Standing Before Hell's Gate

by William Alan Webb

  At Young’s nod, he laid out the plans. One company had already been left behind to guard Hoover Dam and the bridge over the Colorado River, with orders to request a civilian engineer team with heavy equipment to do some repairs on the Mike O’Callahan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. Two more companies would stay in the Las Vegas area, one to guard the airfield and simultaneously search for any salvageable military materials, while the other would secure the main interstate roadway through the city. In addition, in case there was further enemy contact, a platoon of M1129 Stryker mortar carriers, equipped with 120mm mortars, would be on hand for fire support.

  Three companies would be left at Creech, along with the other two M1129 platoons from 1st Battalion. These would act as a reserve that could reinforce the companies to north or south quickly. The allotted tanker trucks would also be left at Creech.

  The remainder of the regiment would push on into central and northern Nevada. Hawthorne Army Depot would be the next place to put one of 1st Battalion’s two remaining companies, both to guard it and to take inventory. Reports from the scrapers who’d brought word of the critical situation at Sierra had also mentioned that Rednecks had overrun Hawthorne, and it was time to take it back. No forces would be left at Carson City unless conditions warranted it. The remainder of the regiment would skirt Reno and not enter the city proper, and would leave one company behind to secure the route. That left seven companies to push on to Sierra as escort for the remaining logistics vehicles.

  “I’ll look over the details before we pull out,” Young said. “But on the surface, it sounds fine. General?”

  “I agree. Good job, Major Strootman, Major Iskold.” Angriff stepped downwind and drew on the cigar so the smoke wouldn’t blow toward the others, then it occurred to him that he hadn’t offered one to Colonel Young. Reaching under his jacket into the inside pocket, he withdrew one and held it out. “I’m sorry, Bob, that was thoughtless of me. Would like to join me in a—”

  “Down!” The soldier deployed twenty yards to their left was half-turned toward them while on one knee, and was waving at them to get down. Something stuck out of the front of his body armor — an arrow.

  An Eagle filled Angriff ‘s hand without conscious thought and he was on one knee in firing position before the others even registered the situation. With his left hand, he jerked Iskold down, too. “Draw your weapon, Major!”

  “I don’t have one!” she said.

  His eyes narrowed into a stern frown. It was the same look he’d given Cynthia when she took the family car without permission and crumpled the front bumper against a streetlight. Young and Strootman had followed his lead, gotten low, and drawn their pistols. All eight of them, the four guards and the four officers, swept their weapons back and forth looking for targets.

  Scrub trees and creosote bushes pushed up through cracks in the runway and provided cover for the bowman. “Whoever shot that can’t be more than fifty yards out.”

  “Contact on the left!”

  Four rifles and three pistols swung in that direction and fixed on a lone figure standing no more than forty yards from where Angriff knelt. Shirtless, it was a young boy in his early teens, holding a bow with an arrow already nocked and ready to release. He was yelling something and slowly walking their way.

  The situation was really Colonel Young’s to control, but he would likely order his men to kill their attacker. In less than a second, Angriff knew the boy would die and he hated the very idea of that happening. “Hold your fire!” he yelled. The boy immediately shifted aim to him and fired. Angriff moved with the reflexes that had saved him countless times, and the arrow whizzed past his ear, exactly where his forehead had been a second earlier.

  The boy drew and nocked a third arrow with the smooth precision of long practice, but seemed confused who to target.

  Angriff tried again. “Put the bow down, son! Nobody wants to hurt you!”

  “Fuck off!” Again he fired at Angriff, not as close as last time, and Angriff knew the emotions he could hear in the boy’s voice had thrown off his aim. But he’d gotten within twenty yards of the first soldier and it was reckless to let him simply keep firing. Eventually he’d score a severe hit on somebody, so despite the nauseous twisting of his stomach at having to give the order, he didn’t flinch from doing it.

  “Bring him down!” There was no caveat about shooting to wound. That was only in movies; in real life that got people killed. But that didn’t mean the men themselves wanted to blow away some pimple-faced kid who should have been in junior high school. Within a second of each other, the guards all fired at once, and without prior agreement they all shot at the right shoulder. Two rounds barely nicked the skin and one went completely under the armpit. Only the fourth round scored a clean hit.

  In the reverse of what might seem like logic, the closer such a high-velocity round was to its target, the worse the wound it produced. As the range increased, with the standard M-16 round, the fragmentation of the bullet after impact went down as terminal velocity decreased.

  At that range, the 5.56-millimeter round, traveling at 3,110 feet per second, should have blown out half of the boy’s shoulder. As it was, it struck with terrible effect and left an exit wound the size of a nickel, although on a grown man it would have been much worse. But the boy was thin to the point of emaciation. His musculature wasn’t as developed as a man’s would be and so offered less resistance. Moreover, an M-16 bullet only began breaking apart after penetrating four or five inches of tissue, depending on the density. His shoulder wasn’t thick enough and the existing tissue was softer than might be expected, so the bullet passed through without disintegrating.

  Regardless, it did the trick.

  The boy spun to his right and fell backward, dropping the bow. Lying on his back, he writhed and stamped his feet against the runway in agony. Angriff’s first impulse was to run to the boy and begin first aid, but he resisted. Unlike Nipple the year before, during the Battle of the Highway, Colonel Young’s men would probably not push him out of the way if they were better suited to treat the boy, and however well-intentioned he might have been, Angriff wasn’t the right man to keep the boy alive. So he forced himself to stay back and let the others work. The first soldier reached the boy’s side within seconds.

  But the boy didn’t want help. Instead, he clawed at the face of the soldier kneeling beside him, still screaming, and when Angriff drew close enough he could understand the boy’s words.

  “You killed Mina… I’m gonna kill you… you killed Mina…”

  As he scratched and lunged at the Americans, blood poured from his shoulder. The other infantrymen knelt and held him down, and the first man pulled a bandage from his own first aid kit and pressed it against the wound. Still, unless he quit squirming before the medical team got there, nothing they did would matter.

  The person who saved his life was Major Iskold. Angriff thought of her as quietly efficient although not assertive, but with the boy’s blood spreading across the concrete, she knelt on the boy’s left side. Using her left hand, she combed tangled brown hair away from his forehead and whispered a soft ssshhh. His wide eyes fixed on hers and she didn’t look away.

  “We’re not here to hurt you. Now lie still so we can stop the bleeding.”

  His face had grown pale and his skin clammy. Even standing eight feet away, Angriff could see the signs of shock setting in. But her words and soothing tone had an instant effect. The boy stopped wiggling and stared at her like she was his mother.

  Slowly, Iskold held out her right hand, palm up. “Morphine.”

  When, seconds later, her hand remained empty, she stroked the boy’s cheek before looking up with a beatific smile. “That’s an order.” Her tone might have been inviting them to eat a slice of sponge cake, but the underlying menace was clear to all. Within seconds, two battlefield injectors appeared in her palm. She set one of them on the narrow, panting chest and injected the other one into his right upper arm.

  The dru
g rapidly took effect. After the boy calmed, Iskold’s hands moved with the sureness of a surgeon. First she told the man applying direct pressure on his Israeli bandage to keep it up, then, as gently as she could, she requested a second bandage and slid it under the exit wound. She then ordered the soldier applying pressure to increase it enough so that the shoulder pressed flat against the underlying bandage. After checking the patient’s breathing again, shallow and rapid, and then extremity capillary reactions, sluggish, Iskold was thinking about how to move the boy to the regimental medical team when running footsteps alerted them all that the medics were on scene.

  After briefing them, she stood back up and rejoined the officers. Blood covered her hands and forearms. A long strand of brown hair had escaped the bun at the back of her neck and fell over her face until she moved it. Dark armpits showed where sweat stained her shirt.

  “Nice work, Major,” Angriff said. One lifted eyebrow was his way of displaying a changed opinion of his heretofore quiet and reserved officer.

  “Thank you, General. Permission to accompany the boy?”

  “Granted.” She turned to leave but he stopped her. “One thing, Major. If you get a chance, find out why he tried to commit suicide and if we should expect any more attacks.”

  “Roger that.”

  #

  Chapter 23

  With a kiss, let us set out for an unknown world.

  Alfred de Musset

  Overtime Prime 2nd Level Mess Hall

  1314 hours, April 25

  Nikki put her tray down across the table from Morgan and slid into the chair. Her sister — it was still hard to think of Morgan as her sister — had half a salad left, which was odd; Morgan was an omnivore, but with strong carnivorous leanings. And unlike her usual cup of coffee, she had a glass of milk.

  Milk?

  “What’s with the healthy routine?” Nikki said.

  Morgan didn’t answer her question directly. “You look rode hard and put away wet.”

  Nikki tried to keep a straight face but couldn’t. A grin cracked the façade. “Rode hard for damned sure.”

  Instead of a bawdy response, however, Morgan reached over and patted her hand. The smooth skin of her flawless cheeks sagged. “I’m very happy for you, Nikki. I really am.”

  “Joe’s gonna be fine, Morgan. You’ll see. They’re both gonna come walking out of that desert any minute now, and then you can give him all kinds of hell for scaring you like this.”

  “I won’t give him hell.”

  Nikki didn’t explain that she’d been kidding about that. She also had a strange intuition that something else was bothering her sister, strange because she’d never felt empathy for people before very recently and wasn’t sure how you dealt with that kind of thing. “So… I’m not very good at this big sister stuff, but is there something else bothering you?”

  Morgan turned to pay attention to several mechanics from her battalion who came into the mess hall, seemingly fascinated with them. “You’re going to be an aunt.”

  #

  Operation Comeback

  1449 hours

  Corporal Duglach knocked on General Schiller’s door and stuck his head in after being answered. “That Glide woman wants to talk to you, sir.”

  Schiller’s chin rested in his left hand as he leaned on the desktop, reading a sheaf of papers. Without speaking or taking his eyes off the reports, he used his right hand to wave permission for her to enter. He saw her come in with his peripheral vision but didn’t look her way until he’d finished reading the memorandum on the top of the paper pile.

  Schiller was punctilious about military decorum and so didn’t know to react to Glide. She wore a tight black T-shirt that allowed every feature of her upper body to show through in outline. Not just her breasts, which is where most men’s eyes went, but also the taut shoulder and abdominal muscles that showed her top physical condition. Old style Israeli camouflage uniform pants and boots completed her uniform, with a British SA80A2 rifle slung over her left shoulder and a Jericho 941 chambered in .45 ACP in a holster under her right armpit. A Kabar Marine knife hung from her belt.

  “Yes?” he said. Like most men, he found her incredibly attractive, but unlike most men his disinterested façade never slipped. Over the years, he’d been compared to an automaton, or a robot. Little did those people know how far from the truth that really was.

  “I think trouble is coming,” she said. He was still having trouble getting used to her thick Israeli accent. “There is great resentment in many people who remain loyal to General Steeple. They believe it is he who should be in charge, not you and not General Angriff.”

  That got his full attention. “Oh? Is there open talk of mutiny?”

  “Kanir’e shelo,” she said in Hebrew, and then switched back to English. “Probably not, at least not yet. Frosty and I have made ourselves well known and conversations end when we are seen. But such talk is not far under the surface.”

  “Thank you for informing me of these developments… err, Glide.”

  “Do you have your personal weapon, General?”

  “It’s right here in my desk.”

  “Since I am in charge of Security here, I must ask you to wear it at all times. What type of weapon is it?”

  “A Beretta M9.”

  “That’s a good weapon. If you feel you need more, please let me know.”

  “If I feel that I need more than that, we are both in a lot of trouble.”

  Glide stared at him for a few seconds before pivoting and leaving. Schiller picked up the papers to read from where he’d left off, but found it hard to concentrate. After trying for a few minutes, he opened the bottom right drawer and placed his Beretta on the desk top. It had been at least a month since he’d cleaned it, and though he hadn’t fired it since then, Schiller believed that all machines and tools needed maintenance whether they’d been used or not. He released the magazine and then ejected the round from its chamber. “Corporal Duglach, please bring me a pistol cleaning kit.”

  He also needed to find the practice range.

  #

  Chapter 24

  Ceasar forgave his enemies,

  Rather than cut them down;

  They repaid his generosity

  By planting him in the ground.

  Oscar O’Connor, from ‘Forgiveness can be fatal.’

  Astride old New Mexico Highway 4, two miles south of Jemez Pueblo

  1524 hours, April 25

  Johnny Rainwater passed the out-of-breath rider a cup of water and waited for him to drink it before pressing for details. The boy, Jimmy Two Trees, was young, it was true, and prone to exaggeration. Rainwater had known that when he’d included Jimmy in the patrols, but the teenager was an excellent rider with an outstanding horse, and in the face of the threat moving toward them, he needed every resource he could find. Besides, exaggeration was one thing and sheer terror another, and Jimmy Two Trees was terrified.

  “Feeling better?” he said when Jimmy passed him the empty cup. He then dipped it into the water bucket and gave some water to the horse.

  “I’m sorry, Johnny.”

  “Don’t be sorry, just tell me what you saw.”

  “They’re in Albuquerque, thousands and thousands of ’em. Got horses and cars and trucks and guns and anything you can think of.”

  “Were they on the move?”

  “Huh-uh. Lots of men riding off everywhere, but it looked like most of ’em were camped.”

  “Good, Jimmy, good. This is very helpful. Did you see Tokar? I sent her down there, too.”

  “No,” Jimmy said, shaking his head so hard that sweat droplets sprayed off the ends of his long black hair. “I’d have known her if I saw her.”

  “All right, Jimmy, you’ve done good. You get on back home and get Mottle bedded down and fed, then get yourself something to eat.”

  As the boy rode off to the north, Rainwater climbed a boulder beside the highway and cupped his right hand to shade his eyes. I
t was pointless; he couldn’t see Albuquerque from the mountaintops on either side of the valley that led to Jemez Springs. He did it anyway, hoping for some hint as to how long he had to get ready before the hordes of hell were upon him.

  #

  The free community of Shangri-La sprawled in the small valleys and mountains surrounding Jemez Springs, the miraculous warm water pools that bubbled up from deep underground. Pre-Collapse archaeology had dated the first human settlements in the area to 2,500 B.C., the time of the building of the Great Pyramids in Egypt. Migrants through the area had built large numbers of pueblos, multi-story adobe houses, which eventually ran to a housing potential of 30,000 or more. When the Collapse had destroyed the United States, an experienced survivalist and off-grid homesteader named Winston Ballinger, who’d been familiar with the Jemez Springs area, had gone there and established a last outpost of American democracy.

  Over the years, Shangri-La had attracted a large number of survivors who pledged to obey the only rule for admittance to the community: loyalty to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and Bill of Rights of the United States. With no enemies who could invade the well-defended valleys, the settlement had grown and prospered over the decades, until Johnny Rainwater had more than 3,000 people for whom he was responsible.

  Hundreds of them had already gathered at the Roman-style amphitheater cut from the living rock of a mountain on the western side of the valley through which old New Mexico Highway 4 ran. Near the pools of hot water that gave Jemez Springs its name, the inhabitants called it the True, which was a bastardization of teatru, the Latin word for theater which Ballinger had originally named it. After years of fighting for proper pronunciation, he’d finally given up. The True it was and would forever be.