Thunder and Ashes

by Z. A. Recht

  “Rumor Intelligence,” Mason explained. “The word on the street, as it were. You’re becoming something of a post-pandemic urban legend.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that Desmond back there thought you were carrying a cure for Morningstar on you,” Mason said. “The guy actually thought that you were running off with the only cure to Morningstar.”

  “But that doesn’t even exist,” Anna protested as the pair walked along the edge of the interstate. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard since—”

  “I know, I know, but if you look at it from his perspective—he thought he was going to save the world, and that you were some kind of villain out to make off with the cure and sell it to the highest bidder.”

  “Then it’s twice as stupid,” Anna seethed. “What the hell use is money in this world?”

  Mason looked frustrated as he tried to think of a way to explain the dead shooter’s motivations to Anna.

  “He hasn’t been living in the same world we’ve been in for these past few months,” Mason said. “He’s been living on the grounds of an Army National Guard station along with about a hundred other government employees—fighting off carriers every day and working on orders, just like before the pandemic hit, at least according to him.”

  “And those orders included finding me and bringing me back?” Anna pressed.

  “Actually, according to Desmond back there, those are the only orders they have,” Mason admitted. “That and stay alive.”

  The pair reached the pickup truck, where Matt, Juni, and Trev were waiting for them. The trio had spread out on the grass in the median, relaxing. Trev was smoking a cigarette, and Matt and Juni were sharing a can of Spam and crackers off to the side. When Trev spotted Mason and Anna approaching, he pulled himself to his feet and dusted off his hands.

  “So what’s the news? Did you get done what you wanted to get done?” Trev asked, folding his arms across his chest.

  “I did,” Mason said, nodding slowly. “I have some news for all of you, if you wouldn’t mind paying attention for a few minutes. I’ve already told Anna about half of it, but the rest of you should hear it, too.”

  Matt and Juni looked up expectantly from their Spam, and Trev raised his eyebrows and leaned back against the pickup truck.

  “Before you get into any of that,” Trev said, cutting off Mason, “I think you owe us another explanation.”

  “About why we were attacked today,” Mason said, nodding his head in agreement. “I know. I wanted to tell you earlier, but I was vetoed.”

  Mason glanced pointedly in Anna’s direction, but she studiously ignored him.

  “We’re what you might call fugitives from the law,” Mason explained.

  “There’s not much left of the law these days,” Trev said. “You must have really pissed someone off.”

  “I did. I mean to say, we did,” Mason admitted. “You know about Anna’s background, her work on Morningstar, and the hope for a vaccine. We’ve told you all of that.”

  “Right,” Trev said, nodding. “Heard it. Go on.”

  “So you know why she’s a valuable commodity,” Mason said. “She’s one of maybe a handful of people on the planet with enough raw knowledge to be able to put together a vaccine. What’s left of the Feds want her back—badly. She’s not only one of their only hopes for a cure, she’s studied the habits of the infected, their strengths and weaknesses—in other words, she’s a human Morningstar strain Google. Just ask her any question.”

  “What’s the incubation rate of Morningstar?” Matt shot out before Mason could continue. Mason was about to reprimand him and say that the last sentence hadn’t meant to actually be followed up on, but Anna interrupted.

  “Five to nine days if the initial contact is minimal. Incubation periods drop dramatically as the initial amount of virus introduced into the bodily system increases,” Anna said, speaking without hesitation, the words flowing out of her one after another in rapid, articulate succession. “A major bite to a vein or artery can bring down the period of incubation to a matter of hours.”

  Matt looked over at Juni and shrugged. “All right, I’m sold on that point. Keep going, Mason.”

  “Anyway, there’s one man in particular who wants her back. His name is Sawyer—he works for the NSA, like I did. In fact, he was on my team before the pandemic hit, along with one other agent—Derrick. He wasn’t so bad a guy, but Sawyer—Sawyer could be a sadistic bastard. He really enjoyed his work. Took it seriously. Too seriously. Almost lived at the office. So when I went AWOL and busted Anna and Julie out of their holding facility a few months ago, it pissed off Sawyer something fierce,” Mason said. “After all, they were both his cases.”

  The others were paying close attention, engrossed in the tale.

  “We managed to get out of Washington all right, but we had to fight our way free,” Mason said. “Sawyer was right on us the whole way. Once we got out of the city and into the country, it was easier to lose him, but he is one tenacious bastard. So far he’s managed to catch up with us several times on the road and tried to take us down. We’ve escaped each time, and until today, none of us were hurt or captured . . . or killed.”

  “So we’ve banded up with a bunch of wanted fugitives,” Matt said, scowling. “That’s fucking great. Now we have what’s left of the Feds on our asses.”

  “Wait, wait,” Mason said, holding up his hands. “That much is true, but we’ve got one thing on our side.”

  “And what’s that?” Matt asked.

  “Sawyer’s gone rogue, officially,” Mason said. “According to the shooter—the man I just ‘talked’ to back at the Land Rover—there’s been a break in the federal government. Most of what remains is out to restore order, bring relief to the civilians—they’re doing their job, in other words. Then there’s a rogue faction, a breakaway group who knows about Anna’s research as well as the studies done at the CDC and Deucalion Co-op in Omaha. They want a cure, and they’re perfectly willing to kill to get it. Here’s our big problem with them: most of their information is nothing but rumor. Some of them think Anna’s carrying a cure on her person, others think she has the blueprints for a cure on a disk she’s keeping, and still others think she could whip up a batch of cure if they just captured her and put her in a lab.”

  “Which is ludicrous,” Anna interjected. “We’d only just begun to look into a vaccine at USAMRIID. Maybe—and I stress maybe—the Deucalion Co-op made some more progress than us. Of course we’ll have to wait until we get to Omaha to find that out.”

  “So this is good news?” Matt asked sarcastically. “It’s good that we’ve got a rogue faction of the surviving government out to kill us and take the Doctor here back to some lab?”

  “Yes and no,” Mason answered. “It’s bad that they’re after us, sure, but it’s great to find out that they’re a rogue faction.”

  “And why is that?” Matt pressed.

  “Because,” Mason said, “It means that they’re just as busy fighting a civil war as they are chasing us down.”

  That quieted the group for a moment. The thought of what remained of the armed forces split down the middle, fighting one another instead of trying to clear cities and restore order was a sobering one.

  “All right,” Trev said after a moment had passed. “So here’s an idea. Why don’t we try and get in touch with the other faction, the one that’s stayed legit? Maybe they could give us an escort, or some backup, or, hell, maybe just some information every now and then.”

  Mason shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “No, we’re not getting on a radio unless we absolutely have to. We’re running silent. Let the two halves figure it out on their own. Right now our best bet is to keep going forward with the plan—get to Omaha, hole up, and try to find that vaccine.”

  In the distance, the group heard the faint growl of a car engine. Mason looked over his shoulder in the direction of the sound.

  “That’s our
cue to leave,” he said. “That’ll be the backup our friends in the Land Rover called before I sent them off the road.”

  “They’ll find the crash,” Trev said.

  “Yes, they will,” Mason agreed. “And they’ll find the shooter I interrogated a few yards away from that. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sawyer is with them.”

  Trev looked over with raised eyebrows. “Sawyer, the tenacious one? Why run? Why don’t we head back that way and see about putting the fucker in the grave? That would solve a major problem of ours, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would,” Mason agreed, “except Sawyer won’t be alone. He’s probably got a squad with him. I don’t think we could put up much of a fight if we went back again. No, let’s put some distance between us and him, and at top speed. We should probably take a couple of side roads for a while to throw him off, and avoid the Interstate.”

  “Easily done,” Trev said, opening the driver’s side door to the truck and fishing out the folded map Junko had been using earlier. “We’ll plot ourselves out a nice backroad route. It’ll take longer, and we might have to worry about fuel, but if it keep us from being jumped again it’ll be worth it.”

  Abraham, Kansas

  March 09, 2007

  1521 hrs_

  THE CLEANUP HAD GONE much more smoothly than Sheriff Keaton had imagined. The townsfolk had raided the clinic for surgical gowns, gloves and masks to keep hot blood off of themselves, and had pulled all of the infected bodies free from their tangled piles near the guard towers and crumpled fenceline.

  A bonfire of human corpses had been formed on the far side of the field outside of town. Each time a new body was added, a splash of kerosene followed to make certain the body would catch. The infected weren’t the only ones being thrown unceremoniously onto a burn pile. The bodies of the raiders who had tried to attack during the excitement at the front gate were all trucked across town and thrown onto the pile as well.

  Sheriff Keaton had placed himself in charge of corpse disposal. He’d said that it was his duty to see to it that the people of Abraham were protected, and that extended to making sure plague-ridden bodies were properly taken care of. Sherman and Thomas volunteered their services wherever they could be used, and Keaton had sent them to oversee the repairs being done on the fence and main entryway into the town.

  Krueger, Denton, and Brewster, who was still a little shaky, found themselves cleaning up the battlefield at the rear of the town, where the raiders had attacked.

  “Oh, man, my head is killing me,” Brewster lamented as he bent over to pick up a discarded pistol. He checked the chamber, unloaded the weapon, and dropped it into a duffel bag that hung over his shoulder. “All this movement isn’t helping any.”

  “No one made you drink all that beer last night,” Denton said, rooting through a small pack one of the raiders had dropped. “It’s your own fault.”

  “Well, sure, but can’t I bitch about it?” Brewster asked.

  “No,” came the simutaneous reply from Krueger and Denton.

  The trio, along with several townsfolk, quickly cleared the area inside the town of debris and discarded bits of weaponry and equipment. Street sweepers were hard at work with hand-held brooms, sweeping up bits and pieces of shrapnel, tree bark, asphalt and brick that had been blown free during the firefight. Another crew was busily removing the blasted and warped section of fence that had been damaged in the grenade attack, and once they’d pulled it down and cast it aside, Krueger seized the opportunity to exit the town’s perimeter and inspect the weapons and bodies left behind on the wooded hillside.

  Behind him followed Denton, nudging at what few bodies were left over with the toe of his boot and occasionally stooping to add a bit of useful equipment to his slung duffel.

  “Look at this, man,” Krueger called out over his shoulder. “Come on, check this out.”

  Denton, furrowing his brow, jogged over to where Krueger knelt next to a large weapon on a bipod. Laying next to the weapon was a raider whose head had met a bullet.

  “So?” Denton asked, shrugging. “Dead guy and his gun. Grab the weapon and let’s go.”

  “No, no, man, this is U.S. Army issue,” Krueger said, hefting the weapon in his arms. “It’s an M-249 squad automatic weapon. We call her the SAW. Where the hell did they get their hands on a piece like this?”

  “Probably looted it off of some dead soldiers,” Denton shrugged.

  “Yeah, maybe, but then look down there,” Krueger said, pointing downhill to another firing position. An identical M-249 lay there, ammo half-expended. “These guys are really well armed for a gang of bandits. Did you see the other weapons they were carrying?”

  “Wasn’t really paying attention,” Denton admitted. “I was kind of busy not getting shot.”

  “Most of them were using AK-47’s, but almost all of their pistols are Berettas—same issue we got in the Army.”

  “So they knocked over an Army supply convoy. At least they don’t have these guns anymore—they’re in our hands now.”

  “Yeah, but . . . I don’t know, it still seems weird that they came by all this nice hardware,” Krueger said. “Never mind. It’s probably nothing.”

  “Hey, guys,” Brewster called from the other side of the fence. He was sitting on what remained of the brick wall, looking miserable. “My duffel’s full. Does that mean I can drop it off at Keaton’s office and go to sleep?”

  Krueger and Denton glanced at one another and shook their heads.

  “Sure, Brewster, why not?” Denton said, chuckling. In a softer tone, he added to Krueger, “That’s it for Brewster and drinking. He’s cut off.”

  “Yep, I hear that,” Krueger replied, grinning.

  As Brewster wandered off in the direction of the sheriff’s office, Denton and Krueger continued their cleanup of the battlefield. A pile of weaponry was growing steadily on the lawn nearest the fence, firearms taken from both dead raiders and dead defenders. A separate pile of magazines and ammunition was growing just as steadily next to it. Every now and then, a townsperson would come walking up with one of the sheriff’s duffels, load up a bagfull of the gear, and head back across town to deposit it in Keaton’s armory.

  Krueger and Denton worked together to toss a body through the breach in the fence, where another pair of townsfolk were waiting to load the corpse onto an electric cart and take it across Abraham to the burn pile.

  Denton counted out, “One . . . two . . . three . . . heave!” The body arced through the breach and landed in a crumpled heap on the other side of the fence. The townsfolk got to work hefting the body onto the cart, and Denton and Krueger went back to searching the battlefield.

  Denton wandered off to the side, using a long stick to push aside leafy branches to check for bodies or discarded equipment. Krueger, a little winded from throwing the heavy body and toting the weapons back and forth, huffed and puffed his way up the rise to where the corpse of the machine-gunner lay. He knelt next to the corpse, pushed it over so it lay on its back, and began rifling through pockets.

  He pulled out a few folded pieces of paper, glanced at them, and tossed them over his shoulder. A compass went into one of his pockets, as did a combat knife. The dead machine-gunner had also been wearing a watch—a nice, rubberized number with a built-in calendar and a quality wriststrap. Krueger pulled it off the dead man’s wrist and slipped it onto his own. No use worrying about what the dead man would have thought. As he was adjusting his new timepiece, a bit of discolored grass on the far side of the hill attracted his attention.

  Krueger squinted at it, then stood to get a better view. It wasn’t a discolored bit of foliage after all—it was the tip of a dead man’s boot, sticking up above the wild grass. Curious, Krueger slid carefully down the short embankment and trudged through the knee-high weeds to where the body lay.

  The raider had been shot high in the chest—in fact, the round looked as if it had gone in just above the man’s collarbone and right out his back. The considerable p
ool of blood under the corpse and soaking through the dirt around it told Krueger that the raider had bled to death.

  “Not a pretty way to go, my friend,” Krueger murmured, looking the man over. Something struck him as odd. Though the man was armed with a pistol, Krueger couldn’t locate a rifle anywhere nearby. So far, all the raider bodies they’d searched had a matching rifle lying nearby. The men had been very well-armed. So why was this one fellow near the back lines carrying only a pistol and a backpack?

  For a moment, Krueger thought he’d discovered the body of the bandits’ leader. He just as quickly discounted the idea. The description Keaton had given them of the raiders’ leader didn’t match this corpse. The body was that of a short, wiry man in his mid-30’s—almost the exact opposite of Herman Lutz’s characteristics.

  So what the hell was the guy doing way back here? Krueger wondered. From the look of things, the man had tried to get a view of the battle and had been hit by an errant round—piss poor luck on the raider’s part. All the evidence pointed to this man being a very important part of the overall battle plan for the raiders. He’d been kept on the back lines, supposedly safe from fire, and he’d only been armed with a pistol, meaning that they hadn’t expected him to do much fighting.

  Krueger flipped the corpse up on its side. The body was still wearing a heavy hiker’s backpack, and Krueger pulled out his knife, slicing the straps clean from the corpse’s shoulders. The pack came free easily, and Krueger stood it on its end, unzipping the top and looking inside.

  His eyes widened, and he froze in place. His left hand, still holding his combat knife, shook a bit as Krueger slowly backed away from the pack, still at a crouch, his hands held out in front of him as if to ward off the backpack. Once he was a good fifteen feet away, he relaxed, turning and jogging back up the rise.

  “Denton!” Krueger called out from the top of the hill.

  Below, busy dragging a body out of a bunch of thick brush, Denton looked up. “What is it? I’m busy here.”

  “Hey, uh, look,” Krueger said, casting nervous glances behind himself at the backpack. “We have a little problem here. Actually, it’s a pretty big problem and I’m not sure how to deal with it, so, uh, we’d better get Sherman over here. You still have your radio on?”