“You have some of this medicine with you?” Mary asked.
“I’ve got a limited amount in my bag,” Jinks said. “I could probably inoculate half of you and when we put you on the locator, we could send a medic with some more after we leave.”
There was rapid fire talk in German around the table. Mart could follow some and whispered translations into Hawk’s ear. There was some sort of debate on whether they would be pushing on, or the nine of them had found a new home. Elizabeth held up her hand.
“This is something we will discuss with the Raiders at another time. At this time, we need their help wit something else.” She turned to Hawk. “When we have walking dead find us, or bad English, they come in on the gravel road from the east. There are two bridges over water. If we could destroy the bridges, we would limit the way people came to us.”
“What makes you think we know how to blow bridges?” Henry asked.
“You may not. I do not know. But if you do, it would be a great help to us and we would be more interested in being part of your trade routes. There are things we need from you. More than just medicine.” Elizabeth looked at Harriet, who glanced away.
Henry looked around at the rest of his crew. They nodded. They could use a safe haven off the beaten path. He turned to his left.
“Mart?”
She looked at him through narrowed eyes. “I’d have to look at the structures first,” she said, without taking her eyes from her First Sergeant. Then she glanced over at Elizabeth as she went on. “And I’m going to need some explosive.”
“We have ideas on that,” Gertie said.
“When can we get started?”
“After dinner,” Elizabeth said, as she stood. “We will help wit the dishes before we go.”
After dinner, the group was led to houses in the tiny village. The women were settled in one home, the men in another. Henry looped a strap of his pack over the post of a cast iron bed frame. He laid the rifle on the bed with a slight bounce as he looked around the room. Nothing fancy about the place. White walls. White trimmed windows. Solid furniture. The dresser most likely had been handmade in the workshops. The soft golden oak gleamed in the sunlight let in from the windows.
Feeling safe behind the locked gate and high walls, they left everything but their sidearms in the rooms as they stepped back outside to get a better feel of the place. They were given a guided tour by Emily, who chatted with Mart in German and switched effortlessly to English for the others.
Different barns housed different animals. Livestock that was let out to pasture was guarded by at least three women during the day. Every night the animals were brought back inside the gates. The horse barn housed both work horses and the buggy horses that were used mostly for riding. The girls could cover much more ground at a faster rate than they could on foot and didn’t have to worry about getting a buggy tangled in anything.
Cattle and sheep went out to pasture. Three years past, hundreds of animals grazed the fields. Now, fifty of either cropped grass and lowed back and forth to one another. Dairy cattle were in the herd as well, but they had lost their best bull in the first year when a pack of zombies came through looking for something to eat.
A small herd of hogs rooted behind one of the barns. They were a high maintenance animal and required the most grain to keep them fed and healthy. Henry mentioned most of the hogs in their area had gone wild and now roamed the hills in packs. They were vicious and had injured more than one person out hunting them. Emily agreed. The same had happened to their herds as well.
As they walked past the wood shop, silent at the moment, a girl with her hair in a loose braid ran up to them. She puffed for a moment before she spoke, drawing air into her lungs in great gasps.
“Sissy sick, Emily. Sissy sick.”
The words came out is a slight slur and Henry noticed the girl’s almond eyes and wide face. She looked to be about ten, but he couldn’t judge for sure. Emily said something to Mart, then turned to Jinks.
“You know something about doctoring, do you?” Emily asked.
“Some,” Jinks replied. “What’s wrong with the girl?”
“She has spasms. Come with.”
The group followed. Sarah, as the little girl was called, led them past the rest of the shops to a small green area. Several other children stood by, dressed in their simple clothes. On the ground, an older girl, probably the same age as Emily, twitched in the afternoon sun. Her body contracted, hands clenched and unclenched as she sucked air into her lungs. Her jaw clenched, eyes rolled in her head without focus.
“Sissy sick,” Sarah said again.
Jinks rushed to the girl, rolled her onto her back and placed her head in her lap. The girl, Emily said her name was Maria, rolled her eyes up at Jinks as the two waited for the wave to pass.
“She has those more often now that she’s older,” Emily said. “This is why we cannot take her wit us when we go out. She stays and watches over the children and the stock.”
“She’s epileptic,” Jinks said as she stroked Maria’s forehead. “She’s having a grand mal seizure. Is she on any medicine for it?” She asked.
All the Amish shook their head.
“Our elders never allowed for us to take the medicines of the English world,” Emily said. “They told us God made us all. And we were all made differently. We were not to try and alter what God had made.”
“Do you have many people like this?” Jinks asked. “They could have been helped with the right medicine.”
“We have…had a number of people who were not like the rest of us. It runs in certain families. Elizabeth says it is from the blood being too close.”
The Raiders looked around at one another, but they began to understand what the girl meant.
“You say you had a few folks like this,” Henry asked. “What happened to them? Where are they now?”
“Some are still here. Some left and tried to go to other settlements. We have heard nothing from them since. Some were lost to us in the first year and went into the pit.”
Maria began to relax in Jink’s arms. She reached up to touch her helper’s cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered.
Soon Maria was on her feet, dusting the stray bits of grass from her dress and picking leaves from her hair. She went on her way with the other children as the Raiders walked back to their houses. There was not much conversation as people thought over the events of the afternoon.
Chapter 33
Two days later, the group of Raiders lay in a shallow streambed with ten of the Amish girls. The girls were dressed in what Henry had come to think of as their combat gear: every weapon they could carry, a skirt and maybe a top. In the settlement, even Elizabeth wore a dress, although she didn’t wear a shirt under it. Water burbled through the creek behind them.
Two days of inspection had given Mart ideas on how to blow the bridges. It also gave the crew time to get the military vehicles parked on the Indiana side of the I-64 bridge running. The Humvees weren’t a real problem, most of them started right up with a jump. They were parked in a row near the barns where the Raider’s rigs had been. The Abrams and the Bradley had been real challenges. With a lot of creative cussing and hard work, they were able to fire the monsters to life.
To move them took a little doing, as no one had experience in a tracked vehicle. Luckily enough, there were plenty of open fields to practice in and some low gears to keep them from getting out of hand. At a crawl, they joined the Humvees in an orderly row in the woods. Henry now had a small reserve unit of vehicles in the area if they were needed. All of this was sent to Dan, who in turn forwarded it to Tom.
One of the supplies they found in a Humvee was a box of semtex. It was a plastic explosive that packed more punch than TNT. Mart had used the stuff to place into the support pilings, along with a high explosive projectile from the Abrams. She had a detonator rigged into the plastic. With luck, the shell and the explosive would work together. They were five hundred yards back from t
he small bridge.
“Ready, Boss?” She held the trigger in her hand and grinned at Henry.
“Ready,” Henry growled.
A wild smile crossed her face. She glanced around her. “Fire in the hole!” she shouted as she mashed the red button.
The KRUMP of a giant stomping his foot washed over them first as the ground clawed its way into the sky. Pieces of the bridge flew into the air to scatter across the countryside in a two hundred yard radius. Dirt and sod rained down on them, even at their distance. God, Henry hated explosions. By the wild look on his face, Horse felt the same. For seconds afterward, the ground vibrated as it settled back into place, wounded.
“Did the earth move for you too, Baby?” Mart smiled.
“When we’re in uniform, I’m your Sergeant, not your Baby,” Henry grumped, “but yes, it moved quite well.”
A shout went up from the Amish girls. The bridge was gone. Nothing more than a smoking crater remained. This had been the bridge furthest out. It crossed a decent size stream, but was a simple, solid structure of concrete and wood beams. The girls couldn’t burn it, nor could they tear it down. Now, it wasn’t a worry. The one behind them was another across a tributary to the Wabash. It was a steel and concrete monster that had been in place for as long as anyone could remember. They wouldn’t blow the entire bridge, but about half the deck would fall into the water.
Elizabeth smiled as she stood. She held her hand out to Mart. “Thank you. This will help to keep us safe. Now, let us take care of the second.”
The horses and buggies were loaded as the group made the trip two miles to the second bridge. It was wired already as well, but the detonators were on a separate frequency than the first. No sense being trapped between two streams. They made their way back, crossed over the bridge and found cover two hundred yards into the trees. The horses were tied facing away from the explosion.
From inside the tree line, everyone found solid trucks to provide cover. This time, when the switch was flipped, the explosion blew down. Asphalt and gravel blasted straight into the creek. Water splashed twice. Once from the explosion; a larger one as the deck fell twenty feet into the streambed. Mud slopped up onto the banks, splattering moss, assorted fish and rock into the long grass.
Mart looked into the smoldering hole when things calmed. “Well, that ought to keep your unwanted company from showin’ up.”
“Ya,” Elizabeth said as they turned to untie the horses for the walk home. “We have other ways across the creeks. You can use those fords to cross when you move along. But you won’t find them unless you know where they are.”
They walked back past green pastures where cattle grazed with sheep. Spring had given way to early summer. Lambs ran beside their mothers; calves lay in small clusters. One babysitter stayed with the young ones, while the mothers went off to graze.
“Decent looking herds,” Henry said as they walked past.
“Ya,” Mary said. “We keep our herds. We have been breeding them the right way for many years. Too bad our fathers cannot say the same for us.”
“Mary, hush,” Elizabeth said as a frown crossed her face.
“It is true and you know it,” Gertie added. “We talked about this last night, Cousin. You would speak to them.”
Elizabeth sighed as her shoulders slumped. For a few paces, she said nothing. Then, she squared her shoulders. “Do you know what happens to animals when you breed them too closely, Mister Hawk?”
“I do,” Horse said, “you get a lot of problems: they get deaf, they get mental problems, they get a lot of physical problems.”
“Yes, among other things.” Elizabeth watched the roadbed pass under her feet. “You know much of stock for a hoodlum, Mister Horse.”
“My mother’s maiden name was Hosstedt. I grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota before Uncle Sam taught me to kill so well.”
“Then you will understand our problem,” Mary said. “Our people have been breeding too close for generations.”
“There were originally twelve families that settled here in eighteen twenty five,” Elizabeth continued. “None have moved away. They have simply been absorbed by the four families left. My family of Yoders, the Schmitts, the Hansons and the Nelsons are all that remain.”
“Every year, more children were born wrong. Sick, deaf, simple. Ten year olds with arthritis. Every year, you English die older,” Gertie said. “Each year, us Dutch die younger. We need new blood.”
“We’ve seen some of the problems you mention,” Henry said. “”Maria and her sister were playing with the other kids when Maria had a seizure.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “They are from one of the families who tend not to be born right. We cannot continue on in this manner any longer.”
Henry looked at them, brow pulled together as he tried to wrap his brain around their request. “So are you asking what I think you are?”
“As Gertie said, we need new blood,” Elizabeth said. “We need seed from you English, but we wanted to choose our men, not just let some wandering scavengers rape us. You five would be right.”
Mart whooped, Jinks giggled as she nudged Cody with her elbow. Jessica snickered as she walked beside Horse.
“Just what you boys dream about,” Jessica said. “A whole town of vestal virgins awaiting your services.”
“What about your men?” Cody asked.
“As was stated,” Elizabeth said, “the blood is too close. But those of us who are sound for children have worked out a way to prevent the bad blood from being passed.”
“What?” Henry asked.
“What do you do with a bull calf or colt when it is not worth allowing them to father offspring, Mister Horse?” Elizabeth asked.
“They’re castrated,” Horse said.
“Exactly. But we could not bring ourselves to do this to our men. The women who are still sound simply have agreed not to give ourselves to the men any longer. But we need new genes to help us continue.”
“How many of you girls are up for this… contribution?” Johnson asked.
“There are twenty seven of us who are sound. Or at least as sound as we can be.” Elizabeth said.
They neared the east gates of the village.
“Can we talk about this among our group?” Henry asked.
“Most certainly. Talk about it with your people. I know it is not an easy thing to ask. Not really. When you decide, let us know in the morning. We have chores to do now.” Elizabeth waved at the guards as they passed through the gates.
The groups peeled apart from one another. The Amish would tend to the horses and change into their town clothes so they could help with evening chores. Henry and his group wanted to check the vehicles they salvaged and so walked to the western side of the village to go over them more thoroughly. Little was said as the groups separated.
Chapter 34
The kid’s name was Kevin. That’s all he’d tell me off the bat. Doc Leary said he was healthy from what he could tell. He couldn’t get a full examination in, ’cause the kid fought like a wildcat when we asked him to undress. Figured he’d been raped and kept as a sex slave. That happened. Lot of sick people out wandering around. Had rub marks from a collar or rope around his neck.
He’d be okay. We were in out of the rain as the thunder boomed again. Leary did a blood check and it came back negative. No zed virus in the kid’s system, no antibodies either, which meant he was from out of our alliance area. To make sure he couldn’t get sick, Leary inoculated him during the exam. He yelped and struggled a bit, but we explained this was so he wouldn’t turn zed.
Ella came back from the stable. She’d untacked Jake, rubbed him down and given him some hay. When he cooled out, she’d fill his water bucket. The rain was great for the gardens, but I didn’t like walking the three blocks home in it.
“Where’s the kid staying?” Ella asked.
“Well, I guess we found him, we might as well drag him home with us.” The kid looked at me with scared blue
eyes, but didn’t say anything. “Seems I take in a lot of strays around here.”
Ella smiled, gave me a hug. “I’m glad you do, Daddy.”
“C’mon, Kevin, let’s go.” I headed for the door, Ella followed. The kid paused, glanced around the room. “You can get a shower when we get to the house, you stink.” I grinned to let him know I was teasing. A real slow smile split his face, then it was gone.
The rain had slowed to something tolerable. Not hard, nice and steady. A good soaker. We walked the streets headed for the house. A platoon jogged past in the other direction. Sergeant Howe snapped me a salute as she went past calling cadence, and I returned it. We talked about Ella’s wedding. About Billy being out on patrol. About where they would live. There were plenty of houses left open. One next door to us was available. All they would have to do was armor the downstairs before they moved in. Right now, we only used it for storing canned goods.
She said it sounded good. “It’s got three big bedrooms upstairs and one down. We could change one into a nursery.”
That one set me back. “Ella, you’re not… ?”
She gave a little chuckle. “No, Daddy, I’m not pregnant. I want to be. Soon. But not yet.”
We walked into the house Cindy saw us first, started handing us towels. She bundled Kevin into a big one warm from the dryer as I explained how we found the kid. Pepper came in and fussed over him too. The kid turned about three shades of red as we talked. Finally Cindy led him to the downstairs bathroom, showed him how all the knobs worked and handed him another washcloth and towel. I went upstairs to find some dry clothes, Ella did the same. By the time I got back downstairs, the shower was hissing.
“Where’d he come from, you figure?” Pepper asked.
“I don’t know. We found him by the outside gate,” I told them. “He wasn’t there when we went up the hill. Or not that I noticed. So he showed up in that hour or so we were up there.”
Snareville II: Circles Page 19