’t think it is all that unusual. Being receptive to it and trusting it is where most people stop.
Today felt different. Very different. What was usually flowing was now coiling. What I normally saw as transparent wisps of color were now darker, uglier, opaque shapes. I summarized it for Max when reached me: “There is some weird shit in the air today.”
“Yeah, I think the outflow has picked up a notch.”
Nothing else was said. We started walking toward the tollbooth. We climbed up into the bed of the same truck I had sat on with Freya.
As people approached the tollbooth, they rolled down their windows and shouted questions at the guards. Our guys just yelled back, “Move on. Just keep going. There is help further along.”
I looked down Main Street. The guys in the militia were standing by and sitt
ing on their cars, weapons prominently displayed, grim looks on their faces. I saw one of them flip a driver off in answer to his shouted remark. It was kind of ironic. Not all that long ago, we would have greeted this much traffic with smiles and grandiose cash flow projections on the part of the business owners.
Without looking away from the traffic Max asked, “What do you think?”
I knew what he was asking and I was tempted to answer him the way the world expected me to. I didn’t.
“It’s time to go. This is going to go bad soon. When it does—well, everything here is going to get washed away. If we move now and we move fast, we can surf the front of the first wave and maybe come out untouched.”
Max nodded. “Yeah. It’s not like I haven’t thought of that. Shelli isn’t going anywhere. It’s ‘Do or Die’ right here for her. I drove over to the farm late last night and talked to Tommy. Same thing. Plus, do you feel like we owe these people something?”
“The only people I owe are Night, you, and Ninja. I don’t really give a shit about this town or its people. It’s just a stop on the way to somewhere else for me.”
“You ask Night what she wants to do?”
“I don’t have to. I know.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Well, we might as well gear up and get breakfast while we can. This is going to get messy.”
We held the line for three days and nights with only minor problems. I told everyone working the main line—what had been Main Street—to paint their faces. I wanted them looking Mad Max crazy.
Some of them really got into it. But did they just stick with black and green? No, they had to be individuals. We had skull faces, a clown face on one guy that was downright creepy, and a whole group that looked like American Indian meets KISS. I think there were even a couple of Celts or Blue Face people. I didn’t ask.
We had minor problems with the migration: cars overheating, running out of gas, or just breaking down. If the owners did not have gold or goodies, then they were moved on. I didn’t care if they claimed to be congressmen, neurosurgeons, or the second coming of Alexander the Great. They walked out of town and kept going. I didn’t have time to vet anyone, and I figured that there would always be time later to sort out the surgeons from the sturgeons. If there was a later.