Based on that, she’d made her plan, and she was ready to carry it out.
All she hoped was that whoever was outside—if indeed they still were—would be cold and achy from their night in the grass, perhaps wet and tired, and Tally would have the drop on them.
Tally knew that there were too many overly optimistic thoughts in there, and that whoever was out there could have military survival training, making them very prepared for anything. The thing that suggested to Tally that this might not be the case was that anyone with military training, tactical awareness, and a pile of survival smarts would probably have been able to get through the gate or over the razor wire fence already, and would have made it into the substation compound during the night.
Tally’s position, still in the storeroom, ready with rucksack and ladder—alert, awake, and crucially unmolested by person or persons unknown—made her more positive reading of the signs seem more likely.
The frenzied killing of the power worker could also indicate that there was no rhyme or reason to whoever had rattled the gate the night before. It meant the danger was multiplied if the killer or killers had returned through habit or instinct to the place the poor man had been killed, but Tally was sure she could outwit, and better, still outpace an adversary gripped by murderous rage—the kind she had seen from the crew on the Sea-Hawk, and the sort her dad had told her about from when he’d been on the Empress. Matching up against someone that crazy, but who still knew how to operate a gun, really didn’t bear thinking about.
So. Ready.
Tally gripped the aluminum ladder with one hand, thankful it was light enough to carry that way, and reached for the substation door.
Three… Two…
Tally yanked the door open, twisted the ladder through ninety degrees to the vertical, and leapt through the doorway.
The day was bright and clear, and Tally worked on memory rather than sight. She didn’t head for the gate, but swung left and headed for the fence nearest to the brick building. It was nearer than the gate by a good ten feet, and she was almost upon it, her eyes having fully adjusted to the bright morning in three seconds. Using both hands, she dug the base of the ladder into the gravel-covered earth and clanged the top of the aluminum ladder against the steel fence at just over forty-five degrees. There was a three-foot gap from the top of the razor wire to the top rung of the ladder.
Without thinking, Tally began to run upward without holding on with her hands, trusting her acutely honed sense of balance to keep her true. There were eight rungs, and as her legs pumped her up each one, she threw her arms wide––outstretched as the ground fell away beneath her.
Sixth.
Seventh.
Eighth rung.
Tally launched herself off the top rung. She had all the air she needed and flipped herself head over heels, clearing the razor wire with space to spare. She felt herself reach the top of her arc, and began at her highest point to prepare for landing.
Head and feet now on the right orientation, the grass on the other side of the fence came up fast. A drop of fifteen feet was nothing to a free-runner of Tally’s experience. She put her ankles together, bent her knees, and prepared for impact.
Tally hit the grass with a whoof of expelled breath, and she carried forward into another roll designed to strip speed and momentum from her trajectory. Within a second, she was up and pelting away from the substation.
It was ten more seconds before she realized she could hear the thump thump thump of feet and the ragged breathing of someone in fast pursuit.
8
But the children. The children.
Flames gusted from the top of the Home Depot on East Victory Drive. They weren’t even in the city proper, and the devastation was already immense. Pillars of smoke rose thick-limbed and black all around the horizon, between the myriad of trees which had been planted for shade, and the low roofs of buildings yet to be torched.
Josh gripped the MP5 Harve had given him as they stopped on Route 80, five miles east of downtown Savannah. The sky was a grayish blue—the haze of smoke from the forty or so fires Josh could see were scraping the color from it—and the particles of soot blown on the gentle breeze were catching in his throat.
“I could just shoot you now,” Josh had said to Harve, clipping the magazine into the machine gun at the roadblock back in Thunderbolt.
Harve had winked. “Sure, you could. Go ahead if you want, but kill me, and six kids in the cage will be taken out and burned alive. It’s only three kids for someone like Jackdaw or Steve, so you could off one of them and save three kids from a roasting, I guess. But yeah, go ahead. Any time you like.”
Don’t think about the children.
Along with the MP5, Josh and the men with him had been given a shopping list of items to carry back with them.
A shopping list. It sounded so ordinary. So insanely out of whack with what it actually represented. They weren’t taking a trip down to the mall or going antiquing in New England; they were seven men walking into a burning city, filled with who knew what dangers, expecting to source items that had probably been looted already anyway.
The town of Thunderbolt was as far as Harve and the rest of Trace’s men had been prepared to go along with them, and where Josh and the others had been armed. Thunderbolt was relatively quiet, and other than Trace’s men, deserted. Everything useful that could have been taken from it had already been transported back to Parkopolis. But the quietness of the place was ultimately unrepresentative of the savagery that pervaded the air over Savannah like a pall of poison gas. Several bodies were hung from oak and palm trees lining Route 80, as warnings to anyone using this road to come out of Savannah. Other bodies lay where they’d fallen. Buildings were long burned out, and as they’d ridden into town on horseback, an all-pervasive sense of threat had been exuded from every broken window and wrecked car. A crude barricade was set across the highway about a mile west from where it crossed the Wilmington River.
Josh had been told by others in the scavenging crew that the last time they’d walked into Savannah from Thunderbolt, the Home Depot had as of yet not been burned, and so they were to go there first.
They hadn’t been allowed to ride into Savannah, either, instead expected to go in and out on foot. “Why?” Josh had asked.
“You’re more expendable than horses,” Harve had replied.
Now, Josh and the five men with him were three miles from the barricade, looking out across the deserted parking lot to the Home Depot as fire and smoke looped up from the roof in thick gouts.
“What’ll we do?” Ralph Plains was a dumpy, bald-headed guy who was losing his hair, sweating in the heat and at the situation he found himself in. Trace had the man’s son, a boy named Billy, in the cage.
Don’t think about the children.
Josh shook his head. “Looks like the fire has only recently started—which means it hasn’t spread, but will. It also means that the person or persons who set the fire are still around. It could be a trap to draw us in. They may have spotted us coming up from Thunderbolt and set this as a lure.”
Josh checked himself. He was talking like a cop, taking charge. This was his first trip into Savannah after finding out what hold Trace had on the small population of Parkopolis—their children—and the people he was with should be leading here. It was their children who were in the direct line of fire. Josh didn’t even know if his children were alive, but one thing he did know was that they weren’t in an underground cage waiting to be set on fire.
Gerry Hobson, a thirty-year-old architect from Thunderbolt, had moved out of the town with his wife and young daughter Sophie when half the population had gone crazy on the Night of the Madness; he’d been captured two days later by Trace. Now, he licked his lips and fumbled at the grip of his MP5. This was a man who wasn’t used to holding weapons, let alone using them. He looked at Josh like a drowning man would look towards a guy on the beach with a livesaver. “Okay, Josh. You’re right. So, we shoul
d go on?”
Barney McClure, a fifty-year-old ex-Army sergeant with a buzz cut that was growing out iron gray above his ruddy, pock-marked face, shook his head. “No. We go in. I want to get this trip over and done with as soon as we can. I say we approach through the trees there, stay low, and go in an entrance furthest from the fire. I’m not prepared to risk my son by going further into Savannah than we need to. If we don’t get everything on the list, then maybe we reconsider. But I say we go in here.”
The three other guys nodded, Ralph and Gerry looking apprehensive, and Josh shrugged.
“Barney, I didn’t say what we should do one way or the other; all I did was suggest what might be going on. I don’t have a kid down in the hole…”
Don’t think about their faces. Don’t think about their eyes.
“Exactly,” Barney said, mounting the curb onto the grass shoulder at the side of the road. There was a path leading into the parking lot, and he started down it, barking back over his shoulder, “You’re not the one who has to shoulder the risks. We do. So, keep your opinions to yourself. We move out. Come on.”
The muffled crump of an explosion from somewhere inside the store caused them to check momentarily as they ran flat-out and heads-down across the parking lot. There was a burned-out Toyota Land Cruiser fifty yards from the store entrance, and Barney gave the signal for the seven of them to crouch behind it.
Josh looked around the side of the burned metal to the store. There were smashed windows along the front of the building. A couple of bodies lay on the concrete, bellies bloated. They’d been there a while.
“What can you see?” Barney hissed, tapping Josh on the shoulder insistently.
“No movement. The fire looks like it’s at the back of the store on the right-hand side, nearest the road. Can’t see anyone on the roof.”
“Okay,” Barney said. “We go left. Get around the back of the store and go in. Clear?”
Josh and the others nodded.
Barney led and Josh held the rear, looking forward and back as they ran, MP5 on his hip. He remained alert to any movement at all, but they hadn’t seen anyone since they’d left Thunderbolt—and that situation didn’t look like it was going to change any time soon.
You could just run. You could. No one would blame you. You could escape, get away. Leave Trace and his murderers behind.
The children. Don’t think of the children.
He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t. He wasn’t built that way.
Protect and serve. That’s what he’d pledged to do back in the day, back when he’d been a cop.
He couldn’t leave those children to die, whatever it meant personally for him. It broke him inside, but he knew he couldn’t make any other choice.
Trace knew exactly what to do to make people do what he wanted. He had his finger hovering over the button, and he was not afraid to press it.
Three days ago, when Trace had proudly showed Josh who was in the below-ground cage, Josh had already picked up on his increased breathing, his sparkling eyes, and the grin on his pudgy pink face. Trace enjoyed the power. Enjoyed turning the screw, and enjoyed exploiting the good in people for his own end.
What good man could leave those kids to burn?
Not this one.
Josh ran on. Towards the store, and towards whatever awaited him there. Away from Tally, wherever she was.
They made it to the rear of the store without incident. A dingy alley backed onto a wide area of dense scrub set between the store’s service entrances and the Harry S. Truman Parkway. Beyond a caged-off storage area was a wide, orange roll-up aluminum goods door, next to a fire exit with a do not obstruct notice on it. They could see smoke rising at the far end of the store, but this section was clear. Ralph tried the fire exit door and it opened easily. It had either already been broken into, or people in the store had used it to escape.
Barney went first, and this time Josh followed him, keeping the 180 degrees to their right under observation while Barney did the same on the other side, and the others came in behind them.
They’d entered the warehouse section of the store. Hundreds of pallets and storage cages ranged around them. Most had had their contents ripped down and opened already. Guts of open crates and packaging materials were spewed across the gray floor. An abandoned forklift sat frozen; its front section speared into a tower cage which had toppled backwards into another. The driver sat dead at the wheel, and the smell of rot coming off him made Ralph gag and cover his mouth
More cages had been pushed over, perhaps by hand, spilling hundreds and thousands of wood screws and galvanized nails. And there under the forklift driver’s rancidity was the clear stink of spilled oil insinuating itself into the rancorous atmosphere. When the fire reached the warehouse and met the oil, the place would go up like tinder. Time was not on their side. Josh looked up at the ceiling of the warehouse, and as if to confirm that assessment, he saw tendrils of smoke convecting through the roof girders and around the dead light fittings.
“We should split up,” Josh said, and Barney flashed him a look of annoyance. “It you think it’s a good idea,” Josh added, trying to keep any sense of sarcasm to a minimum.
Barney didn’t say anything because his eyes said it all. I’ve told you once; don’t make me say it again.
Gerry pointed towards an exit into the store proper, some thirty yards away through the wrecked warehouse. “I’ve got no idea where to find the things we need in here. It’s all barcoded. At least out there we might find the things on the list in the aisles since those have been signposted.”
Before they burn, Josh thought, but he didn’t say it.
Their shopping list—such as it was—was for tools, axes, saws, planes… indeed, anything that would assist woodworking efforts. Carpentry was a skill everyone would have to acquire; Trace had said to them before sending them off with Harve toward Thunderbolt.
They were to bring back any weapons they found, as well, and had been given directions to places beyond the Home Depot where they might find some.
Jackdaw had given them a bunch of empty rucksacks and duffel bags to bring back their finds, and enough spare ammo to get themselves out of any sticky situations where they might find themselves.
On the ride in, Ralph and Gerry had told Josh about roaming gangs who were not only fighting their own turf wars in the city, but defending Savannah from Trace’s insurgency. Ralph and Gerry had been, they said, chased out of the Savannah Historic District already, and that was why, Josh reckoned, Barney had such a desire to get everything they could from the Home Depot and hightail it back to Thunderbolt.
“Oh my God!”
It was Ralph. Josh spun, bringing the submachine gun up at Ralph’s alarmed utterance.
Ralph was pointing at the forklift. Now that they had passed the machine, they could see the other side of the driver.
He was empty.
Half his torso had been ripped away; the innards removed. There’d been chunks of flesh torn from his forearm and bicep. Teeth marks and scratches covered the rest of his skin, and there were places where enough of his arm and torso had been removed to show bone.
Bone that had been chewed through.
“Dogs,” Gerry said simply and without need. The injuries to the forklift driver were more than obvious.
“Okay—Josh, Gerry, and Ralph, you go left when we get through the door. Rest of us’ll go right.”
Leaving behind the driver and his hideous post-mortem injuries, the crew made their way into the store proper.
Although the ceiling, once they moved out of the warehouse, was as smoky as what they’d seen before, there was still no evidence of flame in the far corner of the store. There were pops and crackles as things were licked by flames, but nothing they could see. The two groups split, and looking up at the signage, Josh and his two companions struck out down the aisles, hemmed in by the orange, metal-framed storage racks.
Josh led the way, gun at his shoulder, trigg
er finger poised. Whatever had torn the driver apart might still be in the building, burning or not. The other thing that niggled at Josh’s mind was that, although the dead guy in the forklift was in an advanced state of putrefaction, he’d not been dead since the Barnard’s event. The body had been there in the forklift maybe two weeks, max. Josh had seen enough dead bodies dumped on waste ground to know this. There’d been too much damage to him to tell what had killed him—perhaps in his desperation to get away from whatever had attacked him, he’d climbed up on the dead forklift to get up onto the storage cages and just been caught there.
Maybe whatever had eaten his body had been chasing him.
Ralph and Gerry were silent behind Josh, maybe thinking the same thing. Whatever the dangers in the store, the fire was likely not going to be the only one.
They reached an intersection. The aisles here were full of displays for furniture and bathroom fittings. Many of the porcelain basins had been smashed in what appeared to be a frenzied orgy of mindless violence. Other displays had been knocked over, and a couple of attempts had been made to set fires here some time before, though they either hadn’t taken or had burned themselves out.
Josh looked up, trying to see the store signs which might tell them where the equipment they were looking for might still be found, but the smoke running across the ceiling was getting thicker, making the air hazier. He couldn’t feel the heat of the fire, but the smoke told him all he needed to know about how desperate the situation was right now.
“If we haven’t found anything we need in three minutes, I say we get out of here,” Josh said.
Before Gerry or Ralph could answer, one of the tall display racks, filled with paint cans of all descriptions, began to topple to Josh’s right. He caught a can of magnolia dislodging out of the corner of his eye, and had just enough presence of mind to step away from the teetering column and duck out of the way of other falling objects before a spray of bullets tore open the side of a garden swing seat to his left, sending sprays of torn material and foam up into the air.
Supernova EMP- The Complete Series Page 32