by G. R. Carter
He tried to jump up to the chest-high dock, awkwardly landing on his stomach. Exhaustion sapped his coordination. Will alone drove him on. He pulled his leg up and came to a knee.
Carnage filled the scene. Inmates and guards were intertwined in pools of blood. Distinctive smells of death didn’t sicken him this time; he’d become all too familiar with the smell. He tried to ignore wide-open eyes staring at him in terrible surprise, looking past to see the maintenance tunnel door open. More bodies lie there. The cafeteria door was still barricaded, the shouts he heard from outside could be traced back to there.
He wanted to run. If the six-hundred-plus inmates in that room managed to get out, to come running at them now, not even the weaponry of his new friends would help.
“Hey, mate, we've held up our end of the bargain,” Bohrmann said from outside the dock door. “I'd suggest we get out of here now. Doesn't look like there's much good to be had here, sorry to say.”
When Morton didn't answer right away, he tried again. “Come on, mate, think about the men you've still got, worry about them.”
Bohrmann was right. He’d managed to save a few at least, albeit a fraction of what he'd started the night with.
“There's weapons in the armory. Give me a minute to get in and then we can go,” Morton finally replied.
Something resembling a muttered swear answered back, then his surviving Eels joined him up on the dock. Morton saw the same reaction on their faces he'd just felt on his own. “I want a couple of you to check for any survivors. The rest of you with me.”
He dodged a sprawled-out corpse, then another as he ran over to the armory door. He looked at the locked storage room holding a couple weeks’ worth of Syn. Bloody clawmarks showed where desperate five-fingered animals tried to force their way in. Should he destroy the supply? Try to take some to use as a way to bargain for supplies or even their lives after they fled?
The thought struck like a hammer. He was fleeing, he'd already decided that. But fleeing to where? This prison had been his home. No longer; nothing remained here but terror.
A scream from behind made him look: a bloody inmate was attacking one of his survivors. Before Morton could help, the inmate’s chest spouted two geysers of blood and he flopped backward.
The command of “Hurry, Yank!” told Morton who had saved his subordinate.
Morton reached up to a flush-mounted light fixture about seven feet off the floor. He pushed in both bottom corners, then the fixture swung out on a hinge. He grabbed a large skeleton key from inside the opening. He paused for a moment, noticing something sticky stuck to the metal.
“I'll be a sonofa… ” McCoy muttered. “I was wondering how you were gonna get that open.”
Morton didn't acknowledge him. He hadn't used the manual lock since the thumb scanners had been installed. He hoped the tumbler inside didn't jam or break the key off. He tried to stay calm, to not to think about what might be coming their way any moment. A heavy boom and pounding on the cafeteria door told him time was running out.
Finally the door swung open. A red emergency light remained lit inside. Rows of assault rifles lined both sides of the long narrow room. He started grabbing the weapons nearest the door, handing them back to McCoy, who handed them to the next man. Morton grabbed two for each, then slung two more across his own back. He hurried down towards the fireproof cabinet holding the extra ammunition.
“Hey, Sarge,” a weakened voice called out from the dark.
Morton froze. His eyes adjusted to see a body lying on the floor. A few feet away, sitting propped up against the ammunition cabinet, was Lieutenant Watson.
Morton dropped to a knee beside him.
“Couldn't stop them,” Watson, muttered.
Morton turned back over his shoulder and yelled, “Get some water!” Then back to Watson, “It's all right, Lieutenant. You're going to be okay.”
Watson shook his head feebly. “Don’t think so, Sarge. Hurt pretty bad.” His consciousness began to slip, then he came back, eyes wide open. “Sarge, will you help my wife? My mother-in-law is there… Heather won't leave her behind. Please help her.”
Morton tried not to cry; he had a million questions to ask about what happened. Another life was slipping away on him. “Of course,” he answered. “I'll go to your house as soon as I leave here.”
Watson gave a weakened smile and his eyes began to close. Suddenly he grabbed Morton's arm, hard enough to hurt through his tactical suit. “They were in on it,” he said through gritted teeth. “We were set up…had to get in here…pass the word to someone…can't trust them… ” Watson's head began to tilt to the side as his muscles relaxed.
Morton shook him. “Can't trust who, Lieutenant? Who was in on what? Lieutenant!”
Watson's whole body slowly slumped and fell over. Morton sat in the dark, staring at his friend, wondering what in the world he'd been talking about.
McCoy's voice got him moving again. “Sarge, our friends are leaving. They say it's getting too dangerous. There's still inmates coming through, they've killed a couple more.”
Morton pushed Watson's body out of the way and opened the cabinet doors. He grabbed every case with handles, checking to make sure the caliber matched their weapons. When he had passed as much out as they could carry, he led them out through the dock area and down the stairs back into the night. He was in time to still see the outline of Bohrmann’s squad. He kept jogging with the heavy metal container full of ammunition cradled in both hands.
Panting he managed to say, “McCoy, whatever I say up here, just follow my lead.”
McCoy didn't reply. Morton knew he'd do what was asked of him.
The four men in front stopped and looked back.
Morton couldn't tell if it was surprise or disgust on their blacked-out faces. At this point, he didn't care. After a night of the worst terror he could ever face, of the worst heartbreak he'd suffered since the death of his family, he knew he was a changed man, willing and capable of doing things he’d have found unimaginable just a day ago. Exhaustion played a role in his emotions, he was self aware enough to grasp that. But there was something else, a core change he wouldn't understand for a while.
“Well, Yank,” the squad leader asked. “You ready to hold up your end of the bargain?”
“Yes I am. Just tell me who you're looking for, and I’ll lead you to them.”
“Don't reckon I’ll tell you who just yet. But I do know where they're supposed to be staying: the Ridgeview Lodge. You know where that's at?”
“I sure do,” Morton said with confidence. “I’ll take you there. Just follow me.”
He began to walk across the open lot of the yard towards the outer fence. He took one last glance at the compound, still burning, then turned back towards the dark.
Chapter 28
Downtown Mt. Sterling, Illinois
Night Two of the Great Reset
Sy Bradshaw’s hands were shaking. It was a little chilly out and he’d just run more in one stretch then he usually did in a year, but that wasn’t the real reason why he trembled—he was flat scared.
Just down the street, the Mt. Sterling Municipal Building was completely engulfed in flames.
He was glad for the pitch dark in the shadows of the building he hid behind. He really didn’t want the ten men, or the one woman, hiding with him to think he was scared. But he was terrified to the core of his being. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this.
He made a point not to look at the body lying in the middle of the street. The dead man’s eyes were wide open, illuminated by the firelight, staring straight at him. Sy knew him: one of the hired men off a farm near Burton Tucker’s place. He’d ridden into town with Tucker’s posse. Sy felt a twinge of guilt; he’d refused to go with them at first. That guilt fought with relief for not having faced whatever had killed the hired man. This body wasn’t the first he’d found since they entered the town.
The occasional gray-clad body of an escaped inmate gave h
im no solace. So what if Tucker’s men had killed a few prisoners? The condemned meant nothing to him. But seeing the folks he’d grown up with snuffed out in a single night of terror…that shook him.
The mangled condition of the bodies was shocking: bite marks, scratches—a whole chunk was taken out of one of the posse man’s arms. Clearly the clashes were violent hand-to-hand struggles. Nothing clean and tidy about the deaths, not like he’d seen in the movies. One of Sy’s group suggested it was the effects of Syn withdrawal. Sy knew the stories: supposedly coming down off of a Syn high caused the brain to go haywire. Some Synners turned nearly brain dead for a while. Others became raving lunatics.
A shotgun blast shattered the quiet, then a scream of rage, or maybe terror. Sy couldn’t tell. He looked back at his group. Even in the dark he could see fright in their eyes. Small-town people—farmers and a nurse and an electrician and a teacher—looked right through him. Each knew how to handle a gun; there were literally more guns than people in Brown County, it wasn’t even close. But hunting pheasant or deer was in no way a substitute for facing a mob capable of…
Another scream and Sy started to move. Around the building he went; no more time to just stand here and wait for the sun to come up, or for the mob to find them. He was jogging, crouched over with his father’s old AR-15 in his hands. He had magazines tucked inside every pocket, plus a .45 in a hip holster. Each man and woman had a similar setup, and each had put a few rounds in their assigned weapons before they left the lodge. Sy thanked God or whoever had made him decide to put in a rifle range—and outfit it with plenty of fun-to-shoot guns—out at the lodge. The activity was just the sort of thing lodge clients liked to indulge in when playing country boy. His only regret was that he’d passed on the chance to buy a vintage BAR rifle at an auction last winter. It had been too much money at the time; he’d give just about any amount for it right now.
He kept his focus up ahead, saving some of his night vision by not looking directly at the Municipal Building fire. His memory went to a survivalist book he’d picked up at a hunting show once. He wasn’t too interested in military tactics at the time; he was just looking for off-grid ideas for the lodge. But there was something in there about small-group tactics, how to survey your surroundings and defend yourself against…
Peripheral vision caught a gray-clad figure jump out from the shadows a few doors down from the Brown Boar Bar. Sy recoiled at the force, enough to knock his two-hundred-pound frame off of the sidewalk and into the street. Before he could regain his balance, he felt a sharp pain pulse through his ear, then a tug as his head pulled in that direction. In horror, he realized there was human face up against the side of his. Moist rotten breath poured into his nostrils; his ear was being bitten off!
Sy panicked, dropped his rifle and began to claw at the inmate. He started to push the prisoner away, but his ear was still clamped between teeth. Sy took his thumb and brought it around to the inmate’s eye socket, jabbing as hard has he could into the soft tissue beneath. All that caused was the inmate’s head to twist back and forth, causing more pain. Sy didn’t care about the ear anymore, he just wanted to get away. He grabbed the prisoner by his closest arm and picked him up. With all his weight, he drove the man’s body into the hard concrete below. His shoulder landed perfectly in the gray covered solar plexus—the teeth loosened as a grunt escaped the inmate’s mouth along with the ear.
Sy jumped on top of the inmate before he could start to thrash. He outweighed the man by thirty or forty pounds at least, but he struggled to keep him down. He had an arm in each hand, pinned to the concrete with every fiber in his thick arms. In that instant Sy saw the empty pits of hell residing in the man’s left eye…the right was already swollen and bleeding from Sy’s thumb.
Desperation struck. He wasn’t sure what to do with creature now that he had him captured. He sat for a moment in the middle of the street, a struggling, writhing murderer trapped underneath him.
Before he could decide, a shiny flash streaked past. Sy flinched, bewildered as a blade slid silently into the inmate’s neck, finally stopped only by the hilt. Just as quickly the blade slid back out, made a quick wipe of both sides on the gray jumpsuit, then disappeared.
Sy stayed seated, still holding down the now-lifeless arms in his hands. Air and blood bubbled out of the knife wound, a gurgling sound sickened him. He fought the urge to vomit as he watched the life drain out of the eye still staring up at him. Sy swore he saw surprise in that eye, inanimate now but still somehow communicating something from the man’s soul.
“Bradshaw, let’s go,” a gruff voice said. “Come on, boy, we gotta move. The whole town is lost.”
Sy slowly turned towards the voice. Burton Tucker stood next to him, cleaning and sheathing the knife that had ended the inmate’s life. Tucker checked his shotgun, scanned up and down the street again, and looked down at Sy.
Tucker grabbed a handful of Sy’s shirt and pulled him to his feet. “We got twenty-seven people hiding back there in that alley,” he said, pointing across the street, directly opposite of Sy.
He realized he’d lost track of his group. He spun around to where they’d been, but they were gone.
“Don’t worry,” Tucker said. “They’re all with my people. But we need to get going.”
Sy was still staggered. He’d never watched a human being die up close. The smell of it made him retch.
Tucker’s patience had run out. He grabbed Sy’s arm and pulled him towards the alley. Halfway across the street, they heard shouts from behind them. Tucker dropped Sy’s arm and spun back to the noise.
Ear-splitting blasts from Tucker’s shotgun lit up the street. An inmate who was sprinting towards them flung up an arm and spun to the street, flopping like a fish. Another stopped in his tracks and looked down at his stricken comrade. He roared in rage and ran straight at them. Sy braced himself but Tucker pulled the trigger again. The pellets struck the man’s upper torso and head in a shower of blood, throwing his head back while the legs continued forward. The whole bloody pile slid to a stop just a few feet from where they stood.
“Told you we got to go,” Tucker said. The sixty-year-old moved like a man half his age, covering the rest of the distance to the alley at a trot. “All right, people,” he heard the farmer say. “We got to get out of town. We got trucks stashed at the fair grounds, back behind the livestock barns. I’m assuming everyone knows where that is, right?” No one said otherwise, so Tucker continued. “If we get separated, that’s where we’ll meet. See anybody else, you tell them that. But don’t try to sneak in; run right down the lane, otherwise these boys might think you’re an unfriendly. Get kinda trigger-happy out here in the dark.”
People got up and moving. Mothers and fathers checked on kids, then on each other. Neighbors did the same. Every man, and a good portion of the women, held a weapon of some kind.
“Sy, you with me now?” Tucker asked.
Finally Sy regained his wits and nodded. “Yeah, Tuck, I got you. Thanks for saving me.”
“I ain’t saved you yet,” he said quietly. “Getting fifty people out of here is going to be a challenge.” He looked around to make sure no one was listening too closely. “We don’t have near enough room for everyone. Not sure what I was thinking; lack of planning on my part.”
“You were thinking of defending, not evacuating,” Sy reassured him.
The older man shrugged. “Nothing left to defend here. Not now, at least. Maybe if we get some help from the National Guard or State Police we can come back. But we need to get these folks to safety.”
“Just tell me how I can help.”
Tucker nodded, glad to have the real Sy Bradshaw back. “Where you parked at?”
“At the old warehouses on the west side of town. We came in on Route 24. Seemed like a good place to stop,” Sy told him. He winced when he saw Tucker do the same.
“That’s backtracking. Won’t work. We’ll need every man we can to get these folks to the high school.
”
Sy sighed. “I just piled all of us in my truck. Figured it was better to stick together in one vehicle than two. Three in the cab and eight in the bed worked well coming in.”
“But it don’t do no good going out,” Tucker said. “Nothin’ we can do about it now. You’ll have to leave your truck until later. You okay with that?”
“Honestly, I just want to get the heck out of here. Get out to the country, somewhere, anywhere but here. Feelin’ real claustrophobic in among these houses in the dark.”
“I agree with you there,” Tucker said. “All right, we’ll get them to the high school, then start trucking them out one load at a time, agreed?”
“Agreed.” Tucker moved up and spoke briefly to his son Dillon and one other man whose face Sy couldn’t make in the dim firelight that escaped around the corner of the building. Tucker was pointing towards the alley, then signaled a curve. Both nodded, slapped him on the back and took off into the dark.
Tucker walked back to Sy. “I’ll take the lead with a couple of my men. You take up the rear with yours. Try not to shoot any way but out, okay? Don’t want to get fragged here in my own hometown.”
Sy chuckled nervously as Tucker walked along the edge of the group. “Okay, everyone, get the kids inside, men to the outside. Keep your weapons pointed out. Don’t shoot unless you’re 100 percent positive it’s an inmate coming towards you. If they’re running away, don’t waste the ammo, and don’t draw attention. We’re going to be moving quickly. Let’s go.”
Tucker moved quickly to the front, flanked by two men.
“Glad you could make it,” a familiar voice said to Sy in the night.
Sy stared at a face smiling in the dark, then recognized his friend from the FS fuel station. “Hey, Jeremiah. Man, I’m glad you’re okay. Your family?”