by Dalton Wolf
“Ok. Keep the lights on and let us know if you see any movement,” Gus said in a shaky voice.
“You know…if someone switched the track manually, doesn’t it mean that that someone might be out there waiting?” Felicia asked hesitantly.
“That’s why you’ll be on the turret,” Scaggs pointed out.
“But doesn’t that mean it is real people?”
“Would you rather shoot a person with a bullet or a nail?” Gus asked.
“Point. But be careful out there, ok guys?”
The sun had disappeared behind the heavy, ominous storm front an hour before. Foggy, low-lying cloud cover rolled in smoky waves over the landscape, obliterating what few sights there were to see in the flat Kansas plains and a gloom nearly as thick as evening blanketed their spirits as completely as it covered the countryside. The cameras became useless, only showing a few dozen feet in any direction.
“Remind me to suggest to Festus that he put heat vision cameras on this,” Joel grumbled, climbing the spiral stairs to the catwalk and walking in a hunch to his turret at the front, shaking his head at the grayed-out feed coming in on his Ipad.
“Ok, I’m in position,” he informed his best friend. “Let’s switch this bitch…”
* * * * *
“What is it?” Calvin inquired through a groggy fog from the doorway several minutes later, having been summoned over the intercom by an emergency call from Joel, who waved them back to the room behind the engine where it would be quieter.
Hef had entered just behind Calvin and they both turned back to the big room rubbing their eyes and stretching. Both men had ruffled hair and sleepy eyes. The difference was that as a day went on, Calvin would likely remain foggy and disheveled while Hef would run his fingers through his thick, straight, jet black hair and sprinkle some water into his eyes and look completely refreshed while Calvin would need a shower and two pots of tea to come close to that. He loved his old friend like a brother, but sometimes he just wanted to punch him in his perfect face.
“We have a big problem.” Joel repeated the intercom announcement that now had the entire population of the train arming for battle. That announcement had been accompanied with “Drop your socks and grab your…um, guns.”
“Didn’t I ask you to wake me if something happened?” Hef demanded in an annoyed grunt.
“Not really the time, is it Festus?” Joel asked, eying his friend up and down.
He already looked more refreshed after just running his fingers through his dark hair. As did the captain, who walked out of the sleeper area looking energized, if a bit…sweaty. She must have been working out somewhere, Joel thought. Soon Boomer, Tripper and Sarah exited the hallway with the rest of the military guys in tow.
“Why are we stopped?” the Captain demanded, buckling her holster on and trying to straighten her uniform at the same time. In no time she was standing before Calvin straight as a red-tipped arrow, green eyes flashing at having to report to a civilian.
“There was a problem with the track.”
“What kind of problem?” she asked, demanding clarity from this opaque situation, though she did seem to be less of a bitch than before.
Tripper whistled.
“Uh-oh,” Athena grunted.
They were just learning what kind of problem as Tripper repositioned the cameras. Thirty barrels full of flammable materials suddenly flared up around them as if the entire train had been instantly transported to the center of a homeless city.
“That kind of a problem,” Calvin pointed to the monitor for the track ahead. And out to the sides. “And that kind,” he added.
Sitting a hundred yards ahead, now lit up through the fog by the half dozen red high-illumination lights Calvin had switched on, a twenty-foot wall of debris had been stacked like a garbage pile across the tracks, just past the crossing of a two-lane blacktop.
“I thought we wouldn’t reach the wall until much later,” the captain yawned in a confused daze.
“That’s not the wall. It’s a wall,” Joel replied from the top of his spiral ladder. He didn’t want to come down because of what waited outside, and what he had to tell them.
Fifty-five gallon drums full of some kind of fuel were burning all around the train. The roadway that crossed the tracks was lined with vehicles, though they were parked off the street to keep the lanes open. To the left, a mob of one-hundred angry citizens brandishing pitchforks and guns waited for them to respond to their demands.
“So…what exactly happened, Joel?” Calvin asked, considering options.
“Scaggs and FeFe found a red switch on the monitor. Scaggs tried to switch it back to green, and she did, but then someone switched it again. She did it again. They did it again. On. Off. On. Off. Then they locked her out.”
Hephaestus whistled.
“Then Gus and Scaggs decided to go out and move the switch themselves with me and Felicia, Saul and Quinn covering them from the turrets. There was nothing out there, nothing anywhere, but suddenly they were yelling for help.”
“These guys just came up out of the ground and grabbed them,” Felicia added excitedly. “Like the fracking special forces.”
“You should have woken me, first,” Calvin suggested tersely, but without anger.
“We felt everyone else needed their sleep. It was just a switch, and we know how to change that,” Joel explained. “We had more than enough firepower between the four of us, Saul and Quinn to keep the dead back and make anyone else think twice…or so we thought.”
“What did they say?”
“They want us to get off the train and let them on.”
“And what did you say?”
“Well, realizing we’d made a big mistake by then, I didn’t feel very responsive.”
“…so, what did you say?” repeated Calvin, grimacing.
“I said, I’m sorry but we are no longer allowed to make decisions because we are monumentally stupid. If you would kindly wait there, I must consult with El Supremo regarding your demands.”
Calvin laughed. Even the hardnosed captain had to hide a smile. Calvin felt she might even be blushing for some reason, she was looking so flustered.
“I’m not getting any air from the compressor,” said Felicia over the mic, ruining the optimistic moods of nearly everyone and bringing to their attention just how truly precarious was the situation.
“I’m down too,” Joel reported.
“The compressor might be down,” Felicia suggested. “I can’t hear anything.”
“Uh-oh,” Hef snapped and rushed off to check out the appropriate connections, breakers and other things needing to be checked.
“Can I help?” the captain leaned in and asked.
“No. Thank you, Genevieve. Calvin may need your guns,” Hephaestus told her. “Quinn, wake up!” he yelled into the mic, giving everyone else another headache they didn’t need.
“Sorry,” he apologized to the others.
“I’m up. I didn’t sleep like some other people I know. I was on post in a turret,” Quinn answered testily. “I’m following the lines to the front from the workshop, nothing to report yet.”
“No. Come up here and help me check the compressor itself. I can hear that it’s not running. I’ll check the electrical, you check the mechanical.”
“Be there in twenty seconds if everyone stays out of my way,” promised Quinn.
“What are you going to do, Calvin?” Athena asked.
“I’ll have to stall them,” he replied with a casual shrug.
“How?”
“By using the only weapon I have at the moment that won’t kill them.”
“Your sense of humor isn’t going to get us out of this,” Sarah joked. “It’s barely good enough to even get that mob’s attention.”
“Bombs. Do we have bombs?” Boomer asked.
“Bombs would kill them, Boomer,” Calvin pointed out with a tired sigh. “I’m talking about a weapon so powerful that most people won’t stand a
chance.”
“I don’t know…this is Kansas. They don’t seem to be the type of free-thinking liberals that would allow you to whip that out over there, Calvin,” Athena said with a naughty finger running across her teeth.
“Why, thank you,” Calvin crowed in return.
“Ooh, ooh, something about his penis, no Athena just said that. The…the…something about sex!” Tripper finished lamely. “We’re offering sex.”
“Reason,” Calvin explained, pointing to his head.
“You’re offering them reasons for having sex!” Tripper seemed unable to control himself. “Wait, no, that can’t be right.”
“Nobody needs a reason to have sex, Trip,” Sarah told him.
“Exactly,” Trip agreed.
“I’m going to reason with them,” Calvin clarified.
“Reason? You’ve got to be kidding me,” Athena snorted. “It’s a mob.”
“I have to try and reason with them until we have pressure again,” he pointed meaningfully at the zeroed-out compressor gauge, tapping it impotently for emphasis.
“You can’t talk to stupid people, Calvin.” Athena reasoned with him. “And by definition, a mob is generally filled with nothing but stupid people and maybe one or two charismatic leaders.”
“I’d rather not kill living people unless we have to,” he explained and she could tell he was once again afraid of that possibility, but still ready to fulfill the obligation.
“With sex,” Tripper added. “We’ll kill them with sex,” he gyrated his hips around in circles.
Calvin admonished him with a pointed finger. “Trip, you’re an idiot. We won’t kill them if we can help it. A few dozen nails in the extremities of some people with too much energy and too little leadership, however…” he gave them a well-practiced wink.
“We’ve still got the portable air packs,” he informed them.
“Not really,” Joel told him stiffly. “The range isn’t very far on those, and they already have one of them—”
“—what?” Trip snapped.
“Scaggs took one to cover Gus.”
“Well, Hef and Quinn will get the compressors on soon and we’ll turn their knees into pin cushions,” Calvin promised.
Tripper and Sarah returned a wicked grin, and they could imagine Joel and Felicia doing so as well from the turrets in which both were now releasing the safeties from their rifles since that’s all they had now.
“Let’s work this through,” Calvin suggested mildly. “We can’t just pull out; they have our friends. We have to deal with them straight. We obviously aren’t going to turn our vehicles over to them, nor are we letting them in. What does that leave?”
“Shooting their leader and top lieutenants in the head,” the captain suggested with gusto, bright green eyes shining with resolve.
“Ok, ok. We’re working the brainstorming thing. We’re feeling it. Just shouting them out. Everyone just shout whatever you have. Don’t hold back. But can we maybe try things a little less bloodthirsty first?”
“I’m sorry,” the captain actually blushed. “I just meant it as an option. I saw this in the desert. People are the same all over, basically. Take out the leader and there will be a short time of undirected rage and destruction and then either a lull or some extreme stupidity during the struggle for power and an attempt to regain lost confidence.”
“A few minutes of undirected rage and stupidity might make them charge this train, though,” Calvin argued.
“Perhaps.” Captain Batmouche’ simply nodded.
“And then we would have to kill a lot of them.”
This met another grave nod from the Captain.
“Perhaps it would help the virus clean more of the stupid ones from the Earth,” she stated flatly.
“I’d rather not have to do that.”
“I will wager this time you are going to have to,” the captain declared confidently.
“Maybe and maybe not,” Calvin admitted angrily. “But we’re not going to assume there is no way out. Let’s try diplomacy first. If that fails, and only if it fails, then we take whatever options are remaining.”
“Very well. But I believe you are merely delaying the inevitable. And you will be leaving your friends at the mercy of an angry mob until you reach the realization that you could have saved them a lot of pain and maybe their very lives.”
“You don’t know that they’re going to hurt them.”
“You’re turning down all of their demands. What do you think the next step is?”
Calvin considered her words gravely. Finally he sighed. “I know you are probably right, Captain. But in a declared war those decisions are much easier to make. This isn’t war. This is still America. And in America, out in our free society, we can’t just shoot someone because we suspect they might not want to talk to us,” he held up his hand to forestall a possible outraged tirade. “I simply mean that we are still in the real world. That is a group of very scared people out there, looking for answers and maybe some hope. The rules have been temporarily abandoned by some, but the rules are still out there. They were worth following for quite a while, even though some needed changing. I’m not ready to start declaring anarchy just yet.”
“But that is exactly what you have here.”
“No! No. We have to act with the belief that this is temporary. There won’t be anarchy as long as we hold on to what made us great, or at least really good, and the rules are part of that. Even if we break them when we have to, we have to try our best to keep them the rest of the time…at least as well as we can.”
“Why?”
“Because…what happens when this is over?”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s a wall out there,” he pointed west and arced his arm in all directions.
“On the other side of that wall, nothing has changed other than some people in the rest of the nation are probably getting some really good TV with the Quarantine coverage. What if we get out of this and eventually everything goes back to normal? How would we live in that society having drifted so far from ourselves? What if we’d killed indiscriminately to survive or to save others, or worse to take control of others thinking everything was doomed and we were going to start our own new city like in Beyond Thunderdome or something? Some people are probably hoping for that, but not me. We need to keep in mind that there might be an ending to this. If we break every rule this society has in place, and do anything we need to do to survive, wouldn’t we be giving up our right to live in this society again? Possibly we wouldn’t be able to dial it down again and fit in with the others having strayed so far from the rules of a civilized world.”
“Now you’re sounding like a soldier,” Sergeant Doogard laughed loudly, his deep, rumbling voice echoing through the sleeper car. “Look in any career foxhole and you’ll find a philosopher,” he added brightly. “He’s right, Captain. Best to hold on to every bit of humanity we can for as long as we can. Hell, maybe young Calvin here can actually get us out of this, after all.”
The captain’s eyes flashed at that admission, but she hadn’t made captain by just being pretty. Accepting the reasoning in his words—knowing that this would not work did not mean they should not try—she nodded agreement. “We agreed that you make the decisions, Calvin,” she said.
“But I still ask for advice from my advisors,” he pointed out.
“I think in this case that you are wasting all of our time and risking your friends’ safety. Luckily for you, the air is out so we really have few options other than the one I already noted. You are correct; it should be the final option. Nothing is ever easy, is it?”
Calvin shrugged. “What situation is ever ideal?” He put the PA mic to his mouth.
“My name is Calvin Hobbes. How may we assist you today?” he asked of the mob leader pleasantly.
My name is Reginald Smith,” an indistinct man in the distance replied through a bullhorn. “I am alderman of the 3rd ward of Wamego…”
&nbs
p; “Hello Reginald. How can we assist you this fine overcast day?”
“Put down your weapons and turn your vehicles over to us,” Reginald demanded.
“No.” Calvin replied flatly.
The man waited for more, but Calvin said nothing. “You government and federal forces have no authority here,” the alderman stated bitterly.
“We’re not government people,” Calvin explained.
“We’ve seen uniforms with proper military patches through your windows.”
“Oh, well, yes, there are military people here, technically. But you see, we’re just sort of giving them a ride,” Calvin explained weakly. “This is a private vehicle owned by private citizens.” The truth sounded so much more believable in my head.
“Well, be that as it may, this is their stop. We’re gonna need them. They’re breaking the law being deployed on US soil. We’re gonna have us a little trial and see if we can get some leverage on the outside.”
“Actually, I’m not entirely sure these folks fall under any of that. And you don’t look like the governor to me and I’m betting you don’t know what the laws regarding this particular situation are, so you should probably rethink your position.”
“I’m thinking we’re American citizens trying to protect our rights,” the man replied, putting his rifle on his hip and standing proudly.
“Well we—as in America—America has military bases all over this nation. Soldiers have been deployed on bases here for a very long time, and have nearly always been welcome to spend their money in the local establishments and to travel to and from and between cities and to even sightsee if they want, except in Texas for some reason, where they always think they’re being taken over. Other than that, we have had military exercises throughout this country without issue. As I said, this is America. American soldiers are our military. They are our friends and family. They are American citizens and have the same rights as you and I…I mean, mostly. They have some stricter rules that they have to obey, of course—but that’s not the point.”