The Shadow of Armageddon

by LeMay, Jim

  “We fetch the boy like I said,” said Matt. “Bring him to the basement. I stay upstairs, close the trap door and cover it with the throw rug and desk chair. Then I hang out on the street, pretend I’m one of the locals, tell them everybody died except for me and the oldsters.”

  “Why you?” asked Leighton.

  “I’m the only one they don’t know, except you younger guys of course, and for various reasons I think it’s better for me to play the part than any of you.”

  “That’s right,” said Stony. “I forgot. They don’t know you. You stayed in Nellie’s Fair that winter we went t’ Kansas City so they didn’t never see you.”

  “Right.”

  “They might decide y’r lyin’ an’ stiff y’,” said Doc, the gang’s chief pessimist. “Or they might stiff you and the old folks just for the hell of it.”

  “They won’t have any reason to doubt me,” said Matt, “and they won’t kill me for no reason. They’re too occupied with looking for the gang.”

  “Who they might think is a long way from here,” said Lou, “on the run.”

  “I guess if they do stiff y’,” said Doc gloomily, “it won’t take much for us t’ move that chair off the trap door from down here.”

  “I have no doubt you guys could handle that,” said Matt. “But, y’ know, maybe it wouldn’t hurt to make sure we didn’t leave a trail into town, wipe out whatever trace we find.”

  “Good thought,” said Mitch. “Somebody’ll take care a that first thing in the mornin’. It don’t seem to a rained as much here though so there shouldn’t be much of a trail. They ain’t likely t’ come t’ town the way we did anyways.”

  “They’re more apt to come in by the main street,” said Matt. “And like I said before, the ‘Fever’ signs might scare them away.”

  “I still don’t like it none,” said Leighton, looking around for support, especially at the younger guys. “If they find us here, they’ll stiff us like rats in this hole.”

  “What else can we do?” said Rossi, a quiet kid who seldom spoke in confabs. “Some of us can’t barely walk now, includin’ me, and I ain’t hardly hurt.”

  “An’ if we go on,” said Kincaid with a shudder, “they’ll catch us sure. If Chadwick’s whole gang is there they outnumber us by a bunch.”

  “Yeah,” said Big Miller. “An’ they can go faster ’n us ’cause some of us is hurt.”

  Leighton bristled at what he considered defection in the ranks of his faction but said nothing.

  “Mitch and Stony can’t go another mile,” said Doc. “They gotta heal. And we gotta take care a the kids, too.” (He meant Rossi and Kinkaid.) “We can’t let their abrasions git infected.”

  “Then we stay here,” said Mitch with finality, looking intently into every face. Nobody contested his decision. That concluded the discussion.

  Mitch’s reticence had complimented Johnson’s volubility and gave him a reputation within the gang for wisdom. His authoritative voice, when he did speak, gave the men confidence in his recommendations and decisions. He had handled this meeting well. While he let everyone have his say, he had had the last word; they were staying. Matt had no doubt that if Leighton had tried to take over the meeting as his brash personality often led him to try, Mitch would have thwarted him. Leighton had given up easily this time since even his own faction refused to back him.

  For the first few years, Johnson, aided by Dodd and Downing, ruled the gang as an absolute dictator. After awhile, though, as Johnson became aware that the men wanted greater influence in gang affairs, he adopted the “confab” tradition of other gangs, which allowed each man to have his say in more or less informal meetings. He learned from other gangs that a boss could not be an all-out tyrant. When it happened, men simply left to join other gangs, started their own, or even deposed their current boss, often violently. After the first three years or so, he realized that his men knew enough about the business to make one of those choices and carry on without him. The gang became so democratic that any member could call for a confab at any time to discuss any issue he wanted.

  He further came to understand that he needed wiser counsel than his two lieutenants were capable of providing. He began to invite Mitch to the higher level “executive” confabs along with Dodd and Downing. And then one fall Johnson invited Mitch and Dodd, but not Downing, to one of those special confabs. From then on Mitch replaced Downing in the elite circle, later expanding it to include Matt for many high level decisions.

  Downing didn’t take the transfer of power well. After the executive session from which he was excluded, he had some kind of confrontation with Johnson, the details of which were never disclosed to the rest of the gang. Then he disappeared from Nellie’s Fair for the rest of the winter. Johnson just shrugged when asked of his whereabouts. “Don’t have no idee. I told him he’s welcome t’ go truckin’ with us if he gits back in the spring. If he ain’t here when we leave, fuck him. He won’t be welcome no more.” Downing returned to go with them in the spring, but he remained surly and withdrawn from the others from then on.

  Over time, Mitch gained ascendancy even over Dodd until the gang tacitly accepted him as their second in command. Unlike Downing, Dodd never appeared to resent his diminution of power, maybe because he at least remained among the elite. Or perhaps Dodd did not recognize the change and still considered himself Johnson’s second in command, in which case he would undoubtedly have tried to impose his leadership over the gang if he had survived the ambush. Matt inwardly shuddered at that thought. Dodd was a competently brutal soldier but lacked Johnson’s intelligence and charisma.

  Matt knew that the gang was changing though not in what direction. The one thing of which he had long been sure was that Mitch would make them a good leader.

  * * * *

  Mitch posted Miller to take the first turn guarding the bank entrance while Doc checked everyone’s injuries. Since it was nearly completely dark, Mitch grudgingly took his everlight from his scratch bag – he was one of those who had had presence of mind to grab his bag – and turned it on. Grudgingly because there were few of these artifacts left that still worked and this one was gradually dimming. He had used it more than he’d liked in the culvert. The everlight worked somehow on solar power; setting it in sunlight several hours before use charged it. Now that it was aging, however, it appeared dimmer every time Mitch turned it on.

  Doc had been adamant about cleaning and redressing everyone’s wounds immediately. Infection could be fatal. Mitch still wouldn’t allow them to risk a fire to sterilize dressings in case Chadwick’s men were in the neighborhood, but he promised that tomorrow they’d find a place to build a secure one away from the hole-up.

  Doc had no medical training. His only qualifications for the post of “medic” was his apparent lack of emotion when confronted with torn flesh or splintered bone, whether such trauma occurred to others or to himself, and his ability to diagnose and fix the trauma. He faced the other vicissitudes of scrounger life with similar equanimity. A perennial pessimist, he expected the worst from life. As Doc put it, he never bitched when the worst happened because he had expected it, and felicitous occurrences always made him suspicious.

  Doc checked Mitch’s injury first. He frowned as he examined the gouge which, in the culvert, he had made a little larger by removing dead tissue. He took out the old dressing and packed it with one of his few remaining fresh sterile ones so it would heal from the inside out.

  “How’s it look?” asked Mitch, wincing.

  “Y’ better start healin’ faster. We’re runnin’ outta dressin’s.” Doc never gave his patients any hope. He took care of Stony’s shoulder next and then looked at the others.

  Then they ate. Thank God Stony had shinnied up a tree to grab a pack of food at the last minute. They always hid their food in the trees to keep it from the “critters". Because of the restriction on fire they had to be satisfied with cold rations: some venison they’d killed, dried, and jerked a few weeks befor
e and dried apricots.

  “What else you got in that pack?” asked Lou. His appetite matched his large frame.

  Stony looked around in the pack. “A bag a dried beans, more apricots, more venison, some potatoes, some corn meal.” The beans and fruit had been brought from Nellie’s Fair. They had traded part of the venison for the potatoes and corn meal from some farmers that lived near where they had killed the deer.

  “How long’ll that last us?” asked Mitch.

  “Few days,” said Stony. “Four, five days.”

  They were all quiet as they ate. The lack of food was one more problem they hadn’t had time to consider. And water. They had filled water containers in a stream on the way here, quite a distance away. Add food and water to the list of losses that included their companions, a whole season’s truck, and virtually all their scratch. It was too late in the season to go trucking again. And if they did, taking it to Nellie’s Fair or any other market familiar to them was obviously out of the question; Chadwick would hear of that almost immediately.

  Even Stony, the gang’s chief optimist, yin to Doc’s gloomy yang, was quiet. Then he said what the older men were probably thinking; Matt certainly was. “There’s always our stash. We could use at least enough of it t’ git through the winter, replace our scratch.”

  “An’ maybe use it,” added Doc, “t’ git a long fuckin’ way away from here.”

  “There’s always that,” agreed Mitch. “Let’s git some sleep. We’ll decide what t’ do t’morra.”

  In addition to the stash, Matt and the older men had savings accounts at the bank of Nellie’s Fair. Their money was not in pre-2072 dollars of course, since the Last Days had suddenly rendered them worthless, but in the local currency issued by the Nellie’s Fair bank. If they could only think of a way to get there to withdraw it.

  Mitch appointed a rotation of guards for the rest of the night. The rest settled into the cushions, so exhausted they fell asleep immediately.

  * * * *

  They awoke early, for the main part well rested considering the last few days’ tensions. After a meager breakfast of dried apricots, Mitch said they had to secure their area first before deciding their next move. He sent Matt and Lou out to explore the town and find lookout posts at the two or three points they thought Chadwick’s men were most likely to enter, and Leighton and Miller to retrace the gang’s route into town and obscure any signs of their passage. He assigned Stony and Doc to look for a source of water and a well-hidden site for a fire to sterilize dressings and medical equipment, prepare food, and heat bath water.

  As those with assigned duties were about to leave, Mitch told them to keep an eye out for truck. Even though the downtown had been pretty nearly cleaned out, most likely by the inhabitants, there might be some elsewhere. As far as whether truck in the rest of the town belonged to the townsfolk or the “scroungers-in-residence,” well ... Mitch scratched his beard as though thinking it over. The locals had been here twelve years, he opined, and hadn’t needed whatever was left so far. Chances were they didn’t need it nearly as badly as the gang did now. The others nodded their heads in silent agreement. This was that fine line, thought Matt, between scrounging and looting.

  Matt and Lou found the town to be even smaller than they had thought; there had never been more than a few hundred inhabitants. There were only two entrances to the town, one at each end of the extension of the main street. At the south one the townspeople had placed the sign warning of Fever beside another bearing the town’s name and population: “NEWCASTLE, pop. 462”.

  On the east side of the street were the ruins of a small farm apparently used for boarding or maybe renting out riding horses. The barn was the only structure still intact and the town’s most southerly building. Inside the barn they crawled up a rickety ladder to what had been the haymow, moving carefully – the wooden floor was rotten in places – and looked south through an opening in the wall. About a half mile away the road teed at a more substantial east-west highway. The land between the barn and the highway was overgrown with the usual weeds, brush, and saplings, but the highway was fairly visible because it ran along a ridge.

  “This’ll be a good vantage point,” said Lou. Matt agreed.

  Outside and on their way back to the bank, Lou looked back toward the barn and the remains of the corral, house, and assorted outbuildings.

  “Wonder how that horse riding fad got started?” he asked. “I mean, it was late in the twenty-first century. What a big step backward technologically.”

  Matt shrugged. “Probably nostalgia, part of that back-to-the-simpler-life thing. People moved away from these rural areas all through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. By the middle of the twenty-first, towns like this were practically deserted. Small farms weren’t practical so they disappeared. There wasn’t anything to do for a living. Then people started moving back.”

  “I remember,” said Lou. “Cities were so crowded and crime-ridden that people started heading for the country. Get outta Sodom and Gomorrah and all that. With all the electronics most people could work anyplace they wanted to live. When I was a kid in Denver, people were relocating to the mountains, rebuilding ghost towns that’d been deserted for a hundred years.”

  “Same where I lived in LA. People headed for the mountains or deserts. Not only moved but changed their lifestyles, went back to church in droves, mostly old-time religion or evangelical type churches, took up what they thought of as wholesome hobbies from the less sinful, as they saw it, past: raising and canning vegetables, weaving and knitting, making their own clothes....”

  “Yeah, but riding horses? Couldn’t they have found a more comfortable way of being nostalgic?”

  Matt shrugged again. “Don’t ask me. I never rode a horse until after the Last Days. Still don’t like to ride ’m. But I’ll tell you what. I wish we had some damned horses to get us out of here now.”

  They walked in silence for awhile. Then Lou said, “I suppose things were bad before the Last Days and I know people were lonesome for the good old days. But isn’t it ironic, Matt? Now a lot of us would welcome the late twenty-first back in a blink.”

  Matt thought he heard a catch in Lou’s voice. Probably thinking of his wife and kid and all the others who had died during that dreadful year they now called the Last Days, departing along with a way of life lost forever. Lou suffered from these dark moods periodically.

  At the north end of town they found a reasonably intact two-story house with a good view of the road into town from the second floor. They spent another hour looking through houses that were still more or less sound. Surprisingly, they found quite a few undisturbed by the townspeople or weather.

  “Maybe we aren’t as broke as we thought,” said Lou. “There’s plenty of truck in these houses.”

  “And we don’t have to take it all the way to Nellie’s Fair,” said Matt. “There have to be other markets a lot closer.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t know where the good ones are. We have to find one big enough so there’ll be enough people that wanta trade.”

  “We ought to be fairly close to Wild Billy Kane’s place. He knows every market north of the Missouri River. He can tell us the best one. And the closest.”

  “Good point. And hopefully one where they serve as good a brew as he does.” Lou was known in the gang and elsewhere for his love and knowledge of good beer. “It’ll be good to see Billy again. He’s a good old boy.”

  Matt laughed and lightly punched Lou’s arm. “After all these years you’re going native, Lou. ‘Good old boy’ is Missouri cracker talk.”

  Lou grinned. “’S true though. He’s a good old boy that brews a good old beer.”

  Despite the attempt at humor, on the way back to the basement Lou reverted to his earlier nascent depression. The older gang members often thought of their irrevocably lost world and the sparsely inhabited wilderness they’d roamed for the past twelve years that had replaced it, but by tacit agreement they se
ldom talked about it.

  Chapter Five

  Terence left the next day but, as he had promised the previous evening over their light dinner, he messaged Matt a bibliography of sources that would provide information about Chou’s Disease, bacteria and the history of antibiotic development. Thus armed, in between and after classes Matt began to research Chou’s, though there wasn’t much information available. The more he studied the less he shared Dr. Scheid’s purported confidence in either the government’s or the drug companies’ ability to contain the disease. The cold feeling of impending disaster he had felt after the conversation with Terence increased.

  His study of bacteria and the history of antibiotic development supported what Terence had told him. He learned how evolution led to new strains of bacteria largely immune to existing antibiotics. And how this had occurred in part due to bacteria’s single-minded tenacity but was often caused, usually unwittingly, by mankind. For example, man had repeatedly released waves of antibiotic pollutants into the world for over a century by means of careless waste disposal systems, inadvertently increasing resistant strains of bacteria, which, as Terence had told him, live everywhere they can find moisture and nutritious filth.

  To his surprise he learned that the greatest contests of the human/bacteria arms race were held, of all places, in hospitals. The latter half of the twentieth century saw the rise of a phenomenon called “nosocomial infection,” a term based on the Latin word for hospital, nosocomium, used to describe an infection incurred in a hospital. It became increasingly common for people entering a hospital for a given malady to become infected by another unrelated one.

  There were a number of reasons for this. Hospitals, with their temperature-controlled environments and hordes of human beings carrying germs in and out all day, provided ideal breeding grounds for bacteria. People too old, too young, or too weak could succumb to germs that would not be harmful to them at home, school, or work. Patients without natural immunity or whose immune systems had been repressed for various types of surgery were given heavy doses of antibiotics in the hospital, leading to the development of highly resistant bacteria within them. It became an increasingly common practice to automatically deluge all patients with antibiotics when they were admitted to hospitals, even for the most routine of visits.