by Bobby Adair
24
Three hills poked out of the featureless plain near Balmorhea. One stood a quarter mile due east, one, a half-mile south. Between, but a little farther east, sat the third, rising up from the shore of the town’s little lake. With me following behind, doing my best to keep the pace, that’s the hill we headed for when we heard the faint boom of a distant explosion followed by the glow of a fire on the bellies of the clouds. It was well past dark. Snow blew in sideways flurries as the temperature dropped below freezing.
“Something’s happening in town,” Murphy panted, as he slowed to a walk to catch his breath. He pointed to the northernmost hill. “Unless Preacher Dick is a dumbass, he’ll have some people up there, spotting and keeping a lookout.”
“Not that it’ll do him any good, now that it’s dark.”
“He might have NVGs that still work.”
Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. I couldn’t argue.
Murphy’s gaze fell on the hill farthest east of town. “That’s our best bet if we want to see what’s going on.”
“My bet is they’re shelling Bal,” I brilliantly deduced, “and the reason they set up that ambush back on the highway is because they didn’t want anybody with an armored Humvee and a big machine gun driving up their ass while they were looking the other way. I say go to that northern hill, kill whoever’s up there, and then go commando at their flank.”
“Just the two of us, with no intel?”
“You and me can do a lot of damage, Murphy. You know that’s true. We’ll do what we can and skedaddle before anybody figures out we’re there.”
“And if Preacher Dick’s people aren’t a bunch of Bullwinkles and they do have NVGs and—” Murphy had an epiphany. “Didn’t you say those drones came equipped with night vision features?” He scanned the sky as if he could see anything up there in the blowing snow. “They could be watching us right now.”
“Not in this weather.” I felt pretty safe with that guess. “With all this snow and sand in the air, erratic wind…even if they had a whole fleet of drones up there watching the desert for incoming threats, there’s just too much desert. They’d only find us by luck.”
“And if they have people on the backside of that hill, wearing NVG’s and waiting to ambush any morons coming to the rescue.”
“Whatever.” I didn’t want to play the speculation game anymore. I needed to get moving to keep my anger and worries at bay. “Take us in, Ghost Rider.”
25
We burned through an hour of precious time following an arroyo down to the lake and then working our way up an erosion ditch that snaked all over the eastern slope of the hill. During the trek, we didn’t hear any more explosions from Balmorhea, and the fire that illuminated the night had died to sporadic flickers. It still lit the clouds and much of the desert around, but not steadily. In the blackness between, Murphy and I stumbled on unseen hazards. Luckily, the wind rustling the scrubby desert plants concealed the noise.
Just down from the hill’s ragged crest, I pointed out a gap between a pair of large rock mounds. “That’ll be a good place to see what we can see and maybe get out of this wind for a minute.”
“Extra careful,” Murphy told me. “If anyone is up top, we don’t want to give ourselves away.” Enough said. He trudged slowly forward, weapon up, ready to shoot, taking all the time he needed to stay silent. I followed, matching Murphy’s slow pace.
Twenty downhill paces from the gap, Murphy stopped cold. As though we were Siamese twins, I froze in place. He was staring, trying to discern something out of the dark, his danger hackles up.
Creeping out of the ditch to put some lateral distance between us, I slipped silently behind a sprawling cactus. My position gave me an alternate perspective on the spot that had Murphy concerned. And then, just as Murphy was doing, I waited. It took the patience of a minute, maybe two, before I saw something move in the gap between the rocks. When the Balmorhea fire flared a brighter orange glow on the clouds, the danger clarified. The black silhouette became a head—no, two heads, right at the crest. More of Preacher Dick’s wannabe soldiers, doing a piss-poor job at it, leaving their rumps exposed.
Murphy signaled that he saw them, too. Another few hand signals solidified our plan. We’d try and capture one, and if our luck held, both. If not, we’d kill them. And, because I have a terrible tendency to overthink when I have too much time, my mind ran through another handful of permutations, none of which were to my liking.
Murphy gave me a few minutes to work my way across the hill so I could sneak in close using the rock mound to our right as cover. He moved at a snail’s pace, coming directly up behind them.
Finally in position, I peeked around a hunk of stone the size of a Volkswagen and saw the pair lying on their bellies, clearly outlined against the pale ground. “Freeze!” I barked. “Move and you die.”
Neither of the targets moved. One said, “We surrender.”
I stepped out from behind the big rock, machete in one hand, sawed-off shotgun in the other. Cautiously stepping in close, I put the edge of my blade on the side of one’s neck, and barrel of my shotgun on the back of the other’s. “Very slowly. I mean very, very slowly, you on the right, move your right hand out and put it behind your back.”
“Zed? Is that you?”
“Say what?”
“It’s me, Grace.”
26
Houses blazed down in Balmorhea. They looked to be all on the same block. It was hard to tell with the distance, the darkness, and the blowing snow. Grace, however, assured us that the situation was static. We huddled in the lee of the rock mound—me, Murphy, Jazz, and Grace. We were just barely able to make out one another’s faces in the shadow behind the hill.
I figured I’d start. “What’s the deal?”
Grace related that they’d been staked out on Highway 17 in Verhalen. Well aware of the possibility of drone surveillance, they’d parked the truck inside a deteriorating Quonset hut, and were keeping themselves out of sight as they watched the road coming down from the north. Three assault vehicles, black like the ones that chased us out of Carlsbad, meandered toward them from different directions. Grace realized their position was known and that Preacher Dick’s scabs were trying to encircle them. Whether to capture or kill, neither wanted to find out. They jumped in their truck and raced away. To be extra careful, they didn’t run a straight shot down Highway 17, they headed east, on what they hoped would be an unexpected escape route. Two vehicles gave chase but didn’t open fire. Grace and Jazz spent the rest of the day trying to evade them. It wasn’t until nightfall that they finally lost their pursuers. By then, Preacher Dick’s militia had taken up positions around Balmorhea, so Grace parked their truck in a gulley a mile east of the hill.
“We hit an ambush back up the road,” Murphy told them.
“We’ve been hiking this way ever since,” I added.
Grace laughed. “What were you—halfway to Fort Stockton?”
“Hiking?” asked Jazz.
Murphy gave them the quick rundown, then said, “We got houses burning in Bal. What’s the situation?”
Jazz spat. “Naive Ortega.”
Murphy shared a knowing look with me as he asked Jazz, “Elaborate?”
“She shut down comms with the scout units.” Jazz flipped an enthusiastic bird in the direction of Balmorhea.
“Why?” I asked.
“She thinks they’re compromised,” Jazz snorted.
“Out of her depth.” Murphy shook his head. “Everybody knows the radios are encrypted.” One of the advantages of using military hardware. “Didn’t Dalhover tell her you need to use the code to listen in?”
“We don’t know for sure,” Grace told us. “We haven’t received a message out of Bal since this afternoon. Before that, one of the scouts radioed that Preacher Dick had nabbed somebody and extracted our comm protocols. Now nobody’s talking. Nobody wants to give anything away.”
“Do we know how many scout units a
re still out?” I asked.
Jazz shook her head.
My other concern. “Do we know if the others were attacked?”
“How many drones to they have?” Murphy wasn’t looking for an answer or a guess, he was just expressing his frustration that we were behind the curve on tech.
Grace pointed toward the northern hill. “What we know is this—there’s an armored vehicle on the western slope looking down on Bal. Not hiding. Sitting out there, plain as day.”
“Or night,” Murphy laughed nervously, but none of us shared his humor.
“I think they have people up in the rocks on the crest,” added Grace.
“We saw some movement,” added Jazz. “It’s hard to tell.”
Grace nodded to the southwest. “They have a truck over there. Camper on the back. Hillbilly gun mount welded to the roll bar. Same deal as the other hill, right out in the open. Sitting at the peak.” That hill didn’t reach as high as the other two. It wasn’t rocky, but smooth over the crest and all up and down its gentle slopes. “They want Bal to know they’re up there. They have three armored vehicles parked out on 17, facing the main gate. We had some lightning earlier and we got some glimpses. One might be a tank.”
Murphy cursed. “Nobody’s got tanks anymore. It practically takes a whole platoon just to keep one running. Maintenance. Support. Spare parts. Ammo.” He shook his head.
“Like I said.” Grace shrugged. “I only got a glimpse. All I can tell for sure is it’s military. Three armored vehicles with big guns, all aimed at the front gate.”
“And firing,” I guessed.
“Yeah, well that’s that thing,” she responded. “It’s not those tanks or whatever doing the shooting.”
“Who is?” asked Murphy.
“Can’t say,” answered Grace. “We saw a few explosions a while back. They caused the fires.”
“We didn’t see any muzzle flashes,” added Jazz. “No rockets. Nothing.”
“Mortars?” I asked, looking at Murphy. “With incendiary rounds? How far could they be?”
“A mile,” Murphy guessed. “A little more. Depends on the type of weapon and the type of round. The skill of the crew.” He looked at Jazz and Grace. “The rounds hit those three houses?”
“All pretty close to there,” answered Jazz. “Only one hit a house, and that caught the other two on fire.”
“After that,” added Grace, “they stopped firing.”
Focused on Murphy, because I knew he’d know, I asked, “Any way to locate the mortars in the dark?”
“Luck,” Murphy scoffed.
“They’re not trying to destroy Balmorhea,” suggested Grace. “They’re trying to intimidate us into surrendering.”
I had an alternative opinion. “Perhaps they don’t think they can conquer us outright. Maybe that’s why they want us to surrender. Or they don’t want to suffer the losses from mounting a frontal attack.”
“They have a tank,” Murphy argued. “We don’t have anything that can stop a tank.”
“Maybe they don’t want to kill more of us than necessary,” Jazz optimistically suggested.
I didn’t think their motives had anything to do with preserving our lives. They’d made that clear enough already.
Unsure what to do, Murphy asked me, “What’s the plan, Batman?”
My plan was the same one I’d started with. “We’re armed. We’re experienced. We’ve got home-field advantage, and the weather to keep us hidden. I say we start working our way around the perimeter, killing whoever we come across.”
27
“Wait,” argued Jazz. “We’re just going to attack them?”
“Yeah.” The choice seemed obvious. “If they had a force large enough to overwhelm us, they’d have attacked already. The more we can thin them out the—”
“No,” Jazz told me. “Everything can’t be shoot first. Not every single time.”
I started to retort but Murphy laughed, and said, “He’s going to give you a speech.”
“I’m not.” I was. But then I decided I wasn’t. “We’ve all made it fourteen years because we understand what the world is like now.”
“Maybe it’s that way,” argued Jazz, “because we—I don’t just mean just us right here, I mean all of us who are still alive—have made it that way.”
“And the hillbillies who ambushed us?” I argued back. “And those people we found in Carlsbad? They were Slow Burns just like us. Preacher Dick and his shithead militia killed them for that. Just for that. He lured us into a trap so they could come here and do whatever this is.”
“Maybe they don’t know we’re good people, despite what the virus did to us,” argued Jazz. “Nobody ever gets it until they finally talk to us and see we’re just as normal as they are.”
“Or they don’t accept us anyway,” I shot back. “This isn’t new, people killing people because they’re different.”
“Just because it’s always been like that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t change.” Jazz turned to Grace for support.
I couldn’t help but turn to her, too, and I didn’t like the uncertainty I saw. “You’re with Jazz on this?”
Grace slipped into the mediator role. “We talk a lot about this kind of stuff when we’re out on the road. Maybe it is time we start trying to build a better world.”
“We did build a better world.” I pointed down to Balmorhea, illuminated in the fires still burning. “These assholes are here to destroy it.”
“We don’t know that,” pushed Jazz.
“You can see the fires, right?” I was angry, but trying hard to contain it. “You see the siege, right? This is where we live. Where all of our friends live. You see that, right, sunshine?”
“Zed,” Grace was disappointed in me, “you don’t need to be an asshole to make your case.”
I disagreed. “Some of our friends are probably dead right now because of what these shitheads are doing.”
“And you killed some of theirs, too,” argued Jazz.
“They shot first!”
Grace put a hand on my shoulder, forcing me through kindness to give her my attention. I hated when women did that. I felt so manipulated.
“They’ve lived in the same world we have, Zed.” Grace meant the Carlsbad hillbillies, only she was much to kind to say that. “Maybe we have a chance to deescalate this. You said yourself, they don’t have enough force to overwhelm us, so maybe they’ll back off before it comes to an all-out fight. Maybe they’re here to negotiate and don’t know how to do it without a little intimidation to start with. Maybe this is the hard step that people have to take when they want to build a better world. Maybe there’ll be a lot more steps, but maybe this is what it is. Maybe this is what it feels like to initiate huge change. Kind of crappy. Maybe that’s why building a better, more just world has always been too hard to make happen.”
Murphy bellowed a big laugh.
I glared at him.
“You just got out-Professored.”
28
After sneaking through the wind and snow for forty minutes, we reached the goat pastures south of town. From there, we sloshed several hundred yards through the mud and frigid water of an irrigation ditch to reach Balmorhea’s outermost perimeter defense: another ditch. Only, to call it a ditch didn’t do it justice. Using earth moving machines we’d scavenged out of a quarry twenty miles north, our excavation crew had spent months cutting a dry moat in a rough circle around Balmorhea. The outer edge of the moat created a ten-foot drop off, straight down. The inner side of the moat sloped gently up toward the palisade. The design, it was hoped, and had worked out as such, was to create an impediment for any horde of Whites that might make a charge at our little town. They’d race across the desert, rabid and crazed, and tumble right into the drop off. Some would be injured. Those that weren’t hurt were, for the moment, stunned, or at least brought to a stop, so that the defenders manning the wall could then shoot them.
Any Whites that made it past the di
tch found themselves in a barbed-wire trap. We’d scavenged miles of wire from fences in the area and created mazes to confuse and slow attacking Whites. We created funnels, to guide attackers toward strong points in our outer wall, fortified towers where we had machine guns mounted, though the wall itself wasn’t by any means weak.
Using the dirt and rock dug up to create the moat, we built a berm that completely encircled the town. Atop that berm, we built a ten-foot wall, clad in sheets of tin that overlapped like shingles on a roof. It provided no handholds for attacking Whites. It was impossible to scale without a ladder or rope. In total, the berm and wall stood twenty feet tall. A wall walk ran the entire interior circumference, so shooters could line up anywhere to defend the city.
The structure had taken years to build, and not a single White had set foot inside Balmorhea since its completion. Unfortunately, I started to think our success had a lot to do with luck—luck that we hadn’t been tried by normals, given that Murphy, Jazz, Grace, and me moved through the depth of the defenses unmolested and undetected until I pounded on the sally port door at the base of tower seven and asked them to let us in.
29
Murphy, Jazz, and Grace hustled off to find Dalhover. With an attack imminent, they all had responsibilities, and Dalhover would be at the center of our command structure. Knowing I was wrong for not going with them, knowing I was shirking my responsibility, I chose to accept whatever reaming Dalhover would eventually grant me. I’d deserve it. I’d take it. But I had to find Steph first, so, of course, I headed for the hospital.
It wasn’t a large facility. It didn’t have to be. The hospital operated out of a part of the high school and served only our community and the few hundred people who lived within a day’s drive. As I passed the full rooms, and saw the wounded lying on cots in the hall, I sensed an antipathy from them, something I hadn’t felt in a very long time. I wondered how much of that was me misreading their pain and worry, how much was because my anger over the situation was looking for a target.