Outbreak: Long Road Back

by Van Dusen, Robert

  Frays wiped her hands on her trousers as she stood a few dozen yards from the edge of the group of children huddled in the shade of a leafy maple tree on the edge of the former Wal-Mart parking lot. A fleshy older woman with a kindly face read to the kids from a copy of what sounded like Winnie the Pooh as the little ones sat on blankets on the grass. Frays felt a sudden stab of grief and she sucked her lower lip into her mouth doing her best to keep from falling to her knees and sobbing her eyes out right there on the blacktop. Memories came flooding back of her own childhood when her mother would hold her on her lap in this old rocking chair and read that same story to her before bedtime…

  A little brown haired little girl glanced at the woman standing on the edge of the group and leapt to her feet. “Amy! Hi Amy!” Becca cried happily as she rushed over and took Frays by the hand. “It’s story time. C’mon Amy! You’re missing it!” Frays sighed, smiled at the girl and let Becca drag her over to sit on a fuzzy blanket with Paulie, her twin brother.

  Genny Carver, the child care provider reading to the children, smiled at the younger woman as she sat down with Becca and Paulie Lacey and gathered the two little ones close to her. Rachel, a little orphan girl with dirty blonde hair and a look of perpetual lost sadness in her red rimmed green eyes scooted over and put her head in Frays’ lap. Genny frowned slightly, her heart breaking just a little bit at the troubled pained look in the young airman’s eyes as she held the children. Genny could not help but guess why the children’s friend always looked so out of it around the kids. She had seen the videos people put up on the internet back when the internet still worked, after all.

  After about fifteen or twenty minutes Frays checked her watch. “Oh, jeez!” she exclaimed as she gently started trying to extract herself from the children. “I’m real sorry kiddos but I gotta get going. I have to get back to work. Have a good day, kiddos.” Becca and Paulie each grabbed one of the woman’s legs and gave it a squeeze. Frays’ mouth pinched up and she tousled the children’s hair before bending and kissing the tops of their heads. “Be good for Mrs. Carver alright guys? And say hi to your dad for me.”

  Frays shuddered as she hustled off towards the TOC. Twelve hours sitting there hoping that somebody was going to call them up on the radio was not going to be fun… She hoped that whoever she was going to be on the detail with would be interesting at the very least. It could be a very long twelve hours if you were stuck in there with the wrong person. She had heard a few times that somebody had actually talked to a base in southern Canada checking up on them. Major Tennyson, the post commander, had ordered the people manning the radio to leave the room so what exactly was being said was a matter of debate.

  The radio room was set up inside the old hotel manager’s office behind the front desk. Frays stopped and showed her ID card to the two Navy guys sitting behind the front desk and after they checked their list went into the room. “Hey Frannie!” Frays said with a wide grin as she sank into the nearest rolling chair.

  The Latina’s scarred face brightened visibly. “Amy! How the hell have you been?” she asked as Frays rolled her chair up to the table next to her. “Long time no see!” It was easy to see why Carl had taken up with the young woman while they were holed up in the Frays’ hunting cabin west of Boston. She had long shiny black hair that was coiled into a bun at the base of her skull and a figure that could make a man drive his car straight up a light pole even when wearing Marine cammies and bulky combat gear. However the right side of her face and neck was covered with pockmarks and thick scar tissue, the result of a roadside bomb during a deployment in Afghanistan.

  As much as she liked her friend Frays could not help but find the idea of her and Carl as a couple kind of unsettling. She was easily a decade older than her little brother and…well...Rodriguez was on some kind of happy pills for PTSD or whatever. But then…she did not have much room to talk being a single mother and all. And as long as she and Carl made each other happy then she should stop being such a stick in the mud especially since there was so much to be miserable about these days.

  “I’m doing good, Frannie!” Frays answered happily and clapped the woman on the shoulder. “Little guy’s been kicking the crap out of me but well…I can’t say that it doesn’t make me happy.” After everything that happened to her before she even knew she was pregnant she could not help but relish every single strange little sensation of the life inside her. She loved her little boy so much already. “Whatcha been up to?”

  Rodriguez frowned a little bit and shrugged. “Pulling perimeter guard mostly.” she said quietly as she rubbed her thigh. The woman had been wounded in a firefight with some locals over in Concord a few weeks after the failed attempt of quarantine in Boston. “Handing out MREs and stuff. Winning hearts and minds and all that horseshit. How’s Carl and everybody?”

  “They’re great.” Frays said and fidgeted a little. “Just stopped by and said hi to them between getting done with my work and coming here.” She made a strange face and sent a flittering look towards the door. “How’s perimeter guard been working out?”

  Rodriguez’s face darkened. “Took down a couple Bravo Charlies the other day.” she whispered, casting a nervous glance at the door herself. She tried to give her friend a reassuring look. “Don’t worry though. That can you gave me worked really good.”

  Frays smiled wryly. She had worked out a way to build a suppressor for their M4s out of scrap metal while they took shelter in a high school at the start of the current crisis. Frays had shared her secret with the guys working in the Motor Pool/Machine Shop a couple days ago and now there were folks churning the homemade ‘cans’ out by the dozen. The steel wool stuffed inside them was starting to become a high value item. “Hey, no problem.” Frays muttered and started looking around in the drawers of the desk. “Is there a deck of cards in here?”

  The two of them sat there playing a game of Spades as they listened to the squawky white noise coming out of the radio set up on the desk in front of them. Frays turned the volume up on the radio just a little bit. “How…how’s everything going, Frannie?” Frays asked with a conspiratorial glance at the door.

  Rodriguez gave Frays a wan smile. “I’m doing fine, Frays.” she said and shrugged as she suddenly found the keypad on the radio very interesting. Rodriguez leafed through the three ring binder she found on top of the radio, rediscovering a list of frequencies and procedures for using the equipment. “I’ve been getting my meds. My leg’s still kinda crappy but I get by. How about you?” Carl had come down to visit her in the middle of the night a few times because his sister kept waking him up with her night terrors.

  Now it was Frays’ turn to shrug. “I’m okay. My back aches a little bit but Doc Haskins gives me some aspirin when I get my vitamins in the morning.” Frays frowned. The more…colorful…symptoms of her pregnancy were none of Frannie’s business. “I still get nightmares sometimes but not as bad as I used to.” She smiled slyly at her friend and played a card. “Don’t tell me you mind Carl coming over to visit you.”

  Rodriguez looked a little startled. “How did you know?” she asked. Carl had only come to visit a couple times and they had gone out to sit on the benches out front of the Wal-Mart. They would hold each other and look up at the stars. It was weird because they were near a big city but they could clearly see the flickering little lights in the inky blackness overhead.

  “I’d hear him get up in the middle of the night.” Frays explained and stretched then scratched the side of her nose. “You’re a couple doors down from us and I hope for his sake that he’s not smoking.” Frays grinned and took a trick. As a matter of fact she had smelled Rodriguez’s cigarette smoke in her brother’s shirt when they got up for work this morning.

  Rodriguez smiled and shook her head slightly. She discarded sticking Frays with the queen of spades. “How are you and Lacey doing?” Rodriguez asked as she watched Frays pick up the cards and start to deal again. She could not help but feel like kind of an ass for bringi
ng it up when a confused and irritated expression came and went from the woman’s face.

  “I’m not sure.” she said quietly as she finished dealing the cards. Lacey had lost his wife in the same attack that had taken her parents. He had…helped in all the…stuff…that came after… Lacey had held her tight and told her that everything was going to be okay… Sometimes, late at night, as much as she hated to admit it she kind of wished that he was around after waking up on her cot in a pool of sweat with tears drying on her face. “I haven’t seen him much. Haven’t really gotten to talk to him.”

  Rodriguez nodded thoughtfully and flipped down a card. “Say…has Carl talked to you lately?” she asked still rifling through her cards. A million bad things started flying around inside Frays’ head as she waited for her friend to continue. What was wrong with her baby brother? Why did he not come to her with it? Rodriguez could not help but smile a little bit. “He’s thinking of enlisting.”

  Frays felt the bottom fall out. “WHAT!?” she demanded as she fought down the urge to march out to the garden and confront Carl with the information. Out of everything that could have been going on she absolutely did not expect that. “I mean…what? No!” Frays threw down her cards suddenly shaking with frustration. “Why? Just…just no!”

  “He wants his dad’s gun back, Amy.” Rodriguez said quietly. By order of the FEMA guy running the camp the only people allowed to be armed in the FOB were military personnel and the Blue Diamond guys. Major Tennyson, the FOB’s commanding officer, had put out a call amongst the civilians looking for volunteers to enlist in the Marines. “I told him that we’d be going outside the wire soon too. Stupid kid.” She snickered at her friend and gave her a light punch on the arm. “I think we’re a bad influence on him or something.”

  Frays pinched the bridge of her nose, shrugged and shook her head. “You’d think that but like in the other direction.” the woman said quietly. Rodriguez walked with a limp because she had been shot in the leg and was on meds for PTSD and his big sister woke up screaming every other night. Neither one of them were exactly recruiting poster material. “Stupid kid. He’s not even old enough. The big dummy’s only fifteen.”

  Rodriguez looked stricken. “What? He’s fifteen?!” She started scratching at the scar tissue on her throat then caught her wrist with her other hand and forced it into her lap. “Goddamn! I thought he was like at least seventeen!” It looked to Frays like her friend seemed to shrink inside her plate carrier like a turtle hiding in its shell.

  “Well…he is big for his age.” Frays said, trying to comfort her friend. She suddenly snickered then clapped a hand over her mouth to try and hold the laughter in. Rodriguez rolled her eyes and snorted. Before too long both of them were laughing so hard that their bellies ached. They stopped laughing immediately and looked at each other in disbelief when the radio squealed and a tinny little voice called out to them from the ethers.

  “Say again!” Frays said urgently after she scrabbled for the radio’s handset. “This is…” Frays snapped her fingers, motioning for Rodriguez to pass her the clipboard with the radio’s procedures and call signs on it. “Region One Bravo. Send traffic, over!”

  Rodriguez was out of her chair and over to the door as fast as she could manage. “Guys! We got somebody!” she called and then returned to the desk. Her hand started clawing at the scar tissue on her throat her fingers flicking back and forth over the jagged ridge where a piece of shrapnel had almost severed her carotid artery.

  The door burst inward an indeterminate amount of time later. “Outside, Airman.” a middle aged Hispanic man who looked sort of like a bulldog in a Marine Corps uniform said as he barged into the room. He glanced at Rodriguez as he took the handset out of Frays’ hand. “You too, Specialist. Close the door please.”

  Frays and Rodriguez looked at each other once they had the door shut. Major Tennyson, the post commander, had just thrown…well…politely insisted that they leave him alone to talk with whoever was on the other end of that phone call. “Hey…Rodriguez…” Frays said quietly as she glanced at the two squids sitting behind the desk. The woman’s hand went inside her LCS to rub her son growing in her womb. “Did…did that just happen?”

  Rodriguez let a little smile grow on her face. It made her think of that guy Carl had found on the radio that night in the cabin. “Yeah…Yeah…Frays, I think it did.” she muttered quietly and looked at the Navy guys. “This happen a lot? What’s going on?”

  The Navy guy whose name tape said Simons shrugged. “I dunno.” he said quietly and looked at the other man next to him. “Like once maybe?” The man glanced at the door like he would like nothing better than to press his ear up against it.

  Major Tennyson cracked the door. “Simons, call up the airfield and have them set up the GPS transceiver.” he said loud enough for them all to hear. The four enlisted people exchanged nervous, excited glances. “Tell them to have a detail on standby to receive an airdrop around 1800 hours tomorrow. Frays, pass the word to the people on perimeter guard. Anybody with a pulse out there that sees those ‘chutes is going to be curious and they might not be friendly. Tell ‘em to keep their eyes peeled.” The man left the radio room and marched purposefully towards the door to the hallway. Major Tennyson poked his head back into the room. “Get Lieutenant Haskins over here. I need to talk to her too.”

  The former hotel lobby turned into a flurry of activity as the enlisted personnel hurried to follow the major’s orders. Frays’ hands trembled excitedly as she relayed the instructions to the dozens of makeshift guard towers set up on their side of the wall. There was a maelstrom of speculation buzzing along the wires. Frays grinned at the radio.

  The two of them listened excitedly for awhile, hoping to get another call from whoever that was on the other end. Eventually Frays and Rodriguez started playing cards again and waiting for their shift to end. Frays dug a notepad out of her hip pocket and started sketching something, concentrating on the paper with the tip of her tongue sticking out of her mouth. Eventually Rodriguez’s curiosity got the better of her.

  “Whatcha drawing, Frays?” Rodriguez asked as she tried to peer over the woman’s shoulder. The picture looked like a weird combination of chicken scratches and Egyptian hieroglyphics or something. Her face scrunched up and she glanced at her watch. She had to be over to the Aid Station in an hour to pick up her afternoon dose of mood stabilizers…

  “I’m drawing up a schematic.” Frays explained as she erased part of her drawing and changed a few of the strange little squiggles. “I was just thinking…ever gone coyote hunting?” Frays studied the paper for a moment and added a couple zigzags to the squiggles.

  Rodriguez smirked. Fuckin’ hick. she thought good naturedly. “I never been outta South Boston before I joined the Army, Frays.” Rodriguez said as she continued to try and puzzle out what the picture was. It looked kind of like one of those Magic Eye puzzles she had seen all over the place when she was a kid. “Not many coyotes there.”

  Frays snickered and shook her head. “Well…you play animal sounds like a wounded rabbit or something to get the coyotes to come so you can shoot them.” Frays added a couple more little boxes next to the squiggles and zigzags. “I was thinking that something like that might work since the Bravo Charlies are drawn by noises. Might actually work a little better because they don’t seem that bright.”

  Rodriguez nodded thoughtfully. “But what after that? I mean…so you’ve got a bunch of those things standing around in the open.” She scratched at the scars on her cheek then slapped her palm down on the desk hard enough to make Frays jump a little bit at the sound. “Drone the dog shit outta the motherfuckers! Frays, you’re a genius!”

  “I have my moments, anyways.” Frays said once she had recovered from the surprise. The smaller woman shrugged and tugged at the sleeve of her tee shirt for a moment as the garment had gotten bunched up under the shoulder strap of her LCS. “If they don’t have a drone flying around or anything I guess we could alwa
ys just kind of find safe places and snipe them. Then again that would take up a heck of a lot of ammo.”

  A slow, devilish grin spread across Rodriguez’s face. “Or we go talk to our friend who can make things go boom.” she said. She snapped her fingers and jumped to her feet. “Or maybe we ask Major Tennyson about getting one in the next care package!”

  Frays frowned and shrugged. “I don’t think that they can really like…ya know…stuff one in a connex or whatever.” Frays said quietly. She thought back to the other FOB Freedom on the other side of the world. There had been an airstrip there and she had seen a couple UAVs flying around but had never gotten near where they were kept because that place was behind its own fenced off area surrounded by signs that said things like ‘Classified’ and ‘Trespassers Will Be Shot On Sight’ so she had never really been curious enough to go look. “Did you ever get a close look at one? They seem pretty big to me. At least the ones that we’d need.”

  Rodriguez shivered despite the humidity. For a brief moment she was far, far away lying on her back and gagging on her own blood. She had drifted out of consciousness for a moment only to be rousted by the earth shaking beneath her as a shockwave slapped her in the face and pelted her with grit and small rocks. Someone threw their body across her to try and shield her from the worst of it… “Nope.” Rodriguez muttered as she absently wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The woman squirmed in her seat. “Hey…mind if I go grab a smoke?”