by Adrian Birch
I fired again. This time I hit one of the rangers in the side. A concentration of pellets ripped into his elbow. He cried out and clutched at his arm. Blood fell and splashed onto the pavement like spilled coffee.
I could see the wounded sergeant calling out to his men to fall back into the armored vehicles. A couple of rangers ran out into the road and dragged the fallen private, who looked like he’d lost consciousness. I didn’t fire. The squad knew they’d been outmaneuvered. They couldn’t stay in the street while I was in an upstairs window with plenty of ammunition. They all scrambled into the vehicle and then sped away, but I knew that many, many reinforcements were bound to arrive in minutes.
For now, though, the pharmacy was totally unguarded.
“Let’s go,” I said to Chris. “We have to hurry.”
We raced downstairs and across the street. The electronic metal door that the Home Guard had installed at the pharmacy had a simple card scanner, just like an ATM machine. Chris slid in Jason’s access card and jerked it out. The door instantly opened.
We rushed inside. I kept my gun ready.
I don’t know what I expected to find, but the pharmacy looked basically like it had always looked before the quarantine. Tim Huckabee was even behind the counter, the only pharmacist I ever remembered working there. He had to be at least in his seventies. The only difference now was that he was wearing a white Home Guard medical uniform a lot like Chris’s.
He didn’t recognize me, but I doubt I would have recognized myself. I probably looked absolutely insane climbing up on top of the counter in scrubs and with bare, scratched feet, waving a pistol in his face.
I had no idea what I was doing. All I could think about was every bank robbery I’d ever seen in a movie. The robbers almost always jumped up on top of the counter and started screaming aggressive orders.
What else was I supposed to do?
“Antibiotics and TGV tests!” I screamed. “Where the fuck are they?”
Tim Huckabee went pale. He held his hands up and backed into a case of vitamin bottles, toppling half of them on to the floor. He looked like he thought I was going to shoot him any second.
“Ashley!” Chris said. “They’re here! I know where the antibiotics are kept!” He was already in the back of the pharmacy, stuffing plastic shopping bags with boxes of antibiotics and other medications.
I jammed the gun into Tim Huckabee’s face. He whimpered.
“Test applicators!” I yelled. “Where are the test applicators?”
He gingerly pointed a gnarled, arthritic finger at a safe beneath the register.
“Open it!” I screamed, pressing the pistol’s barrel against his cheek.
He sobbed, bent over, and threw up. I felt splashes of vomit reach my bare feet. And then he fell forward and passed out cold.
Shit. I’d overdone it.
“You have to chill out, Ashley,” Chris called from behind my shoulder.
I nudged Tim Huckabee’s limp body with my foot. There was no way he was going to revive in time to open the safe. I looked at Chris. “Now what?”
“Well, I have a fucking lifetime supply of contraband antibiotics.” He was holding at least ten plastic bags, each stuffed to bursting. “So not bad. And I found one TGV Insta-Read test.” He tossed me the test, still wrapped in plastic. “That’ll have to be good enough for now. Let’s not press our luck.”
I nodded.
I took half of the plastic bags from Chris as we hurried from the pharmacy and back out onto the street.
Sirens were blaring in the distance. The Home Guard was on its way.
The hearse was riddled with bullet holes. Both of the front tires were flat. Gas was leaking onto the pavement.
“What the fuck are we going to do?” Chris was panicking. The sirens grew louder.
“It’s better we’re not in the hearse anyway,” I said, which was actually probably true. “We’d just stand out. Follow me.”
I hurried into the back alleyway behind the Bronze Dragon. My bare feet, already lacerated, were practically completely raw, but I tried to ignore the pain as I stepped around trash and broken bottles.
“Where are you hiding the refugees?” I asked Chris, trying to figure out what to do next.
“With the Underground,” he said. “Which means they’re all over the place. They’re with people who are secretly sympathetic and willing to resist the Home Guard, in basements and attics all over the quarantine zone. But it won’t last long. No one’s willing to shelter anyone for more than a few days. Everyone’s afraid of the Home Guard cracking down. They’re starting to search properties. A few of the refugees are with your boss, actually. Your old boss.”
“Bill’s sheltering refugees?”
This actually didn’t surprise me. My boss at the trucking company, Bill Hernandez, lived outside of town on an acre of land at the foothills of the mountains. He definitely wasn’t the type to sympathize with the Home Guard’s tactics. His place was maybe four or five miles away.
“Bill actually kind of started the whole thing,” Chris said.
“His place is good enough for me.” I picked up my pace while we made our way from the alleyway to the back of the high school.
“If that’s where we’re going, we’re going the wrong way,” Chris stopped. “You know that, right?”
But I didn’t stop trotting through the empty lot behind the high school baseball field. The sirens had grown even louder. The Home Guard had probably reached the pharmacy by now. I didn’t think anyone was following us, but we had to move fast. Chris jogged to catch up. I could see the abandoned carnival rides rising up just beyond the high school.
“Just follow me,” I said.
* * *
By the time we reached the fairgrounds, I couldn’t hear the sirens anymore.
When I opened the door to the stables, the horses started whinnying and prancing. Now that they’d been watered and fed, they were full of energy and wanted to get out of the stalls they’d been stuck standing in for almost two weeks.
I found my sister’s horse near the end of one of the stable rows. I rubbed my hand along her nose. “Ready to go for a ride, Kaypay?” I whispered.
The horse stamped her hooves.
“I don’t know how to ride a horse,” Chris said.
“You don’t have to know how. You just have to hang on.”
I led Kaypay and seven other horses out of their stalls and tethered them all together with a long rope. I could only find five dusty saddles in the tack room, but I brushed them off and put them on the five lead horses. I secured the bags of antibiotics to one, and helped Chris climb atop another.
I climbed onto Kaypay in the front of the line and tapped her sides with my bare heels.
“Don’t fall off,” I called back to Chris.
Kaypay wanted to trot, but I kept her from going too fast. With all of the horses tethered together, we’d have to take it slow.
I led the procession through the fairgrounds and toward the fields. A dirt road led all the way through the fields to the foothills of the Rockies. By following it, I was pretty sure I’d be able to find Bill Hernandez’s house while still avoiding all the main roads where the Home Guard would be patrolling.
* * *
We reached Bill’s place in just over an hour.
Bill’s property was filled with big rigs. They all must have been out of operation since the quarantine began. There was also a big warehouse-style motor shop at the head of the driveway, and behind it was the house.
Bill was really happy to see me. He came out in the felt cowboy hat he always wore, smiling, holding his arms open. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about Bill since everything had happened, but he had always been a good boss, and we’d always gotten along. He gave me a big hug when I slid off the horse.
“Ashley!” He looked me over. “My oh my! I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see you again. Chris told me you were missing, and it just about broke my heart. Thank God you’re okay.”<
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“We brought goodies.” Chris started untying the plastic bags filled with antibiotics from the saddle.
“You’re kidding me!” Bill smiled, smoothing his mustache. “Is that what I think it is? So much! How the hell’d you get all that?”
“Illegally,” Chris laughed. “Very illegally.”
“My oh my.”
“You have Ashley to thank for all this. All of it.”
Bill smiled at me. “Well, somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”
I was actually feeling a little bit good for the first time in a very long time.
While Bill helped us hide the horses in the motor shop, Chris told me it was actually Bill who first started calling the resistance “the Underground.”
“After that,” Chris explained, “people who needed help started showing up. Bill was the one who started figuring out who might be willing to shelter positives from the Home Guard. He’s been able to find—what? Five or six households now?”
Bill nodded. “They’re good people, but they sure are scared. The Home Guard’s getting more and more nosey.”
“Bill won’t say who’s doing the sheltering,” Chris explained. “He won’t even tell me. But it’s probably not a bad idea to keep it all as secret as possible.”
After securing the horses, we shut the motor shop’s large double doors and Bill led us to the house.
“Come and have some lunch,” he said. “You two must be starving.”
Nothing could have been truer. I was famished.
I couldn’t believe it, but Bill actually made us steaks. I’d never tasted anything better in my life. While we ate, I told Bill about the cliff dwellings my dad and I discovered years ago. It was the first time I’d ever spoken about them with anybody.
“I can’t imagine a safer place to shelter refugees,” I said. “It won’t be easy getting provisions out there, and the weather’s going to get cold, but if we can make it work, it would be almost impossible for the Home Guard to find a hideout like that for a long time.”
“Well, sounds like it’s better than anything else we have now.” Bill offered me a second steak. “You sure you can find it?”
I nodded. “I’m sure. It might take two or three days on horseback, but I can find it. My dad marked it on a topography map for me. And I’m going. I’ve decided. Any of the refugees who are willing to make the journey can come.”
After lunch, Bill virtually emptied his pantry, filling duffel bags and suitcases with rice and beans and canned food. He gave me four sleeping bags and rolled up another eight or nine blankets from his closet. He even insisted we take every box of shotgun shells he owned. We secured all of these provisions and tied them under tarps onto three of the horses.
“This won’t last long,” Bill said. “We’ll work on getting more provisions soon.”
He was going to shut himself away in a cluttered spare room to call all of the members of the Underground who were sheltering positives, asking them to pass word to the refugees to gather at his house if they wanted to go with me to hide in a remote location.
“Tell them that if they want to come, it’s going to be rough out there,” I said before Bill closed the door. “No electricity, no running water…none of that. We’ll have shelter and plenty of antibiotics, at least. But they’ll have to be blindfolded on the way out, too. Tell them that.”
Bill nodded. “That’s probably a good idea. I understand the blindfolds. The fewer people who know the route, the better. I’ll tell them. And it’ll be their choice whether to go.”
He shut the door and started making calls.
Chris had emptied all of the boxes of antibiotics onto Bill’s kitchen table. He’d taken many of the pills out of their foil trays, sorted them into piles, and was now using a mortar and pestle to grind and mix them.
“Next step is measuring out the doses and filling the capsules with the powder,” he explained. He brushed off his hands. “But first, let me have a look at those feet.”
I sat at the table beside Chris. “Bill said he’d ask one of the Undergrounders to bring me a pair of boots,” I said. “I guess one of them has feet close to my size.”
He winced as he examined my injuries. “You really tore them up, didn’t you? How did you lose your shoes?”
I didn’t answer.
“Right,” he said. “Don’t ask. Fine.”
He pulled my feet onto his lap. They were filthy. Most of the dried blood had worn off, but now all of the cuts were filled with dirt and grime. Chris started washing the cuts out with a disinfectant pad. I winced whenever he cleaned out a particularly deep gash.
“So, what about you? Are you coming to the cliff dwellings?” I asked.
Chris shrugged. “Where else am I going to go? After that crazy shit we pulled at the pharmacy today, you and me are probably at the top of the Home Guard’s most-wanted list. I can’t stick around here. I guess you’ll have to give me horseback-riding lessons.”
I was relieved to hear this. I didn’t want to shoulder the responsibility of bringing a whole group of infected refugees way out to the middle of nowhere alone.
“Normally this wouldn’t be any of my business,” Chris said quietly. “But is it true that you, uh, slept with Bryce Tripp?”
I didn’t blame Chris for worrying that I might be infected. If he was going to be holed up with me way out there in the ruins for who knew how long, he had the right to know what he was getting into. He also needed to know if he should start me on the antibiotic cocktail.
“Yes,” I said simply. “I slept with him. But I didn’t let him…you know. I don’t think I let anything get inside me.”
Chris nodded. He didn’t look up from my feet. He opened a plastic bandage and pressed it over one of the larger cuts.
“I know I can’t know for sure,” I added. I was trying to sound brave, or at least detached and clinical, about the possibility of my being sick. “But I guess I’ll just have to wait. It’s been two days since then.”
Chris nodded again. “How do you feel?”
“Well, I’m not dead yet.” I tried to laugh. “I feel pretty good. Great actually.”
It was true. Ever since the firefight with the Home Guard, I wasn’t even feeling foggy from the sedative hangover.
“That’s good.” Chris patted my foot. He’d finished cleaning out the cuts. He set my feet back down onto the floor. “Most people die within twenty-four hours of becoming infected. Some last as many as three days, but it’s rare. Never longer than that, though.”
I nodded. “Okay,” I said. “Good to know.”
I’d been hoping he was going to tell me I was in the clear after two days, but I’d just have to wait another twenty-four hours before I could know for sure that I wasn’t infected.
Chris asked, “Do you still have that Insta-Read test I gave you at the pharmacy?”
“Yeah,” I answered. It was still in the pocket of the scrubs I was wearing. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Why don’t you test yourself?”
“I don’t want to waste it,” I said. “I’ll know I’m negative if I last another day anyway, won’t I? We might need it later. It’s our only one. And, honestly, I don’t feel sick at all.”
“You’d be better off knowing for sure, though. Right? Just in case?”
I thought about this, but I shook my head. “No. Really,” I said, “by this point it’s unlikely I’m sick. And if I am, there’s nothing I can do about it. Besides, we might need the Insta-Read later.”
“It’s up to you,” Chris said.
He went back to filling the pill capsules and didn’t press me any further. I was pretty sure I wasn’t sick, but if Chris was concerned, I couldn’t help worrying a little.
* * *
A total of nine refugees showed up at Bill’s house, some on foot, others in trunks of cars that sped straight away after dropping them off. This number included a young couple with an infant—the three Bill had been hiding in his hunting shack.
My third-grade teacher who had come to the granary was nowhere to be seen. But the Botteroffs were there, quietly hanging onto one another, waiting for instruction. The rest were young, two girls and two guys, I guessed ranging in age from fifteen to seventeen. I didn’t recognize any of them. They looked like maybe they’d been dumped into the quarantine zone from some Denver suburb.
Right away Chris distributed sandwich bags filled with antibiotics.
“Three times a day,” he told everyone. “Don’t forget. You’re going to feel fatigued. There’s no way around that. And many of you will experience unusually vivid dreams. But for now, this is the only way we know of to slow the progression of the disease.”
Everyone eyed the pills warily, but I didn’t see anyone choose not to take one. None of the refugees looked like they’d progressed any later than early stage two, but they were obviously terrified of moving on to stage three.
My plan was to ride through the night. Judging by my dad’s map, I figured we’d be able to reach the ruins by sunset the next day if we left right away. We couldn’t afford to wait around. Bill said the Home Guard always arrived at his place in the evening on residential patrol, and it was already late afternoon.
I kept the horses tethered together, put people two to a horse, and told them basically to hold on tight. Nobody was happy when I passed around blindfolds, but Bill gave a little speech and insisted that it was necessary to protect the secrecy of the hideout.
He handed me a pair of hiking boots—only one size too big—and hugged me.
“Good luck, Ashley. Thank you. You’re a saint.”
“Let’s hope this works out,” I said.
Chris and I shared Kaypay. I helped him up onto the saddle.
“We’ll try to come back in a week or so,” Chris told Bill. “Get the word out that we’re sheltering positives. Anyone willing to wear a blindfold on the trip out is welcome.”
“I will,” Bill said. “I’ll have a fresh stock of provisions. You can count on it.”